Democratic State and Democratic Society

After the optimism following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world has seen more of a democratic backlash. But despite the backlashes, in some societies the stability of democracy does not seem to be threatened. Why is this so? One common answer points to civic culture, a shared feeling of responsibility for the common fate of citizens. An alternative, to be explored in this volume, is that the stability of democratic rule is anchored in its integration in the large set of social institutions with both direct and indirect relationship to politics. These are linked to, give input to and are affected by democratic processes. Where these relations are ubiquitous and strong, democracy is stable. At the same time, institutions are slowly but constantly changing. Hence, in order to understand changes in the functioning of democracy at the level of the state, it is necessary to explore the changes in surrounding institutions and the way they shape a democratic society. The empirical focus of the book is institutional change in the Nordic model, with special emphasis on Norway. There are many reasons to pay closer attention to the Nordic, and Norwegian, case when it comes to analyses of changes in the functioning of democracy. On a par with the other Scandinavian countries, Norway is in the forefront in the world in the quality of democratic governance, as well as social trust and quality of life. As an extreme case, the most corporatist society within the family of the “Nordic Model”, Norwegian society offers an opportunity both for intriguing case studies and for challenging and refining existing theory on processes of institutional change. From a theoretical perspective this invites reflections which, to some extent, are at odds with the dominant conceptions of institutional change. Neither models of path dependency nor models of aggregate, incremental change focus on the continuous social bargaining over institutional change. Despite recent processes of differentiation and liberalization, common to the Western world as a whole, corporatism implies a close connection between state, economy, public sphere, cultural life, and knowledge production. This also means that institutions are intimately bundled, in a stronger, subtler and more wide-reaching way than typically assumed in the literature on varieties of capitalism. The volume draws on, but...