Four Main Branches of Norwegian Political Science

While the main trunk of Norwegian political science grew from the study of history and jurisprudence, it quickly split off into four main branches—statistical survey studies, comparative politics, international relations, and public administration—all of which continue to enjoy considerable influence and institutional support. Three of these branches can be directly traced to an institution that was not formally associated with the UiO. The fourth branch traces its roots back to the UiO, but has enjoyed support and success in other campus settings as well, especially in Bergen.

One of the most important impetuses for this Norwegian social science tradition can be traced to the Institute for Social Research (ISF). The ISF was established in 1950 by a group of individuals who had earlier gathered around Arne Neass (often credited as Norway's foremost philosopher in the twentieth century), and the generous support of the Rinde family. In the decades that followed, this institution was enormously influential; it became a sort of American bridgehead in European social science research (Thue 2000, 33; 2006). By exploiting a number of generous American scholarship and exchange programs (e.g., the Fulbright Program, and the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations), Naess was able to send some of his most promising students to the United States and to invite a number of American scholars to teach and advise a nascent generation of Norwegian social scientists.

The fruits of these exchanges are many and varied. The first of Neass's students to go to the United States was a lawyer and sociologist, Vilhelm Aubert, who began to study under Robert Merton at Columbia University. There Aubert came into contact with Paul F. Lazarsfeld, who would visit Norway in subsequent years and help establish a research tradition that continues to exert a strong influence.

Lazarsfeld, as the dynamic leader of the Bureau of Applied Social Research, played a remarkable role in building up contemporary social science in Norway. His visits, and those of his colleagues, helped Norwegian social scientists connect to an important international network of social science researchers. Most important for Norway's nascent political science environment was a long string of exchanges between students and staff at the ISF and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

It is this sort of international networking that can help to explain the prominence of Norway's most influential political scientist: Stein Rokkan. Another admirer of Neass, Rokkan was sent to the U.S. to study first at the University of Chicago and then at Columbia University. In the doing, his approach to the study of politics drifted away from the more historical, descriptive and normative perspectives that were finding a home at the UiO.

In the late 1950s, Rokkan teamed up with Henry Valen (1947–2007) and established a Norwegian election studies program that continues to exert much influence. The research tradition that resulted constitutes the first major branch of Norwegian political science. After establishing the voter-research program with Rokkan in 1957, Valen continued to direct the program until 1985, producing a long series of influential books and analyses on voter behavior in Norway, the last of which was published in 2007 (Valen and Narud 2007). The result is an impressive collection of electoral research data and a stable full of researchers trained in advanced statistical techniques. This legacy—of a methodologicallysophisticated, survey-based tradition of political sociology—can still be found at ISF (today associated with the work of Bernt Aardal), but it has also established an institutional beachhead at the Department of Sociology and Political Science at NTNU (in Trondheim), the political science section of which was founded by Ola Listhaug.

In 1958 Rokkan left to Bergen for the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI), which had already been established in 1930. Together with the economist Just Faaland (who had arrived at CMI in 1952) Rokkan helped to revitalize the social science wing of the CMI by linking it to a number of international research programs and by mobilizing additional financial resources. In 1966 he became a professor of comparative politics at the University of Bergen's department of sociology (established the following year in 1967)—and it is here that we find one of the most important institutional legacies of Rokkan's work. In 1980, the year after Rokkan's death, the University of Bergen (UiB) established the department of comparative politics, an institute whose work remains heavily influenced by Rokkan. In particular, Rokkan's academic legacy can be traced to his interest in combining an older macrosociological tradition with recent developments in social science data collection and methods. The comparative, socialhistorical research that results constitutes the second main branch of contemporary Norwegian political science.

As with the first two branches of Norwegian political science, the third branch was also grafted with the help of Arne Neass. One arm of this branch, which is devoted to international relations, drew more consciously from the tradition and influence of legal studies at the UiO, and the activities of the Norwegian Nobel Institute (established in 1904), whose associates award the annual Nobel Peace Prize. This influence can be seen in a strong initial focus on international law. Indeed, the very first thesis in political science was written on the subject by Eirik Steinnes (Thue 1997, 193), but the study of international politics at the UiO moved quickly in a more historical direction, as evidenced in Knut Midgaard's (1959) “History of Ideas” thesis on peace research. This tendency built up steam in the early 1960s when Nils Ørvik was hired as the field's second associate professor at the UiO (in 1963).

The second arm of this branch of research grew out of the institutional sector and maintained a special focus on peace and conflict studies. This arm is more data-driven and methodologically sophisticated. Here the influence of Arne Neass and the ISF is found in the person of Johan Galtung, who was hired as a professor of peace and conflict research at the UiO in 1969 (and held that position until 1977, when he moved abroad). Already in 1959, Galtung had established the ISF's Section for Conflict and Peace Research, which later (in 1966) gained its independence as the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO). At about the same time, the Fridtjof Nansen Institute was established (in 1958) and the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI) was formed in 1960.²

This institution-based tradition of international politics is still strong and influential, as exemplified by the work of Nils Petter Gleditsch, and the continued research output at each of these three research institutes (Nansen, NUPI, PRIO).

The fourth and final branch of Norwegian political science does not trace its legacy back to Stein Rokkan or the ISF. But it does share with Rokkan a strong historical-sociological component to its work. This branch owes its heritage to Knut Dahl Jacobsen, who was awarded the first full professorship in political science at the UiO in 1965. Four years later, however, Dahl moved away from Oslo and set up the field of public administration and organizational studies at the University of Bergen (UiB) in 1969. In 1980, when the UiB created a department of comparative politics it also created a twin: the department of administration and organization theory. Today this research tradition enjoys a strong institutional anchoring in Oslo, Bergen, and Tromsø, but is perhaps most commonly associated with the systemic-anarchic perspective of organizational decision-making associated with Johan P. Olsen (who began as a professor in Bergen but is now at UiO).

These four branches of Norwegian political science—Valen-inspired electoral research, Rokkan-inspired comparative politics, Galtung-inspired peace research, and a more sociological approach to organization studies that we today associate with Johan P. Olsen—continue to dominate the discipline today.

The Spread of Norwegian Political Science

Political scientists in Norway, as elsewhere, tend to be employed in the education, research, and private sectors. Providing a solid overview of potential employers is nearly impossible, but Table 3 offers a list of some of the most important actors in the university and research sectors, along with their Internet addresses. Many of these institutions will be familiar from the historical description above.

Another way to gauge the pulse and direction of contemporary Norwegian political science is to look at the number and area of dissertations/theses produced in Norway each year. In order to provide this overview, I have aggregated the annual department reports as submitted to the Norwegian Political Science Journal (Norsk Statsvitenskapelig Tidsskrift, or NST) for the past three years (2005, 2006, 2007). On the basis of their thesis titles,⁴

I have then organized this production under five main rubrics: political theory, political be- havior, public administration, comparative politics, and international relations. These data are presented in Table 4.

From this table we can still see how far political theory has fallen as a subject of research in Norwegian political science. (I suspect this trend is not limited to Norway.) By contrast, the other main branches of political science—comparative politics (which includes both the Rokkan and Vallen traditions), public administration, and international politics—continue to play an important role.

A third and final way to map the scope of contemporary Norwegian political science is to look at the role played by its national organization. Formally, Norwegian political scientists are organized in the Norwegian Political Science Association, an organization responsible for two important landmarks in Norwegian political science. Although the Association itself is currently inactive, its two institutional landmarks remain very visible.

The first of these is the Association's journal, Norsk Statsvitenskapelig Tidsskrift (NST).⁵

⁶ Issued four times a year, this journal is currently enjoying its twenty-third year. Its editorship today circulates among the political science departments at each of the four largest universities (each department enjoys editorial responsibility for three years, before passing it onto the next). Traditionally, the articles published in the NST are written in Norwegian with short English abstracts. In recent years, however, under the editorship of Torbjørn Knutsen, the journal has published several of its articles (and book reviews) in English. This trend is indicative of the dominance of English in contemporary Norwegian political science.

The second institutional representation of the Norwegian Political Science Association is its annual conference. Like the editorship of the national journal, responsibility for organizing this conference circulates among the four largest departments. The conference tends to be held in the first week of January and includes papers from across the broad spectrum of contemporary political science. For example, the 2008 conference will be organized in Tromsø, which has organized a call for papers in the following areas: international relations, public policy, organization, political theory; comparative politics, and political behavior.6 While the size of these conferences can vary, the 2007 conference in Trondheim attracted about 100 delegates.