ABSTRACT
Parties today are increasingly organized to fight elections in volatile electoral markets. The electoral linkage primarily relies on access to the mass media. In this chapter, we investigate the extent to which Norwegian party members still provide linkage. The linkage to civil society is operationalized as descriptive similarity between members and voters – for example, in terms of gender and education. We also discuss whether these changes have affected the voters’ trust in parties. To study such changes over time with member survey data is rare. To our knowledge, in addition to Norway, such data can so far only be found in Denmark. Here we focus on the time-span 1991–2017. Overall, our basic findings based on the new 2017 data is that Norwegian parties, in spite of their decline, still have a sufficient number of members to provide an effective descriptive linkage. We must, though, add two ‘howevers’. First, the declining congruence in terms of education and children at home lit up the ‘warning sign’: party linkage is under pressure. Second, women are still not present in Norwegian parties in sufficient numbers for the members to represent civil society.
