The Norwegian government has apparently just released a report on the work of a
Commission established to study power and democracy in Norway.
A list I'm on just sent around the following exercepts or quotes about the study that were written by Stein Ringen, Professor of Sociology and Social Policy, Oxford in the Times Literary Supplement February 13, p.3-5. The Book review was called "Wealth and decay : Norway funds a massive political self-examination -- and finds trouble for us all" :
"If this is the kind of polity in which rule by popular government is withering, what then of more normal democracies?"
"One reason is said to be that other competing institutions are gaining power and that the legislature must be losing out. The winners are the market, the media and the courts."
"The forms of local democracy are in place, but the honourable practice of local politics has gradually become a matter of administering decisions imposed by central government."
"With falling membership ranks, political parties are reinventing themselves. They are becoming professional political machines in which members matter less and have less sway. This is made possible by tax-funded subsidies for political parties on a grand scale."
"Traditional organization is in decline, crowded out by what is called "here-and now organization" in often small, single-issue action groups. Diagnosis: "a democratic infrastructure in collapse"."
"Elections are by proportional representation and with easy access to representation for small parties. The result is a Storting of seven or eight parties, without stable or even recognizable majorities and oppositions, and shifting minority governments. The Norwegian experience is that this is a form of disorder that voters dislike."
"The message of the study is that the decline in the quality of representative democracy comes -- some international pressures aside -- from the constitutional procedures and institutions themselves: in the demise of local government, in election and party systems, in the lack of accountability in the welfare state, in the courts and judicial review. This means that the best way to repair democracy, is to repair democracy. We do not need to wait with democracy until we have repaired society and capitalism. We can take on democracy directly. The agenda is constitutional reform."
