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The study is intended to provide novel insights into the adaptation of new members of parliament to a working environment that differs in many ways from more traditional workplaces. The study is based on semi-structured interviews with 16 first-term members of the Icelandic parliament, the Althingi, after two years' experience following their election in 2013. The findings show that learning to become active members of parliament is primarily an informal and disorganised process driven by the newcomers themselves. Little formal on-the-job training is available. Two years into their term, the interviewees felt they were still learning and adapting to the rules and norms. New MPs' performance seems to depend on several factors, including how active they are in the learning process and how successfully they manage to build relationships with colleagues and find informal mentors, who in some cases belong to different political parties. The data limits the inclusion of contextual factors potentially influencing the MPs socialisation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the number of corporatist public committees, appointed by central government, in Iceland and Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway, Sweden). Its main aim is to shed light on where Iceland stands compared to these countries in term of corporatist practices. Scholars view corporatist public committees as the core expression of Scandinavian corporatism and thus well suited for the measurement of corporatism. This study shows that the functional representational channel is an important feature of Icelandic democracy. In Iceland various interest groups are integrated into the democratic process of decision-making and implementation in an institutionalized and privileged manner. This is the essence of corporatism, defined as the institutionalized and privileged integration of organized interests in the preparation and/or implementation of public policies. Moreover, the results show that Iceland is today much more corporatist than the Scandinavian countries; especially, in terms of preparatory corporatism. Already in 1970, it appears that Iceland was more corporatist than Sweden in terms of the number of corporatist committees. The paper also sheds light on sectoral corporatism in Iceland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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