Party Followership and Leadership in Norway

Abstract

This article measures the relative sizes of the four cultural followerships of individualism, fatalism, hierarchy and egalitarianism among the Norwegian political parties by means of the European Values Systems Study surveys conducted in 1982 and 1990. First, this analysis shows that among the electorate at the end of the 1980s, the cultures of individualism and egalitarianism have grown stronger at the expense of fatalism and hierarchy. These estimates of political followership support the claim that Norwegian politics has become more competitive, more volatile and less benign. The correlations between the estimates of cultural followership and measures of party leadership show that individualism and egalitarianism are anti-leadership cultures in that these cultures correlate with the number of party chairs and inversely correlate with party leadership tenure and experience. Furthermore, the results show that fatalism and hierarchy are pro-leadership cultures in that they correlate with party leadership tenure and experience, and inversely correlate with the number of party chairs.