Challenges to political parties1997

Are political parties still the most important political organizations in politics? Or are they, as some charge, powerless and intellectually bankrupt? Although political parties have been the main vehicles of mass politics during the twentieth century, their role in the twenty-first is not at all clear. Challenges to Political Parties: The Case of Norway addresses these issues by examining the role of parties in Norwegian politics over the last twenty years. Because Norway has been a stable country with relatively few of the tensions present in other democracies, it is easier to see in this environment how parties are adapting to the many constraints of the modern world. The framework developed in this collection by a number of leading Norwegian and international social scientists sheds...