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The nomination process has been called "the secret garden of
politics"-- and for good reasons. The process by which candidates
for election are being screened and selected is among the least
understood and researched political phenomena, even though this
process is so closely linked to the power structure within
political parties. Nominations are mechanisms for selecting
candidates, but also for holding the incumbent delegates
responsible. In this book, nomination processes in four Nordic
countries - Denmark, Finland, Iceland, and Norway -- are analysed
and evaluated as instruments of democracy. The authors compare
institutions, procedures and unwritten norms. The book in
particular addresses questions about the citizens' ability to
influence the nomination processes. The process is not only
modelled in traditional terms of representation, but also as a
principal-agent relationship. Despite great institutional
similarities, the nomination processes and their outcomes vary
considerably across the four countries. In particular, significant
differences are found with regard to the extent of citizen control.
The book provides a first mapping of this central feature of Nordic
politics and thus also serves the comparative purpose of
differentiating between otherwise similar political systems.
Until the last quarter of the 20th Century, Western party systems
appeared to be frozen and stability was generally taken to be the
central characteristic of individual-level party choice. But during
the 1970s and 1980s, in a spasm of change that appeared to occur in
all countries, this ceased to be true. Voters in Western countries
suddenly demonstrated an unexpected and increasing unpredictability
in their choices between parties, often to the extent of voting for
parties that are quite new to the political scene. Understanding
these fundamental changes became a pressing concern for political
scientists and commentators alike, and a matter of extensive
controversy and debate. In the middle 1980s, an international team
of leading scholars set out to explore the reasons for these shifts
in voting patterns in sixteen western countries: all those of the
(then) European Community (except for Luxembourg and Portugal),
together with Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and
the United States. In this book they report their findings
regarding the connections between social divisions and party
choice, and the manner in which these links had changed since the
mid-1960s. The authors based their country studies on a common
research design. By doing so, they were able to focus on the
characteristics that the sixteen countries had in common so as to
evaluate the extent to which the changes had a common source. The
passage of time has not dated this book, and in this edition the
original text is augmented by a new Preface that describes the ways
in which the book's findings retain their relevance for
contemporary scholarship, and by an Epilogue in which the main
analyses reported in the book are brought up to date.
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