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This article contributes to the literature on parliamentary design in general and the pioneer literature on parliamentary bodies specialized in gender equality in particular. It does so by establishing a frame for the critical assessment of the impacts of such an institutional design. Moreover, by using interviews and data on the behavior of committee members, it demonstrates the advantages of applying a mixed method within a field that has mostly relied on participant interviews. A systematic analysis of the impact of the Danish Committee on Gender Equality shows that although this particular committee has not succeeded in adding the perspective of gender equality to legislation, it has increased parliamentary control with the government. Furthermore, it has enabled much better interaction between parliament and civil society organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last several decades, a number of societal changes can be expected to have led to the increased mobilization of interest groups representing citizen interests. For this mobilization to be effective, citizen groups need to win access to relevant political arenas. This article investigates the development of the Danish interest group system and the representation of interest groups in political arenas. While replicating findings of increasing citizen mobilization from other countries is expected, it is argued here that the development of groups' political representation as a consequence of this mobilization depends on the dynamics of resource exchange in different political arenas. This argument is tested on a unique dataset of Danish interest groups in 1975 and 2010 which includes data on group populations and group access to the administration and the media. The analysis demonstrates that citizen groups must overcome not only the challenge of organizing, but also persistent logics guiding the inclusion of, interest groups in different political arenas. Citizen groups have been more successful in increasing their representation in the media than in the administrative arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops a theoretical distinction between direct and indirect welfare chauvinism in order to analyze how electorally successful populist right-wing parties transmit social policy preferences with significant redistributive implications for the shape of the welfare state. Direct welfare chauvinism occurs as a result of legislative changes that explicitly exclude recipients from social protection or reduce the level thereof on the basis of ethnicity. Indirect welfare chauvinism is the result of policy measures that apply to both natives and immigrants, but which deliberately negatively affect immigrants the most. Combining quantitative and qualitative analysis of labour market reforms in Denmark, where one of the most successful populist right-wing parties in Europe - the Danish People's Party - held a pivotal position in the period 2001-11, the article traces the intentions and deliberate policy-making strategies of the party. It shows that the distinction between direct and indirect chauvinism is a useful theoretical tool for understanding how the Danish People's Party can fulfill the expectations of both its electorate and its coalition partners, even if they point in different directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does the mass media affect the dispersion of the policy positions of political parties? In this article it is argued that the mass media polarize parties' policy positions because vote-seeking strategies are more viable if party policy positions are clearly communicated to the electorate and because a vote-seeking strategy corresponds with parties taking a distinct policy position away from the median. Hence, the main hypothesis is that party policy position dispersion is larger with more mass media penetration. In order to test this argument, a novel dataset on party positions and mass media penetration in 267 Danish municipalities in 2004 is utilized and a new measure of the dispersion of policy positions in multiparty systems is constructed. The analysis corroborates the article's main hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have long argued that politics has become personalised throughout the post Second World War era. Increasingly, focus shifts from policy to politicians' personal traits. The media - particularly television, it is argued - is the driving force in the process by focusing more on individual politicians and their personal traits than parties and their policy proposals. Empirically, it is not known whether the personalisation of media content affects the political behaviour of voters. Based on survey data from the 2009 Danish local elections (N = 3,336), this article explores the determinants of preferential voting - that is, voting for a specific candidate rather than a party. The findings show that institutional factors and individual characteristics are far better predictors of personalised voting behaviour than any measure of media exposure - and that viewing the main national news bulletins, as well as reading regional newspapers, have a similar positive effect. Thus, the study provides answers to the highly debated but rarely studied question of whether and how the media possibly personalise politics with regard to voting behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In non-presidential multiparty systems, it is not only the voters but also coalition formation after the election that decides the government of the community. Some national-level studies investigate which parties are most likely to win the Prime Minister's office. The aim of this article is to investigate the same question at the local level: What makes a party more likely to win the post of mayor? The article finds that party size and change in size are important along with experience and ideological centrality. The results are similar to those obtained at the national level, and this study thus expands the scope of these explanatory variables. However, the study also shows that being a large party is not sufficient for a party to have a good chance of winning the mayoralty. Furthermore, norms guiding appropriate behaviour seem important in addition to instrumental behaviour. It appears that parties that are popular in the electorate benefit from being perceived as more deserving of the mayoralty than others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amalgamating municipalities carries risks in terms of public expenditure control. The tax base of the new amalgamated municipality represents a common pool resource. The incentive is to exploit it – that is, to spend before closing time. This article investigates last-minute spending by Danish municipalities before the local government reform in 2007 in which 271 municipalities were reduced to 98. It shows that local councillors exploited this situation to finance local projects before closing time. The article thus demonstrates the occurrence of common pool problems in amalgamation situations. However, it also shows that it is the availability of a common pool that matters, not its size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The trend within studies of voting and political attitudes has been to give less attention to class as a structuring dimension and more to postmaterial values. The basic argument of this article is that this is a false opposition: The adherence to different sets of values is related to social background, although in complex ways, which can only be discovered with a multidimensional conception of class. This conception may be found in Pierre Bourdieu's analytical approach, which is here applied in an analysis of survey data from the Danish city of Aalborg. Data from a survey of political attitudes are subjected to multiple correspondence analysis (MCA), which reveals a pattern of attitudes that is highly structured by both the old and the new dimensions of politics. Up to this point, the results converge with the state of the art. However, the methodology utilised (MCA) allows one to link the constructed space of attitudes to a set of indicators based on a two-dimensional conception of social class. On the basis of this analysis, the article concludes that the political landscape appears as highly structured by the two principles of social differentiation from Bourdieu's class model: volume and composition of capital. The conclusion is that social class understood in this way is closely related to both old and new politics, as well as to the propensity to vote for a political party from the left- or right-wing alliance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local government amalgamations may have unintended consequences on electoral behaviour. Using the most recent local elections in Denmark as its case, this article demonstrates that inter-level split-ticket voting between three levels (national, regional and local) decreased slightly from 2001 to 2005 – that is, simultaneously with the implementation of a major reform, where many municipalities and all the counties were amalgamated. These amalgamations affect the level of split voting through a process where the local party system operates as an intervening variable: the larger municipalities have a more nationalised local party system, which leads to fewer voters being vote splitters by necessity. The analyses combine general electoral statistics with large voter surveys and benefit from the quasi-experimental setting offered by the fact that not all municipalities were amalgamated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The individual camps within the new institutionalist paradigm generally argue that every political actor operates within a specific framework of opportunities and that the physical environment in which bargaining takes place is very important to understanding political outcomes. This article uses three of the new institutionalisms to answer two important questions concerning minority-protecting institutions in the national constitutions of Denmark (Article 42) and Finland (Section 66). First, why were such institutions developed? Second, why were these institutions ultimately removed in Finland, but not in Denmark? For both countries, it is argued in this article that historical and discursive institutionalism are useful for understanding why such protections were originally considered necessary by particular political groups in society: the rise of socialism during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries compelled non-reformist parties to push strongly for constitutional change that would legalize powerful procedural tools that could delay and potentially reverse policy decisions passed in parliament. However, the article invokes rational choice institutionalism to explain why the outcomes in terms of the use of such institutions differed over time in the two countries: differences concerning the scope and timing of the relevant procedures compelled opposition parties to utilize them differently. As a result, the legislative process was often stalemated in Finland (and the procedures were subsequently removed in 1992), while in Denmark, the procedures contributed to a parliamentary culture based on consensus and pre-legislative bargaining and hence, still remain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Danish parliament is renowned for its influence over Danish European Union (EU) policy. Contrary to popular belief, this strength is now in question. The most central feature of the Danish EU decision-making model is parliamentary control over the executive expressed in political mandates before Council meetings. In 1973, this was a perfectly reasonable way for the Danish parliament to influence EU policy. Today, the status of the Council has changed, severely challenging the ability of the Danish parliament to secure influence over EU policy. This article demonstrates that the Danish European Affairs Committee is aware of the changes in European decision-making, and that the lack of adaptation, despite this knowledge, is due to structural and cultural barriers to learning in the Danish Folketing. This study reveals that our understanding of particular responses to the pressure of Europeanization is enhanced when the conditions for learning and ‘non-learning’ are spelled out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues that one needs to open up the question of what it means to be a civil servant today in order to understand the key characteristics of public administration in contemporary Western democracies. The role of the civil servant is characterised by a multitude of expectations deriving from old and new role demands that exist side by side. In this sense, the role is constituted of different archaeological layers. Which layers become the dominant ones are not given, but widely depend on the context within which the role is enacted and on the civil servant's individual role interpretation. The article presents the results of a case study carried out within three Danish government ministries on the role of the civil servant. It is shown how differently the role is interpreted in the Danish state administration depending on which of the archaeological layers are activated, and how these different interpretations all lead to role conflicts for the individual civil servant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates the processes driving the ongoing Danish reform of the structure of the public sector with the purpose of understanding the factors rendering the reform possible at this particular juncture in time. For this reason, the article applies a theoretical framework consisting of John Kingdon's ‘Multiple Streams’ perspective combined with the Institutional Rational Choice approach developed by Fritz Scharpf, among others. As a heuristic tool for the analysis, the policy process is divided into the three phases of initiation, estimation and decision making. The analysis points to a rather complex process influenced by institutional and situational factors, including those of coincidence and external events. The process can be understood as a series of interrelated games in which bounded rational actors pursue their interests. In conclusion, the article finds that the speed and tight steering of the process left relatively little room for a broader public and political debate. The process leading to what has become the largest public sector reform in Denmark was in actuality determined by relatively few actors involved in decisive moments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first ever simultaneous general and local elections in Denmark (November 2001) allow for a comparison of Danish voters’ inclination towards inter-level ticket splitting with similar phenomena in Sweden and England. Inter-level split-ticket voting occurs when voters cast their vote on two different parties in the two different (but simultaneous) elections; this happened far more often in Denmark in 2001 than in the two other countries. One hypothesis suggests that this owes to party system differences between the three countries, since both the number of parties running in the different elections and the discrepancy between the national and the local party systems are expected to influence the level of inter-level vote splitting. However, elec-tion statistics and survey data based analyses (Denmark in 2001, Sweden in 2002, and England in 2001) give only limited support to the hypothesis. It appears that Danish voters did in fact split their 2001 national and local votes more than Swedish and English voters did and more than party system differences can account for. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Danish parliamentary developments since the Second World War include the consolidation of minority rule, a reduction in the power of established political parties, and more external constraints on parliamentary actors. They also involve a number of more specific changes to the various steps of delegation and accountability. The evidence tends to support the thesis of a paradox in the development of parliamentary democracy. On the one hand, changes in the constitutional chain of delegation and accountability have, on the whole, favoured the principals (voters, parliament, ministers) compared with their agents (parliament, ministers, civil servants). On the other hand, the established parties have declined somewhat and there are more external constraints than there used to be. This implies that the power of democratic principals has increased within narrower limits of action. In such a situation, the principals can be said to ‘decide more about less’ because of the stronger national and (not least) international constraints. However, the emergence of a partially new system of governance cannot unequivocally be called better or worse than the traditional Danish system of democratic governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Nordic welfare states are based on a unique system of highly decentralized municipalities. However, in Denmark a discussion about merging municipalities has emerged. The discussion has kept within the framework of the classic dichotomy between capacity and proximity, or been limited to considerations of effectiveness versus democracy. The assumptions behind both arguments can be nuanced and problematized, and a new study, based on an extensive set of data, analyses the basic assumptions behind the argument of proximity. In accordance with earlier studies, it finds that participation is higher in small municipalities. However, municipal size does not affect citizens’ interest in and knowledge of local politics. Nor does it affect citizens’ perception of local politicians and their trust in local political decisions. This is surprising, given previous research in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political attempts to reform existing policies often fail to bring about substantial change. When they succeed, the new policy is heavily influenced by the pre-existing policy path. This is confirmed by the story of Danish welfare reforms in the 1980s and 1990s, which can be explained in terms of their path dependency. In order to understand better the mechanisms of path dependency I draw on the fundamental insights of the new institutionalisms: rational choice institutionalism, historical institutionalism, and social constructivist institutionalism. The article begins with a brief presentation and comparison of the three new institutionalisms. It then discusses the dialectics of path shaping and path dependency before seeking to explicate the mechanisms of path dependency. Finally, the various accounts of path dependency are applied in an empirical study of the failure of welfare retrenchment in the 1980s and the relatively successful restructuring of the welfare state in the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses critical issues and political alienation in Denmark. Sources of political alienation, the distrust in politician and dissatisfaction with democracy; Issues of Danish politics which are related to political alienation; Policy distance and political alienation.

The article analyzes the Danish national election in March 1998. Judged from the aggregate figures, Denmark has stabilized. Net volatility was moderate, `bloc' volatility was close to zero, and despite forecasts of a non-socialist victory, the Social Democratic-led government managed to continue. Further, in the 1990s, the periods between elections have been close to the maximum four years. Therefore, the old picture from the 1970s of Danish politics as highly unstable and as extremely volatile is now outdated. Quite the contrary at the level of individual voters. Close to a third shifted from one party to another, and even among voters who did not shift, a substantial proportion had considered voting for another party. Individual voter mobility seems to be a result of weak voter differentiation between different parties, and not a result of protest and outspoken dissatisfaction. Whatever the explanation, individual volatility is an omen of possible future instability: There is no guarantee that different voter movements will always balance out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic issue effects ("sociotropic" effects) are found to eclipse "pocketbook" effects on the vote for shifting Danish governments in cross-section surveys of the general elections of 1987, 1990 and 1994. Voter stands on the economic issue, Denmark's economic conditions, are in turn affected by left-right orientation and by images of the competing governments as managers of the economy and in the aggregate differ markedly from real economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A New Politics dimension of non-economic issue preferences emerged in Denmark during the 1980s. The new dimension is clearly separated from the traditional economic Old Politics dimension, though the two are correlated. The New Politics dimension has not given rise to viable new parties but is represented by three medium-sized parties: the Socialist People's and Radical Liberal parties constitute the New Left, and the Progressive Party constitutes the New Right. The three old class parties contribute little towards explaining the individual variance in the position of New Politics; as always, the Social Democratic Party represents the Old Left while the Liberal and Conservative parties represent the Old Right. In terms of social positions, New Left attitudes are correlated especially with level of school education and with employment in the reproductive sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent study it has been argued that strong centre parties may lead to polarization, not moderation. The study showed that as the centre's share of parliamentary seats increased, this convergence of voters was off-set by two concurrent divergent party trends. As the centre parties expanded, either: (i) the extremist parties increased as well, or (ii) an outward movement of moderate parties took place. This article sets out to test these two trends in order to assess which is the more valid according to two case studies, because each pattern has a different impact on electoral competition, governmental durability and democratic stability. The two trends are appraised in Denmark and The Netherlands for all post-war elections until 1990. The results show that the centre is indeed related to systemic polarization, but that one of the two patterns is invalid. The trend that perceives the centre as a possible destructive force is not supported, while the tendency that does not jeopardize democracy is supported. In both countries the centre's potential coalition partners — the parties on the moderate left and right — attacked their centre-based party system by pulling away in an outward polarizing pattern. The goal was the creation of a bipolar system, with a vacant centre. In each case the centre parties were of a different size and adopted different tactics in order to combat the "moderate-induced" strategy of polarization. The centre's counter-strategies succeeded, but the party systems were transformed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Termination of government coalitions" is an ambiguous notion. While the concepts of "termination" and "coalition" do not present insurmountable problems. the concept of "governments" is indeed very tricky. Empirical findings on termination of governments are highly dependent upon the definition of government, as shown by a Danish case study of 1945-93. A government is defined on the basis of party composition. It is found that Danish majority coalitions terminate because they lose the first upcoming election. whereas minority coalitions terminate for party strategic reasons, notably decisions made by the pivotal Radical Liberal Party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers information regarding the Danish parliamentary election of December 1990. It discusses that the result of the 1990 election can be described as a move toward the center in the sense that both the Socialist People's Party and the Progress Party were substantially cut. Denmark has a minority government and the last majority government retreated in 1971. The Social Democrats, received new votes from all over the political range, though mostly from the Radical Liberals and especially from the Socialist People's Party.