Institutional Change in the Public Sphere: Views on the Nordic Model 9783110546330, 9783110546323

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Fredrik Engelstad, Håkon Larsen, Jon Rogstad, Kari Steen-Johnsen (Eds.) Institutional Change in the Public Sphere

Fredrik Engelstad, Håkon Larsen, Jon Rogstad, Kari Steen-Johnsen (Eds.)

Institutional Change in the Public Sphere Views on the Nordic Model

Managing Editor: Dominika Polkowska Associate Editor: Andrea S. Dauber-Griffin Language Editor: Adam Leverton

Published by De Gruyter Open Ltd, Warsaw/Berlin Part of Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston The book is published with open access at www.degruyter.com.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.

Copyright © 2017 Fredrik Engelstad, Håkon Larsen, Jon Rogstad, Kari Steen-Johnsen and Chapters’ Contributors ISBN: 978-3-11-054632-3 e-ISBN: 978-3-11-054633-0 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. The Deutsche National­ bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. Managing Editor: Dominika Polkowska Associate Editor: Andrea S. Dauber-Griffin Language Editor: Adam Leverton www.degruyteropen.com Cover illustration: © 2017 Thinkstock

Contents Preface    xi Fredrik Engelstad, Håkon Larsen, Jon Rogstad, Kari Steen-Johnsen 1 Introduction: The Public Sphere in Change. Institutional Perspectives on Neo-corporatist Society    1 1.1 Institutions and Institutionalization    3 1.1.1 Theory of Institutional Change    4 1.2 The Position of the State and the Public Sphere    6 1.2.1 Freedom of Expression    7 1.3 From Freedom of Expression to the Public Sphere    9 1.3.1 The Public Sphere as an Institution?    12 1.4 Aspects of the Public Sphere in Flux    15 1.4.1 Elements in an Institutional Theory of the Public Sphere    18 References    19

Part I: The Public Sphere Craig Calhoun 2 Facets of the Public Sphere: Dewey, Arendt, Habermas    23 2.1 Publics, Publicness, and the Public Sphere    23 2.2 Culture, Action, and Reasoned Critique    26 2.3 Unknowable Society    30 2.4 Indirect Relationships and their Consequences    35 2.5 Conclusion    41 Acknowledgement    43 References    44 Fredrik Engelstad, Håkon Larsen, Jon Rogstad 3 The Public Sphere in the Nordic Model    46 3.1 A Nordic Model    46 3.2 The Public Sphere: a Specification    49 3.3 Public Sphere Regimes and the Media Welfare State    50 3.4 The Nordic Model: Historical Background    51 3.5 The Position of the State in the Nordic Public Sphere    53 3.6 Freedom of Expression    54 3.7 Media Institutions    55 3.8 The Arts and Cultural Institutions    58 3.9 Research and Higher Education    60

3.10 Voluntary Organizations    61 3.11 Religion    63 3.12 A Nordic Model of the Public Sphere: a Fruitful Construct?    65 References    67 Gunnar C. Aakvaag 4 Institutional Change in Norway: The Importance of the Public Sphere    71 4.1 Exogenous and Endogenous Theories of Institutional Change    72 4.2 Voting and Bargaining as Causes of Institutional Change    75 4.3 Deliberation in the Public Sphere    78 4.4 The Democratic Power Circuit    81 4.5 Instituting the Democratic Power Circuit Model in Norway    84 4.6 Applying the Democratic Power Circuit Model: Peasants, Workers and Women    86 4.6.1 The Peasants    86 4.6.2 The Workers    88 4.6.3 Women    89 4.7 Concluding Discussion    91 References    94

Part II: Media in the Public Sphere Bernard Enjolras, Kari Steen-Johnsen 5 The Digital Transformation of the Political Public Sphere: a Sociological Perspective    99 5.1 A Sociological Perspective of the Public Sphere    100 5.2 Institutional Change and Digitalization    102 5.3 Changes to the Social Organization of the Public Sphere    104 5.3.1 Changes in Communication Media    105 5.3.2 Changes in the Role of Civic Associations and in the Expression of Public Opinion    108 5.3.3 Changes in Participation and in Social Hierarchies    109 5.3.4 Changing Symbolic Structures in the Public Sphere    111 5.4 Conclusion: the Functions and Dilemmas of the Digital Public Sphere    113 References    115 Signe Bock Segaard 6 The Institutional Anchoring of Social Media Venues as Arenas for Local Political Communication.Perceptions by Voters and Politicians    118 6.1 Introduction    118

6.1.1 6.2 6.2.1 6.2.2 6.3 6.4 6.4.1 6.4.2 6.5

Institutionalization of Social Media Venues as Political Arenas    120 Framework and Expectations    122 Rational Actors within Political Institutions    122 Previous Research on Social Media and the Implications of Individual Factors    124 Measuring Perceptions of Social Media    126 Social Media as Suitable Arenas for Political Communication?    128 Voters’ and Politicians’ Perceptions    128 Explanation of the Perceptions: the Implications of Individual Characteristics    131 Conclusions: Social Media Venues as Institutions for Political Communication    134 References    136

Fredrik Engelstad 7 Strategic Communication and Institutional Change    139 7.1 Dynamic Elements of Change    140 7.2 Habermas on the Public Sphere    141 7.3 Empirical Specification    143 7.4 Citizens: Flows of Communication    144 7.5 Ambiguities of Media Pressure    145 7.6 Lobbying: Tactics, Rhetoric, Reputation    146 7.7 Civil Service and Politics: Information, Initiative, Reputation    147 7.8 Politics for Sale?    148 7.9 A Model of Contradictory Relations    150 7.10 The Problematic Openness    151 7.11 A Farewell to Normative Theory?    152 7.12 Core Elements in Professional Ethics    154 7.13 Coda    155 References    157

Part III: Aspects of Freedom of Expression Olav Elgvin and Jon Rogstad 8 Religious Threats and Institutional Change in Norwegian Mass Media    161 8.1 Introduction    161 8.2 Critical Events, Discourse and Institutional Change    162 8.3 Data and Study Design    166 8.4 Religiously Framed Threats and Coverage of Religion in Norwegian Media    167

8.5 8.6 8.7

Norms, Values and Perceptions of Threats    170 Traces of Change: (Not) to Publish for the Sake of Publishing    173 Institutional Change Through Changes in Discourse    176 References    177

Sissel C. Trygstad 9 Opposing Forces: On Whistleblowing in Norwegian Working Life    179 9.1 Expanding the Field for Workplace Democracy    179 9.1.1 Methodology    180 9.2 Institutional Change    181 9.2.1 Changes in the Pillars    182 9.2.2 Freedom of Expression    182 9.2.3 On Employees’ Right to Disclose    183 9.2.4 Freedom of Expression Versus the Managerial Prerogative    184 9.3 Findings    186 9.3.1 Norwegian Surveys    187 9.3.2 Has the Legislation Made any Difference?    189 9.3.3 Findings in a Comparative Perspective    189 9.4 Discussion    191 9.4.1 Institutional Inertia?    192 9.4.2 Decoupling?    193 9.4.3 Countermeasures    193 9.5 Conclusion    196 References    197

Part IV: The Arts in the Public Sphere Håkon Larsen 10 The Public Sphere as an Arena for Legitimation Work: The Case of Cultural Organizations    201 10.1 Legitimacy and Sociology    201 10.2 Legitimation Work in the Culture Sector    202 10.3 Communication Between the Organizations and the State    204 10.4 Societal Mission    206 10.5 Satisfying the Art World    210 10.6 The Public Sphere as a Key Arena for Legitimation Work    211 10.7 Conclusion    214 References    216

Part V: Religion and Institutional Change Inger Furseth 11 The Return of Religion in the Public Sphere? The Public Role of Nordic Faith Communities    221 11.1 Nordic Religious Landscapes    221 11.2 Theoretical Perspectives    223 11.3 Studying the Presence of Religion In the Public Sphere    225 11.4 A Growing Nordic Interfaith Infrastructure    226 11.4.1 The Pioneers – the Christian Umbrella and Ecumenical Organizations    227 11.4.2 Umbrella and Worldview Organizations    227 11.4.3 Interfaith Organizations    229 11.4.4 Presentational Communications on a Variety of Issues    230 11.5 Critical Issues    232 11.5.1 The Role of Public Stakeholders    232 11.6 Public Participation by Religious Actors    234 11.7 Deprivatization of Religion    235 References    237 Knut Lundby 12 Public Religion in Mediatized Transformations    241 12.1 Introduction    241 12.2 Three Spheres of Public Religion    241 12.2.1 The Journalism Sphere    242 12.2.2 The Cultural Sphere    242 12.2.3 The Religious Media Sphere    242 12.2.4 Public Religion    243 12.2.5 Mediatization of Public Religion    243 12.2.6 Mediatization and Secularization    244 12.3 Nested Institutions    245 12.3.1 Religion and Media as Institutions    245 12.3.2 Institutional Change – Changing Configurations    246 12.4 Mediatization as a Theory of Institutional Change    247 12.4.1 Change and Transformation    247 12.4.2 The Institutional Approach in Mediatization Studies    248 12.4.3 Media Logic – Institutional Logics    249 12.5 Researching Mediatized Public Religion    250 12.5.1 Diachronous or Synchronous Approach    250 12.5.2 Interaction in Mediatized Religious Environments    250 12.5.3 Baseline for the Diachronous Analysis    251

12.5.4 12.6 12.6.1 12.6.2 12.6.3 12.7 12.7.1 12.7.2 12.7.3 12.8 12.8.1

Baseline for The Synchronous Analysis    251 The Journalism Sphere    252 Media History: Changes Across Reader Cultures    253 Contemporary Survey: the Significance of News Media    253 Mediatized Public Religion in the Journalism Sphere    254 The Cultural Sphere    254 Media History: Popular Magazines    255 Contemporary Survey: Satire, Humour and Entertainment    255 Mediatized Public Religion in the Cultural Sphere    256 The Religious Media Sphere    257 Media History: ‘Christian’ Publications and ‘Religious’ Programmes    257 12.8.2 Contemporary Survey: in a Corner of the Public Sphere    258 12.8.3 Mediatized Public Religion in the Religious Media Sphere    259 12.9 Conclusion    259 References    260

Part VI: Afterword Fredrik Engelstad 13 Afterword: A Viable Model of the Public Sphere?    265 13.1 Institutional Elements in the Public Sphere     265 13.2 A Viable Type of Public Sphere?    267

About the Authors    269

Preface This book is the second in a three-volume series on institutional change in Nordic societies, with the main emphasis on Norway. Where the present volume focuses on the public sphere, the previous volume, also published by De Gruyter Open, was devoted to working life and the welfare state, whereas the subsequent volume will cover a broad set of democratic institutions. Taken together, the three volumes reflect in new ways the old sociological questions of how society is possible, and how it does change? But modern societies are too complex to be conceived within the framework of one theory of structure and change. One answer to this challenge is to focus on social institutions and institutional change, as the most generic – albeit not the only important – units of society. The last two decades have seen considerable progress in the understanding of institutional change. The three volume series takes as its departure these theoretical innovations, and applies them to one specific form of society – the Scandinavian or Nordic societies. These societies are interesting because they are different expressions of a neo-corporatist model, with a strong interplay of state and society, a state which at the same time is strong and liberal, a strong social welfare sector and highly organized, and even “politicized”, civil society. Within a democratic frame of reference, the main specificity in the first volume, Cooperation and Conflict the Nordic Way, edited by Fredrik Engelstad and Anniken Hagelund, is that of bargaining and compromise between social partners, in the labour market as well as in civil society. There is a close link between this and the present book in the reciprocal relationship between the welfare regime and the public sphere. Compromises are dependent on a well-functioning public sphere, while on the other hand the strength of the public sphere is dependent on a strong and simultaneously liberal state which by intervention guarantees the autonomy of the public sphere. In the third volume, these strands are more explicitly linked together in analyses of the relationship between a broad set of institutional features and the political institutions as such. The books are the outgrowth of a network project on sociological theory funded by the Norwegian Research Council. Three partners have taken on practical responsibilities for the project: the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo, the Institute for Social Research and the Fafo Institute for Labour and Social Research. We are thankful to the Norwegian Research Council and to the collaborating institutes for their support of the project and for the many productive conversations with our colleagues. We also express our gratitude to the participants at the conference on institutional change and the public sphere at Åsgårdstrand, Norway in June 2014, from whose contributions and comments we benefited in producing this book. Fredrik Engelstad, Håkon Larsen, Jon Rogstad, Kari Steen-Johnsen Oslo, September, 2016

Fredrik Engelstad, Håkon Larsen, Jon Rogstad, Kari Steen-Johnsen

1 Introduction: The Public Sphere in Change. Institutional Perspectives on Neo-corporatist Society The last two decades have seen far-reaching structural transformations in the public sphere. Few topics have attracted more attention, wild guesses, and misinterpretation, than the prospective effects of ongoing changes in information and communication technology. What even the close future will look like, is highly uncertain. Technology, however, is but one element in the broader social processes of change. Its effects on the public sphere emerge in interaction with cultural and institutional patterns, and thereby citizens’ social and political participation. In order to study these transformations three strands of research are brought together in this volume: research on the public sphere, research on institutional change, and research on the Nordic model. When it appeared more than 50 years ago, Jürgen Habermas’ book on Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962) was a pioneering contribution. Recent transformations invite a re-evaluation and reconceptualization of the theory of the public sphere, originally conceived with reference to the period between the late eighteenth and the early twentieth centuries, as well as its later revisions and developments. As theories of institutional change have been some of the most innovative in the social sciences in the last decade and as they are particularly well suited to analyse the constellation of institutions that make up the public sphere, it is to these theories we turn to understand the processes transforming the contemporary public sphere. The theoretical ambition of the book is above all to develop theoretical insights by close links to empirical studies throwing light on the functioning of the public sphere, how it is constituted, how it may be delimited and what should be seen as its core elements. Even if communicative transformations are taking place on a global scale, their effects differ in various types of society. To make the discussion of the theory of the public sphere as precise as possible, theories of institutional change are applied to detailed empirical studies of one social type – modern Nordic societies, with a particular focus on Norway. Jürgen Habermas was of course not the first to study the public sphere, amply demonstrated by the four-volume collection The public sphere (Gripsrud, Moe, Molander & Murdock, 2010–2011), a compilation of central texts spanning from early Greek philosophy to modern critical theory. Here, the relationships between his conception and those of John Dewey and Hannah Arendt are laid out in detail (Calhoun, this volume). Habermas’ work has of course been met with criticism and discussion (Calhoun, 1992 is a locus classicus), and it is contextualized and debated in the present book as well. Yet, it is still the most fruitful point of departure for discussions and analyses of problems of the public sphere in modern society. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989 [1962]) the public sphere was conceived as an arena for deliberation and a channel of communication © 2017 Fredrik Engelstad, Håkon Larsen, Jon Rogstad, Kari Steen-Johnsen This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.

  

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among citizens and in civil society vis-à-vis the state. Contemporary analyses, then, raise questions involving long term changes in the institutional traits of the state and of civil society. This is particularly important in the Nordic societies, where the state is virtually omnipresent in society. In Structural Transformation literature and the arts were accorded a prominent role in the public sphere; in later versions this aspect has come more in the background (Jacobs, 2012); whereas mainstream media studies have gained most of the attention in Habermas’ later work (2006, 2009). The present book follows a somewhat different path. A recent book on The Nordic Media Welfare State (Syvertsen, Enli, Mjøs & Moe, 2014) has already given a comprehensive overview on the Nordic model in the media field, with main emphasis on “traditional” media. Hence, the discussions on media concentrate on the significance of social media, their interaction with politics, and on the relationship between the media and the PR industry. Simultaneously, the analysis of the public sphere is broadened to general questions of freedom of expression. In modern societies freedom of expression is particularly important in five institutional fields: Media, arts and cultural production, religion, voluntary organizations, and research and higher education. Of these, the two latter are treated more cursorily, mainly discussed in the special chapter on Nordic comparisons (Engelstad, Larsen & Rogstad, this volume). The Nordic societies serving as empirical base for this volume may be seen as varieties of a common neo-corporatist model, with a strong and active state closely interacting with a dense network of civil society organizations, a high degree of coordination in labor market policies and processes of wage formation, along with a generous welfare state. Here, the Nordic countries stand in clear contrast to the liberal model of UK and USA, but also to the societies of Continental Europe (Esping-Andersen, 1990), albeit closer to Germany and the Netherlands than to Mediterranean Europe. The interaction between the socio-political structure and the public sphere works in a double sense. Not only in terms of base influencing the superstructure, but also by the public sphere being an essential precondition for the shape of the socio-political configuration. The development of the Nordic model cannot be understood without the reciprocal relationship between the public sphere and the socio-economic aspects. Even if the main focus is set on one country, it yields more than a single case study. Among the Nordic countries Norway represents the strongest version of neocorporatism; hence it is a strategic case that yields a transference value to the understanding of coordination and conflict in the Nordic model as such, as well as its long term viability. Moreover, similarities and differences between elements in the public spheres in the Nordic countries are specifically discussed below (Engelstad, Larsen & Rogstad, this volume). Beyond this, the theoretical ambition is not that of generalization, but to increase sensitivity to variation, and to single out significant elements driving social change – over time and across societies.

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 Introduction: The Public Sphere in Change

1.1 Institutions and Institutionalization A common challenge to Habermas’ accounts of the public sphere and later works inspired by it is that they rely either on a clear empiricist approach (e.g. descriptions of Parisian salons or London coffee houses) or on mostly conceptual notions about social change (as in the transformation to late modernity). In both cases, specific models of processes of social change on the macro level are absent. The assumption of the present book is that such processes of change are best understood within an institutional perspective, which makes it easier to identify mechanisms of change, trace process changes and reveal patterns of power. An institution is principally a set of rules or norms regulating the behaviour of individuals, as well as organizations and other corporate actors. It is a framework for action with relatively high stability – more than a convention or informal common understanding (Thelen, 1999). A useful and commonly cited definition by W. Richard Scott is used in several chapters: ‘Institutions are social structures that have attained a high degree of resilience … [and are] composed of cultural-cognitive, normative, and regulative elements’ (2001, p.  48). On a deeper level, John Searle (1995, 2010) conceives institutions as basic regularities springing out of speech acts, an idea of particular relevance for studies of the public sphere. Searle gives a principled understanding of the combination of actor-oriented and structure-oriented analysis, where the main link is continuous processes of institutionalization and deinstitutionalization (see Dahrendorf, 1959 for an early formulation). In the research literature, three strands of institutional thinking are often distinguished: rational choice institutionalism, sociological institutionalism and historical institutionalism (Hall & Taylor 1996). However, these are not necessarily incompatible and are often complementary (Thelen, 2012; Engelstad & Hagelund, 2015). Institutions should be distinguished from organizations, even though there is a certain linguistic overlap (e.g. ‘health care institutions’, which refer (mostly) to nonprofit organizations). Institutions may be conceived as purely informal, but if so they are mostly restricted to small groups in order to maintain stability. In macro relationships, which are the focal points here, formal elements are crucial. They may take the form of agreements, rules or legislation, which have a long-term character; at the same time, these structures must be enacted and sanctioned by political measures, powerful organizations or aggregates of actors. Rules and norms always call for interpretation; as a consequence, they are a constant object of power struggles. Even if the regulative aspect is quite strict, it is open to multiple specifications. Therefore, the regulative aspect of institutions is not deterministic; they rather function as arenas for conflict and competition. Given that actors are restricted by institutional regulation, they are often motivated to influence the structure and working of institutions, for example, by calling for legislative reform. Despite their regulative nature, institutions are not located at a special, overarching level in social structure. Often they form a nested structure, somewhat like



Institutions and Institutionalization 

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Chinese boxes, with different levels of specification. A simple example is as follows: The ‘media’ is an institution in a broad sense; within that framework are found more specified institutions, such as the press, and even more specified institutions, such as newspapers (Lundby, this volume).

1.1.1 Theory of Institutional Change Even though institutions are relatively stable, they are in constant transformation, albeit at a slow pace, due to changes in environment or to processes of reinterpretation. They emerge, widen or restrict their scope, change their extension and may eventually disappear. Attempts to grasp institutional change in theoretical terms come in several versions, according to disciplinary specificities and methodological assumptions (Hall & Taylor, 1996; Thelen, 1999) or types of mechanisms applied (Mahoney & Thelen, 2009; Schmidt, 2002, 2008; a critical discussion in Aakvaag, this volume). For the present purposes, a slightly different taxonomy is selected, linked to the specific mechanisms of the public sphere and its central actors. First, one set of driving forces emerges where changes in technology, and not least communication technology, are pertinent. New technology becomes a source of change in existing roles or forms of interaction. A relatively simple model is that of ‘punctuated equilibrium’ (Collier & Collier, 1991). Societies are assumed to normally be in a state of relative equilibrium and to proceed along existing paths. In that case, changes are elicited by external shocks, be it new technologies, war or economic crisis. They open a ‘window of opportunity’ to the creation of new rules and a new course of action until the next external shock leads to a renewed revision of rules and policy paths. The most far-reaching change of this type discussed in the following is the emergence of social media, discussed by Enjolras & Steen-Johnsen (this volume). Both the technology and its corresponding social patterns are changing so fast that no second equilibrium seems to be established. Alternatively, the process may be interpreted as a cascade of new technologies and modes of communication, which over a decade has resulted in a world-wide hegemony by a few large producers regulating salient parts of the incalculable number of communicative processes. Second, the public sphere is changed by legislation and other forms of political intervention, of particular importance in Nordic countries. Paul Pierson (2004) discussed this form of change with a somewhat different emphasis on what may be termed a ‘contingent model of path dependency’, where positive feedback processes are central elements. Institutional arrangements working fairly well over a certain period of time tend to be self-reinforcing, as acceptance of a given set of rules makes actors adjust to them; this in turn narrows the relevant set of alternatives. Adjustments may take place due to changes in the environment or in preferences. General types of policy regulations are state subsidies to the news media or state ownership of public service broadcasting; they may also change over time as a result of changes

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 Introduction: The Public Sphere in Change

in the environment or in the dominant political ideology. Larsen’s discussion (this volume) of legitimacy in highly subsidized culture organizations (opera houses, philharmonic orchestras) is a related example. Here, tensions arise when established state patronage of the fine arts is confronted by public scepticism of support for elite art only. The outcome is a growing concern about the legitimacy of these organizations and increasing demands for special measures to broaden their public appeal. Third, changes may occur because political actors (independently of the state) are specifically acting to change the institutional framework. They define the purpose of a policy reform and the problems it is expected to solve and offer alternative policy instruments and appropriate methods. Schmidt (2008) terms this the cognitive function of political discourse. Aakvaag (this volume) gives several examples of this type of process created by broad socio-political movements using what Habermas (1996) terms the democratic power circuit. Another example is lobbying activity vis-à-vis political authorities, with the goal of changing existing regulations (Engelstad, this volume). Finally, institutions change primarily as a result of actions by a large aggregate of actors, where the explicit purpose may differ from the final outcome. Kathleen Thelen and coworkers have elaborated several models of institutional change along this line (Thelen, 2004; Streeck & Thelen 2005; Mahoney & Thelen, 2009). Four types of mechanisms are discussed: displacement, layering, drift and conversion. Layering means that a process of sedimentation takes place when new elements are added to old ones. This may lead to reinforcement of the original purpose or tensions between old and new elements (Engelstad 2015). One example is the inclusion of whistleblowing in the existing framework of workplace democracy, examined by Trygstad (this volume), resulting in considerable tension. Another is the coexistence of social media and conventional media in communication between politicians and the electorate in local politics (Segaard, this volume), where the final outcome may be different uses of media, depending on target groups and the scope of communication. Displacement is a more radical form of change, where one institutional arrangement is supplanted by another. A striking example is the exodus of advertisers and ads from paper media to electronic media, creating a new form of hybrid institution. Drift is the result of changes in the environment leading to changes in the functioning of an institution. A telling example is the description by Lundby (this volume) of the effects of mediatization on religious understanding and activity. A related process is the redefinition of what is to be considered as works or performances of art. Finally, conversion means that an institution remains formally unchanged, but at the same time it redefines its functions. Elgvin and Rogstad (this volume) illustrate the point by discussing changes in the interpretation of the freedom of expression on religious questions in the news media.



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1.2 The Position of the State and the Public Sphere Neo-corporatism implies a strong state with broad contact with civil society. A pertinent question then arises of whether a strong state has to be an authoritarian state or if it may be liberal and democratic, as is implied in interpretations of the Nordic neo-corporatist model. To liberalists, this combination may appear self-contradictory. However, the realization of this notion rests on a complex set of checks and balances institutionalized over a long period of time (Engelstad, Larsen & Rogstad, this volume). Of special importance in the Nordic public sphere is the constellation of liberalism and social democracy. When the labour movement swept over Scandinavia from the beginning of the twentieth century, liberal values were already anchored in society. One long-term effect was the emergence of a tendency toward political compromise, but it also elicited a dialectical development. Even though the rise of the labour movement entailed a strong growth in state regulations with a paternalist leaning (Slagstad, 2001), in the long run it also provoked responses anchored in liberal values. If the labour movement was dominant for decades, from the 1980s the situation was reversed (Sejersted 2011). In both periods, however, the value sets of liberalism and social democracy existed side by side. The neo-corporative state is also a liberal state, manifested in its commitment to a well-functioning public sphere. The state engages in public service broadcasting to uphold a serious alternative to commercial channels (Larsen, this volume). Even though the press is privately owned, it is partly subsidized by the state in order to counteract monopoly in opinion formation. A generous cultural policy includes strong support for literature and the arts. Moreover, the state subsidizes a large number of voluntary associations with the same justifications – to promote culture and democratic dialogue in civil society. Higher education is virtually free. To some extent, even religious organizations are subsidized by the state (Engelstad, Larsen & Rogstad, this volume). Common to state engagement with civil society is a general version of the socalled arm’s length principle (Nielsen, 2015), a liberal principle later applied to the sphere of culture policy (Mangset, 2013). This formulation may sound too good to be true (cf. discussion by Larsen, this volume); grey zones and tensions certainly exist between public support and what is often termed the social obligations (samfunnsoppdrag) of cultural organizations. Nevertheless, a main rule has gradually been reinforced, that economic support shall not entail restrictions on artistic creativity and cultural production.

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 Introduction: The Public Sphere in Change

1.2.1 Freedom of Expression Robert Dahl (1989, p.  221) emphasizes freedom of expression, along with access to alternative information, as a basic precondition for democratic governance (See also Calhoun, this volume p. M18, on John Dewey). At the same time, freedom of expression is never unlimited but is open to (re)interpretation. It is regulated and restricted by considerations of security policy and overarching national interests, of legitimate secrecy linked to business strategies and of private life and protection against personal defamation (Kierulf & Rønning, 2009). Specifications of these restrictions vary between societies, but they are unavoidable in any democratic state. In order to make freedom of expression meaningful, this balance of principles is handled by institutionalization, through law or otherwise. Institutions embrace a formalized guarantee of the liberty of citizens to express their views in public, very often anchored in the national constitution. In order to work and to be legitimate, restrictions on freedom of expression must be stated with sufficient clarity. The balance of freedom of expression against other principles invites fierce struggles over interpretations and justifications of the restrictions. One obvious example is blasphemy. In many societies, blasphemy is regarded as a serious crime, in the worst case leading to draconic punishment. In the US, in contrast, blasphemy was never a theme in federal law, and in France it was abolished in 1881. More recently, Sweden, the UK, the Netherlands and Norway have eliminated blasphemy from the criminal code. In several other European states, it is dormant for all practical purposes. A recent example occurred in Denmark, when the artists and publishers of the Mohammad caricatures in Jyllands-Posten in 2005 were not prosecuted; the last time the paragraph was used was in 1938. The complexity of concerns in the field is illustrated by the case of Norway. The issue of blasphemy was thoroughly discussed by the Norwegian Free Speech Commission appointed by the government. Its report (NOU 1999:27), explicitly inspired by Habermas (Kalleberg 2014), suggested an amendment to the Constitution, Article 100 on Free Speech, which was subsequently adopted by Parliament in 2004. The Commission underscored the importance of religious criticism as a vital part of a liberal democracy, even though the issue had taken a new turn due to the new multicultural and multireligious context. Fierce religious criticism may imply that religious feelings are hurt; nevertheless, the value of protecting religious feelings and identities is outweighed by the value of ensuring the freedom of speech (NOU 1999: 27, 6.3.). However, when the amendment was brought to vote in 2004, the political majority voted against abolishing the paragraph on blasphemy (Steen-Johnsen, Fladmoe & Midtbøen, 2016). The issue was brought up again in 2009, when the current government proposed strengthening the paragraph, with reference to tensions in the new multicultural society. The ensuing public debate, however, led to the opposite result; the blasphemy paragraph was abolished altogether (Furseth, 2015, p. 49f). The balancing of principles is also present in the legislation against hate speech, which



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also has clear religious connotations. However, in this field restrictions have been strengthened in several countries (Bleich, 2011). Art and literature have a significant impact on changes in the freedom of expression. A telling example is explicit descriptions of sexuality where there has been a growing liberalization in modern societies throughout the twentieth century. In Norway, the last trial concerning infringement on decency in literature was raised in 1967. Even though the court prohibited the book, it was reissued a few years later, and a new court case has not been raised. Ex ante censorship of films was abolished in 2000. Still, art is not immune to restrictions on expression. One problem here is the delimitation of a work of art, which has been greatly debated for decades, as therefore has been what is considered as ‘expression’. When an artwork takes the form of a performance, the borders between expression and action are blurred (Slaatta & Okstad, 2014). A recent demonstration is a Swedish case in which an artist performed a fake suicide attempt in public and was arrested by the police (Odell, 2009). Working life is another arena where the freedom of expression is in flux. One area of conflict concerns where the fine line between loyalty and disloyalty to the employer is to be drawn. This also includes reporting illegal action on the part of management. Another question is raised about the balance between work obligations and the expression of political views, for example, on trade unionization. A third area of conflict is between expressing views internally or externally, in conventional media or social media. The rights of employees as citizens have gained more attention and support, and at least on the surface trade unions are generally accepted. In Norway, this has been reinforced by legislation protecting whistleblowing. However, both private and public employers are more prone to keep up enterprise reputation and prevent negative public attention by including statements on loyalty in work contracts (Trygstad, this volume). In particular, employees in the public sector seem to find that their right to freedom of expression is limited by their employer (Trygstad, 2014). Freedom of expression is not only about legal borders and prohibitions but in practice is also about social tolerance among citizens. Generous legal liberty is culturally restricted by codes of civility in day-to-day interaction. Here too, there are fine lines to be drawn between breaches of decent interaction on the one hand and undue self-censorship on the other. A recent survey study of the freedom of expression in Norway indicates that a substantial part of the population is supportive of social and more formal sanctions on the expression of contempt vis-à-vis special groups in the media and in social media (Steen-Johnsen et al., 2016). A significant aspect of this in the public sphere is self-censorship in the press. The publication of the Muhammad cartoons in Denmark in 2005, and later in Norway, resulted in drastic reactions in the form of attacks on property and threats on the lives of the cartoonists. Subsequent studies indicate that violence and threats of violence against news media actually has a certain influence on publication policies (Elgvin & Rogstad, this volume). However, it is difficult to distinguish between what is a growing consciousness of unfounded

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 Introduction: The Public Sphere in Change

provocations vis-à-vis special groups in the population and what actually amounts to self-censorship among editors and journalists. The 2015 survey on freedom of speech found that even though very few in the population and among journalists would prohibit the publication of provocative cartoons (directed towards Jews, Muslims, Christians), more than 40 percent in both groups stated that the media should be cautious (Steen-Johnsen et al., 2016, p. 76). Freedom of expression may be regarded as a ‘negative’ freedom as conceived by Isiah Berlin (1969 [1958]), that is, the absence of external restrictions. But for citizens to be able to express themselves freely, they must also have access to relevant information pertaining to their interests (Dahl, 1989), conceived as ‘positive’ freedom by Berlin (1969 [1958]). The positive freedom of speech puts an obligation on responsible social actors, foremost on the state (Kenyon, 2014) but also on private actors, to secure the ‘infrastructural requirement’ of information (NOU 1999: 27). The state may make documents relevant to internal deliberations in the form of letters, memos or minutes available to the public. Furthermore, the state may take general responsibility for the dissemination of information to the public to ensure an enlightened public debate. In addition, there are implicit or explicit media policies on the part of the state, even in liberal societies (Benson, 2009). Most visible are well-established public service broadcasting and political and partial economic support for the press, found in various forms in large parts of Europe but most extensively in Scandinavia (Syvertsen et al., 2014; Engelstad, Larsen & Rogstad, this volume). This brief sketch indicates that freedom of expression may be regarded not only as an individual right but also as an institution in a strong sense. It is specified by a set of legislation and formal rules, although these vary across societies. This is complemented by informal interpretations and specifications. At the same time, the openness of regulations allows for competing interpretations concerning both action within given limitations and attempts at changing the rules themselves.

1.3 From Freedom of Expression to the Public Sphere The foregoing presentation serves as a prologue to discussions of the concept of the public sphere. When Jürgen Habermas published Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit in 1962, it marked a modest introduction to what much later was to be seen as a major contribution to the social sciences. Habermas’ combination of conceptual innovation and empirical investigation brought the notion of public sphere – Öffentlichkeit – to the fore and thereby laid the groundwork for a lasting reinterpretation of modern, democratic society. Curiously, it took almost three decades before the book was given the attention it deserves, which occurred in the wake of the 1989 English translation, despite earlier translations into Norwegian (1971) and French (1978). As a result, the implications of changes in Habermas’ thinking, which had taken place in the mean-



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time, were blurred. Hence, a closer examination of later developments of the theory is necessary to give a realistic assessment of his contribution. Calhoun’s chapter in the present volume puts the work of Habermas within a broader context of ideas developed by John Dewey and Hannah Arendt. Each of these thinkers gives forceful but somewhat selective descriptions of the public sphere. Reading them together yields a stronger theory of public life and democracy. Habermas focused on social foundations and structural transformations of the public sphere, whereas Dewey took a more optimistic view and underlined the significance of indirect consequences, and Arendt emphasized the creativity of political action (Calhoun, this volume, M24). Another ambition is to sketch and partly rephrase the development in Habermas’ thinking on the public sphere as a combination of historical description and normative theory and to (re)interpret it within a framework of institutional change (Engelstad, this volume). This facilitates reflections on the challenges to the theory from the communicative revolutions of the 1990s and 2000s prompted by the emergence of professionalized communication, of the de-professionalized communication of the ‘social media’ (Steen-Johnsen & Enjolras, this volume) and of the challenges to ‘old’ European societies prompted by growing pressures from multiculturalism (Elgvin & Rogstad, this volume). Very crudely, Structural Transformation may be divided into two parts. The first is the historical study of the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The second is a much broader characterization of structural changes in the public sphere in the period between the 1850s and the 1950s. In its original version, the public sphere was described as a network of discussion fora, journals and publishing houses linked to a relatively limited and unified social group (Habermas 1989, p. 31ff). Conversation unrestricted by convention and censorship pointed towards social arrangements based in reason and common interests. In this way, the public sphere was seen as an arena where citizens could discuss artistic and cultural achievements as expressions of the self-understanding of society (Hohendal, 1989; Engelstad, 2003), while at the same time it served as a mediating instance between civil society and the state. The second part of the book describes the emergence of the mass media on a broad scale, along with mass public education and economic–political corporatism. The overarching diagnosis of the second part is that of a decay of the public sphere. Serious literary and political deliberation is absorbed by public entertainment and PR; the responsibility for the upbringing of children is left to the state. Crucial social differentiations are blurred, and the public sphere is refeudalized, caught up by a partnership of the political and social elites. Here, a line is drawn to C.W. Mills and The Power Elite (1956) as a visible inspiration. The English translation of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere secured the book a strong impact and subsequently heated discussion. The description of the emergence of the public sphere invited a large number of historical studies (for a summary, see Mah, 2000). At the same time, a broad set of critical points was

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linked to the concept of the public sphere and its roots in the bourgeois strata. Typical questions raised were whether the public sphere should be conceived as one sphere or a set of spheres and whether groups other than the bourgeois public, such as workers or women, should be included in the public or be accorded separate public spheres (Calhoun, 1992). Less critical attention was paid to the diagnosis of the second part of the book, with the effect that Habermas’ later revisions of the conception of the public sphere have gone rather unnoticed. Structural Transformation is a historical–critical exposition influenced by the early Frankfurt School critique of the alienating effects of the culture industry in Dialectic of the Enlightenment (Horkheimer & Adorno (1972 [1947]). The historical–critical approach implies that the original normative ambitions of an organization or institution, or even a historical epoch, yield ideal standards for its evaluation. Observed historical changes are judged accordingly. An example often referred to is the norms and expectations of the ‘enlightenment project’. In the present case, whether or not implicit standards for the public sphere are satisfied is at stake. During the 1970s, Habermas made a decisive break with the Frankfurt School. The historical–critical approach was replaced by an explicit normative theory resting on basic social community anchored in communication. These changes had their theoretical roots in Habermas’ conception of communicative rationality, inspired by speech act theory and developed in the Theory of Communicative Action (1984[1981]) a decade earlier. Here, he set up three criteria for communication to be rational: actors are able to justify that their utterances (a) live up to claims of truth, (b) are set forth with a sincere intention and (c) are compatible with general norms (1984, p. 99). These rest on a basic condition of inter-subjectivity; for norms to be valid it is presupposed that actors in concert may justify them and reach consensus about them. Thus, Habermas’ thinking about the public sphere rests on the normative structures of everyday patterns of communication and the requirements they demand of the participants, explicitly and implicitly. Further revisions were made by Habermas himself in the early 1990s. In the preface to the German re-edition of Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1990), he reflected on the implications of the significant social changes during the three decades after the book was published. His concerns about the general passivity of the public were partly modified, as the increased level of education has created a greater potential for active participation in social movements and political discussion. In parallel, Habermas has revised his views on the possibilities of democracy. Previous expectations of participatory democracy were toned down, and emphasis shifted to constitutional democracy, along with an acknowledgement that increasing social differentiation had made comprehensive social planning impossible (Habermas 1990). In Between Facts and Norms (1996 [1992]), this new conception was applied to the concept of the public sphere, accentuating its complexity and thereby also its fragmentation in modern society. The public sphere, he writes, consists of ‘… a very complex network stretching out to a large number of overlapping international,



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national, regional, local, and subcultural arenas’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 373). Despite this enormous multiplicity, however, the various aspects of the public sphere may be held together because they have a common language. To the extent that they relate to the political system, it is possible to cross the borders between the various partial public spheres (ibid.). Whereas the mass media were regarded as a problem in Structural Transformation, in the 2000s Habermas explicitly emphasized their central position in a modern democracy. Inspired by modern media studies (Peters 2008), by the mid – 2000s he went one step further, taking as his point of departure empirical studies indicating that the standards of communicative rationality are effective in interaction at the group level. He argued that they may be applied as a critical standard to the public sphere, even if there is a great distance between the level of small groups and the macro structures of the public sphere. This did not deny that the media are also significant power holders, in line with standard media research. However, Habermas postulated that the power of the media is neutralized if two conditions are fulfilled: ‘…journalists operate within the guidelines of the public task of a “free” press and of an “independent” media system, as laid down by the constitution’ (2009, p. 169), while at the same time citizens have the possibility of participating in the public formation of opinion (2009, p. 171). As long as the media enjoy editorial independence from owner interests, like all others they will be affected by the rules of the game of the public sphere. This change of view of the media is linked to Habermas’ assumption that modern societies cannot function without norms furthering common understanding. The public sphere rests on a set of underlying ‘rules of the game’, shaped by the three criteria of communicative rationality. Utterances in the public sphere are exposed to criticism from different parties and encounter general norms of objectivity as rules of the game for public debate. Thanks to ‘the force (Kraft) of the better argument’, the public sphere acquires a purifying effect. Strategic communication from powerful actors is also bound to be measured against norms of communication (2009, p. 161). Therefore, ‘… even the powerful actors will only contribute to the mobilization of relevant issues, facts, and arguments’ (Habermas, 2006, p. 420). A precondition for the purifying effects, however, is that the rules of the game are consistent and generally recognized and accordingly that there is consensus on what issues are to be discussed.

1.3.1 The Public Sphere as an Institution? The question may be raised, then, about the more precise content of the concept of the public sphere and its relationship to institutional theory. Whereas Habermas characterizes the public sphere as a network of different types of arenas, he maintained in Between Facts and Norms that ‘The public sphere should not be conceived as an institution, and by no means as an organization.’ (1996, p. 360). But if the public sphere is

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not an institution, what is it then? Already the notion of structural change – Strukturwandel – indicates the public sphere as a social arrangement with stable traits, albeit going through transformations in the long run. Thus, already in the original book the public sphere is endowed with institutional traits, even if these are not clearly spelled out. Nevertheless, the public sphere may be too complex to be characterized as an institution. A solution, then, would be that even if the public sphere as a generic concept is not conceived as an institution, it is a constellation of core elements that may each be analysed as institutional fields with specific modes of operation. Habermas (1996, p. 360ff) distinguishes three basic features of the public sphere: It is (i) a social space, an arena where citizens get into contact. It is generally open to anyone who wants to participate, as listener or as speaker, and it functions as a channel allowing various views to be relevant for the formation of society by connection to the state or other authoritative bodies. (ii) The arena facilitates exchanges of opinions, views on common concerns and ideas on the future of society. It is thus an arena where public opinion in a broad political sense is crystallized. (iii) The public sphere presupposes a certain structure of communication, anchored in rational argumentation and linked to the conception of communicative rationality sketched above. Without denying their usefulness, these points invite further questions. How can such a complex structure as the public sphere be held together, and how is it possible to understand the way it changes over time? The answer to these questions depends on understanding institutional change. Whereas Structural Transformation was very fruitful on the emergence and early functioning of the public sphere, the exposition of changes after the mid-nineteenth century is disappointing due to an overly conceptual grounding. Despite references to contemporary sociology, this part of the text is very much an extrapolation of Horkheimer and Adorno’s dystopian Dialectic of Enlightenment (1972 [1947]). Paradoxically, the new and optimistic vision of the public sphere from the 1990s and 2000s is also basically static. Take then the cohesion of the public sphere. Habermas postulates that it is constituted by a set of arenas held together by language, which seems less than persuasive. It takes far more power to keep large social structures together than people being able to speak to each other. Some form of institutionalization is a precondition even for minimal integration of such complex structures. Here, the notion of freedom of expression becomes crucial. Freedom of expression is a precondition for the existence of anything like a public sphere. If it decays, the public sphere decays. As argued above, freedom of expression must be institutionalized – articulated and sanctioned by formal rules and stable practices – in order to be effective. If freedom of expression constitutes the basis of the public sphere, another distinction may also be introduced. The extension of the public sphere as social space coincides with the relevance of limitations on the freedom of expression. Therefore, the limits to the extension of the public sphere are found at the cutting edge of where these limitations are enforced or where they on the contrary become irrelevant. If so, the freedom of expression as an institution circumscribes the public sphere.



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If the public sphere is a constellation of institutional fields, which are the most important arenas, and how do they interact? Five core institutions were briefly mentioned above: the media, arts and cultural organizations, religious organizations, voluntary organizations and research and higher education organizations. These are meeting places for citizens for reflection and deliberation over central questions in social life. They serve as channels to the larger society and in specific ways set premises for political decision making. They are not direct parts of the state (in contrast to, for example, the courts; state churches are intermediate cases) and must operate independently of political pressures to function adequately. Nevertheless, in specific ways they are in interaction with the state by giving input in politics and by voicing opposition and protest. What they have in common is that in different ways they fulfil eminently critical functions and thus bring the freedom of expression to the fore. This is the case in several respects. In various ways they all contain critical potential vis-à-vis society by representing alternative ways of interpreting social life. This form of plurality is a result of ongoing processes of social differentiation. Moreover, all five institutional fields are pluralist in the sense that they contain internal tensions and debates between schools, between group interests, between ideological strands and between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. And, despite their specificity due to differentiation, they are critical in their relationships to each other; the arts opposed to science, science to religion and the media to all the others. In this perspective, the public sphere is mainly conceptualized in spatial terms. However, Habermas also includes public opinion and the formation of public opinion (1989, p. 89ff, 1996, p. 360ff; Calhoun, this volume; Aakvaag, this volume). In English language discussions, this double quality of the public sphere is less prominent; here the main emphasis is put on the spatial aspect. This may be due to the English translation of the German concept of Öffentlichkeit into ‘public sphere’, which has a clear connotation of spatiality, whereas the German notion connotes both aspects. The performative traits, however, are brought to the fore in some research. Mah (2000) points to the salience of informal opinion formation in pre-modern societies, notably during the French Revolution, where institutionalized channels of information were few and scattered. Adut (2012) lays out a broad theory of the semiotics of political performance and scandals in modern societies, and Alexander (2010) has written about the importance of performative success in contemporary US political campaigning. Such processes are events that may have considerable effects when they occur, but they remain volatile as long as they are weakly institutionalized or not at all.

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1.4 Aspects of the Public Sphere in Flux The description by Habermas (1989) of the emergence of the public sphere in France, England and Germany is to a large degree similar to what is found in Scandinavia (Krefting, Nøding & Ringvej, 2014). Both Sweden and Denmark had well-established universities and an active literary culture in the eighteenth century. As mentioned, freedom of the press was legally anchored in Sweden from 1766. Denmark saw a brief period of broad liberalization, with the abolishment of ex ante censorship in 1771. After a few years came a period with more strict restrictions but without the reintroduction of ex ante censorship. In Norway, the same parallel is found, albeit with a delay of half a century. Up to 1814, Norway was a Danish semi-colony; after partition it took a few decades before a viable national public sphere emerged around 1850. However, it is striking how much the situation after the mid-nineteenth century differs from the description given by Habermas. One of his most cited social diagnoses is an alleged tendency toward the re-feudalization of modern society (1989, p. 142); the opposite is found in Scandinavia in the subsequent hundred years. The process is rather that of a long-term integration of groups of the population formerly left outside the power circles of early modern society (Aakvaag, this volume). How is this disparity to be explained? One source lies in the varying conceptualizations of the state. If German history from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century is a main reference, it lies close at hand to interpret the state as basically authoritarian. This is in clear contrast to the generally democratic character of the state in Scandinavia in the same period. To this may be added a strong and relatively homogenous labour movement with an ambitious, and at the same time realistic, programme of reform. This is strikingly different from the German case with a strange combination of internal strife and political determinism (Berman 2006). In parallel, in all of Scandinavia the breakthrough of broad social movements with a reformist edge was dependent on, and contributed to reinforcing, the public sphere. As underlined by Aakvaag (this volume), the success of the social democratic movement, along with the peasant movement, the feminist movement and several others, rested on its ability to use and reinforce the democratic power circuit, where the public sphere holds a prominent place. Despite its success, political development in Scandinavia certainly did not take place without backlash and serious conflict. The same is true for the development of the freedom of expression (NOU 1999: 27, chapter 3). Even if starting from a relatively privileged position at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the long-term trend has been one of significant increases. The ability of citizens to take reasoned stands on social questions has improved dramatically, both as a result of education and of access to relevant information. Speaking truth to power has gained acceptance. Ideals of transparency in politics and civil service have been greatly expanded. However, the development has been far from linear and gives another illustration of the grey zone between volatility and institutionalization. One separate tendency is linked to the newspapers. From about 1920 and for half a century, most of them acted as spokes-



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men for political parties or ideologies, with the consequence that critical journalism remained underdeveloped. Only from around the mid – 1970s would it make sense to talk about an independent press in a strong sense in Norway. In parallel, a counter trend is observed, not least connected to tensions around immigration, religious pluralism and international terrorism. Despite legislation protecting whistleblowing, employees encounter stronger formal requirements of loyalty (Trygstad, this volume). Threats of physical violence for breaking religious taboos have occurred after 2000, most acutely in Denmark after the publication of the Mohammad cartoons in 2005–2006. Are journalists and editors unduly forced into silence or self-censorship on central topics? In-depth studies of prominent representatives of the press in Norway (Elgvin & Rogstad, this volume) leave the answer open. Some reservations are visible, but it is difficult to tell whether they are reactions to threats or represent a better understanding of how to cover topics that are sensitive to the feelings of religious or ethnic groups. If the news media traditionally have enjoyed a privileged position among the public sphere institutions, this is no longer self-evidently the case. One aspect of the revolution in communication is the growth in professionalized communication, with the emergence of the PR industry, not least as a response to critical journalism. Its strategic nature seems to change what Habermas termed ‘the rules of the game’ and create new challenges to the evaluation of professional norms of news mediation (Engelstad, this volume). At the other end of the spectrum lies the mostly nonprofessional communication cultivated in the social media. In this development, the Nordic countries are spearheads. Four of the five Nordic countries are in the top ten on the ICT Development Index, while Finland is ranked number 12; all of them are rated well above, for example, the US, which is ranked number 15 in the world (International Telecommunication Union, 2016, p. 46). At the same time, the mode of news coverage is changing fast, from broadcasting and print newspapers to digital media. The Internet and the social media obviously represent an extension of democracy (Enjolras & Steen-Johnsen, this volume). What is revolutionized is not only the medium of communication but also political functionality and aesthetic norms. Centres of political agenda-setting are moving from conventional journalism to the virtual arenas of the social media. The efficiency of the social media offers potential for mass mobilization by social movements or ad hoc demonstrations to expand to a degree previously unheard of. The social media enormously increase the opportunity for ordinary citizens to express their personal and political views. At the same time, this improvement in the freedom of expression is counteracted by the increased opportunity to pester other people, also offered by the Internet, with the result that many prospective participants in political debates withdraw from the public space to escape harassment. The location of social media in a grey zone stretching into both the public and the private sphere is one reason for some of the ambiguities in the norms of communication.

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The effects of social media on national politics are best demonstrated by the US presidential campaigns. They also affect politics in Scandinavia, albeit to a more modest degree. A study of Twitter in the 2013 Norwegian parliamentary campaign demonstrated how Internet technology leads to the emergence of new types of opinion leaders, thereby making it easier for newcomers to gain access and for small parties to increase their visibility (Enjolras & Steen-Johnsen, this volume). However, for social media to be fully efficient, a common use must be established between politicians and voters, which means that they must be institutionalized as a shared arena for political communication. And they still have to compete with conventional modes of communication via face-to-face encounters and old fashioned newspapers. In the foreseeable future, at least, social media and other forms of communication are not exclusive but rather complementary (Segaard, this volume). At the same time, the fear of a digital divide (Norris, 2001) is not unequivocally supported in societies where Internet coverage is virtually total. If digital divides exist in terms of participation in political debate on different digital arenas, social media also have a mobilizing effect on citizens with a relatively low degree of participation in formalized politics when it comes to participation in demonstrations and ad hoc political action (Enjolras et al., 2013). Therefore, social media may soften rather than reinforce traditional democratic divides (Segaard, this volume). In Structural Transformation, two aspects of the public sphere held a privileged position, the political and the literary. Literature would bridge the distance between the public and the private sphere, while at the same time serving as a measure of the moral qualities of society (Hohendahl 1989). In Habermas’ later versions of the theory, the literary aspect is relegated to background. But the theme certainly still deserves attention and has more recently been taken up by cultural sociologists (Alexander 2006; Jones, 2007; Jacobs, 2012) who have highlighted the aesthetic functions in public communication, as well as the central place of the arts and entertainment media in the public sphere. The salience of the arts to national identity is still acknowledged in most of Europe, where state-driven culture policy is taken for granted. At the same time, democratization of cultural expression questions the hegemonic position of traditional artistic forms. Arts institutions have gone through considerable change, not least due to the massive presence of commercial popular culture. Therefore, a potential deficit of legitimacy appears in terms of public support for the arts. This is particularly felt in the Nordic social democratic societies, not necessarily in the form of cuts in state subvention but in intensified calls for legitimacy strategies. Behind this lies a combination of changes in artistic hegemonies and growing pressures on the allocation of state subventions to cover not only the ‘elite’ arts (Larsen, this volume). In Norway, this is expressed in the concept of ‘social responsibility’ (samfunnsoppdrag), which connotes a delicate balance between state responsibility for sustainable artistic production and the obligation to steer clear of dictating content. Similar balancing issues are central to state subvention of the newspaper industry in Scandinavia (Engelstad, Larsen & Rogstad, this volume).



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If Habermas has toned down the significance of cultural production in the public sphere, he has over the last decade focused more energetically on religion and the relationship between religion and politics (2008). Traditional theories of secularization have proved insufficient, and a new consciousness about religion has emerged in the public sphere, albeit based on new premises. Habermas points out that religion may serve as a reservoir of moral consciousness and thus holds a legitimate position in the public sphere. In this way, tolerance between secularists and religious believers becomes necessary. Even so, religiously based argumentation has no place in political discourse; here only rational discourse is acceptable, pace Habermas (2008). The ‘return of religion’ reflects a complex set of factors. The immigration of Muslims into Europe and into Nordic societies has created new types of confrontations and debates over religious questions. Additionally, this has resulted in new forms of inter-religious dialogue, which make religion more visible in the public sphere (Furseth, this volume). Informal institutional change is also taking place as the public sphere adapts to the growing mediatization of religion (Lundby, this volume). A form of soft secularization emerges, where religious dogma is fused with humanistic value sets, and the public image of the Church acquires traits of a nongovernmental organization with a strong socio-ethical message (Repstad, 2010). Due to such processes, religion constitutes a new form of social force that may challenge Habermas’ separation of religion and politics. Broad ethical reflection emphasizing love of one’s neighbour and respect for the work of creation elicits religious activism in such diverse fields as immigration policies and environmental policies and partly in opposition against formal political processes. Simultaneously, ideals of religious dialogue strengthen tendencies to restrict the freedom of expression (Elgvin & Rogstad, this volume), on a broader basis indicated by recent studies in Norway (Steen-Johnsen et al., 2016).

1.4.1 Elements in an Institutional Theory of the Public Sphere The foregoing reflections may be summarized in a few points pointing towards a generic theory of the public sphere. The ambition is not to “refute” Habermas (or Arendt and Dewey), but to draw inspiration from their work. This is done by providing building blocks which make understandable empirical variations in the public sphere, over time and across societies. Seven main elements are singled out. Type of state. As a main addressee for the public as well as a regulative instance of civil society, the form of the state is crucial to the form of the public sphere. Crudely, the state may take a purely liberal form, with minimal intervention into civil society, and thereby into the public sphere. Alternatively, the state may have an autocratic strand, bent on control of civil society. Or, the state may be of the neo-corporatist type, with strong interventions into civil society, while at the same time upholding a liberal disposition.

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Freedom of expression. Without freedom of expression, the public sphere disintegrates. Freedom of expression varies according to the degree of negative freedom of unimpeded expression, restrained by the occurrence of censorship. Censorship may be both formal and informal, imposed by legislation or by mores and sentiments in the public. A second dimension is the positive freedom of expression, manifested in guarantees of citizens’ access to information, and the degree to which this is seen as a responsibility of the state. Institutional fields comprising the public sphere. Five fields have been singled out as the core of the public sphere: the media, research and higher education, voluntary organizations, arts and culture, and religion. They may vary in the degree to which they operate as closed and self-sufficient, or embody voices directed to the broader public. Modes of integration in the institutional fields. Institutional characteristics determine to which degree the five fields remain isolated from each other or have potential to form common spaces for learning, debate and conflict. Integration is also furthered by mediation, which means that the “media logic” invades institutional fields other than the media themselves. Moreover, integration is shaped by the commonalities of state intervention, regulation and support; legally, economically, and otherwise. Access to the public sphere. Access to the public sphere may depend on gender, social class, language, ethnicity or other characteristics. Access may be restricted on formal grounds or by strong informal sanctions. The emergence of social media, and the interplay between established media and social media may have significant effects on access to the public sphere, but thereby also on the shape of meeting points in the public sphere. Normative patterns. Social differentiation entails differing normative patterns in different institutional fields. Different forms of occupational ethics may be in conflict with each other, as often observed by the ethos of medicine and bureaucracy. Tensions create normative grey zones, which may be made the object of formal regulation, or they may be mastered only by recourse to some sort of meta-ethical position (“on which conditions do we agree to disagree?”). Power struggles. In their most general form power struggles are fought out over interpretations of rights, norms and legitimate expectations in the public sphere. To the degree that public policies are markedly present, they also invite conflict over distribution of economic means. Moreover, ongoing attempts at changing the rules of the game, modifying the mode of operation of institutions, is a central part of power struggles.

References Adut, A. (2012). A Theory of the Public Sphere. Sociological Theory, 30, 238–262. Alexander, J. (2006). The Civil Sphere. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Alexander, J. (2010). The Performance of Politics: Obama’s Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Benson, R. (2009). Shaping the public sphere: Habermas and beyond. American Sociologist, 40, 175–197. Berlin. I. (1969 [1958]). Two concepts of liberty. In I. Berlin, Four Essays on liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berman, S. (2006). The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press. Bleich, E. (2011). The rise of hate crime laws in liberal democracies. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 37, 917–934. Calhoun, C. (Ed.) (1992). Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press. Collier, D., & Collier, R. (1991). Shaping the Political Arena. Critical Junctures, the Labour Movement and Regime Dynamics in Latin America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dahl, R.A. (1989). Democracy and its Critics. New Haven: Yale University Press. Dahrendorf, R. (1959). Class and Class Compromise in Industrial Society. Palo Alto: StanfordUniversity Press. Engelstad, F. (2003). National literature, collective identity and political power. Comparative Social Research, 21, 111–145. Oxford: Elsevier. Engelstad, F. (2015). Property rights governance and power balances. In F. Engelstad & A. Hagelund (Eds.), Cooperation and Conflict the Nordic Way. London/Warsaw: De Gruyter Open. http:// www.degruyter.com/viewbooktoc/product/462497 Engelstad, F. & Hagelund, A. (2015). Introduction: Institutional change in neo-corporatist society. In F. Engelstad & A. Hagelund (Eds.), Cooperation and Conflict the Nordic Way. London/Warsaw: De Gruyter Open. http://www.degruyter.com/viewbooktoc/product/462497 Esping-Andersen, G. (1990) Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Furseth, I. (Ed.) (2015). Religionens tilbakekomst i offentligheten? Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Gripsrud, J. Moe, H., Molander, A. & Murdock, G. The Public Sphere, vol. 1–4. Los Angeles: Sage. Habermas, J. (1984 [1981]). Theory of Communicative Action. Boston: Beacon. Habermas, J. (1989 [1962]). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Polity. Habermas, J. (1990). Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Zweite Ausgabe. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Habermas, J. (1996 [1992]). Between Facts and Norms. Cambridge: MIT Press. Habermas, J. (2006). Political communication in media society: Does democracy still have an epistemic dimension? The impact of normative theory on empirical research. Communication Theory, 16, 411–426. Habermas, J. (2008). Religion in the public sphere: Cognitive presuppositions for the “public use of reason” by religious and secular citizens. In Between Naturalism and Religion. Cambridge: Polity. Habermas, J. (2009). Political communication in media society: Does democracy still have an epistemic dimension? The impact of normative theory on empirical research. In J. Habermas, Europe. The Faltering Project. Cambridge: Polity. Hall, P & R. Taylor (1996). Political science and the three new institutionalisms. Political Studies, 4,936–957. Hohendahl, P.U. (1989). Building a National Literature. Germany 1830–1870. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Horkheimer, M. & T.W. Adorno, (1972 [1947]) Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum. International Telecommunication Union (2016). Measuring the Information Society Report 2015. Geneva: ITU. Jacobs, R.N. (2012) Entertainment media and the aesthetic public sphere. In J.C. Alexander, R.N. Jacobs & P. Smith (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Jones, P. (2007). Beyond the semantic 'Big Bang': Cultural sociology and an aesthetic public sphere. Cultural Sociology 1(1), 73–95. Kenyon, A.T. (2014). Assuming Free Speech. The Modern Law Review, 77, 379–408. Kierulf, A. & H. Rønning (Eds.) (2009). Freedom of Speech Abridged? Cultural, Legal and Philosophical Challenges. Gothenburg: Nordicom. Mah, H. (2000). Phantasies of the public sphere: Rethinking the Habermas of historians. The Journal of Modern History, 72, 153–182. Mahoney, J. & Thelen, K. (2009). A theory of gradual institutional change. In J. Mahoney & K. Thelen, (Eds.), Explaining Institutional Change. Ambiguity, Agency, and Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mangset, P. (2013). Armlengdes avstand eller statens forlengede arm? Bø i Telemark: Telemarksforskning. Nielsen, N.K. (2015). Bonde, stat og hjem. Nordisk demokrati og nationalisme – fra pietismen til 2. verdenskrig. Aarhus: Aarhus universitetsforlag. Norris, P. (2001). Digital Divide. Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. NOU 1999:27. “Ytringsfrihet bør finde sted”. Oslo: Justis – og politidepartementet. Odell, A. (2009). Jag tror at jag på bron hittade tilbaka. Dagens Nyheter, 20.09.2009. Peters, B. (2008). Public Deliberation and Public Culture. The writings of Bernhard Peters, 1993–2005. H. Wessler (Ed.). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Pierson, P. (2004). Politics in Time. History, Institutions, and Social Analysis. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press. Searle, J. (1995). The Construction of Social Reality. New York: The Free Press. Searle, J. (2010). Making the Social World. Oxford: Oxford University Press Schmidt, V.A. (2002). The Futures of European Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schmidt, V.A. (2008). Discursive Institutionalism: The explanatory power of ideas and discourse. Annual Review of Political Science, 11:303–326. Scott, W.R. (2001). Institutions and Organizations. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Sejersted, F. (2011). The Age of Social Democracy: Norway and Sweden in the Twentieth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Slagstad, R. (2001). Liberalismen i sosialdemokratisk kontekst. In R. Slagstad, Rettens ironi. Oslo: Pax. Slaatta, T. & H.M. Okstad (2014). Når kunstnere vurderer ytringsfrihet i Norge, anno 2014. Oslo: Fritt Ord. Steen-Johnsen K., Fladmoe, A. & Midtbøen, A. H. (2016). Ytringsfrihetens grenser. Sosiale normer og politisk toleranse. Oslo: Fritt Ord/Institutt for samfunnsforskning. Streeck, W. & Thelen, K. (2005). Institutional change in advanced political economies. In W. Streeck & K. Thelen (Eds.), Beyond Continuity. Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Syvertsen, T., Enli, G., Mjøs, O. J. & Moe, H. (2014). The Media Welfare State. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press Thelen. K. (1999). Historical institutionalism in comparative politics. Annual Review of Political Science, 2, 369–404. Thelen, K. (2004) How Institutions Evolve. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thelen, K. (2012). Beyond comparative statics: Historical institutional approaches to stability andchange in the political economy of labor. In G. Morgan, J. Campbell, C. Crouch & O.K. Pedersen (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Institutional Analysis. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press. Trygstad, S. (2014). Ytringsfrihetens kår i arbeidslivet. In B. Enjolras, T. Rasmussen & K. SteenJohnsen, (Eds.) Status for ytringsfriheten i Norge. Oslo: Institute for Social Research.

Part I: The Public Sphere

Craig Calhoun

2 Facets of the Public Sphere: Dewey, Arendt, Habermas The promise of democracy is that citizens can make collective choices not only about short-term policies but also about the kind of institutions and future they want to share. This possibility turns not just on elections and other constitutional features of democratic government, but also on commitments to the public good – even the very idea that there is a public good – and participation in public communication to establish it and guide its pursuit. This is a claim against the authority or necessity of monarchs or dictators, but also for the possibility of choosing a way of life and organization of social solidarity. There have been many skeptics. In 1925, Walter Lippman (1993 [1925]) famously suggested that the public was a phantom, at most a reference point for establishing the collective interest but not a meaningful part of the process for ascertaining what policies would actually serve that interest. Solving problems, he said, required experts and effective administration but not large-scale public action or debate. Lippman’s argument served famously to occasion John Dewey’s (2012 [1927]) spirited defense of democracy and the centrality of public engagement to democracy. In a sense, Lippman can be seen as the foil to the entire ensuing development of the academic study and popular discussion of democratic publics: he said they don’t matter much, that the real work of policy-making and problem-solving inevitably gets done by political insiders; most people are mere bystanders not agents; and democracy itself is best limited to elections that check abuses of power or resolve crises. In this chapter, I want to explore some ideas of the three most important authors to take up the theme of what publics might accomplish in the decades after Lippman’s challenge: John Dewey, Hannah Arendt, and Jürgen Habermas. These can be brought together to help develop a stronger theoretical grasp of the problems and potential of democratic publics.

2.1 Publics, Publicness, and the Public Sphere John Dewey answered Lipmann directly and almost immediately with an argument that publics were needed in order to address the problems that arose from the indirect consequences of social action in complex, large-scale societies. He thought the actual performance of publics could be greatly improved, not least by better information but they were real not phantom. At the center of his analysis was an asymmetry he wanted to reduce, between the capacity for a small number of people to make problem-causing decisions – including pursuing profits in ways that generate what © 2017 Fredrik Engelstad, Håkon Larsen, Jon Rogstad, Kari Steen-Johnsen This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.



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we might now call negative externalities – and the large number of people affected by them. Dewey suggested that publics were objectively formed from all those affected by social actions but became subjectively effective when they were organized and self-aware. He showed a clear awareness that large-scale active publics depended on social foundations that were at best underdeveloped. “Modern state-unity depends on technology and far exceeds the limits of face-to-face community” (Dewey, 2012 [1927], loc 1952–63). Thirty-five years after Dewey, Jürgen Habermas responded to the situation he saw in post-war Germany. In a context of cynicism about democratic institutions, Habermas set out to show the unrealized potential of the public sphere as a category of bourgeois society. Formally democratic institutions had been introduced, but administrators had been carried over from the previous Nazi regime and public silence reigned on many important issues. The situation all too much resembled Lippman’s notion of the public as mere phantom. There were negotiations among business, labor, and political leaders but not an open debate about the character society should assume or still less the implications of the Nazi past. In contrast to such negotiations among interest groups, Habermas celebrated the emancipatory potential of a collective discourse about the nature of the public good and the directions of state action. This could be free insofar as it was rational – based on the success of argument and critique rather than the force of either status or coercion – and could achieve unity by disregarding particular interests – like particular statuses – in favor of the general good. Habermas called for renewal of what he identified as an 18th century ideal: the notion that ever – wider circles of private individuals could join in rational-critical debates, disregarding their differences of status, identifying the public good common to all of them and their whole society, and so informing the state and public policy (Habermas 1989 [1962]). The best version of the public sphere was based on “a kind of social intercourse that, far from presupposing the equality of status, disregarded status altogether”. It worked by a “mutual willingness to accept the given roles and simultaneously to suspend their reality” (Habermas 1989 [1962], p. 131). The attractiveness of this idea is demonstrated by the remarkable spread of the term. It not only gained prominence in several academic disciplines but also became a staple of journalism and wider public discussions about the state of democracy and contemporary society. Where Dewey had seen publics as responses to specific issues, drawing in all those affected, Habermas identified a more or less stable zone of publicness – the public sphere – located between civil society and the state, grounded in the former and addressing the latter. This was not simply an abstract ideal, Habermas argued, it was made realistic by the development of a new pattern of social organization and ideas since the late 17th century that created social bases adequate to sustain it: newspapers and a publishing industry, coffee houses and other publicly accessible spaces, and indeed states increasingly attentive to public opinion. Habermas elaborated the social foundations of an effective public sphere in considerably more historical concreteness than Dewey.

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The issue of foundations, the infrastructure of public life, is important. In the first place, the infrastructure turns the abstract normative potential of public communication into an immanent possibility. Secondly, the infrastructure gives publics their contours. It shapes both who is a participant and who is connected to whom. Public communication is organized not just by conscious choices of participants, but as a byproduct of the organization of settings and media for communication. Habermas emphasized a late 18th century transition from aristocratic salons and early literary magazines to both more open and more political discussions on new foundations. He stressed that newspapers grew as businesses, revealing that crucial support for public communication can come on for-profit economic bases. Publicness is different from family or community crucially because it is a matter of connections among strangers. As much as anything else, publicness is about connection. The private is disconnected. It turns on a claim to be self-sufficient, to be understandable in and of itself. The private is closed to the public, it is for example what each of us owns and claims for our personal use rather than shares with all our fellows, what is concealed rather than made evident. The public is people in general, or the specific people of a place or group. To be in public is to be in their company – or exposed to their gazes, and that is a connection too. In public, a person has responsibilities to others, whether merely the common civilities of everyday interaction, or the more complex norms for participation in an argument, or the obligations of those with public offices to separate these from their private profit or comfort. These public relationships may be organized by government and law. But though much of the historical genesis of our thinking about publicness can be traced to ideas about government, notably in Roman law, these precedents do not exhaust the kinds of connections that make up publicness today. And though governments remain in many settings important agencies for pursuing the public interest, this doesn't mean that the public interest is the government interest. On the contrary, the public interest is generally understood as the shared interests of the members of the public – as expressed in the notion of a commonwealth or republic. And it is crucial to recognize that these interests are constituted by shared engagement in markets and firms, urban life and travel, religion and voluntary associations. In short, people are knit together in society and in addition to their personal or private interests, they have interests in how their shared social lives fare. But as Lippman would say, this doesn’t guarantee that they will successfully organize to debate or pursue those interests. But if they do, publicness works as a further form of social integration or solidarity. Public refers to the good we potentially seek together, but also to the very notion or creation of the “we” that may do the seeking. This is sometimes obscured by use of nouns and definite articles like “the public” or “the public sphere”. Dewey is alert to the issue. He observes that “the concept of the state, like most concepts which are introduced by ‘The,’ is both too rigid and too tied up with controversies to be of ready use” (Dewey, 2012 [1927], loc 862). The same I fear is true of “public” (and Dewey’s



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own use of the definite article in his title doesn’t reassure). The notion of “the public,” definite article and noun, immediately concentrates our attention on some presumed substantive referent such as the citizens of a state. The usage is probably inescapable, if only as a shorthand, but it calls our attention to a body of people rather than a mode of connection among them. We may call the latter ‘publicness’ (however awkward the term). And we should keep in mind that publicness is variable. It can do more or less of the work of organizing any particular population of people, society, or state: creating connections among its participants, shaping shared culture and institutions.

2.2 Culture, Action, and Reasoned Critique Habermas does not offer the whole story or the last word on the public, but he is nonetheless helpful for clarifying the “stakes” of the concept of public or public sphere. These lie in the possibility that the basic character of social life including its political institutions and perhaps even economic relations could be shaped by reasoned collective choice rather than only inherited from tradition, imposed by power, or dictated by allegedly necessary conditions of functional integration like the logic of markets asserted by neoliberalism. In the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas did not propose a universal theory of public life, and still less claim to offer a description of public life everywhere (so he is hardly refuted by showing that public life in many places is not what he described). Rather, he argued that at least one constitutive category of bourgeois life had not yet exhausted its emancipatory potential – even though the conditions of actual capitalist democracy had thwarted it. The basic question guiding Habermas's exploration of the public sphere was: To what extent can opinions guiding political action be formed on the basis of rationalcritical discourse? This is a salient issue primarily where economic and other differences give actors discordant identities and conflicting interests. For the most part, Habermas took it as given that the crucial differences among actors were those of class and political-economic status; in any case, he treated them as rooted in private life and brought from there to the public. He focused on how the nature, organization, and opportunities for discourse on politically significant topics might be structured so that class and status inequalities were not an insuperable barrier to political participation. The first issue, of course, was access to the discourse. But given access, there was also the question of willingness to listen to another's speech, and also distribution of the sorts of education that empowered speakers to present recognizably “good” arguments. Beyond this, there was the importance of an ideological commitment to setting aside status differences in the temporary egalitarianism of an intellectual argument. Habermas’s later accounts of communicative action – oriented to understanding rather than instrumental effects – pursued the same issues.

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The public sphere joined civil society to the state by focusing on a notion of public good as distinct from private interest. It was however clearly rooted in civil society and indeed in the distinctive kind of privacy it allowed and valued. The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor. The medium of this political confrontation was peculiar and without historical precedent: people’s public use of their reason (Habermas 1989 [1962], p. 27).

This public use of reason depended not only on foundations in civil society but on normative commitments to openness and rational political discourse. Openness meant access to public information and participation in public debate. Habermas writes as though these expanded in a more or less evolutionary process, though we know long struggles were involved. Indeed, the public sphere of Habermas’s golden age became the bourgeois public sphere only by expelling radical artisans and others and establishing limits both of class and of what counted as respectable opinion (Calhoun, 2012). Likewise, the rights of women to speak in public were often as much contested as their right to vote (Clark, 1995; Fraser, 1992; Landes, 1988; Ryan, 1992). Exclusion from both information and voice was often as basic to the practice of public life as openness was to its normative foundation. But through the 19th and 20th centuries, public life in a wide range of countries was opened increasingly to citizens beyond just property-holders, to women, to workers, to racial and ethnic minorities. This fulfilled part of the ideal of the public sphere that Habermas’s book embraced and articulated. Yet the book ended on a note of disappointment. Habermas traced a structural transformation that eroded the bases for effective rational-critical debate among independent members of civil society, and allowed the public sphere to be overtaken by manipulative mass media on the one hand and negotiation among powerful interest groups like employers and unions on the other. Media lost their independence from states and especially markets and merged into an entertainmentdriven culture industry that made them a “platform for advertising” (Habermas 1989 [1962], p. 185). Public relations specialists and the agents of firms, unions and other instrumental market actors gained the capacity to manipulate public opinion. The rise of opinion polling was more an attempt to aggregate private opinions than deliberatively public. Give-and-take argument between informed citizens gave way to projects of mass persuasion and negotiation behind closed doors. Central to Habermas’s story is the paradox that though openness was as basic to the public sphere as reasoned debate, the way in which it became truly large scale brought reduction in rational-critical quality. As Dewey had anticipated, the structures of face-to-face public communication could not be stretched to be effective on a very large scale. Bureaucratic and market powers re-established capacity to “manage”



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public opinion or steer it from above. At the same time, rising corporate power and state penetration of civil society undermined the distinction of public and private, producing a “refeudalization” of society. Television allowed widespread access, but to centralized messages; in itself it didn’t reproduce the give and take conversation of the 18th century coffee houses1. He stressed the development of a literary public sphere as an important precursor to the political public sphere of the late 18th century. Moreover, the role of the literary public sphere was not merely preparatory; somewhat curiously it disappears from Habermas’s account once the political public sphere is fully on stage but of course literary (and religious and scientific) debate remain active and entwined with strictly political themes in public discourse. In later discussions Habermas accepts the multiplicity of publics, suggesting that pluralism advances democracy so long as none is hegemonic and all cooperate in a rational search for truth (see Habermas, 1988, p. 458; see also Habermas, 1996). Habermas has also accepted the force of related criticism that his original account of the public sphere did not adequately recognize its exclusionary character. Despite its ostensible openness, it seems to exclude from participation many kinds of voices, arguments, and views. As Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge (1993 [1972]) argued soon after Habermas’s book appeared, this includes many potential contributions that reflect the experience of workers and other subordinated groups. The theme was later developed, most especially with regard to gender-bias, but also race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, cultural style and other dimensions. This encouraged reliance on the idea Negt and Kluge introduced of “counterpublics” which contested the hegemonic construction of dominant publics. Nancy Fraser (1992) and Michael Warner (2002) have been further prominent theorists of this. While Habermas’s account of the continuing value of the category of public sphere evoked by the 18th century ideal set him apart from Horkheimer and Adorno (1972 [1947]) and their pessimistic turn in critical theory, he largely incorporated their critique of “mass society” as “administered society” into his survey of 20th century developments and with it many of the fears of 19th century liberals. As he summed up: Kant still counted on the transparency of a surveyable public sphere shaped by literary means and open to arguments and which is sustained by a public composed of a relatively small stratum of educated citizens. He could not foresee the structural transformation of this bourgeois public sphere into a semantically degenerated public sphere dominated by the electronic mass media and pervaded by images and virtual realities (Habermas 1989 [1962], p. 176).

1 Of course, this sort of view was challenged by a wave of studies of media reception that suggested that audiences did not merely receive televised messages, but interpreted and debated them and in appropriating them often changed them. For a summary, considering also some of the challenges in making sense of empirical research on audience reception, see Livingstone (1998).

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Bemoaning mass society, Habermas sought ways to protect communicative action from colonization by systems of money and power. He saw relatively little in new electronic media or political styles to harness to the advantage of the public sphere. Where Dewey had seen the scale and impersonality of modern society as reasons publics were necessary, Habermas saw greater threats. So did the other great theorist of publics of the era, Hannah Arendt. Arendt (1958) joined in the critique of mass society and was generally unimpressed with the quality of political discourse in the 1950s and early 1960s. But where Habermas’s response was to try to protect a space for deliberation and argument from intrusions, Arendt’s was to stress public action that could be creative and culture-forming. The public realm, for her, was composed of that which human beings created and held in common: artifacts, relationships, culture – or as she would say, stories. All these helped make up a way of life or a world, but only the artifacts could in a strict sense be made; the rest depended on action – which was not so fully subject to control. In its most general sense, she suggested, “to act means to take an initiative” (Arendt, 1958, p. 177). Action allowed for startling, unexpected beginnings – but where it led and how much it mattered always depended on others. “Action,” she wrote, “is never possible in isolation” (Arendt, 1958, p. 188). Action takes place in a public space of appearance, before and with others. What people do creates both stories and effects not just visible to other people but visible in the response of other people. This was an extension of the ancient Greek approach to achieving honor and just recognition but also a challenge to the modern notion that the essence of individual life was interior. As political animals human beings found their essential existence largely in communicating and forming life with others – and in the stories told afterward. Public action of this kind is basic to forming a common world. Our promises, for example, become the bases for institutions; repeated narratives establish standards of judgment. We make contracts to form business corporations, constitutions to organize countries. But the space of appearance, humans together in speech and action, is always prior to formal constitution, and always “in the moment”. “Wherever people gather together, it is potentially there, but only potentially, not necessarily and not forever” (Arendt, 1958, p. 199). Action thus is never simply “making” because it is always unpredictable, always a matter of enlisting others, and always a setting in motion rather than a stabilization. Power stabilizes. Arendt shared much with Habermas’s distinction of communicative from instrumental action. But her stress was not simply on rational-critical discourse aimed at understanding; it was on natality, the potential for novelty in the world – and the source of faith and hope for the future of the world. This world was created of promises, institutions, and indeed constitutions. Polities needed to manage this, but not control it so completely it was lost. But it was also a way of literally making something new, not only disclosing but creating a shared world. This was the basis for Arendt’s praise for the American revolutionary founding, an act of bringing a new public way of life into the world by means of speech and shared promises (Arendt, 1990 [1963]).



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Both Arendt’s and Habermas’s books on the public sphere appeared just before, or just as momentum was gathering, for one of the greatest effusions of public engagement of recent history: that identified with the 1960s. Of course the 1960s brought more to public life than just renewed political activism. Older critical theorists like Horkheimer and Adorno saw their fears confirmed by efforts to merge culture and intense personal experience; film, music and sexual liberation with politics. Having analyzed the dangerous infusion of aesthetics into politics in Nazism, they were alert to the negatives in the 1960s. Habermas had similar worries, though a more open mind. He had described the public sphere as much more narrowly focused on rational-critical public debate bearing on state politics. The 1960s seemed to explode the boundaries. The events of that decade also made it clear that discussion of the public sphere demanded attention to social movements, not only debate. Though Arendt was largely dismissive of the actual politics and public engagements of the 1960s, her work spoke to them in an important respect. She recognized the centrality of culture-forming activity and of creative initiative that could not be controlled. She argued the impossibility of reducing politics to mere contests over power let alone over policy. At the same time, if only obliquely, Arendt freed the idea of publicness from the notion that it could be only about states. It is important to keep in mind the public life of cities, art, science, religion.

2.3 Unknowable Society In Arendt’s The Human Condition, discussion of the public realm follows immediately on denunciation of “the rise of the social”. This latter phenomenon Arendt equates with “the rise of housekeeping”, that is the various activities, problems, and organizational devices that constitute ordinary, mundane life – rather than life with the possibility of action and excellence. Arendt speaks of “life processes”. She means economic activity, and also political efforts to alter economic conditions. She means the ways in which people are absorbed into social relations that are not of their conscious creation. She means mass normalization – from eating dinner in front of television to using credit cards, driving cars, and tolerating the surveillance implied by the gathering of statistics about one’s viewing, driving, purchases, and payments. If Dewey recognized that the complexity and scale of modern society was significant and Habermas worried that it tended to bring organization in autopoetic systems rather than self-aware human action, Arendt was outright hostile to the rise of society – and not just because of scale and impersonality but because it was organized to serve mere needs of human existence not the possibilities of human creativity. Arendt’s disdain for society, and ordinary human welfare is troubling, but at the same time, her account enables us to recognize something in modernity that threatens both private and public. For Dewey this distinction was of minor theoretical inter-

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est; his focus was more on the contrast between the few and the many. For Habermas it was basic, with formation of individuals in private life a condition of both competent and independent voice in public life. At the same time, Habermas insisted that the issues of private life could rightly be excluded from the public sphere, indeed that it was important that they should be excluded in order to allow the public to focus only on what people shared in common. This was in one sense a peculiar notion: that people somehow did not share the institutions that produced and reproduced inequality,that marginalized women or workers. But Arendt turns our attention to a different and important point: that the organization of life together in terms of the imperatives of states and capitalist economies is a threat not just to vibrant public life but to private happiness. The public had been opposed to the private, Arendt argues, but now in important ways both are opposed to the social. She acknowledges the everyday meaning of publicity – exposure to the gaze of the multitude. But what she is really concerned with is the way publicness connects. “To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time” (Arendt, 1958: 52). The difference of the public from the mass is precisely that it has the power to distinguish and relate. This power to give form and establish connections offers the capacity to order human relations in ways that transcend mere intimate subjectivity and mere responses to to necessity. “Without this transcendence into a potential earthly immortality, no politics, strictly speaking, no common world and no public realm, is possible” (Arendt, 1958: 55). Here Arendt comes close to Dewey (2012 [1927], loc 2311): Wherever there is conjoint activity whose consequences are appreciated as good by all singular persons who take part in it, and where the realization of the good is such as to effect an energetic desire and effort to sustain it in being just because it is a good shared by all, there is in so far a community. The clear consciousness of a communal life, in all its implications, constitutes the idea of democracy.

This realm of housekeeping may seem to be the realm of privacy, but in three senses it is not. It is a realm of consumption not deprivation – and dependent on connections to producers. It is exposed to external scrutiny. And it is devoid of true personal character. In other words it involves content which might superficially have been private but which have been transformed into the stuff of the social by commensuration and aggregation. This, I think, is a considerable part of what Arendt meant by blaming equality for the rise of the social. Indeed, Arendt suggests, the rise of the social disrupts the old opposition between public and private. “The decisive historical fact is that modern privacy in its most relevant function, to shelter the intimate, was discovered as the opposite not of the political sphere but of the social, to which it is therefore more closely and authentically related” (Arendt, 1958, p.  38). The transformation of privacy, she suggests, is



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in large part a matter of efforts to claim and protect a realm of the personal from the reduction to common denominators and impersonal connections in this new phenomenon of the social. Intimacy is rethought as a quintessential expression of the personal and of direct interpersonal but not public relations. To claim the intimacy of the heart, deep subjectivity, or one’s very moods and emotions as private was to rebel against their potential reduction to currencies of the social. Arendt (1958, p. 52) describes the modern enchantment with “small things” from pets to gardening as “a purely humane corner” in a world of industrial objects. Not least, Arendt (1958, p. 51) suggests that bodily pain, nearly non-communicable, is a borderline experience between life among men and death because it is so radically subjective that it cannot assume an appearance, a form meaningful for others in any approximation of how it is meaningful for oneself. Appearances are central to the public realm. In public action we face outward, not inward. It is appearances that connect acting and speaking men. Participants’ agency is disclosed in speech and action. The metaphorical table around which we sit (to hearken back to the earlier quote from Arendt) is the product of speech and action. Craftsmen create objects that embody their creativity and endure, but the words and actions that make up vita activa have no such material continuity; they live on as they are remembered and as they shape history. At the extreme, words and acts may come together in moments of constitution, of the radical performativity that can bring a new institutional order into being, which Arendt celebrates in On Revolution’s story of the American founding. This depends on the space of appearance in which power is actualized, “where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds are not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities” (Arendt, 1958, p. 200). Public actors seek the immortality of being remembered for their speech and actions, not some notion of their inner essence. They do not simply find the self, they cultivate it. Publicness is action that connects us around Arendt’s table of matters of shared concern and the promise of creating a better world with each other. Arendt emphasized the capacity of action in public to create the world that citizens share in common. The term “public,” she wrote, signifies two closely interrelated but not altogether identical phenomena: It means, first, that everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity. ... Second, the term ‘public’ signifies the world itself, in so far as it is common to all of us and distinguished from our privately owned place in it (Arendt, 1958, pp. 50, 52).

Public action, moreover, is the crucial terrain of the humanly created as distinct from the natural world, of appearance and memory, and of talk and recognition. Such action both requires and helps to constitute public spaces-spaces held in common among people within which they may present themselves in speech and recognize

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 Facets of the Public Sphere: Dewey, Arendt, Habermas

others. Public action is thus a realm of freedom from the necessity – notably of material reproduction – that dominates private life. Public action can create institutions, as in the founding of the American Republic, but as action it is unpredictable. Its publicness comes from its performance in a space between people, a space of appearances, but it is in the nature of public action to be always forming and reforming that space and arguably the people themselves. This conceptualization offers clear advantages for thinking about the place of plurality in the public sphere. As Arendt (1972, p. 232) wrote of America, “since the country is too big for all of us to come together and determine our fate, we need a number of public spaces within it”. Arendt saw this plurality threatened not just by mass conformity but by the reduction of public concerns to material matters. A focus on sex as much as on the economy threatens the public/private distinction. It not only intrudes on intimacy and private life but impoverishes public discourse. Arendt (1973 [1951]) saw this problem as basic to totalitarianism, which could allow citizens neither privacy nor free public discourse. Totalitarianism is distinguished from mere tyranny by the fact that it works directly on private life as well as limiting public life. This is not just a matter of contrasting intentions, but of distinctively modern capacity. Modern sociological conditions offer rulers the possibility to reach deeply into the family in particular and personal life in general, to engineer human life in ways never before imagined. This potential for collapsing the public and private realms is linked to Arendt’s unusually negative view of civil society. “Society,” she writes, is “that curious and somewhat hybrid realm which the modern age interjected between the older and more genuine realms of the public or political on one side and the private on the other” (Arendt, 1990 [1963], p.  122). Civil society is first and foremost a realm of freedom from politics. But public freedom is freedom in politics. This calls for action that creates new forms of life, rather than merely attempting to advance interests or accommodate to existing conditions. This distinguishes Arendt’s view (1990 [1963], p. 30), and republicanism generally, from much liberal thought: “Thus it has become almost axiomatic even in political theory to understand by political freedom not a political phenomenon, but on the contrary, the more or less free range of non-political activities which a given body politic will permit and guarantee to those who constitute it”. Arendt’s account of the rise of society has been one of the more controversial – indeed, literally as well as figuratively unpopular – of her arguments. Hannah Pitkin (1998) argued that the concept of the social was confused and in tension with many of Arendt’s most profound insights and arguments. In particular, in most of her work Arendt argued that problematic social arrangements are the results of human action – or more often the failure of human beings to rise to the need for action – and therefore that humans have the capacity to liberate themselves from the problems by virtue of their own freedom to take action, to engage in politics (a position close to Dewey). By



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contrast, Pitkin suggested, Arendt presented the social as somehow alien, an external force constraining human beings and blocking action. Arendt describes the social in a flood of mostly negative metaphors; it rises up intrusively, devours human individuality, lets loose meaningless growth, and perverts politics. Pitkin argues that by presenting the social (hypostatized into a noun) so much as an external force Arendt undercuts her own more general and more important argument that we have the capacity to engage in critical thought, grasp what is going on, and take action to change it. The critique of mass society in which Arendt participated was widespread in the 1950s and 60s, and had both academic and popular versions. Along with others Arendt simultaneously analyzed the social system that turned humans into mere cogs in its machinery and denigrated the potential for large-scale collective action to change this. This account was echoed by Habermas in the last chapters of Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere though he describes a degeneration caused more by a collapse of the differentiation between public and private. Almost immediately, Oscar Negt and Alexander Kluge responded with The Public Sphere and Experience, introducing the idea of counterpublic, arguing for the actuality and potential of a proletarian public sphere, and suggesting that critical public engagement was grounded in experience, not simply abstract thought. Engaging Habermas specifically, this was also a challenge to mass society views in general. This in fact echoed a theme from Dewey who argued for common experience, including of production, as a source enabling popular democracy to escape reliance on experts. By contrast, the mass society critique was often elitist and evidenced contempt not just for crowds but for the concerns of ordinary people that commonly drove collective action. The masses of modern society, Arendt suggests, are “worldless”. Or, in the metaphor introduced earlier, they have no table to sit around. They haven’t created a world of promises, public meanings, and constitutional order to establish differentiation and relationships. They behave rather than act. Arendt’s account of the rise of the social includes industrialization, a statistically mediated world of markets and bureaucracies, and a superficial equality that offered broad but weak rights. As short-hand we may say that she focuses on capitalism and bureaucracy. She looks back to the upheavals created by the Great Depression, but beyond this to a longer process of organizing human affairs on a large scale by impersonal, instrumental means. This created a mass neediness for belonging that paved the way for fascism. This was reinforced by the opacity of the new world of large-scale and abstract systems in which national institutions and local communities failed adequately to bring order and distant forces could create huge upheaval. Organic nationalist ideologies flourished partly because they promised a way to understand what was going on, albeit in an arguably paranoid fashion. Arendt’s account of society is frustrating in the extent to which it presents an external force all but preventing public action. But for her society is also in a crucial sense unknowable – and I have tried to suggest that this problem has become more severe where connections are forged in partially automated, highly engineered pro-

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 Facets of the Public Sphere: Dewey, Arendt, Habermas

cesses made opaque by both secrecy and complexity. Society, in this sense, moves of itself, threatening privacy and publicness alike and making it hard, though perhaps not quite impossible, to bring about a different order of human relationship by public action.

2.4 Indirect Relationships and their Consequences John Dewey was also struck by the enormous complexity of social organization (and he was writing in the 1920s and Arendt in the 1950s; I won’t belabor the point that complexity has grown). Dewey’s book is part of the early 20th century engagement with the rise of large industrial enterprises, new transport and energy infrastructures, and the growth of both government and a range of new associations like trade-unions. Dewey sees these not as problems in themselves, but simply as the basic character of modern life. They knit large populations together, make possible economies of unprecedented productive capacity and trading reach, and facilitate the organization of states both more intensive and extensive. In the introduction to The Public and Its Problems, Dewey quotes the passage from Woodrow Wilson’s The New Freedom which was taken as an epigraph by Graham Wallas in his book The Great Society: “Yesterday and ever since history began, men were related to one another as individuals. Today, the everyday relationships of men are largely with great impersonal concerns, with organizations, not with other individuals” (Dewey, 2012 [1927], loc 1771). Dewey notes that this is overstatement, but insists it is largely true. But if we commonly experience these organizations as impersonal and analyze their effects in collective terms, they also allow for some actions of specific human beings to have enormously far-reaching impacts. Where Habermas in his later work would emphasize the systemic imperatives of economy and politics, Dewey maintained an insistence on seeing actual human actors behind large-scale effects2. Dewey’s (2012 [1927], loc 898) perspective, which he says is simply empirical, takes its “point of departure from the objective fact that human acts have consequences upon others, that some of these consequences are perceived, and that their perception leads to subsequent effort to control action so as to secure some consequences and avoid others”. Some consequences are concentrated among the direct parties to the original action, but others affect a much wider range of people, often indirectly. Dewey (2012 [1927], loc 1462) says that “the lasting, extensive, and serious consequences of associated activity bring into existence a public”. But this leaves out a key mechanism; it is the perception of such indirect consequences that Dewey believes

2 See Calhoun (1998), for an argument that Habermas’s turn to explanation in systemic terms came with some loss not just of critical purchase but capacity to show the role of human action.



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gives rise to publics; their efforts to organize action in response create states. “The public consists of all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for” (Dewey, 2012 [1927], loc 939). But by whom is the care deemed necessary? This could well be a small minority of the potential public, though Dewey implies an expectation of growth. He offers little clarity, though, as to how the passive public of the affected turns into the active public that cares and does something about the consequences. Communication, publicness is itself the answer: “There can be no public without full publicity in respect to all consequences which concern it” (Dewey, 2012 [1927], loc 2505). Departing from empirical description, Dewey asserts (2012 [1927], loc 2932) that “the essential need, in other words, is the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussions, and persuasion”. There is a puzzle here, for Dewey mostly evinces high hopes for the contributions of behavioral science to better politics. It may be urged that the present confusion and apathy are due to the fact that the real energy of society is now directed in all nonpolitical matters by trained specialists who manage things, while politics are carried on with a machinery and ideas formed in the past to deal with quite another sort of situation (Dewey, 2012 [1927], loc 2046).

More than 85 years later, we might wonder whether the course of development of expertise in politics had taken an unexpected turn. There is, in fact, a great deal of expertise. From polling to selecting targets for political advertising to focus groups and selecting messages to even experiments in using ideas from neuroscience to manipulate responses there is a brave new world of political technologies. It owes much to advertising, marketing, and public relations but also more than a little to advances in behavioral science. Indeed, in some tension with his general enthusiasm for behavioral science, Dewey anticipated this – in terms similar to those Habermas would use 35 years later: “We seem to be approaching a state of government by hired promoters of opinion called publicity agents” (Dewey, 2012 [1927], loc 2525). And of course this portended inequality. “A class of experts is inevitably so removed from common interests as to become a class with private interests and private knowledge, which in social matters is not knowledge at all” (Dewey, 2012 [1927], loc 2922). But this leaves the question, why didn’t the public do something? For Dewey, states do not just demarcate the populations that may be organized as publics; they are organized efforts to carry out the business of publics. “The obvious external mark of the organization of a public or a state is thus the existence of officials” (Dewey, 2012 [1927], loc 1032). Dewey’s book is a challenge to all theories that approach the state as a radically distinctive phenomenon, searching for its causes and taking it as the organizing principle for understanding the modern world. For him, the state has no special status. “There is no more an inherent sanctity in a church, trade-union, business corporation, or family institution than there is in the state.

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Their value is also to be measured by their consequences” (Dewey, 2012 [1927], loc 1535). In a certain sense, the meaning of Dewey’s title is that publics are brought into being by the distinctive set of problems with which they deal. But of course Dewey also thinks the US public of his day suffers problems of underdevelopment, though they are remediable. The major weakness of the US public that Dewey notes is a mismatch between the scale at which we are habituated to organize and think and that of the consequences that affect us. “We have inherited …local town-meeting practices and ideas. But we live and act and have our being in a continental national state” (Dewey, 2012 [1927], loc 1942–52). Dewey’s project in the book is, at least in part, to call forth an American public capable of dealing with the very large-scale and complex webs of consequences that he sees emanating from some actions – presumably those backed by concentrated wealth and power. This is an international issue as well. “Extensive, enduring, intricate and serious indirect consequences of the conjoint activity of a comparatively few persons traverse the globe” (Dewey, 2012[1927]: loc 2097). If scale challenges national publics, of course, it challenges transnational and global publics even more. Dewey is impressively alert to the impact of improved transportation infrastructure. “Railways, travel and transportation, commerce, the mails, telegraph and telephone, newspapers, create enough similarity of ideas and sentiments to keep the thing going as a whole, for they create interaction and interdependence” (Dewey, 2012 [1927], loc 1952). Writing in a new 1946 introduction to The Public and Its Problems he is worried by what WWII revealed, but expects movement toward more effective global governance. Where Arendt thought a world-state impossible, Dewey is more hopeful. But in a discussion of the importance of habit, he suggests some of the reasons why this may be a slow development, if it is coming at all. People work within the channels they know best. I would add, people have very unequal resources, and for many working in their countries, cities, or localities may be the most promising option. Dewey asks, a bit plaintively, “how can a public be organized, we may ask, when literally it does not stay in place?” (Dewey, 2012 [1927], loc 2231). Perhaps we should take this less as a rhetorical expression of doubt about the possibility of placetranscending publics than a genuine question about how they can be organized. The means cannot be the same as local community. Not only do publics link strangers, often impersonally, and at a distance. They are not organized in terms of dense webs of internal relationships. Scale itself limits density, but if this is in one sense an organizational loss, in another it is a key dimension of openness. Local community also impresses Dewey as crucial. “Unless local communal life can be restored, the public cannot adequately resolve its most urgent problem: to find and identify itself” (Dewey, 2012 [1927], loc 3015). Dewey is not saying that the public can exist simply in local community. Rather, I think, he is suggesting that spacetranscending public life needs to be complemented by local community. He has in mind a national public, but the point applies more broadly. It is hard for a public to



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be sustained only in “virtual” or electronically mediated connections (though this is perhaps instructive as a limit case). The relatively local need not be a matter of isolation. Moreover, it can be a matter of intermediate associations; integration into the large whole is more effective if it is through smaller scale, even face-to-face groupings as well as a matter of direct access. It is partly a matter of social support. It is very likely a matter of carrying habits and practices learned locally into larger arenas. At the same time, local communities may not simply mediate participation in larger publics; they may represent them. However inaccurate the notion that one’s local community is a microcosm of the country it is nonetheless powerful. People think of whole countries as made up of numerous local communities at least somewhat like their own (and indeed, the same goes for imagining the country – or world – as involving people who also live in families, have jobs, etc.). It is not entirely clear what Dewey means by the public needing to “find itself” (like an adolescent searching for autonomous identity). But the basic idea seems to be that the public can only be fully effective when it is self-aware as well as aware of the indirect consequences and relationships that both give it problems to address and make possible its largescale internal connections. Dewey seems to be searching for a way to describe how the large-scale public becomes tangible, surveyable, and meaningful for ordinary individuals. Just what the dialectic between local and large-scale can or should be remains a question for exploration. To what extent can public communication or action thrive by large-scale electronic means alone? What would be missing without webs of more directly interpersonal relations? Dewey draws on the sociology of Charles Horton Cooley (1909) to make the contrast of the face-to-face (a term Cooley coined) to large-scale and impersonal relations. He notes that face-to-face relations are “local and contiguous and consequently visible”. Implicitly – but without ever really making it a focus of attention – he raises the question of whether all the effects of impersonal and large-scale action are equally visible and therefore whether they become thematized for the attention of the relevant public that is nonetheless affected by them. Of course they are not, but the matter is more complicated. Dewey points out that publics are only minimally able to grasp the actual largescale integration of social life (let alone act effectively on that scale). Moreover, largescale publics have a hard time recognizing and understanding themselves. “In spite of attained integration, or rather perhaps because of its nature, the Public seems to be lost; it is certainly bewildered” (Dewey, 2012 [1927], loc 1983). Borrowing Graham Wallas’s term for the society of large-scale complex organizations, Dewey (2012 [1927], loc 2252) worries: “the machine age in developing the Great Society has invaded and partially disintegrated the small communities of former times without generating a Great Community”. Society, for Dewey, means much the same as for Arendt except that it is nowhere near so threatening. But he never defines the Great Community clearly. It would seem to be something like what Talcott Parsons (2011) called “societal community” – that is, some large-scale production of solidarity

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 Facets of the Public Sphere: Dewey, Arendt, Habermas

and a sense of belonging. This could be produced largely by means of mediated communication, but in Dewey’s case with the proviso that it brings understanding of just what is going on3. We have the physical tools of communication as never before. The thought and aspirations congruous with them are not communicated, and hence are not common. Without such communication the public will remain shadowy and formless, seeking spasmodically for itself, but seizing and holding its shadow rather than its substance. Till the Great Society is converted into a Great Community, the Public will remain in eclipse. Communication can alone create a great community. Our Babel is not one of tongues, but of the signs and symbols without which shared experience is impossible (Dewey, 2012 [1927], loc 2252).

Dewey gives voice here to a hope that has run through the entire modern era. Won’t technology combine with enlightenment to produce a new combination of solidarity and accurate self-understanding, banishing the mystifications of tradition? Moderns have expected national solidarity to be replaced by some more modern form for more than 200 years. Immanuel Kant thought that the effects which an upheaval in any state produces upon all the others in our continent, where all are so closely linked by trade, are so perceptible that these other states are forced by their own insecurity to offer themselves as arbiters, albeit without legal authority, so that they indirectly prepare the way for a great political body of the future, without precedent in the past. He expected a “universal cosmopolitan existence … a perfect civil union of mankind” (Reiss, 1970, p. 51). Similar thoughts have animated liberals into the present day, cosmopolitan hopes for global order combined with knowledge. Two basic questions are whether extending reach requires thinning of solidarity and identity, and if so, how much that matters. What cosmopolitanism offers, Martha Nussbaum (1996, p. 15) suggests, is “only reason and the love of humanity, which may seem at times less colorful than other sources of belonging”. Habermas is similarly committed to thinness and proceduralism, suspicious of calls for ‘belonging’ and thick identities4. Here Dewey seems torn. He thinks that “in its deepest and richest sense a community must always remain a matter of face-to-face intercourse” (Dewey, 2012 [1927], loc 2963). Or again, “democracy must begin at home, and its home is the neighborly community” (Dewey, 2012 [1927], loc 2984). Here we see some tension with his own

3 The proviso is more complicated than Dewey suggests. First, even in local communities it is not at all clear that people who recognize the community’s existence and their membership and share a common culture really understand all the causal relationships that organize their lives. Second, it is entirely possible to produce common culture on a large-scale, influencing basic patterns in social life, without people being aware clearly that this is going on. The rise of national cultures, for example, was accomplished partly by shared media of communications, and it produced effects like homogenization of national fertility patterns (see Watkins, 1991). Dewey inadequately distinguishes community as a structure of relations from common culture, and common culture from collective understanding. 4  See for example the appendix on “Citizenship and National Identity” in Between Facts and Norms.



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earlier chapters which were much more optimistic about the potential for expansion of the public in large-scale, technologically mediated democracy. But in the later part of The Public and Its Problems, he worries more about the disruption of family life and especially local community, going so far as to assert that “the local is the ultimate universal” (Dewey, 2012[1927]: loc 3005). Since clearly face-to-face intercourse won’t be enough to deal with the challenges of modern complexity, Dewey is left using the word community to refer to two completely different sociological concepts: the densely knit local community and the widely diffused, metaspatial Great Community. It is clearer how participants might be able to survey, understand, and adopt a common sense of value and purpose in the local community (though far from obvious that this is in fact the state of affairs in most local communities). He acknowledges the tension. “The Great Community, in the sense of free and full inter-communication, is conceivable. But it can never possess all the qualities which mark a local community” (Dewey, 2012 [1927], loc 2963). Dewey continues to hope, because “fraternity, liberty, and equality isolated from communal life are hopeless abstractions” (Dewey, 2012 [1927], loc 2321). He doesn’t want to see them sacrificed to scale and complexity. His position has a special pathos since he insists on the emotional and sociological importance of local community. Habermas of course shares the hope for a large-scale cosmopolitan unity, even as he cedes much of social organization to systems beyond the reach of communicative action. But he vests his hopes in achieving solidarity more completely on the basis of reason; informed by different experiences as well as theory, he finds calls for thicker social relations troubling5. One of Dewey’s central concerns is that the public should be self-aware. “The fact of association does not of itself make a society. This demands, as we have also seen, perception of the consequences of a joint activity and of the distinctive share of each element in producing it” (Dewey, 2012 [1927], loc 2725). In Dewey’s (2012 [1927], loc 2128) words, “an inchoate public is capable of organization only when indirect consequences are perceived, and when it is possible to project agencies which order their occurrence”. Dewey repeats several times that the public needs to “find itself”. But this is made vastly harder by the challenge of understanding the growing web of indirect consequences. “The local face-to-face community has been invaded by forces so vast, so remote in initiation, so far-reaching in scope and so completely indirect in operation, that they are, from the standpoint of the members of local social units, unknown” (Dewey, 2012 [1927], loc 2128). In order to cope with this, there will have to be enormous advances in knowledge – which Dewey expects to follow partly from science and partly from the experience of practi-

5 See his surprisingly sharp response in Between Facts and Norms (p. 498–9), and to Charles Taylor’s appeal for greater recognition of culture and belonging in “Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State” (Habermas, 1994).

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 Facets of the Public Sphere: Dewey, Arendt, Habermas

cal experiment. “The prime condition of a democratically organized public is a kind of knowledge and insight which does not yet exist” (Dewey, 2012 [1927], loc 2495). How to integrate such knowledge with widespread participation in public life is of course a basic challenge.

2.5 Conclusion Insights from Dewey, Arendt and Habermas can potentially be integrated into a stronger theory of public life and its potential as a support for democracy. I do not claim to have done this, but hope I have pushed the project forward. Each contributed something underestimated by the others: Dewey the centrality of indirect consequences, Habermas the notions of social foundations and structural transformation, and Arendt a richer concept of action and cultural embeddedness. I have also tried to connect their work to some important themes they neglected. Perhaps the most glaring issue is the extent to which actual public life has been marked by exclusion even when its protagonists claimed openness as one of its virtues. This has been noted over and again in the literature and in practical affairs there has been a long struggle for inclusion of a range of different marginalized or subaltern populations. The issue of inclusion/exclusion raises other questions besides simply who may be left out. One is the issue that troubled Habermas: did expansion in the scale of the public sphere contribute to loss of its rational-critical capacity. Another is whether the problem lies in imagining a single integrated public sphere in the first place; is it better to speak of multiple publics with different participants conducting their internal debates and contending with each other? But then, in what communicative space do they contend if not a larger, potentially integrative public sphere? It is easy to say “Look! There’s a religious public, a women’s public, a sports public, a teen public, public sphere of pacifists, a public sphere of film fanatics”. All true perhaps, but somewhat begging the question of why we cared in the first place. The idea of counterpublic has helpfully identified the extent to which some arenas of public engagement are organized directly in tension with a dominant public. Negt and Kluge saw a proletarian public sphere acting as a counterpublic to the bourgeois public sphere of European capitalist states. Fraser extended the idea influentially to include a range of subaltern counterpublics. Warner not only elaborated the general argument but also reminded us that counterpublics need not be subaltern, pointing to the public sphere forged by Evangelical Christians and more generally the religious right in the US. Sometimes withdrawal from the dominant public sphere may be a choice made by counterpublics, hoping to benefit from a more autonomous setting for internal discussions, perhaps building a common identity by reducing plurality. Sometimes counterpublics form more reluctantly, among those excluded or marginalized by the dominant public sphere, whether because of some identity or because of

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their opinions. And their ambition may be precisely to gain full inclusion in a larger public. Being a counterpublic is not something automatically to celebrate. In all cases, the notion of counterpublics, or even simply multiple publics differentiated by identity, taste, or opinions reveals a challenge to the very idea of publicness as openness. It suggests that participation in the dominant public may block the development of some discussions which will flourish more in partially closed spheres. Are these still public spheres? Or is the point that in a large and complex society public discussion will necessarily be highly segmented – something minimally considered by Dewey, Arendt, and Habermas. The idea of counterpublics also raises another question: the relationship of social movements to the public sphere. The boundary between a counterpublic and a social movement is fuzzy. Very often there is an overlap between a larger public discourse on a theme – say, the rights of women – and a more specific set of campaigns to effect social change. There is also a meaningful difference. Social movements are often seen primarily as instrumental projects. This notion may be helpfully enlarged by recognizing the extent to which movements develop – and stay alive  – only with a continual discussion of their nature and purpose and the issues that animate them. This discussion, moreover, may not be entirely strategic, nor even rational-critical. It very likely is part of a developing movement culture in which identities and understandings are recast. Not only may movements be accompanied by associated publics, movements very often shape debates in larger public spheres. This is a theme surprisingly underdeveloped in the accounts of Dewey, Arendt, and Habermas (though each of them touched on movements more in other work). For example, Habermas’s story of the structural transformations of the public sphere in Europe and America is told as a story of the rise of large bureaucratic organizations, new forms of administration of public opinion, and replacement of public engagement by negotiations among interest groups. But this leaves out the continuous counterpoint of movements that challenged the seeming administered consensus, put new issues on the agenda, and revitalized public engagement. The story of US history, for example, is as much the story of successive movements – religious, populist, labor, anti-slavery, pro-suffrage, temperance, civil rights, peace, environment, and so forth – as it is the story of the rise of corporations and the state and their various forms of collusion. Both multiple publics and social movements focus our attention on the internal differentiation of the public sphere and the limits of a model that imagines the whole as organized in discourse among individuals. This is centrally a matter of scale, but it goes also to basic conceptualization and questions about the nature of public communication itself. The model of interpersonal speech cannot encompass modern democratic public life. In the first place, only a small part of the communication of such a public can be directly interpersonal communication. This means we need to complement a model of interaction with dimensions. Language use in public is necessarily a matter of the circulation of tropes, images, and information as well as anything

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 Facets of the Public Sphere: Dewey, Arendt, Habermas

conceptualized readily as messages and arguments. Public spheres are necessarily embedded in and productive of culture; some of the work they do is culture change. In addition, partly through culture and partly in other ways, public engagement is partly a source of social integration. It knits together the members of the public. This in turn raises questions about the idea that members of the public are fully formed in advance of their actual participation. As Dewey suggested, participation in public can both educate the participants and improve the quality of collective knowledge and understanding. Identities and ways of thinking as well as opinions are changed by active public participation. This calls into question the widespread claim made by elites – even subordinated elites – that many of “the people” are not ready to be part of “the public”. Chinese students protesting for democracy told me in 1989 that peasants just weren’t ready (Calhoun, 1994). They weren’t educated; they didn’t know how to participate in public discourse. Liberals in Russia think the same thing today: the masses are erratic; they vote either for reactionary chauvinists or communists. Some advocate a literacy test for voter registration. And of course, these ideas are not foreign to Western liberals who worry that the people are simple too, well, populist. But if we need to be suspicious of entry qualifications this does not mean we can easily insist on identity preparation or capacity. Capacity for public engagement must be understood as variable. It varies for whole countries or other large populations based on their histories, cultures, and institutional supports. It varies among individuals as an embodied competence. If one can learn and change through public participation, one can get better (or worse) at it. This competence is, I would suggest, a practical matter not fully subject to conscious control. It is a matter of habitus. This does not mean that there is no distinctive role for rational-critical argument; this can indeed have a regulative function in relation to public understanding. But it cannot be taken as definitive or exhaustive of communication in the public sphere, even ideally. All of this suggests that the need to resist three longings that color many accounts of the public sphere. It is not subject to complete rational control, as Arendt suggests by stressing the importance of action as initiatives with unpredictable results. It is not possible to make public life an extension of community; it is a different form of social connections or integration, not least because it is specifically about strangers and often large-scale. And publicness cannot be neatly bounded by the limits of a public sphere, because publicness always has the capacity to transform the public itself.

Acknowledgement The chapter builds on the Tanner Lecture on Human Values, 2013.

References 

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References Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined Communities. Rev. Ed.. London: Verso. Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Arendt, H (1972). Crises of the Republic. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Arendt, H. (1973 [1951]). The Origins of Totalitarianism (2nd. ed.). New York, NY: Harcourt Brace. Arendt, H. (1990 [1963]). On Revolution. New York: Penguin. Calhoun, C. (1994). Neither Gods nor Emperors. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Calhoun, C. (1998). Populist Politics, Communications Media, and Large Scale Social Integration. Sociological Theory, 6(2), 219–241. Calhoun, C. (2011). From the Current Crisis to Possible Futures. In Calhoun, C. & Derluguian, G. (Eds.). Business as Usual: Sources of the Global Financial Meltdown. New York: NYU Press. Calhoun, C. (2012). Roots of Radicalism: Tradition, the Public Sphere and early 19th century Social Movements. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Calhoun, C., Mendieta, E. & Antwerpen, J. V. (eds.) (2013). Habermas and Religion. Cambridge: Polity. Clark, A. (1995). The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Cooley, C.H. (1909). Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind. New York, NY: Scribner’s. Dewey, J. (2012 [1927]). The Public and Its Problems: An Essay in Political Theory. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Durkheim, E. (1984 [1893]). The Divison of Labor in Society. New York, NY: Free Press. Fraser, N. (1992). Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy. In Calhoun, C. (Ed.) Habermas and the Public Sphere (109–42). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Freud, S. (1966 [1922]). Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. London: Hogarth. Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York, NY: Anchor Books. Habermas, J. (1989 [1962]). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, J. (1984). Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. I. Boston, MA: Beacon. Habermas, J. (1988). Theory of Communicative Action. Vol II. Boston, MA: Beacon. Habermas, J. (1994). Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State, Pp. 107–45 In Gutman, A. (Ed.) Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Rev. ed. (107–145). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Habermas, J. (1996). Between Facts and Norms. Cambridgem, MA: MIT Press. Horkheimer, M. & T. Adorno (1972 [1947]) Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York, NY: Herder and Herder. Jacobs, J. (1961). The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York, NY: Vintage. Landes, J. (1988). Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. LeBon, G. (1960 [1909]). The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. New York, NY: Viking. Livingstone, S. (1998). Relationships between Media and Audiences: prospects for audience reception studies. In Liebes, T & Curran, J. (Eds.) Media, Ritual and Identity: Essays in Honor of Elihu Katz (237–255). London: Routledge. Lippman, W. (1993 [1925]). The Phantom Public. New Brunswick: Transaction Books. Mendieta, E. & Van Antwerpen, J. (Eds.) (2010). The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Negt, O. & Kluge, A. (1993 [1972]). The Public Sphere and Experience. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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Nussbaum, M. (1996). For Love of Country. Boston, MA: Beacon. Parsons, T. (2011). American Society: Toward a Theory of Societal Community. New Haven: Yale University Press. Pitkin, H. (1998). Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Reiss, H. (Ed.) (1970). Kant’s Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ryan, M. (1992). Gender and Public Access: Women's Politics in 19th Century America. In Calhoun, C. (Ed.) Habermas and the Public Sphere (259–88). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Samuelson, P.A. (1954) The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure. Review of Economics and Statistics 36(4), 387–389. Sennett, R. (1977). The Fall of Public Man. New York: Knopf. Sennett, R. (2008). The Craftsman. London: Allen Lane. Smelser, N. (1962). Collective Behavior. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Swanson, J.A. (1992) The Public and Private in Aristotle’s Political Philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the Self. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Traugott, M (2010). The Insurgent Barricade. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Warner, M. (2002). Publics and Counterpublics. Cambridge, MA: Zone Books. Watkins, S.C. (1991). From Provinces into Nations: The Demographic Integration of Western Europe, 1870–1960. Princeton. NJ: Princeton University Press.

Fredrik Engelstad, Håkon Larsen, Jon Rogstad

3 The Public Sphere in the Nordic Model Five institutional fields were pinpointed as the main components of a public sphere in the introductory chapter (Engelstad, Larsen, Rogstad & Steen-Johnsen, this volume). They vary significantly in their institutional structure as well as the distribution of power. These variations to a large extent determine how the public sphere as a whole will function. In the present chapter each of the fields are briefly presented, in order to show some of their specificities, while at the same time pointing to their links to politics and political regulation. Even though material from Norway is the most prominent in this book, Norwegian society is part of a broader type of social formation. A broader focus on Nordic societies accentuates that the constellation of institutions in one country is not the product of purely random historical processes, but represent more stable institutional clusters. To the degree that there are central commonalities between the Nordic countries also when it comes to the shape of the public sphere, it makes sense to talk of a Nordic model in this respect, not only in the politico-economic sphere, as is most common. There have been and still are controversies over the fruitfulness of the concept of a Nordic model. Hence, the chapter is introduced by a brief discussion of alternative ways of conceiving a ‘model’. Moreover, the discussion is informed by two important works: Comparing Media Systems (Hallin & Mancini, 2004) and The Media Welfare State (Syvertsen, Enli, Mjøs & Moe, 2014). Even though these works are limited to the media field, and thus cover only part of the topic treated here, they give valuable impulses to the understanding of the public sphere as a whole.

3.1 A Nordic Model Does a Nordic model exist? The issue was raised in a classical article by Lars Mjøset (1992) and still does not seem to be settled. Mjøset (1992) stated there is no such thing, and others agree with reference to specific social fields (recently Gooderham, Navrbjerg, Olsen & Steen, 2015, on organization of labour markets). However, there is no lack of research assuming the existence of the Nordic model (Ryner, 2007; Dølvik et al., 2015), while other research takes a more neutral view (Alestalo, Hort & Kuhnle, 2009). One reason the question remains unsettled may be the lack of agreement on what constitutes a ‘model’ and the variables to be included. Quite often, institutional characteristics and outcome variables are confounded, for example, labour market policy formation and the level of unemployment, but then the concept of a model loses what it might have of explanatory power. The reasons for the negative answers of Mjøset (1992) and Gooderham et al. (2015), however, lie elsewhere – namely in their © 2017 Fredrik Engelstad, Håkon Larsen, Jon Rogstad, Kari Steen-Johnsen This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.

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claims that there must be relatively strict homology between the units for the model to be fruitful. Obviously, no two societies are identical; but if that was the case, what criteria must be met in order to subsume them under one model? This question may be viewed from two angles, those of ‘typology’ and ‘ideal type’ (van Kersbergen & Vis, 2015). A typology consists of a set of types; well-known typologies are, for example, varieties of capitalism (Hall & Soskice, 2001) or welfare state regimes (Esping-Andersen, 1990). The Nordic countries are treated as part of a larger type of European countries in the former case, as a separate type in the latter. Within each type, differences between units (countries in this case) are not measured; what is measured is the dissimilarity from other types. The ideal type is a model in a stricter sense, a construct  – whether purely abstract or originating in observation  – from which units may deviate in several respects. An ideal type/model measures differences within the type by constructing a common denominator from which the actual countries deviate. Applied to the Esping-Andersen example, this means how actual social democratic welfare states conform to and differ from a given model. In this case, the question is not whether one unit deviates significantly in relation to one variable but whether and how one unit deviates from the bundle of all the variables in the model. Here, both Mjøset (1992) and Gooderham et al. (2015) appear too strict because they focus on single components and not on the whole. It is in the sense of ideal type that the notion of a ‘Nordic model’ is discussed in the following. It has the advantage of depicting individual variations between units – even if they are referred to as one bundle – while at the same time conceptualizing changes over time. The effectiveness of the model is measured against empirical variations in the Nordic societies at any given time and whether core elements are present to a degree that it makes sense to talk about a common basic structure sufficiently different from other post-industrial countries. In its socio-economic version, the Nordic model has three main components: (i) a large, active and at the same time liberal state; (ii) class compromise and cooperative relationships between labour market parties organized in national federations and (iii) a generous welfare state. In many respects, these elements are reciprocally supportive in the same sense as the conception of institutional bundling in Varieties of Capitalism (Hall & Soskice, eds., 2001), as specified by Dølvik et al. (2015) and Engelstad & Hagelund (2015). The sustainability of the Nordic model rests on the dynamism of capitalism, tempered by broad normative and institutional preconditions. This gives the model considerable stability and at the same time necessary flexibility. The normative preconditions constitute democratic culture, egalitarianism and social inclusion developed over a period of more than a century (Alestalo et al., 2009; Aakvaag, this volume). In a broad sense, these norms do not differ significantly from those in many other democratic societies; the salient point is how they have materialized over time in institutional structures. They could not be developed and sustained without a wide space for political and social deliberation. A well-functioning public sphere as an arena for the formation of basic consensus – and at the same time conflict and compromise – is



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Table 1: Core elements in the extended Nordic model Normative preconditions –– Democratic culture –– Egalitarianism –– Social inclusion Large, active and liberal state –– Input democracy, political decisions preceded by deliberation and broad hearing processes –– Active labour market policy, facilitation of coordinated wage bargaining –– Policies of redistribution and generous social security net –– Liberal orientation with guarantees of freedom of expression Concertation between labour market parties –– Broad system of political regulation –– Basic agreements between trade union federations and employer associations –– Labour market federations regularly take part in coordinated wage bargaining –– Employee participation in decisions on the job and at the enterprise level Generous welfare state –– Universal rights to welfare provisions –– Public and free education at all levels –– Virtually free health care –– Well-developed public pension system The public sphere –– High level of state activity in the structuring of the public sphere, on a par with the economic realm –– Active policies, including economic support, in all five core institutional fields in the public sphere: media, arts and culture, research and higher education, voluntary organizations and religious communities –– Universalism and inclusion as guiding principles for policies –– Arm’s length distance on the part of the state regarding decisions on journalistic, artistic and cultural matters

a precondition for the Nordic model. Therefore, the public sphere is a necessary condition for the model and should be included in it. The core elements in this extended Nordic model are specified and summarized in Table 1.

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3.2 The Public Sphere: a Specification In the Introduction to this volume, the public sphere is described as a constellation – a mosaic or a network of arenas are the concepts used by Habermas (1996 [1992]) – of institutional fields circumscribed by institutionalization of the freedom of expression. In The Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere (1989 [1962]), Habermas conceived the public sphere as a channel allowing flows of communication between citizens and from the citizens to the state. The public sphere was further divided into the political public sphere and the literary public sphere. In this conception, the state is located at the receiving end, whereas citizens shape the channels of mediation. When Structural Transformations uses the idea of ‘institutions’ of the public sphere (1989, p.  31ff), it denotes the meeting places of socio-physical media of communication: coffee houses, journals, theatres. This is a narrower concept of institution than the one used here. Thereby, other aspects of institutions, not least the freedom of expression, function as the institutional basis for the public sphere and remain under-thematized. This void points to a more general lacuna in Habermas’ theory, the role of the state as facilitating or restricting processes of public deliberation (Benson, 2009). Keeping the focus on the public sphere between citizens and the state implies that the public sphere differs in extension from the totality of issues and facts that are communicated in modern societies. This delimitation may be experienced as counterintuitive, but that is mainly due to the drastic changes in institutions and patterns of communication since the original conceptualization. Unfortunately, in his later developments Habermas remains vague on the extension and shape of the public sphere. Within the narrower limits presented here, five specific institutional fields may be singled out as constituting its core. They have in common the characteristics of a topos in a double sense – of being topics of debate and criticism and of producing knowledge and at the same time of being social spaces manifested in institutions. The five topoi are the media, arts and cultural production, voluntary organizations, research and higher education and religion. What these topoi have in common is that they are sources of the formation and revision of and critical debate on social opinions relevant to collective decision making. In the Nordic region, common to all these is that they are closely connected to the state by comprehensive sets of restrictions and various forms of facilitation – political, economic or otherwise. Of the five fields, the media is most obviously a part of the public sphere and the one that is most studied. Here, the media is taken in a broad sense, ranging from TV channels at the national level to small niche journals. Arts and cultural production held a prominent position in Structural Transformations but later drifted into the background. Despite enormous aesthetic changes in tastes and modes of expression, these fields are still constitutive of collective identities. Voluntary organizations emerge around all kinds of issues; relevant here are those associations that transcend the private sphere and develop some form of collective opinion formation and function as ‘schools in democracy’. Research and higher education is the arena per se



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for the innovative, deliberative development of conceptual tools for understanding social processes and technological inventions that affect all aspects of social life. Finally, despite secularization, religion is still and probably will remain a privileged source of reflection and diffusion of social values and morality. This taxonomy may be compared to Jeffery Alexander’s (2006) conceptualization of the public sphere. What Alexander terms communicative institutions consist of mass media, public opinion polls and voluntary organizations. Two of these elements coincide with the ones presented here; the remaining differences reflect contrasts between the Nordic societies and the US. On the other hand, the arts and culture are to a lesser extent a socio-political theme in the US; opinion polls play a more marginal role in the Nordic countries, and religious organizations are more easily classified as voluntary organizations in the US than in the Nordic countries, where the Lutheran majority churches continue to have ties to the state.

3.3 Public Sphere Regimes and the Media Welfare State To our knowledge, taxonomies of public sphere ‘regimes’ in a broad sense have not yet been developed, except for the narrower theme of media regimes. Covering the modern world as a whole, Hallin & Mancini (2004) developed a typology with three media regimes: a liberal type, a polarized pluralist type and a democratic corporatist type. Their taxonomy rests on four criteria: early development and broad diffusion of mass media; a degree of independence from political groups; a degree of professionalization and self-regulation and a degree of state intervention to protect freedom of the press. The democratic corporatist type is characterized by high scores on all four variables. The Nordic countries are classified as democratic corporatist, along with Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland (ibid., p. 67). However, within this group there is considerable variation; the Nordic countries stand out as a separate cluster with altogether far higher scores on all variables than the rest (Hallin & Mancini, 2004, p. 299). In The Media Welfare State, Syvertsen et al. (2014) delimit a specific Nordic media model by combining inspiration from Hallin & Mancini (2004) with elements from Esping-Andersen’s (1990) typology of liberal, conservative and social democratic welfare states. Based on a theoretical assumption of a homology between the welfare state and the structure of the media (2014, p.  20,) four pillars in the Nordic media model are singled out (2014, p. 17): –– Communication services conceived as public goods –– Editorial freedom from intervention from outside –– Economic support for a pluralist press –– Preferences for consensual solutions involving cooperation between main stakeholders

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When viewed in isolation, none of these four pillars are exclusive to the Nordic countries; the main point is how they are specified and combined. Editorial freedom is a general norm in modern societies, albeit differently institutionalized. Likewise, economic support for the press is found outside the Nordic region (to be discussed below). Economic support may be interpreted in light of the conception of communication services as a public good. At the same time, in the conception of Syvertsen et al. (2014, p. 20), this constitutes the main link between the media regime and the welfare state. The welfare state is universalistic in the sense that most provisions are equally accessible to the population as a whole. Therefore, it is the obligation of the state to offer provisions and services to all citizens, irrespective of social status or wealth. In parallel, access to the information necessary for participation in political deliberation should be equally available. This is the main justification of a large system of public broadcasting in which state ownership has a central part and for economic support of (parts of) the press in order to guarantee pluralism in channels of information. Similarly, state intervention is a crucial precondition for a broad distribution of news and other information. This presupposes, then, an active media policy that retains legitimacy, among other things, by neutrality in party politics. Finally, Syvertsen et al. (2014) point to a core feature of the Nordic welfare state model, that of cooperation and consensual solutions via an elaborate system of agreements, along with ‘input democracy’ (Goodin, 2004), which means that stakeholders are actively invited to participate in political deliberation of prospective legal reforms. In its most developed form, this is connected to labour market bargaining and negotiations over welfare state issues (Dølvik et al., 2015; Hagelund & Pedersen, 2015). The willingness to reach agreement in no way precludes conflict over economic and welfare state issues; the point is one of bargaining over wages and working conditions being institutionalized on a higher level. The same is true for media policy or cultural policies in general; they constitute frameworks where disagreements can be fought out without seriously threatening political stability.

3.4 The Nordic Model: Historical Background Despite considerable variation in political history and economic structure (Stråth, 2001), common cultural roots are clearly present in the Nordic countries in the welfare sector and the culture sector, and in the shape of the public sphere. Two long historical lines have been decisive. The Lutheran reformation and establishment of Lutheran state churches led to the requirement that every citizen should be able to read the Bible, institutionalized in the teaching of the catechism. Therefore, the level of literacy by 1800 was virtually 100 percent across Scandinavia (Tveit, 1991), well above the numbers for England and France. In parallel, freedom of expression was already institutionalized around 1800 – in 1766 in Sweden, in 1814 in Norway and somewhat



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later in 1849 in Denmark. This formed the basis for the flowering of newspapers and magazines and for the mobilization of social movements from the mid-nineteenth century. Add to this the emergence of a modern, comprehensive system for primary education from the latter half of the nineteenth century, in contrast to the more stratified nature of educational systems in, for example, England and Germany. A shorter but no less decisive historical line runs through the development of social democracy after World War I. Except for Finland, the labour movement in the Nordic countries remained unified, with a dominant Labour party outside the Third International closely connected with one trade union federation. Moreover, the labour parties were able to forge alliances with farmers and smallholders. Social democratic parties in power for decade after decade, particularly in Sweden and Norway, made the twentieth century the Age of Social Democracy (Sejersted 2011). The policies of social democracy rested on the basic conception of a mixed economy, both in business and in cultural life, and may be summarized in three aspects of reform: coordination, modernization and inclusion. The notion of inclusion is common to all the Scandinavian countries (more problematic in Finland, which experienced a civil war) and is most pertinently expressed in the metaphor of Sweden as the People’s Home (folkhemmet) launched by the Social Democratic party in the 1920s. This conception of inclusion is directly relevant to the theory of the public sphere, as it stands in contrast to the idea of a proletarian ‘counter public sphere’ (Lageröffentlickeit, cf. Negt & Kluge, 1993 [1972]) existing as a parallel to the public sphere of the bourgeoisie. Such parallel institutions did exist in Scandinavia in the period between the two world wars, with class  – based newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, theatres and sports associations. But in the golden decades of social democracy after World War II, they were merged into common national institutions. Common political developments also emerged out of exchanges between the Nordic countries after World War II and out of experiences and ideas on democratic reforms, such as reforms of schools, old age pensions and sickness allowances. A formalized source of commonalities in the Nordic region is the establishment of institutions for Nordic cooperation after World War II, both on a parliamentary level and on a governmental level via the Nordic Council and the Nordic Ministerial Council, respectively. For a long time, these organizations functioned as strategic arenas for coordination and deliberation on a policy level but lost much of their force when Sweden and Finland joined the EU in 1994, while Norway and Iceland were partly integrated into the EU via the European Economic Agreement. To make it easier to deal with, in the following the Nordic model is described and discussed with reference to the four countries on the European mainland, while mostly leaving out Iceland and the sparsely populated islands in the Atlantic. This would be detrimental if the discussion was built on the assumption that a Nordic model is fruitful only if all five Nordic states confirm a common pattern. However, given the mode of reasoning employed here – that is, presenting a model and discussing commonalities and deviances – it does not create a serious problem.

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3.5 The Position of the State in the Nordic Public Sphere To liberalists, the characterization of the social democratic state as both strong and liberal may appear an oxymoron. However, this notion rests on a complex set of checks and balances institutionalized over a long time. The point of departure is the existence of an efficient state administration in the Nordic region from the eighteenth century in societies where political power was strongly centralized. This meant that the subsequent process of modernization to a large extent was centred on the democratization of an otherwise relatively well – functioning administrative apparatus. Already from the mid-nineteenth century, the principle of ‘arm’s length distance’ emerged, allowing popular movements – such as religious lay movements – autonomy vis-à-vis the state and at the same time considerable influence within their field of interest (Nielsen, 2015, p.  49). Democratizing processes did not develop without conflict and backlash, but in the latter half of the nineteenth century they were well on their way in Scandinavian societies (Finland at the time was still under Russian rule). Parallel to social democratic welfare policy, a broad public responsibility for the culture sector emerged after World War II as another aspect of social inclusion. Here, a parallel version of the arm’s length principle materialized, connected to state subvention of the arts (Mangset, 2013; Larsen, this volume): economic support should not entail restrictions on artistic creativity and production. The same logic applies to the press and broadcasting. State ownership of or state subsidies to the media do not have an effect on what is publicized. One reason for this liberal element in the state is that freedom of the press was firmly established before the growth in the social democratic inclination to state intervention took force and not the other way round. A prominent aspect of the strong and liberal state is the direct contributions from the state to enlightened public debate. Two aspects deserve special mention. As part of the ‘input democracy’, public committees with broad representation are appointed to investigate a large range of socio-political problems, thus laying foundations for political decisions. In Sweden and Norway, the reports are published in special series (SOU, NOU); Denmark and Finland have a slightly less formalized system of publication. Another aspect of information from the state concerns public access to official documents. In Sweden, this was introduced in 1766, whereas the rest of the Nordic countries followed suit well after World War II; it was introduced in Finland in 1951 and in Denmark and Norway in 1970. In the 2000s, the legislation was revised and extended in all Nordic countries (Jørgensen, 2014, p. 10). In some respects, the rules in the Nordic countries take the lead internationally; at present, the right to information is anchored in the constitution in Finland, Norway and Sweden. Even though specific rules on access to information vary between the Nordic countries, the differences are the product of historical contingencies and show no clear pattern (ibid., p. 34f).



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3.6 Freedom of Expression Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden all have freedom of expression enshrined in the law, but there are differences in the level of detail. The Swedish provisions on freedom of expression go back to the promulgation of ‘His Majesty’s Gracious Ordinance Relating to Freedom of Writing and of the Press’ of 1766; current provisions were adopted in a modernization process in 1949. Article 1 of Sweden’s Freedom of the Press Act states: ‘The freedom of the press is understood to mean the right of every Swedish citizen to publish written matter, without prior hindrance by a public authority or other public body, and not to be prosecuted thereafter on grounds of its content other than before a lawful court, or punished therefore other than because the content contravenes an express provision of law, enacted to preserve public order without suppressing information to the public.’ A Russian semi-colony up to 1917, Finland had for a long time rather strict censorship. Subsequently, its location between east and west constituted a pressure for the freedom of expression during the Cold War (Salovaara-Moring, 2009). Today, Finland is ranked at the top of the World Press Freedom Index (2016). In the Finnish Constitution of 1999, section 12 states: ‘Everyone has the freedom of expression. Freedom of expression entails the right to express, disseminate and receive information, opinions and other communications without prior prevention by anyone.’ In Denmark, freedom of expression was introduced in the Constitution of 1848 and is presently laid out in Article 77: ‘Any person shall be entitled to publish his thoughts in printing, in writing, and in speech, provided that he may be held answerable in a court of justice. Censorship and other preventive measures shall never again be introduced.’ The Norwegian provisions are very similar to the Danish ones and are enshrined in the Constitution. The legal foundation of freedom of expression is laid out in Article 100, as it has been since 1814. The article has been amended several times, most recently in 2004 (with some minor linguistic amendments in 2006): ‘There shall be freedom of expression. No one may be held liable in law for having imparted or received information, ideas or messages unless this can be justified in relation to the grounds for freedom of expression, which are the seeking of truth, the promotion of democracy and the individual’s freedom to form opinions’. Particular to the Norwegian Constitution is that Article 100 obliges the state to put in place the infrastructure necessary for ensuring real freedom of expression. This concerns not only citizens’ access to state documents but also implies a broader obligation by the state to take charge of the communicative infrastructures, for example, by guaranteeing public broadcasting and subsidizing newspapers. Also particular to Norway is work environment legislation protecting whistleblowers (Trygstad, this volume). The enactment of freedom of expression in the law does not mean that freedom of expression is absolute (Kierulf & Rønning, 2009). Numerous exceptions cover threats, defamation, libel, slander, invasion of privacy, harassment, discrimination and hate

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speech. These exceptions are similar in the Nordic countries, even though blasphemy is still formally proscribed in Denmark and Finland; it is a dormant issue in Denmark and virtually so in Finland as well. However, restrictions on hate speech, not least directed towards minority groups, have recently been sharpened in all the Nordic countries. Freedom of expression is not only a question of legal restrictions but of what different citizens consider justified or legitimate (Enjolras, Rasmussen & Steen-Johnsen, 2014). An implication of growing cultural and religious pluralism is that freedom of expression is tested when citizens profess to have different and sometimes incompatible values. One example is the response to the Mohammed cartoons published in 2006 by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which sparked heated debates across all the Nordic countries and other secular Western democracies (Bangstad, 2014; Elgvin & Rogstad, this volume). The response of many Muslims was quite similar in the three countries but was more critical in Denmark and Norway than in Sweden, partly because the publishing houses were located in the former two countries. However, the Norwegian government made contact with the national Islamic Council to calm emotions. Sweden is usually regarded as a far more multicultural country than either Norway or Denmark (Brochmann & Hagelund, 2012). While ‘racism’ and ‘racialization’ are concepts widely used in the Swedish context, they are less prevalent in the other two countries (Mulinari & Neergaard, 2012). At the same time, Swedish tolerance may have as a consequence that politically incorrect statements are more commonly regarded as less acceptable. The problem was illustrated in the winter of 2016 in the debate that followed the revelation that the Swedish media had failed to report organized sexual harassment by young males of immigrant descent because they were afraid of fuelling racism.

3.7 Media Institutions A global trend is that the institution of media is changing in line with market developments. The presentation of news is thoroughly transformed by the Internet and social media (Enjolras & Steen-Johnsen, this volume); more recently news is distributed to an increasing degree through new channels controlled by giant Internet enterprises. In tandem, traditional media houses are downscaling; heavy losses in income from advertising after 2000 have created a new economic situation, most seriously for newspapers. Media organizations as actors are becoming more conspicuous and single-minded commercial players (Enjolras et al., 2014). In the Nordic societies, the Internet is of special significance. Four of the five Nordic countries are in the world’s top ten on the ICT Development Index, while Finland is ranked number 12. All are above the US, for example, which is ranked as number 15 (International Telecommunication Union, 2016, p. 46).



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Unavoidably, these changes create tensions within the mixed system of Nordic media institutions. Both publicly owned and privately owned media are the object of comprehensive media policies. The broadcasting field includes a well-developed system of public service broadcasting, along with commercial radio and television. Newspapers, in contrast, are privately owned. Changes are taking place with such speed that it is impossible to predict the future situation, even in the short run. At present, however, it seems at least that public service broadcasting still enjoys high support (Harrie, 2012), higher than in most of the rest of Europe. In Sweden, the three public service companies financed by a licence fee – Sveriges Television (SVT), Sveriges Radio and Utbildningsradion (UR) – are limited companies owned by the foundation Forvaltningsstiftelsen. The foundation owns and administers all the shares in the three companies. Norsk Rikskringkasting (NRK) is the only license-financed public service broadcaster in Norway. It delivers content on radio, television, the Internet, mobile phones and tablets. NRK has been a state-owned limited company since 1996, and the state holds all its shares. In Denmark, Danmarks radio (DR) is the only media company with its main funding coming from the license fee. But Denmark has a different model than Norway and Sweden, in that the license fee is also used to partly finance other companies, most importantly TV2, although its main funding source is advertising. Since 2011, a privately owned national radio station, Radio24syv, has also been financed with license money. Nevertheless, DR does receive the majority of the public service funds (Ohlsson, 2015). The Scandinavian countries held out against commercialization longer than the rest of Europe (Hilliard & Keith, 1995; Hujanen & Jauert, 1998), but in the 1980s politicians allowed for local transmission in the national markets, as well as satellite transmissions, whereby the monopoly on television broadcasts of the national public service broadcasters was lifted. Shortly after this de-regulation, national cultural policies permitted a second national broadcaster to be distributed nationwide, as the technology now allowed for more channels to be carried on the analogue terrestrial network. The Danish TV2 was established in 1988, the Norwegian TV2 in 1992 and the Swedish TV4 in 1992. They were all defined as commercial public service broadcasters. The Norwegian TV2 and Swedish TV4 were fully financed by advertisements. In order to get the privilege of being distributed throughout the country alongside the license-financed public service broadcasters, they were all obliged to fulfil some cultural policy obligations. In Iceland and Finland, public service media are financed by a public service tax. In Iceland, the public service broadcaster, RÚV, is also allowed to carry advertisements, which amounted to approximately one third of the revenues in 2013. In both countries, citizens below a specific income level are exempted from the tax, as are senior citizens. The Icelandic tax is fixed, while the Finnish one is progressive (Ohlsson, 2015, p. 21). Even though the press in the Nordic countries is constituted of privately owned commercial enterprises, there is considerable regulation by the state, something that

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requires a fine balance between liberal and social democratic values  – safeguarding the freedom of the press on one hand and safeguarding citizens’ general access to information on the other. All the Nordic countries are ranked in the top 10 on the World Press Freedom Index (2016). Freedom of the press rests on the autonomy of editorial decisions. This implies freedom from intervention in editorial decisions both by the state and by owners. The main thing that guarantees editorial freedom from state intervention is the freedom of expression, which is common to all the Nordic countries, as mentioned above. Freedom from undue intervention by owners is promoted indirectly in two ways. The first is by legislation regulating ownership concentration in the press, which has as its primary intention guaranteeing a variety of views, but thereby indirectly signals the importance of editorial autonomy. Ownership regulations of the press are found in France and Great Britain, among other countries, but only in Norway among the Nordic countries (Medieeierskapsutredningen, 2012). The second is the so-called Editorial Bill (Redaktørplakaten), which is a declaration of autonomy adopted by the national press associations that is valid for all newspapers that are members of these associations. A strong argument for economic support of the press is the intention to preserve diversity and competition, in a combination of liberal and social democratic values. In Sweden and Norway, subsidies are in several cases allocated to so-called ‘number two papers’ (the second largest papers in terms of circulation in a specific region). Economic support includes direct economic support of selected newspapers and exemption from the value-added tax (VAT), valid for the industry as a whole. Of these, exemption from the VAT is practised in virtually all European countries and in Norway specifically for digital distribution of news content. Moreover, subsidies may cover expenses relating to distribution, as is the case in Denmark. Direct economic support of the press is to varying degrees found in the Nordic countries, except in Finland, but also in other European countries such as France and Austria (Murschetz, 1998; NOU 2010:14, p. 48). Finally, the autonomy of the press rests on its degree of self-imposed ethical regulations. Common to the Nordic countries are well-established institutions promoting professional ethics. However, the practical design varies considerably between countries. Denmark has a special code of media ethics, anchored in legislation on media responsibility. The act also covers the responsibilities of the editor. Breaches of media ethics are overseen by a committee headed by a lawyer appointed by the Minister of Justice. In the other Nordic countries, media ethics are based on the self-regulation of the press. Finland, Norway and Sweden all have a combination of ethical codes issued by the media associations and committees overseeing their practice. In addition to the committee, Sweden has a special media ombudsman. In all four countries, relevant media are obliged to report verdicts on breaches of the ethical code in the paper. In addition, Sweden has introduced fines as a special type of sanction.



The Arts and Cultural Institutions 

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3.8 The Arts and Cultural Institutions The cultural policy scholar Peter Duelund (2003) points out that in the post-war era, ‘cultural policies in the Nordic countries have generally been included in the idea of state subsidized welfare. As such, these policies result from a balance of individual liberty and collective political regulations. According to Nordic ideas of social welfare, cultural policy should ensure both freedom of artistic expression and equal access for everyone to art and cultural products’ (2003, pp. 486–487). Due to their history as sovereign powers for centuries, Denmark and Sweden have based their cultural policies on feudal and aristocratic traditions and have made use of traditional institutions in establishing their constitutional democracies. Norway, Finland and Iceland developed their national cultural policies and public cultural institutions within a much shorter time span (Duelund, 2008, p. 12). What unites the cultural policies in the Nordic countries in the post-war era is the Social Democratic movement and the ideas behind the creation of the new welfare state (ibid., p. 14). Part of the Social Democratic welfare state was a cultural model, upon which the cultural policies of the Nordic countries were based. The period between 1960 and 1975 is often depicted as one of the democratization of culture (Duelund, 2003, 2008; Mangset, 1992). Cultural policy was considered an instrument in the political and cultural education of the people, fostering critical and independent thinking, which is a prerequisite for a well-functioning democracy. In addition, cultural policy was considered a market corrective; through cultural policies one sought to promote cultural activities as alternatives to the commercial cultural industry, thus preventing cultural levelling. The decade between 1975 and 1985 is often labelled a time of cultural democracy. A broader concept of culture was introduced that included amateur activities, a new focus on local initiatives and ideas of participation. Instead of spreading high culture to a broad audience nationwide, the goal was now to inspire citizens to engage in cultural activities in their local communities. The change was part of a broad trend; in many parts of Europe, ideas were spread about what was labelled the new cultural policy focusing on the notion of cultural democracy (Larsen, 2012; Vestheim, 1995). Duelund (2008, pp. 16–17) depicts the time from 1985 to 1995 as one of economic instrumentalism. He describes this period as a time when people wanted to use cultural policy to promote and tighten the link between the arts and businesses. People were seeking more private sponsorship of cultural institutions. Norwegian cultural policy scholars have labelled the time from 1980 onward as a period characterized by instrumental cultural policy, meaning that culture was seen as an instrument to achieve positive effects on other areas rather than as a goal in itself (Mangset, 1992; Røyseng, 2007; Vestheim, 1995). Duelund (2008, pp. 17–18) goes on to define a new period from 1995, which he labels political colonization (1995–2003). He describes the time after 1995 as one of a return to the national. Examples are debates in Denmark and the Netherlands on the creation of a cultural canon, and in France a separate

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Ministry of Immigration and National Identity were established. When he labels this period one of political colonization, Duelund of course is referring to Habermas’ (1987) theory of systems colonization of the lifeworld. He characterizes the period from 1985 to 1995 as one when cultural policy was colonized by the market (which should be part of the lifeworld) and the period from 1995 to 2003 (when the study ended) as one when political colonization of the lifeworld took place. Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland all have arts councils, but they differ from the British arts council model in that the ministry dealing with culture also has considerable influence on the culture sector in each of these countries. The Nordic cultural model is somewhere in between the British arts council model and the French cultural model, which is based on a strong Ministry of Culture. The Danish Arts Council was established in 1964, the Norwegian in 1965, the Finish in 1967 and the Swedish in 1974 (Mangset, 2013, ch. 4). The Norwegian and the Swedish arts councils are quite similar. However, one difference is that the Swedish council provides support for arts organizations, in addition to artists and projects. In Norway, the arts organizations receive their support directly from the Ministry of Culture. In Denmark, several arm’s length bodies were established, with separate bodies for music, theatre, visual arts and literature. However, these were all united in 2014. In addition to the National Arts Council, Finland has also had regional arts councils since the 1960s (Mangset, 2013, ch. 4). A further dissimilarity between the Nordic countries is found in policies on literature. In this regard, Norway is an outlier, with extensive support for literature, with two main elements. Most of the national fiction literature, in addition to some nonfiction, children’s literature, translated books and comic books, are bought by the Arts Council and distributed to public libraries. And there is an agreement between the Publishers Association and the Booksellers Association regarding fixed prices on new books, representing an exemption from competition law. In contrast, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland all have free prices on books. Finland introduced free prices on books in 1971, and Denmark was the last of the Nordic countries to introduce free prices in 2011. In this system, the publishers can stipulate a suggested retail price, but the booksellers are not obliged to follow it. In contrast, in Norway and Sweden there was a voluntary subscription agreement between the Publishers Association and the Booksellers Association in the period between 1970 and 1993, with the publishers suggesting a retail price that the booksellers were obliged to follow (Larsen, Rønning, & Slaatta, 2012; Rønning, Slaatta, Torvund, Larsen, & Colbjørnsen, 2012).



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3.9 Research and Higher Education In Structural Transformation, it was implied that the public sphere was dominated by enlightened citizens with general knowledge and interests. At the time, universities were basically professional schools of theology and jurisprudence. In present-day society, expert knowledge has acquired a central position in the public sphere, as a large portion of the population is educated as a result of the continuous production of knowledge and the hegemonic culture of scientific understanding of the world. Apart from their influence on the public sphere per se, research and higher education have salient spillover effects on policy formation. A central question in this respect is the degree to which they constitute a general public concern or are organized as private foundations. In the Nordic region, research and higher education are mainly state responsibilities. As a rule, universities are owned and funded by the state. The most common exceptions are business schools and theological seminaries. However, some of these are also publicly owned, and most are integrated into the national educational system. In the Nordic region, the volume of research is high at between 3.1 and 3.4 percent of the GNP in Denmark, Finland and Sweden for 2013. The volume has increased somewhat in Denmark and declined somewhat in Sweden since 2001 (NIFU, 2015, Table 4). These figures are well above the EU average (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2016a). The great exception here is Norway, where the volume has remained stable at around 1.6 percent of the GNP since 2001. However, it should be noted that due to oil revenues Norway’s GNP is about 30 percent higher than those of the other Nordic countries, which means that the differences in volume per capita are not dramatically different. Student fees at public universities are virtually negligible. The Nordic countries also have a high degree of enrolment in tertiary education. The  percentage of age cohorts 20–29 years old varies between 45  percent in Denmark and 30  percent in Norway (OECD 2016a, Chart C1.1). A very large majority is enrolled in public schools and universities, with percentages varying from 98 percent in Denmark to 73 percent in Finland – all higher than the average in the OECD countries (OECD 2016a, Chart C3.1). In most of Europe, including the Nordic countries, traditional differences in higher education have to some extent been levelled by the Bologna Process, which aimed at coordinating and streamlining higher education across the continent as a whole. In all Nordic countries, research councils play a salient role, despite considerable variation in their organization. At the one extreme, Norway has one national research council, whereas in Sweden there are four publicly funded and one semipublic foundation, Riksbankens jubileumsfond. The amount of research funded by public means is relatively similar in the Nordic countries, around 30 percent of total funding in Denmark, Finland and Sweden. Again, Norway is the outlier, with more than 50 percent public funding of research (NIFU, 2015, Table 12).

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All the Nordic countries have an elaborate system for research ethics on the national level, established by state intervention. In contrast to much of the professional ethics standards that are managed by professional organizations, research ethics are anchored in legislation. With some variation, they have a discipline-based system with three to five different national committees and occasionally sub-committees. These issue guidelines for research ethics and pronounce verdicts regarding accusations of scientific fraud. In one sense, the committees for research ethics may be seen as putting restrictions on scholarly freedom of speech. However, the ethical guidelines function rather as a defence mechanism against the silencing of researchers by employers. They also help increase confidence in research amongst the public. A peculiarity for the Nordic region was a wave of large-scale power and democracy studies conducted in all four countries between the 1970s and the 2000s. These were politically initiated as broad investigations of the distribution of power and of the functioning of democracy in society as a whole. They were concluded with large general reports in addition to a considerable number of specialized books and papers. Addressing instances outside the purely academic realm, the power studies have been characterized as a special form of social reflexivity (Götz, 2013).

3.10 Voluntary Organizations The significance of voluntary organizations in deliberations about and the functioning of the public sphere has increased greatly in the last two decades. In Making Democracy Work (1993), Robert Putnam argues that all kinds of associations where citizens meet strengthen both social trust and the propensity for political activity. Here, there is a clear parallel to the early Habermas. In later works, Putnam expressed concern that these arenas were becoming fragmented and therefore that social belonging and political activity were being fragmented, thus facilitating ethnic cleavages (Putnam 2007). In the Nordic case, Putnam’s thesis of the importance of civic associations is clearly confirmed; however, his concern about their decline is not. Several studies have demonstrated the differences between the Nordic countries and the US (Rothstein, 2001; Torpe, 2003). In general, the Nordic countries are at the top in terms of organizational propensity in the world, with an average of about 2.5 organization memberships per capita (Friberg & Kangas, 2008, Table 4.1). ‘In addition, record high shares of the population volunteer’, between 35 and 58 percent, as compared to, for example, the US with 22 percent (Sivesind & Selle, 2010, p. 99f). Trade unions and employer associations are placed at the heart of the Nordic model; therefore, interest organizations have a very strong presence in the public sphere. Both labour market parties are organized in multi-level organizations. In all the Nordic countries, union density is very high, comprising some two thirds of the workforce in Denmark, Finland and Sweden and slightly over one half in Norway,



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compared to the OECD average of 17  percent (OECD, 2016b). Trade union membership has declined somewhat since 2000, with the greatest decline in Sweden and the least decline in Norway. One important reason for the decline in Sweden, Finland and Denmark is that the administration of unemployment insurance has been removed from the trade unions (the Ghent system) to public agencies (Lind, 2007). The high membership rates have been a crucial condition for the bargaining strength of the unions and therefore for their strong position as political actors and participants in the public sphere. The same is true for the employer associations. The activity of the labour market parties is not restricted to negotiations over issues of working life but extend to adjacent policy fields such as education, vocational training (Nyen & Tønder, 2015), pensions and health policies (Hagelund & Pedersen, 2015). Apart from the political organizations and labour market federations shaping the public topography of the twentieth century, social movements with more specific goals have been a salient part of the organizational landscape in Scandinavia. A typical example in Denmark is the liberal Christian movement inspired by N.F.S. Grundtvig. In Sweden, the ‘popular movements’ (folkrörelsena), including but not limited to the labour movement, had a lasting influence throughout the twentieth century and gave birth to the conception of Swedish society as the Home of the People (folkhemmet). Norway saw a combination of religious lay movements, temperance organizations and movements for a new Norwegian language merge into what is commonly called the ‘counter cultures’ (Rokkan 1970); here, tensions between the labour movement and the others were pronounced. These movements have had considerable influence within their respective policy fields throughout Scandinavia. The interactions between social movements and the state have continued, albeit in different forms. Traditionally, interest organizations have to a great extent been included in decision-making processes via representation on public committees. However, the number of standing committees has declined steeply since 1980, while lobbying has increased, not least that directed to the parliamentary channel, as illustrated by the cases of Norway and Denmark (Gulbrandsen et al., 2002; Rommetvedt et al., 2011). Social movements and civil society organizations also act as advisors and dialogue partners in policy formation, as, for example, in environmental policies (Gåsdal & Sande, 2009). Obviously, these relationships are not without strains and conflicts. Interaction with the state contributes to mainstreaming and professionalization, resulting in increased distance from the members. At the same time, the close contact with the state makes associations visible partners in the Nordic ‘input democracy’ (Goodin, 2004). A crucial field for nonprofit organizations is the production of welfare services. In parts of Europe and the US, this is their main field of activity, whereas it is comparatively small in the Nordic countries. At the high end, in the Netherlands and Iceland more than 30 percent of the workforce in welfare services is employed by voluntary organizations. As a consequence, public funding of the nonprofit sector is very high in these countries. In the Nordic region, the average is below 10 percent and is some-

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what higher in Denmark (Sivesind & Selle, 2010, p. 106). This is mostly due to the size of the public sector (for long-term state–organization relationships, see Henriksen & Bundesen, 2004.) The relatively low degree of civic participation in the nonprofit welfare sector in the Nordic countries is compensated by a higher degree of activity in the sector of cultural organizations, not least sports and music. Although the public sector supports culture and sports with a considerable amount of funding, some 75  percent of the income in this sector is generated through the sector’s own activities and events, membership fees, lotteries and support from sponsors (Arnesen, Sivesind & Gulbrandsen, 2016). It is a common assumption that public funding in the voluntary sector leads to a lower degree of citizen volunteering – the ‘crowding out’ hypothesis (Bolton & Katok, 1998). The Nordic countries show the opposite. High public subvention goes together with a high degree of participation. One reason for the lack of support for the crowding out hypothesis lies in the effect of facilitation by public subvention; volunteering becomes a more attractive alternative if it is complemented by infrastructure and some professional assistance. At the same time, a tendency toward polarization in the field of voluntary associations has become visible. Whereas grassroots activities are mostly limited to local communities, organizations operating at the national political level representing all parts of the voluntary sector become more professionalized and less dependent on participation from the local level associations. Nevertheless, if participating in the public sphere to a lesser extent serves as a ‘school in democracy’, organizations still secure open channels to political authorities for citizenship interests and initiatives regarding special interest and current issues. In particular, the central level is highly active in influencing policy making processes through direct contact with political and administrative authorities and through media and the Internet (Arnesen, Sivesind & Gulbrandsen, 2016). Even if grassroots participation to a large extent is limited to the local community and to a lesser extent serves as a ‘school in democracy’ in a strong sense, it still fosters a feeling of responsibility for the quality of social relationships.

3.11 Religion A constituent part of the political history of the Nordic countries is the establishment of national state churches after the Lutheran reformation in the mid-sixteenth century. Today, only Denmark has a traditional state church system, while in the other countries the large Lutheran majority churches maintain various ties to the state. In addition to growing secularization, obvious reasons for the change in this system are the growing religious diversity due to waves of immigration into Scandinavia from the

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1960s on and internal democratization in the majority churches, which resulted in the desire of many clergy members to be liberated from state patronage. In Sweden, the state church in its original form was dismantled in 2000 and transformed into the Church of Sweden, which still has two thirds of the population as members. Even though the Church is subsidized by the state, members also pay a special church tax. In contrast, there is no pressure at present to abolish the state church in Denmark. Norway stands between these two in that the state church is being transformed into an independent Church of Norway, freed from direct state administration but still in a privileged position among others as it is fully funded by the state, with no special church tax, as in Sweden. Finland actually has two official folk churches, the majority Lutheran church and, reflecting its former connection to Russia, an orthodox church that counts about one  percent of the population as members. Over a 150-year period, the majority churches have coexisted in ambiguous relationships with religious lay movements that are most outspoken in Sweden and Norway and that comprise an activist and considerably large minority of the population. The dominant Grundtvig movement in Denmark has represented a liberal and inclusive version of Christianity, which may be one reason for the absence of pressure on the state church. The largest religious group outside Christianity in the Nordic countries is at present Muslims, who are estimated to include about 5 percent of the population in Sweden, 3 percent in Norway, 3 to 5 percent in Denmark and less than 1 percent in Finland (Pew, 2011). On average, the Nordic region is approximately on a par with Europe as a whole in this regard (4.5 per cent). A counterpoint to the privileged position of the Lutheran majority churches is the strong constitutional guarantee of freedom of religion in all Nordic countries (LlorentBedmar & Cobano-Delgado, 2014). Moreover, the state facilitates and partly subsidizes all religious communities and congregations. This is most noticeable in Norway, where religious associations, be they Roman Catholic, Muslim or Buddhist, receive the same subsidies per member as the Church of Norway. An important aspect of the privileges of the Lutheran majority churches has been the teaching of Christianity in the school system. Previously, religious education in the public schools was closely linked to the teaching of the Church, even though other religious creeds were also taught. This is now replaced by more neutral teaching of religious issues, whereas Christianity still enjoys special privileges, not least due to its core position in national history. The exception here is Sweden, where religious teaching in schools has been explicitly non-confessional since 1969 (Llorent-Bedmar & Cobano-Delgado, 2014). The strong commitment on the part of the state to religious matters in the Nordic countries is paradoxical. One might believe that 400 years of the state church system would contribute to extensive religious indoctrination. Actually, the opposite is the case; the Nordic countries are viewed as some of the most secular in the world. When asked in a European survey whether they believe in God, Nordic respondents were

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definitely in the bottom group.  At one end was Sweden, where 18  percent of the population confirmed they believe in God, and at the other end was Finland, where 33  percent believe in God. Denmark and Norway stand in between (Eurostat 2010, Table QB32). As a comparison, the average for the 27 EU members was 51  percent. One effect of this secularization of the population is that the majority churches also become secularized; they focus more on social ethics and are more prone to take stands on social questions with a political bent, even if abstaining from direct party politics (Repstad 2010). If religious matters nevertheless are visibly present in the public sphere, it is due to several factors. One is the presence of specific Christian political parties, which are small and quite unlike broad Christian Democratic parties on the European continent. In Norway in particular, the Christian People’s Party holds a privileged position as a party in the centre of the left–right dimension. Another factor is the high degree of attention evoked by Islam, even though its adherents constitute a tiny minority of the population. The growth in religious diversity has also led to the formation of interfaith associations, originally comprising a variety of Christian denominations and more recently also including organizations that are not Christian and even those that are humanistic. This increase in organizational efficiency has also made religion more visible in the public sphere (Furseth, this volume).

3.12 A Nordic Model of the Public Sphere: a Fruitful Construct? In the introduction to this chapter, the ‘Nordic model’ was specified as an ideal type based on a set of interrelated elements, as summarized in Table 1. The test criteria of the fruitfulness of the model or ideal type lie in the subsequent sketch of similarities and differences between the Nordic countries and their deviations from the model. Empirically, the viability of a specific Nordic public sphere must be judged in relation to the impact of international trends. Does the model at present, or will it in the relatively near future, articulate a contrast between Nordic societies and other modern societies? Even if global trends are noticeable in the Nordic region, salient issues indicate that the specificity of the Nordic model is by no means irrelevant. (i) The Internet as a global phenomenon has a considerable influence on the structure of the media in all Nordic countries, but it does not nullify the specific traits of the Nordic region in relation to the strong position of public service broadcasting and public support for the press. (ii) The field of arts and culture is becoming more influenced by market forces and private support. Nevertheless, broad public subvention and national arts councils significantly affect the funding of cultural life. (iii) Important parts of the European university system have been streamlined by the Bologna Process. This, however, has not affected the fact that higher education in the Nordic countries is free. EU research initiatives have expanded, but their volume is modest compared to the



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funding through national universities and research councils. (iv) Regarding voluntary organizations, there is in many respects a tendency of professionalization; organizations developing into lobby groups, keeping less contact with their members. Yet, the Nordic countries are on top when it comes to membership density, both in national interest organizations and in more locally oriented organizations. (v) Ongoing tendencies of secularization are seen all over Europe, and the Nordic societies are no exception. At the same time, despite the comparatively low degree of religiosity in the population, state churches – or their successor, the national popular church – still hold a dominant position in all the Nordic countries. These common trends in the Nordic region are obviously mitigated by national specificities, as can be illustrated by various examples. In the media field, this is shown in the differences in support for the press; the Norwegian and Swedish systems are directed toward the production of newspapers, the Danish system is directed toward distribution and Finland has no support system. In the culture field, book prices are regulated in Norway but not in the other countries. In terms of research, Norway has the lowest volume of research measured by percent of GDP per capita, even if this is to some extent an effect of the high volume of GDP, whereas Norwegian voluntary organizations receive a higher degree of public funding. In the religious field, the position of the state church is dissimilar. In Sweden, the state church has been abolished, in Norway abolishment is under way, while in Denmark and Finland there are few or no signs of this. In order for these observations to be meaningful, they should be seen in relation to the central position of the state. The strong and liberal state common to the Nordic countries, is aptly exemplified by the rate of government spending compared to GNP, which is well above 50 percent in Denmark, Finland and Sweden; due to its oil revenues, Norway has a rate of 44 percent, despite very high spending in absolute numbers (2016 Index of Economic Freedom). From a political perspective, Sweden and Norway appear as the most statist and corporatist, based on long-term hegemony of the labour movement and social democratic parties, whereas the labour movement remained in the minority in Denmark and Finland. In Denmark, the state has a stronger presence in several areas, for example, ownership in the broadcasting sector, in state control of media ethics and in the preservation of the state church. In these respects, Sweden and Norway represent more of a mix – more commercial ownership in broadcasting, a self-imposed system of media ethics and a gradual dissolution of the state church. However, this does not imply a weaker position in terms of the public interest but a more developed coordination between politics and professional groups. For example, the establishment of a public media ombudsman was discussed in Norway in the 1990s (NOU 1996: 12) but was later rejected on the assumption that self-regulation of the press is the best way to secure and manage media ethics (NOU 2011:12). The noticeable differences between the Nordic countries do not overshadow the more dominant commonalities. And it can be decisively said that in all countries the state holds a central position in all five fields of the public sphere. This is not

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to say that the state has no central position in the public sphere in other modern societies. For example, active state support for literature is found in France; public service broadcasting is prominent in the UK and most European universities have been restructured on state initiative according to the Bologna Process. With the very visible exception of religion, what is special about the Nordic model is not so much the presence or absence of single elements but the aggregate effects of all the elements present. The Nordic countries are generally more inclined to broaden the public sphere to make it more democratic and more inclusive. In this process, a strong state and accordingly an intricate and well-developed system of checks and balances are essential elements. The public sphere is to a very large extent about politics and is shaped by political debates and decisions. Thus, the specificities of the Nordic model are linked to a special political style, shaped by the constellation of liberalism and social democracy. Liberal values were already anchored in society when the labour movement ascended to power. The long-term effect was not only a tendency to compromise but a more dialectical development. Even though the rise of the labour movement implied strong growth in state regulations with a paternalist leaning, in the long run it also elicited responses relating to liberal values. If the labour movement was dominant up to the 1980s, the situation is now reversed (Sejersted 2011); but in both periods the two value sets have coexisted. The extension of freedom of expression and of the arm’s length principle may be viewed in this light. State subsidies are given to the press to preserve cultural and political diversity, which is a compact expression of the same phenomenon. Finally, a brief comment on the case of Norway is of some interest, as it demonstrates even more fully the relationship between political structure and the shape of the public sphere. On one hand, Norway is the Nordic country with the strongest neo-corporatist regime, most obviously in the tripartite system of national wage bargaining, with the state playing a very active part. It is also here that the combination of state support and liberal values is the strongest. This is seen in the conception of freedom of expression, in that Norway is the only Nordic country where the state has a constitutional obligation to secure access to information for the public. Moreover, the liberal element comes forth in the economic support for literature through the Arts Council, in broad state subvention of voluntary organizations and in state support of religious congregations of all kinds, including non-religious life stances.

References Alestalo, M., S.E.O. Hort & S. Kuhnle (2009). The Nordic Model: Conditions, Origins, Outcomes, Lessons. Hertie School of Governance – Working Papers, No. 41, June 2009. Alexander, J. (2006). The Civil Sphere. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Gunnar C. Aakvaag

4 Institutional Change in Norway: The Importance of the Public Sphere6 The goal of this chapter is to provide a new and better theoretical account of the overall pattern of institutional change in modern Norway by emphasizing the importance of the public sphere. One effective way to describe the modernization of Norway is as a cumulative process whereby new categories of individuals – peasants, workers and women – have gradually been included as full members in society (Koht, 1953; Furre, 2000; Slagstad, 1998, pp. 417–418; Rokkan, 2010; Sejersted, 2005, 2000, pp. 18–20 and 23–25). This social transformation has taken place through large-scale institutional changes that sociologists need to explain. This chapter argues that the four currently dominating theoretical models of institutional change are not fully up to this task for two reasons. Models that accentuate either external shocks or incremental accumulation cannot account for the highly ‘political’, goal-oriented and reflexively monitored aspect of overall institutional change in Norway, whilst the two dominant models of political collective decision making, voting and bargaining, cannot account for the high level of consensus that have fed into processes of institutional change both as their input and outcome. To overcome these deficits, this chapter takes a different approach, what might be called ‘deliberative’ or ‘discursive’ institutionalism (Schmidt 2008). It emphasizes what has been an essential aspect of Norwegian society at least since the middle of the nineteenth century: deliberation in the public sphere. To create such an alternative model founded upon public deliberation, which is the overall goal of this chapter, three tasks must be solved: 1) explaining how important and powerful societal actors can be motivated to play by the rules of the public sphere; 2) integrating public deliberation into a more general model of institutional change that also accommodates the obvious importance of external impulses, incremental changes, voting and bargaining; 3) and illustrating the empirical benefit of such a model for the case of Norway. In what follows, after a brief presentation and critique of the four competing theories, I will address the three tasks in that order. As the overall goal of the chapter is to develop a new theoretical approach, more space and effort will be devoted to theoretical discussion than empirical analysis.

6 I would like to thank Knut Lundby, Jon Rogstad, Kari Steen-Johnsen and in particular Fredrik Engelstad for their useful comments. © 2017 Fredrik Engelstad, Håkon Larsen, Jon Rogstad, Kari Steen-Johnsen This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.



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4.1 Exogenous and Endogenous Theories of Institutional Change Institutions are important because they impose order – predictability and cooperation (Elster, 1989, pp. 1–15) – on social life. I define a social institution as a regular and rule-governed social practice (Giddens, 1984, pp.  17 and 28–34). Regularity implies that a social practice – a particular way of doing things, such as teaching, voting or negotiating wages – is repeated across extended slices of time-space. The same kind of people (teachers) do the same kind of things in the same way (teach) at the same occasions (classes). Therefore, at the everyday level, participating in an institution is experienced as déjà vu: been here and done this before. Furthermore, social institutions are rule-governed as their regularity is caused by people conforming to shared rules that specify what to do and not to do in a particular type of situation. Such rules may be entitlements or prohibitions, unconditional ((do not) do x) or conditional (if y does z, (do not) do x), formal or informal, social (moral) or cognitive, may enable or constrain action and may be followed for internal or external reasons. Institutions change when rules and the regularity they create change. This can go both ways. New rules can create new practices as people start orienting their actions to new rules, and new practices can create new rules, as old rules bend to a new way of doing things. An array of specific mechanisms is involved here, but I will not go into the details (see Pierson, 2004 for a discussion). Instead, I will address the more general question of what causes institutions to change in the first place. That they do is beyond question. Even the Roman and Soviet empires fell. So the question is: why? If we examine the literature on institutions, we find two dominant general answers: external shocks and internal incremental accumulation – what I will call the exogenous and endogenous models. Neither one, I will argue, is fully up to the task of explaining institutional change in Norway. I will first briefly discuss the models before I criticize them. A cluster of exogenous models posit that due to the inherently inert character of institutions, it takes an external shock to alter them. To see why, I will take Hall & Taylor’s (1996) tripartite categorization of ‘institutionalisms’ as my point of departure. Historical institutionalism depicts institutional rules and regularities as the product of conflicts between groups with different interests and differential access to resources. As institutions to a large extent come to express the interests of the most powerful actors, those in a position to change them, such as feudal lords or capitalists, have little interest in doing so. The result is inertia. Rational choice institutionalism portrays institutions as solutions to cooperative problems that actors in recurrent prisoner’s dilemma situations face. By imposing costs on actors who chose the noncooperative strategy, institutions make cooperation the optimal choice and create an equilibrium that no rational actor has any incentive to unilaterally disturb. Finally, sociological institutionalism describes institutions as mostly consisting of informal social and cognitive rules that actors draw on to overcome the existential, cognitive and social anomie inherent in all social life. As such, rules are internalized and have

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become ‘second nature’; it is therefore very hard for actors to break the rules. According to the cluster of exogenous models, institutions are therefore resistant to change because powerful, rational and meaning-seeking actors have little reason and/or capacity to alter them (Mahoney & Thelen, 2010, pp. 4–7; Schmidt, 2008, pp. 313–314). For this reason, it takes some kind of external shock to change them. For instance, feudalism would not have been abolished in Europe if not for the external shock of the Black Death (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2013, pp. 96–101). According to the exogenous models, institutional life is dualistic: long periods of stability are periodically interrupted by externally caused upheaval (punctuated equilibrium), whereupon social order is again restored. The endogenous model starts out with a critique of this view. According to it, institutions change in spite of external shocks. As systematized by Mahoney & Thelen (2010), the theory of internal incremental institutional change starts with the fact that all institutions produce winners and losers. Some actors benefit from the current division of labour within the household, and others do not. Thus, there will always be losers looking for opportunities to change existing institutions. And as institutional rules must be interpreted and implemented in a discretionary manner, there will always be some scope for this. The result is a set of actors with both the desire and opportunity to gradually push institutions in new directions. What they create is incremental institutional change that, when accumulated over time, can be quite substantial. Therefore, this model breaks both with the external and dualistic assumptions of the exogenous models. An overall evaluation of these two clusters of models falls outside the scope of this chapter (see Pierson, 2004 and Mahoney & Thelen, 2010 for a general discussion of sources of stability and change in institutions). However, while it is not hard to find examples of external shocks and incremental accumulation causing institutions to change, I will argue that neither of the two models is sufficiently equipped to explain the main path of institutional change in Norway. One initial problem with applying the exogenous model to Norway is the discrepancy between clear-cut examples of external shocks, which are few, and institutional change, which has been extensive. They are Sherlock Holmes’ dog that did not bark. We find only two clear-cut examples of external shocks in modern Norway. The first was the Napoleonic wars, which made it possible for Norway to claim independence from Denmark in 1814, abolish absolutism and set up one of the world’s first liberal constitutional monarchies (see Seip, 2010 part 1, pp. 15–60). However important this was  – and it was  – this external shock only explains how the rules of subsequent institutional change in Norway came into being and not how a continuous stream of actors have applied them to conduct institutional change. Therefore, it has limited direct explanatory value. The institutional implications of the second external shock, the occupation of Norway by Nazi Germany in 1940–1945, was essentially to push Norway further along the ‘social democratic’ path it had chosen in 1935 (Furre 2000, pp.  119–146; Lange 2005, pp.  153–178). This shock can thus explain the increased acceptance and momentum of institutional change, symbolized by The Joint Program



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(Fellesprogrammet) of 1945, but not its direction. This brings me to the major problem with the exogenous model, namely that it cannot adequately account for the political mediation of external impulses. In Norway, the overall path of institutional change has been chosen by political actors – ‘national strategists’ (Slagstad, 1998) – embedded in social movements and ideological–epistemic frameworks. Therefore, reflexively monitored and feedback-controlled collective action on behalf of society as a whole has been an essential part of the Norwegian modernization process. Now of course, if not shocks, Norwegian institutions have been subject to many external influences, such as migration, financial crises, new technologies, fluctuating oil prices and new ideas. Yet such influences have been processed by a political system that has, with a considerable amount of autonomy in terms of interpretation and response strategies, monitored and steered society according to an overall political, collective vision of a good, just, solidary and efficient society. Take the oil crisis of 1973 as an example. This exposed some flaws in the Keynesian economic policy of the social democratic order. But it was not until a conservative government from 1981 onward implemented policies such as those deregulating the financial sector and the real-estate market and privatizing public corporations that the social democratic order was replaced by a more deregulated ‘neo-liberal’ institutional order (Furre, 2000, pp.  266–268), although some historians rightly question the extent to which this really was a systems shift (Sejersted, 2000, pp. 113–130). In other words, it was not until an external influence became politically mediated that it created institutional change, this according to a clearly demarcated, widely shared political vision of society. Indeed, in Norway, such overall political steering has been a key part of institutional change. As Slagstad (2006, p. 169) says: ‘Politics has been the centre of the Norwegian modernization project’. That is to say, conscious political choices have been made regarding the goal of institutional change and the means for realizing it, and the implementation of these plans have been continually monitored and revised by the political system to great success. I will later outline in more detail how this process has unfolded. For now, the conclusion is that the exogenous model by itself has problems accounting for the highly ‘politicized’ nature of institutional change in Norway. Let us turn now to the endogenous model. In the absence of external shocks, a model emphasizing the accumulated results of local everyday conflicts between institutional winners and losers looks more promising. And of course, such conflicts and the change they produce are a routine part of institutional life in Norway, as is in any Western or other society in which non-authoritarian institutions allow for voicing some dissent. Be that as it may, the major problem with this model applied to the Norwegian case is again that the overall pattern of institutional change does not fully fit the model. The modernization of Norway, understood as a set of institutional changes whereby more and more groups are included in society, is not the unintended or ‘blind’, aggregated consequence of local institutional conflicts. Rather, it is, as I have just emphasized, to a large extent the result of politically initiated and monitored processes of collective action whereby broad social movements have used an increasingly

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democratic political system to fight for social inclusion. In this process, we find clear goals and ideas about appropriate and efficient means, a democratic political system to allow for implementing goals, and collective actors fronted by elites who have used the political system to successfully fight for their goals. Therefore, its importance notwithstanding, the endogenous model cannot on its own account for the high level of political mediation in Norway. To sum up, despite their important contributions, at the general level, the exogenous and endogenous models display the same weakness. They both exhibit a teleological deficit: they systematically underestimate the extent to which the overall course of institutional change in Norway has been designed by means of reflexively monitored political steering by collective actors motivated by widely shared goals and values. To avoid a possible misunderstanding here, let me add that the problem with the two models is not that they leave out individual agency, which they do not. What they tend to omit for systematic reasons, if I am correct, is agency at the collective level of political steering of society as a whole. The two aspects they emphasize – external influences and incremental accumulation  – cannot on their own account for this. Therefore, we now need to look at collective decision making in the political system.

4.2 Voting and Bargaining as Causes of Institutional Change To overcome the teleological deficit in the exogenous and endogenous models, I will now examine models of political, democratic collective decision making. With collective decisions, I have in mind attempts to regulate matters of common concern – including external influences and incremental accumulation – by making decisions that are binding on all members of society (Elster, 2007, p. 401; Parsons, 1967, p. 308). Collective decisions are democratic to the extent that all affected persons can influence the outcome. According to Elster (2013, pp. 27–36, 2007, pp. 401–424), there are only three pure types of collective decision making: voting, bargaining and argumentation. They cannot be reduced to each other, but they can occur together or in sequence (for instance, if argumentation over different collective courses of action does not yield a determinate outcome, one might vote on alternatives, which opens the way for negotiations and vote-trading). I will now apply Elster’s typology to the study of institutional change in Norway. According to many political philosophers, political scientists and sociologists, voting is the essence of collective decision making in representative modern liberal democracies. Thus already Rousseau, in The Social Contract, argued that it is through the secret ballot that the ‘collective will’ of the people is constituted. And in perhaps the most influential post-war definition of democracy, Dahl (1989, pp.  108–115) emphasizes ‘voting equality at the final stage’. More recently, Fukuyama (2011, p. 322),



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in his monumental study of the emergence and nature of modern political institutions, puts periodic elections at the centre of democracy (what he calls ‘accountability’). In Norway as well, this model has been influential among social scientists and historians. For instance, the Norwegian Power and Democracy Study (1998–2003) took voting as its point of departure when assessing the conditions of democracy in Norway at the entrance of the 21st century (Østerud, Engelstad & Selle, 2003). Voting, in combination with an appropriate principle of demarcation of the franchise (for example, all sane adults) and an aggregation mechanism (such as the majority principle), makes it possible to register and implement the will of the people. Therefore, voting enables us to understand the political mediation of external influences and incremental accumulation in Norway as a sort of two-step process. In the first step, in itself an important institutional change, the circle of eligible voters was gradually expanded to include all adult citizens, as the constitution of 1814 only provided the right to vote to a small percentage of mostly property-owning males (6 percent of the total population vs. 75 percent today) (SSB, 2010). This took a hundred years: from 1898 on, all men could vote; from 1907 on, some women could vote and from 1913 on, all women could vote. In the second step, social groups such as peasants, workers and women used their new political leverage to vote for political delegates and parties that would fight for their interests in the political system, resulting in major changes in institutions, such as working life, education and the family. It goes without saying that voting is a collective decision-making device that has allowed the political mediation of external influences and incremental accumulation in Norway to stay in touch with the collective will of the population. Yet the voting model has been criticized for painting a partial and incomplete picture of collective decision making. In particular, it has been criticized for overlooking the importance of bargaining: negotiating about different collective outcomes by making (credible) threats and promises and where the goal is not the simple aggregation of preferences, as in voting, but attaining a compromise that reflects the negotiating strength of the participants. Collective decision making via bargaining has been a seminal cause of institutional change in Norway. For instance, institutional development in Norway has been described as being shaped by elite compromises regarding foreign policy, geographical centre/periphery, gender equality and working life (Gulbrandsen et al., 2002, pp. 34–42 and 268–272). Indeed, in perhaps the most influential account of the emergence of democratic mass politics in Norway (and Western Europe), the Norwegian political sociologist Stein Rokkan (2010) criticized the voting model from the perspective of the bargaining model. According to Rokkan, important social groups ordered along geographical (centre/periphery), functional (class) and ideological (religion) lines have organized into interest groups that collectively fight for their interests. They do so in ‘segments’ of the state apparatus in which relevant interest groups, government officials, bureaucrats and others meet and negotiate collective outcomes. The emergence of a semi-corporatist system in Norway made Rokkan come to his famous conclusion that bargaining (‘corporate pluralism’) is a more impor-

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tant mechanism for collective decision making and thus collective self-regulation and monitoring than voting (‘numerical democracy’). In his oft-quoted catchphrase: ‘Votes count, resources decide’ (Rokkan, 2010, p. 95 and 206). Again, an overall assessment of these two models falls outside the scope of this chapter (see Elster, 2007, pp.  401–424). Voting and bargaining certainly have been crucial aspects of the political mediation of external influences and incremental accumulation in Norway and thus of collectively designed institutional change. Nevertheless, I will argue that they cannot fully account for the overall pattern of institutional modernization in Norway. Starting with voting, the expansion of the franchise and the subsequent use by social movements of representative democratic institutions to conduct institutional change is a key aspect of the modernization of Norway. Voting addresses the teleological deficit of the exogenous and endogenous models by emphasizing reflexively monitored collective self-regulation carried out via the representative political system. Yet the voting model cannot account for one essential fact, namely what has aptly been called ‘the trend towards political consensus’ in Norway (Torgersen, 1962). This political consensus is characterized by a high level of convergence regarding the goals and means of collective decision making: what kind of institutional orders one wants to create and the corresponding allocation of rights and obligations, opportunities and burdens among citizens. Since 1814 in Norway, the political consensus has centred on the liberal idea of equal individual freedom for all, and subsequent social movements have not diverted from it but added new layers. I will have more to say about this later. The problem with voting in this respect is that it cannot by itself explain the emergence of political consensus. Voting is simply a mechanism that aggregates pre-established preferences and beliefs. So, political consensus is a given exogenous input in the voting process that makes it possible to steer a course into the future that the majority can agree on when voting on different political parties and programmes. In itself, voting cannot explain the trend towards political consensus. Neither can the bargaining model explain the trend towards political consensus, although it too presupposes it. To paraphrase Durkheim (1984), there is a ‘non-bargaining element’ in bargaining. Successful bargaining presupposes a framework of not only shared rules but also common goals, values and norms – that is, a political consensus. Otherwise, bargaining would be nasty, brutish and short. Now, I do not doubt that political consensus – shared goals, values and norms and trust – might be the outcome of bargaining processes. However, I doubt that it is the bargaining itself that explains it. Bargaining models, such as Rokkan’s, start with the existence of collectively organized interest groups with conflicting rankings of collective outcomes. These rankings then clash in the semi-corporate political system where compromises are made that reflect the parties’ negotiating strength. In this connection, Rokkan (2010, pp. 209–210) particularly emphasizes ‘exit’ opportunities: the threat of withholding important resources. However, there is nothing in this process that can account for how the parties converge towards common goals, values and norms.



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To do so, the parties would have to be willing to change preferences and beliefs as a result of interacting and exchanging perspectives and arguments with each other, and that would not be bargaining anymore. That would be deliberation. Furthermore, even though the bargaining model can to some extent explain the political mediation of external influences and incremental accumulation, it leaves a rather ‘segmented’ (Egeberg, Olsen & Sætren, 1978) picture of politically created institutional change. As different parties fight for their special interests, there is no one to overlook the overall steering of society (Hernes, 1978; Sejersted, 2001b, pp. 256–273). Therefore, bargaining has quite a lot in common with the model of incremental accumulation, and so the teleological deficit partly re-enters. To sum up, even though the voting and bargaining models of institutional change take steps toward solving the teleological deficit by emphasizing collective decision making, they encounter another problem: the consensual deficit.

4.3 Deliberation in the Public Sphere This brings us to Elster’s (2007, pp.  405–409) third model of collective decision making: argumentation. The rest of this chapter argues that deliberation in the public sphere has been an important element in institutional change in Norway and one that can account for both the high level of conscious design (teleological deficit) and political consensus (consensual deficit). Some important attempts by historians to do so already exist (Slagstad, 1998; Sejersted, 2000), and what I have to say is inspired by these previous attempts. My contribution in this chapter is creating a much more explicit theoretical model of institutional change. This model, which might be called deliberative or discursive institutionalism (Schmidt, 2008), combines deliberation with the four other causes we have discussed. Furthermore, it is based on a new model of public deliberation combining insights from Habermas (1996, 1992) and Elster (1986, 2007, 2013, 1998a) that I will now present. Public deliberation is a mechanism of collective decision making based on argumentation. Its goal is neither the aggregation of preferences and beliefs nor compromises but rather unanimous agreement – that all participants come to hold the same preferences and beliefs for the same reasons. For deliberation to be important in politics, a demarcated social arena where argumentation can take place must exist. According to Habermas (1992, pp. 14–56), such public spheres started to emerge in north-western Europe in the second half of the 18th century, and they became politically very influential during the nineteenth century. The public sphere is a physical or virtual (technologically mediated) arena where private persons meet as citizens to discuss issues that affect them as a collective and that can only be resolved by means of collective action (Habermas, 1992, p.  26). According to Habermas (2005, p.  89), four social norms regulate public deliberation: all affected parties must be able to

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take part; all issues and arguments may be raised; the power of the better argument rules and all participants must be sincere (mean what they say and say what they mean). Together, these norms constitute a social sphere where arguments rule and from which emerges a historically new kind of political power: communicative power (see Høibraaten, 1999 for a discussion). The challenge of this model of collective decision making, if it is to be more than simply a normative model of how rational and fair political decisions should be conducted, is to explain how and why people in fact are motivated to play the game of public deliberation and feel obliged by the consensus thus produced. Habermas’ (1984, chapter III) response to this challenge is basically a rationalist one: we are rational animals that cannot but be persuaded and swayed by the peculiar ‘forceless force’ of the better argument. This raises the question of what makes an argument rational and binding. What kind of arguments will persuade a rational person? Based on Habermas’ (1984, pp. 19–23, 2004, chapter 7; see also Elster 2013, pp. 44–60; Schmidt, 2008, pp. 306–307) distinction between theoretical and practical discourses, I propose that in addition to the overall constraint of consistency, two kinds of arguments will in particular persuade rational people. First, corresponding to debates addressing factual questions of truth (including questions of causal connections, predictions and counterfactuals), empirical evidence is the benchmark. Second, corresponding to normative debates regarding what is fair and just, arguments invoking impartiality (‘good for all and not only for me/mine’) are the yardstick. Despite the fact that rationality may be constitutive of the human mind (Davidson, 2001, essays 11 and 12), Habermas’ position is challenged by the fact that there are many social and psychological forces countervailing the power of the better argument, even in public deliberation: deliberation sometimes takes too much time (‘too many Friday afternoons,’ as Oscar Wilde said of socialism); even without time limitations, participants may fail to reach an agreement due to irreconcilable differences in preferences and beliefs (Elster, 1983, p. 38); the consensus they reach may reflect differences in economic, cultural, social or other resources (Bourdieu, 1984); the way discussions are framed might benefit some participants (Bråten 1973); differences in authority might influence argumentation processes (Bourdieu, 1991); acting before an audience might induce participants not to lose face rather than be swayed by arguments (Elster 2007, p. 408; Goffman, 1967, pp. 5–45); and so on. Consequently, despite the remarkable self-correcting nature of public deliberation, Habermas’ rationalist answer needs to be supplemented by further arguments that can explain why public deliberation can motivate people to create and adhere to consensus. To do so, I will support Habermas’ rationalist argument with a set of social constraints that all have one thing in common: in a weak social sense, they ‘force’ participants in public deliberation – even the cynical egoists – to respect the rules of the game, that is, to reach an agreement via argument and to adhere to it. Following is a list of some important constraints (the sequence is arbitrary and does not reflect importance), most taken from Elster (1986, 1998a, 2007, 2013).



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–– The legitimacy constraint. Legitimacy is vital to gain support for one’s proposed solution to a collective action problem because it provides an indispensable scarce resource: voluntary compliance (Weber, 1978, p.  31). In liberal Western democracies, debate in the public sphere is the primary source of legitimacy. Therefore, even the rich and mighty must argue their case in the public sphere and play by the rules there (Habermas, 1992, 2006). –– The impartiality constraint. In public deliberation, no one will be persuaded by an argument that a proposed collective solution is ‘good for me/mine’. Instead, only arguments claiming that a solution is ‘good for all’ will have merit. Therefore, public deliberation acts as a kind of filter sifting out biased solutions that serve only the few (Elster, 1986, pp. 112–114). –– The imperfection constraint. Often, actors faced with the impartiality constraint and encountering a menu of different principles of justice and fairness will chose the one that best fits their interests. Even so, if actors argue in favour of principles that too obviously support their particular interests, this will provoke suspicion and weaken their position in the debate. Therefore, even rational egoists motivated solely or mostly by their private interests are forced by their selfish rationality to choose principles that only imperfectly match their interests (Elster, 1998a, p. 102). –– The consistency constraint. Assume you have invoked a general principle in a context or debate in which it favoured your interests. Lest you be seen as an opportunist and lose credibility in future debates, you must stick to this principle in subsequent debates, even when it does not serve your interests (Elster, 1998a, p. 104). –– The civilizing force of the hypocrisy constraint. The consistency constraint is backed up by a psychological mechanism. When a rational egoist, in order to disclose his or her real interests (to maximize personal gain), is pretending to act according to a principle of fairness, cognitive dissonance will result as one’s desires (egoistic) and one’s actions (proclaiming fairness) clash. Subconsciously, that person’s desires might adapt to his or her actions and make him or her less egoistic. Therefore, it is dangerous to fake impartiality; one might actually become impartial (Elster, 2007, p. 406). –– The symmetry constraint. Once you enter into debate with someone, you must recognize that person as a rational subject who can only legitimately be influenced by arguments and not by non-argumentative means, such as manipulation, deceit, power, money and brute force. This presupposition of reciprocal recognition (symmetry) is built into the very pragmatic infrastructure of argumentatively coming to agreement with someone about something (Habermas, 2005, pp. 31 and 39–45). Put differently, argumentation brackets social differences. To rephrase Saint Paul (Galatians 3:28): here there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in deliberation in the public sphere.

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–– The strength of weakness and weakness of strength constraint. In public deliberation, there will often be a bias against the rich and powerful, as everyone knows they have many ways of securing their interests. Therefore, when they argue in favour of their interests, they will often be met with suspicion – the weakness of strength. Indeed, the whole idea of a public intellectual, a role emerging together with the modern public sphere, is based on the idea of someone – a Zola, Russel, Sartre, Foucault, Bourdieu or Habermas – speaking truth to power, that is, criticizing the rich and powerful. However, there will often be an inverted bias in favour of the less resourceful, as is seen in the favours granted ‘victims’ in public debates. This is the strength of weakness. Public deliberation subject to these rational and social constraints explains how it is possible for citizens to reflexively address and collectively solve problems that society as a whole encounters. Indeed, the deliberative model challenges the view that politics is just about solving conflicts of interest. Politics is also about engaging in debates about the good society – what it is and how to create it (Sejersted, 2000, pp. 56–59; 2001b, pp. 256–273). Therefore, public deliberation addresses the teleological deficit. Furthermore, as public deliberation subject to the set of constraints described above changes (or makes people act as if they change) preferences and beliefs (Elster, 1986, pp. 112–114), it makes it possible for individuals and groups to reach a consensus about the good society. Therefore, public deliberation addresses the consensual deficit. As I will soon argue, public deliberation has in fact been a seminal political force in Norway. Therefore, to explain the broad pattern of teleological and consensual institutional change in Norway, we need a model that depicts how external influences and incremental accumulation are politically mediated not only by voting and bargaining but also by public deliberation. I will now develop such a model.

4.4 The Democratic Power Circuit To develop this model, I turn again to Habermas. Not the pessimistic Habermas of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere who worries that the public sphere has been ‘re-feudalized’ by large public and private organizations using the public sphere to manipulate voters, workers and consumers nor the gloomy Habermas of The Theory of Communicative Action who laments the way the ‘system’ (capitalist markets and state bureaucracies) by way of money and administrative power ‘colonizes’ a communicatively structured ‘lifeworld’, including the public sphere. Rather, I will start with Habermas’ discourse-theoretic theory of law and democracy, as presented in the 1992 Between Facts and Norms. Here, Habermas’ (1996; see Elster, 1998b for a general discussion) starting point is a ‘deliberative’ theory of democracy, which depicts the essence of democracy as ‘decision making by discussion among free and



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equal citizens’ (Elster, 1998c, p. 1). How can such a deliberative democracy be institutionalized? This is accomplished first and foremost by setting up a public sphere, a demarcated social arena where citizens can come together and discuss how they want to live together. However, this is not enough, for three reasons. First, the public sphere needs a constant input of issues to discuss and resolve. Second, procedures for making efficient collectively binding decisions need to be institutionalized. Third, such decisions need to be implemented and monitored via some institutional apparatus. Habermas (1996, pp. 341–387) has included all these elements in Between Facts and Norms, although I will reorganize and simplify them somewhat in the democratic power circuit (DPC) model. This is a dynamic, sequential and recursive model for collective meaning and will formation in liberal democracies based on five arenas with five different tasks. The first arena is the lifeworld of individuals who in their social capacities as parents, employees, employers, students, passengers, taxpayers, consumers, etc. encounter problems they cannot solve on their own. Therefore, the ‘task’ of the lifeworld is simply to generate private problems in need of collective solutions. The second arena is the legally protected sphere of civil society in which citizens spontaneously come together as activists and members of non-governmental organizations to form a Weberian (1978, pp.  938–939) ‘party’, an organization that makes it possible for people to act in concert to procure their common interests, such as fighting inefficiency, exploitation, injustice, discrimination, etc. Therefore, the role of the civil society in the DPC model is to alert society of problems in need of collective solutions. This brings us to the third arena, the public sphere, which I have already described as the physical and virtual social space where free and equal citizens discuss issues that collectively affect them. The task of the public sphere is to establish a public opinion: a sort of collective will of the people. Therefore, public opinion – the consensus formed among citizens after publicly debating issues such as tax reforms, educational policies and gender quotas  – acts as a rational filter for members of society selecting problems and solutions according to urgency and problem solving capacity. However, the rather dispersed public opinion is one thing; making collectively binding decisions is another. This brings us to the fourth arena, the political system, which I define as the institutions – parliament and executive branches – where collective decisions on behalf of society are made. Much such collective decision making takes the form of voting on competing courses of collective action, which also allows for strong bargaining elements (logrolling). However, deliberation also takes place within the political system, not least because political processes are monitored by the public and require legitimacy through good arguments. Moreover, public opinion influences political decisions (which it must if public deliberation is not to end up merely as inconsequential ‘talk’) not only by its argumentative strength but also by virtue of ‘anticipation of retrospective control by voting’ (Elster, 1998c, p.  2). That is, politicians know voters will punish them in the next election if they do not respect public opinion. In addition, political parties help bridge the gap between public opinion and

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the political system because they are civil society organizations that recruit engaged citizens, talk to ordinary people, take part in debates, and so on, which makes them sensitive to public opinion. But at the same time they are also major actors in all modern representative political systems, which means they have the power to directly influence formal political decisions and thus channel public opinion into the political system. The fifth and last arena is the legal–administrative system, the task of which in the DPC model is to implement political decisions. This is partly achieved by a politically controlled administrative bureaucracy that prepares, implements and monitors political decisions and partly by giving political decisions the form of laws that individuals and organizations typically will respect because they are backed up simultaneously by the ‘hard’ power of the state’s monopoly on the use of legitimate violence and the ‘soft’ power of legitimacy that laws have due to their democratic origin. Therefore, members of society have both instrumental and normative reasons to comply with laws. The process in the DPC model can be summarized thus: lifeworld: problems → civil society: alert society → public sphere: public opinion → political system: binding decisions → legal–administrative system: implementation. Because members of modern societies encounter a continuous flow of problems (often caused by previous political decisions), there is no ‘end of history’; the DPC model consists of a recursive process that never comes to an end. The DPC model has several strengths. First, by accentuating deliberation in the public sphere, it explains how members of a society can converge on important societal issues via an argumentatively induced change of preferences and beliefs. Therefore, it addresses the consensual deficit. Second, the model also depicts how members of complex modern societies can reflexively adapt their institutions to the goals they have and the problems they encounter via democratic collective decision making. Therefore, it also addresses the teleological deficit. Third, the model recognizes that institutional change is a never-ending process of trial and error. It therefore does not commit the intentional fallacy of describing institutional change as the perfect implementation of a societal blueprint. Institutional change is of course much messier than this, as the recursive element of the DPC model recognizes. Fourth, the model acknowledges that many of the problems it is invoked to solve stem from external influences and incremental accumulation, such as fluctuating oil prices, migration and demographic explosions. Nonetheless, according to this model, how a society responds to such challenges is politically mediated by the DPC model whereby such influences are perceived, interpreted and responded to. Therefore, institutional change is not merely sightless evolution but is at least partly politically monitored and designed. The watchmaker is not always blind. Fifth, voting is important in the DPC model because at some point discussion must come to an end and decisions made. However, in the DPC model, voting comes after and is influenced by public deliberation of the issue at hand. Voting thus takes place in the shadow of public deliberation. Sixth, the same goes for bargaining, which in the DPC model occurs within the politi-



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cal system but is constrained by public opinion because politicians are themselves rational actors, belong to parties, must legitimize their decisions and need to win future elections. Thus, bargaining too takes place in the shadow of public deliberation. Seventh, the DPC model incorporates seminal insights from all four models into an integrated model of politically mediated institutional change. Finally, I will now argue that empirically this model fits the Norwegian case quite well.

4.5 Instituting the Democratic Power Circuit Model in Norway In arguing that this model fits the Norwegian case, I will proceed in two steps corresponding to the two empirical conditions that must be satisfied for the DPC model to have explanatory value: first, the institutional infrastructure of the DPC model must be in place (scene), and second, influential social movements must employ it to create institutional change (actors). It is important to bear in mind that the scene and the actors developed in tandem. The scene (DPC) created political opportunities for actors (social movements), who then used these to broaden the DPC. However, for analytical purposes, I find it useful to separate them. I will look first at how the scene was assembled. The question of when the DPC model was institutionalized has a reasonably straightforward answer: in 1814. In that year, thanks to the external shock of the Napoleonic wars, Norway declared sovereignty from its colonial power Denmark, abolished absolutism (its political system since the assembly of estates was dissolved in 1660) and set up a liberal constitution inspired by the American and French revolutions. National sovereignty was soon tempered due to the union with Sweden (1814– 1905), but the political system has remained a liberal constitutional monarchy ever since (with a brief interlude during the Nazi occupation). The first two parts of the DPC model to be institutionalized in Norway were the legal–administrative and political systems. According to Fukuyama (2011, pp. 15–16; 2014, pp. 23–25), a modern liberal political and legal–administrative system has three pillars: a bureaucratic state, rule of law and accountable government. In 1814, Norway inherited a reasonably efficient bureaucratic apparatus from the absolutist period, a system that was further developed in the subsequent decades (Sejersted, 2001a, pp.  14–24). The most novel and radical aspect of the new constitution was rule of law. The 1814 constitution gave people a catalogue of individual rights that would, for instance, protect their freedom of speech and protect their private property from the state (Seip, 2010 first part, pp. 49–51; Sejersted, 2001a, pp. 15–17). Therefore, people went from being ‘subjects’ to being ‘citizens’. Finally, absolutism was replaced by a much more accountable form of government whereby an elected parliament passed laws (although the king could veto them) and overlooked the decisions of the king and his government. However, as only a minority of six percent of the whole population

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had the right to vote and as political positions in parliament, government, the legal system and state bureaucracy were more or less monopolized by a bureaucratic elite consisting of no more than one percent of the population (Sejersted, 2001a, p. 171), the political system created in 1814 was in no way a full democracy. This democratic deficit notwithstanding, a new political order containing the political and legal– administrative elements of the DPC model was more or less in place from 1814. The two more informal parts of the DPC model (civil society and the public sphere) were created partly in response to the modernization of the political and legal–administrative systems and partly as a response to broader economic, social and cultural modernization processes. They also developed in tandem: an emerging public sphere was immediately populated by civil society parties that subsequently gave substance and vitality to the public debates. However, let me describe them separately. A public sphere in the Habermasian sense appeared in the decades immediately after 1814. According to Sejersted (2001a, pp. 190–203), it emerged first as a mostly artistic scene connected to new institutions in the city such as theatres, galleries, museums, publishing houses, clubs and restaurants where citizens (mostly the bureaucratic elite and the upper middle class at first, soon followed by other groups) came together to interact outside of both the private intimacy of the family and the bureaucratic regulations of the state. It did not take long, however, before the public sphere took on political functions. Neither did it take long before a political public sphere proper was created in relation to newspapers, journals, seminars, lectures and parliamentary debates, where the use of political power was discussed and criticized. Moreover, in this period, a material infrastructure was assembled by means of roads, railways, telegraphs and steamships. Thus, a ‘communication state’ (Sejersted, 2000, pp. 61–64) gradually took shape that ‘disembedded’ (Giddens, 1990) public debates and stretched them across the whole nation–state. This process was mainly propelled by a liberal bureaucratic elite who believed public debate was needed to discipline the collective will of a people gradually moving from the ‘loyalty’ of absolutism to the ‘voice’ of liberal democracy (Hirschman, 1970). Subsequently, around 1850, a public sphere was in place in Norway, producing a new kind of communicative power and also the need to legitimize political decisions by arguments. The public sphere was immediately inhabited by new kinds of collective actors, namely non-governmental and non-commercial organizations springing out of broader social movements. As a result of the modernization of Norway, traditional and local forms of community, support and trust began to break down. New social movements and associations, connected with issues such as language, religion, geography, poverty, economic interests and social status, moved in to create a new basis of community, support and trust. They gave Norway a rich associational life resembling the nineteenth century America described by Alexis de Tocqueville, where citizens organize spontaneously from below to solve collective problems. So, by 1850, not only was a modern liberal political and legal–administrative system assembled, it was besieged by a vibrant public sphere inhabited by a broad



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collection of civil society organizations. Therefore, around 1850, although in no way perfect, the DPC model was firmly established, creating opportunities for a new way of conducting institutional change.

4.6 Applying the Democratic Power Circuit Model: Peasants, Workers and Women I will now look at the three social movements that have most successfully employed public deliberation within the context of the DPC model to conduct institutional change in Norway: those involving peasants, workers and women. I will organize my rather brief and schematic analysis around four axes: the institutional barrier each movement encountered, how they used the DPC model to overcome it, the institutional change that followed and how that added a new layer to the Norwegian political consensus. First, however, some words about the liberal bureaucratic elite of 1814 are necessary. The institutional barrier the bureaucratic elite faced was absolutism, a society where people were being treated as docile subjects instead of free and equal citizens. Taking advantage of the external shock of the Napoleonic wars, as noted above, the result of their effort was striking, namely to set up a constitutional monarchy based on bureaucracy, rule of law and accountable government. In other words, they erected the DPC. Doing this, they were motivated by the cultural–normative ideal that has been the basic element in Norwegian political consensus ever since, guiding 200 years of Norwegian modernization – equal individual freedom for all. In the words of the influential count Herman Wedel Jarlsberg, Norway was to become a ‘temple of freedom’ (quoted from Slagstad, 1998, p.  11). This makes Norway part of a broader Western (today even global) modernization project built on what Eisenstadt (2000, p. 5) calls the ‘cultural program’ of modernity, individual freedom. In what follows, I will analyse the three social movements’ use of the DPC model. I will in particular emphasize public deliberation, in line with the basic theme of this book.

4.6.1 The Peasants The first movement in Norway to successfully fight for institutional change using the DPC model was what I will call the peasant movement, even though it also consisted of intellectuals and members of the lower middle class (the petite bourgeoisie). The institutional barrier they faced was an agrarian elite society in which peasants, 85 percent of the population (Helle et al., 2013, p. 212), were ruled by a small one percent bureaucratic elite that had more or less monopolized political power. Despite rule of law and some governmental accountability, the few still ruled the many. In particular, from 1830–1840 onwards, the peasants challenged the bureaucratic elite in order to

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disperse power by democratizing society. Rokkan (2010, pp. 216–236) has famously labelled this the centre/periphery conflict, but we might just as well call it the elite/ people conflict. In broad terms, the political mobilization of the peasants followed the DPC model. Important in our connection is how the peasant movement made extensive use of the public sphere to fight for their cause. They did so partly by employing institutions already established by the bureaucratic elites, such as theatres, the university, publishing houses, newspapers, municipal bodies and parliament, where they participated in and influenced artistic, intellectual and political debates. Subsequently, they created their own institutions – theatres, publishing houses, journals and newspapers – in order to disseminate their ideas and influence public opinion. And they did this to great effect. Not for nothing did the emerging Norwegian nationalism become so tightly connected to the (often idealized) peasant culture. Another important reason for the peasant movement’s success was their efficient organization in civil society. As the traditional agrarian order started to break down in Norway, new social movements and associations emerged that gave ordinary people a sense of community, security and trust. These associations, which were locally embedded but also worked on the national level, in particular dealt with three important issues where the periphery (peasants) challenged the centre (the bureaucratic elite): religion, language and teetotalism. As a result, an associational society – a ‘counter culture’ – emerged in opposition to the hegemonic culture of the bureaucratic elite. Moreover, the peasants were able to use the political system to implement the antielitist public opinion they created. Before 1884, their leaders did so as members of parliament. But from 1884 onwards, when they founded their own political party, Venstre, they conquered government, where they would dominate until 1935 when the labour party seized the political system. Access to the political system made it possible for the peasant movement to pass laws on educational reform, social security, expanded suffrage, communal self-governance and restrictive financial politics that all suited their interests and then to apply the legal–administrative system to implement them. Two legacies stand out from the peasant movement’s use of public deliberation within the context of the DPC. On the institutional level, the peasants fought down the bureaucratic elite and democratized society. The crowning moment of this achievement was the transition to parliamentarianism in 1884 (Seip, 2010 second part, pp. 239–254). From then on, the government, which was by then the last retreat of the bureaucratic elite, had to resign without mandate from the almighty parliament (the people). Being the first group to successfully employ the DPC to create institutional change also made the peasant movement an inspiration for later social movements, particularly the labour movement. On the level of political consensus, the peasant movement further expanded the idea of individual autonomy by incorporating democracy: rule by the people. Indeed, the peasant movement’s democratic ethos has been called ‘Norway’s gift to the modern world’ (Slagstad, 1998, p. 93). What this ethos implies is best understood in light of the republican concept of freedom as nondomination (Pettit, 2014). A person is only free to the extent he/she is not subject to



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the arbitrary will of others, which at the political level implies democracy. People should only be subject to laws they give themselves and not to those given them by the (bureaucratic) elite.

4.6.2 The Workers As Norway started to industrialize towards the end of the nineteenth century, a new social group employed the DPC model to conduct institutional change: the workers’ movement. The institutional barrier they faced was a capitalist economic system producing stark inequalities in life opportunities. Therefore, their overall goal was to tame capitalism and let workers be treated with dignity and share in the productive output of the rapidly expanding industrial market economy. As in the case of the peasants, the labour movement would use the DPC model to mobilize politically. One of the first things the labour movement would do was to put the ‘worker question’ on the public agenda. To do so, they partly worked within the already existing ‘bourgeois’ public sphere. But like the peasants, they also established new institutions, such as newspapers, journals and publishing houses, thus expanding the public sphere. The result was striking. Benefitting in particular from the impartiality and the strength of weakness constraints of the public sphere, the labour movement put the need to monitor and improve the conditions of workers in Norway at the centre of public opinion, where it has stayed ever since as a sort of ‘social democratic’ egalitarian background consensus framing voting and bargaining processes. As in the case of the peasants, a key to success in the public sphere was complementary organizational activities in civil society. After a brief but ultimately unsuccessful attempt in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions led by Marcus Thrane (Seip, 2010 first part, pp. 183– 206), Norwegian workers started to organize again towards the end of the nineteenth century, this time very successfully. This first unionization happened at the level of plants, then industries and then nationwide with the Workers’ National Trade Union (today the LO) in 1899. Ever since, the LO has been the biggest labour federation in Norway, currently with 900,000 members out of a population of five million (Nergaard, 2015, p. 39, figure 1). Furthermore, as with the peasants, the workers created their own political party to make sure their interests were properly looked after in the political system. Founded in 1887, the Labour Party first moved into government in 1928 and then again in 1935 as part of a red–green coalition with the peasants. They would remain in power until 1965, interrupted only by the Nazi occupation in 1940– 1945 (and a brief four-week conservative intermezzo in 1963), making commentators label the period from roughly (the exact dating varies a bit) 1935 until 1980 the ‘social democratic order’ (Furre, 2000), the ‘social democratic age’ (Sejersted, 2005), the ‘labour party state’ (Slagstad, 1998) and even the ‘one-party state’(Seip, 1987[1963]). When in power, the Labour Party would ambitiously enlarge, empower and employ the legal–administrative apparatus to achieve their political goals.

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So what did the labour movement achieve? At the institutional level, although more a creatio continua than a creatio ex nihilo, it created a welfare society (Olstad, 2010, pp. 161–163; see also Engelstad & Hagelund, 2015). This was founded upon two pillars in particular that constitute much of the essence of the ‘Nordic model’. The first is a heavily regulated work life centred on the tripartite system (labour, capital and the state) dating back from the Basic Agreement (‘Hovedavtalen’) between labour and capital in 1935 (Falkum, 2015). This pillar is both a formal and informal social contract by which the workers accept capitalists’ right to own and steer corporations, whereas workers get the right to collectively bargain over salaries, are protected by workplace laws and are represented on the plant and board level. The second pillar is a universalist welfare state set up to ‘decommodify’ (Esping-Andersen, 1990, pp. 21–23 and chapter 2) life through socializing risks occurring through the individual’s lifecourse. This is done by a system of direct economic benefits in connection with sickness, injury, unemployment, child care and disability but also by free or heavily subsidized public services in education, kindergarten, health, housing and old age care. At the level of political consensus, the labour movement added a strong egalitarian element to the cultural programme of individual autonomy (Olstad, 2010, chapter 5; Brandal, Bratberg, & Thorsen, 2011, pp.  11–16). Becoming a member of Comintern 1919–1923, the labour party for a brief period agitated for a Leninist one-party system, which would have meant abolishing the liberal constitution, dismantling the DPC and breaking with the established political consensus. However, the labour party after some tumultuous years chose to follow a reformist strategy, fighting for the interests of the workers within the DPC (Olstad, 2010, pp. 60–70). As a result, they added a strong egalitarian socio-economic ethos to the political consensus revolving around the idea of equalizing income and living conditions among individuals and groups in society. Workers (ordinary people) should benefit as much as capitalists from the capitalist system, therefore providing individual freedom for all and not just for the few. So strong is this ethos that a conservative coalition government in 1967 introduced the National Insurance Act, the law that more than anything consolidated the Norwegian welfare state.

4.6.3 Women Finally, there is the women’s movement. Even though feminism has come in several waves in Norway, the first being the suffragette movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I will look only at what has been called the ‘second wave’ (Holst, 2009, pp. 36–55). This latter may be said to have lasted from the late 1960s into the 1980s, with the 1970s being its golden age. The institutional barrier the women’s movement reacted against was patriarchy. Despite increasing formal equality between the sexes regarding, for instance, the right to vote, inherit, work and have an education, gender equality was far from achieved in Norway. Society



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was still a patriarchal order systematically biased in women’s disfavour in relation to political participation, income, labour market participation, access to education, cultural recognition and the burden of unpaid domestic labour. So the women’s movement singled out as their target all formal and informal barriers to women’s equality, be they economic, educational, cultural, social, sexual or legal. And just like the peasants and workers, women employed the DPC for their own purposes. From the late 1960s, new feminist organizations such as Nyfeministene (‘The new feminists’), Kvinnefronten (‘The women’s front’) and Brød og roser (‘Bread and roses’) emerged. Even though they could not compete with the peasant and worker movements in pure numbers  – they numbered only a few thousand altogether (Furre, 2000, p. 261) – they were very efficient in spreading their messages. The main reason for this is their notable success in setting gender issues and gender equality – contraception; sexual freedom; abortion; the division of labour in the family; sexist language; the gender gap in wages; female underrepresentation in work, politics, science, media and art and much more – on the public agenda. And just like the peasants and workers, they achieved this partly by employing the established institutions in the public sphere but also by creating new arenas. In both cases, they produced a prolific amount of pamphlets, films, novels, plays, music and research that exposed and criticized the patriarchal biases inherent in existing institutions and culture (Slagstad, 1998, pp. 422–427). In doing so, and because of their small number, the feminists benefitted greatly from the impartiality and strength of weakness constraints in the public sphere. However, in contrast to the peasant and worker movements, the women’s movement never created a feminist party. Rather, they incorporated their agenda into existing political parties, mostly on the left, even though more or less all political parties became sensitive to the feminist agenda. As a result, the women’s movement could influence the legal–administrative system to implement their political goals. What did the women’s movement achieve? At the institutional level, they created what has become known as state feminism (Hernes, 1987). That is, feminist organizations expanded and employed state capacity to redeem feminist goals. They did so in the form of laws and regulations, such as the abortion law (1978) and the gender equality act (1978); by quotation measures in education, academia and economic life; by targeting benefits and services to individuals (including women) and not male breadwinners (Esping-Andersen, 1999, chapter 4); by building welfare state facilities that make it possible for women to combine labour market participation with having children (kindergartens and paid parental leave) and by expanding the welfare state, thus providing women with jobs in health and education. The result is that during the last 30–40 years, Norway has gone from a housewife society to a two-income family society, although the discussion continues regarding how much gender equality actually has been achieved (Skjeie & Teigen, 2003; Reisel & Teigen, 2014). At the level of political consensus, the women’s movement added a new layer to the ideal of individual freedom, namely gender equality. The basic idea is that women are to have

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the exact same educational, occupational, economic, political, cultural and sexual opportunities as men and that society – notably the state – has a major responsibility in making this happen.

4.7 Concluding Discussion Institutions  – rules and the regularities they create  – are the backbone of human societies. Understanding how and why institutions change is therefore crucial if we want to understand how and why societies change. This chapter started with the most common description among historians and social scientists of the overall pattern of social and institutional change in Norway since 1814, namely as a process of successive social inclusion of new groups, particularly peasants, workers and women. I then asked: What caused Norwegian institutions to change in this way and incorporate new groups? In this connection, I have criticized exogenous and endogenous models for overlooking the political mediation of external influences and incremental accumulation (the teleological deficit) and have criticized models emphasizing collective decision making by voting and bargaining for overlooking that both voting and bargaining take place in the shadow of public deliberation (the consensual deficit). Therefore, this chapter argues that we need to include what is more or less absent from these four models, namely deliberation in the public sphere. Consequently, my position can be called ‘discursive institutionalism’ (Schmidt, 2008), or even better, ‘deliberative institutionalism’. I have developed a conception of argumentation in the public sphere that calls attention to the rational and social reasons why actors – even rational egoists – might be expected to play by the rules of public deliberation. However, external shocks, internal incremental change, voting and bargaining are obviously also important aspects of institutional change in Norway. For that reason, I have developed a model that integrates them with public deliberation: the DPC model. This model is the basis for my proposed explanation of the overall path of institutional change in Norway since 1814. To support this model, I have tried to show how the DPC model, thanks to the liberal bureaucratic elite, was more or less institutionalized in Norway by 1850. I then explained overall institutional changes in Norway as a result of how peasants, workers and women have employed the DPC model. My empirical analysis has centred on the most important institutional barrier a group faced, how they employed the DPC model to overcome it, the most important institutional change that resulted and what new layer was added to the political consensus. The results are summarized in Table 1. The analysis presented in this chapter obviously raises many questions. I cannot go into all the details here, but let me end by briefly discussing some important issues related to the results summarized in Table 1.



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Table 1: The DPC model and institutional change in Norway since 1814 Political consensus

Institutional change

Institutional barrier

Social movement

Individual freedom

Rule of law

Absolutism

Bureaucratic elite

Rule by the people

Democratization

Elite society

Peasants

Egalitarianism

Welfare state

Capitalist inequality

Workers

Gender equity

State feminism

Patriarchy

Women

First, one advantage of the DPC model is that it reveals the similarities between the empirical cases discussed in the chapter. Therefore, despite different collective actors, goals and results, the process by which they have conducted institutional change is basically the same: the DPC model. However, that must not blind us to the differences between them. The greatest is between the bureaucratic elite on the one hand and the three other social movements on the other. The liberal bureaucratic elite could not apply the DPC model to modernize an absolutist agrarian Norwegian society; consequently, their project of institutional change was much more contingent on an external shock (the Napoleonic wars). Therefore, the exogenous model fits this case rather well. The peasants, workers and women, on the other hand, were not dependent on an external shock to the same extent because they could employ the DPC model when fighting for their interests. For this reason, these cases lie closer to the endogenous model. Furthermore, even among the three ‘endogenous’ cases, I think there is a division between the peasants’ and workers’ movements on the one hand and the women’s movement on the other. The peasants’ and workers’ movements were huge social mass movements organizing hundreds of thousands of people and creating political parties that would seize governmental power for long periods. As a result, they were at times more reluctant to submit their political and legal– administrative power to public scrutiny, especially the labour movement in its most technocratic phase in the first two post-war decades (Slagstad, 1998, pp.  336–364). The women’s movement, however, had a much weaker numerical organizational basis and never formed a political party. For this reason, they put more effort into consciousness raising efforts in the public sphere, where they were particularly dependent on the symmetry, impartiality and strength of weakness constraints. Therefore, the feminist movement is probably the case that most clearly illustrates the importance of the public sphere for institutional change in Norway. Second, although they are the most important cases, peasants, workers and women are of course not the only groups in Norway that have employed the DPC model to conduct institutional change. For instance, religious, ethnic and sexual minorities have used the DPC model to fight for their interests, and the same goes for the disabled, the peace movement and the environmental movement. And some of them have been quite successful. Taking the gay movement as an example, it too has

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founded organizations in civil society and influenced public opinion in the public sphere, subsequently shaping political decisions that have been implemented by the legal–administrative system. The result has been important institutional changes: the legal prohibition against sex between same-sex persons was lifted in 1972; homosexuality was abolished as a psychiatric diagnosis in 1982; the partnership act of 1993 gave same-sex persons the right to enter legally binding partnerships and in 2008 parliament introduced a gender-neutral marriage act, thus legally juxtaposing heterosexual and same-sex marriages. Third, I may be accused of painting too rosy a picture of institutional development by overlooking tensions and conflicts. For instance, in the nineteenth century, there were a number of conflicts involving peasants, workers and other groups (Seip, 2010 first part, pp. 144–175). In the twentieth century, even in the years right after the war, the epitome of societal consensus, we find harsh ideological conflicts between the political left and right regarding the scope of legitimate state intervention in society (Sejersted, 1993, pp. 271–302). Many more examples could be given. Be that as it may, historians still describe the modernization of Norway since 1814 as ‘amazingly peaceful and harmonic’ (Sejersted, 1993, p. 251). More importantly still, there is no contradiction between conflicts and the importance of the DPC model. On the contrary, the DPC model consists of a set of institutionalized procedures designed to solve conflicts in a peaceful, rational and fair way. And overall, in Norway the DPC model can be said to have achieved this remarkably well, as the inclusion processes demonstrate. For instance, both the peasants and the workers in the end chose to work for their interests within the context of the DPC model, while liberal conservatives and social democrats were able to reach a consensus pertaining to the need to balance state intervention and rule of law. Finally, notwithstanding the success of the DPC model thus far in adapting institutional rules and regularities to the collective goals and values of broad parts of the Norwegian population, it currently faces several challenges. I will briefly mention two, one relating to new challenges of inclusion and the other to the infrastructure of the DPC model. The first challenge consists of including the wave of, in particular, non-western immigrants that have come to Norway over the last 40 years. This has brought up difficult and much debated questions regarding how to finance a generous, universalist and expensive welfare state confronted with immigrants who participate less in the labour market, how to maintain the established social contract and regulations of working life and how to deal with challenges of cultural otherness (Brochmann, 2010, pp. 437–439). I think it is fair to call this the next ‘big’ challenge of social inclusion. The other challenge of the DPC model concerns the rise of social media and its effects on the public sphere. Some worry about echo chambers, new outlets for extremism across the ideological spectrum, lower quality of deliberation due to the unedited character of much debate on social media, problems with financing the old quality media and erosion of the private/public distinction of the public sphere. Others, however, celebrate the deliberative potential of social media, pointing

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to the fact that more people now have access to the public debate, that the volume of public deliberation has increased and that it is easier to mobilize citizens politically (see Enjolras et al., 2013 for a discussion). Both migration and the emergence of social media are processes we are right in the middle of; therefore, it is too early to pass judgment on their overall effects on the DPC model, at least for me.

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Part II: Media in the Public Sphere

Bernard Enjolras, Kari Steen-Johnsen

5 The Digital Transformation of the Political Public Sphere: a Sociological Perspective If the idea of the public sphere is central to the modern conception of democracy, contemporary political theorists have disagreed about both the nature of the public sphere and the assessment of its performance in complex societies. In this essay, we develop an institutional perspective on the contemporary political public sphere through the specific lens of transformations that are spurred by digitalization and in particular by the development of social networking sites (SNSs) and show how this perspective is applicable to ongoing changes in the Norwegian public sphere. We argue that the development and increasing usage and popularity of SNSs enabling decentralized and low-cost access to information production, interactive communication centred on a social graph and information propagation through a digitally empowered social network has transformed the social organization, the symbolic structure and the functions of the public sphere (Peters, 2008a, b). In our argument, the media is conceived as the most important institutional communicative infrastructure of the public sphere. The media in complex differentiated societies may be conceived as ‘a negotiator of public consent’ (Hjarvard, 2013, p. 55) via continuous discursive negotiation in the public sphere both when it comes to motivating the need for political action and to legitimizing political decisions. For Hjarvard, the media serves the three functions of constituting ‘a realm of shared experiences’, ‘an interface in the relations within and between institutions’ and of institutionalizing a political public sphere (2013, p. 37). From this viewpoint, the media contributes to the cohesion of society by linking its differentiated parts together on a symbolic level. The media may be considered to produce ‘the symbolic patterns that create the invisible tissue of society on the cultural level’ (Alexander, 1981:18). While these roles have traditionally been assigned to mass media, there is a need to explore whether, how and on what premises new digital media fulfil the same or other functions. The traditional Norwegian media model is often described in terms of the Northern European democratic corporatist model (Hallin & Mancini, 2004). Based on a development of this scheme, Syvertsen et al. (2014) have coined the term the ‘Nordic media welfare states’, which share four commonalities: universal services; editorial freedom; distinct cultural policies for the media and political solutions that enjoy a high degree of legitimacy among public and private actors (2014, p.  2). The Norwegian media has effectively been characterized by high levels of public legitimacy and comparatively high readership levels (Larsen & Ihlebæk, 2014). In later years, however, the business model of Norwegian traditional media has been challenged by the impact of digitalization, and cut-backs and processes of restructuration have been common among national, regional and local media organizations. Concurrently, the use of social media for social, entertainment and political purposes has soared, and © 2017 Fredrik Engelstad, Håkon Larsen, Jon Rogstad, Kari Steen-Johnsen This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.



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Norway is ranked high in terms of Internet and social media penetration (Enjolras et al., 2013). In this chapter, we explore the impact of digitalization on the current Norwegian public sphere. As pointed out by Rasmussen (2013, p. 97), the democratization of access to media in the wake of the development of the Internet means ‘that the Habermasian line of theorizing the public sphere needs revisions, particularly when applied to Internet-based media. The contemporary public sphere tends towards a more dispersed structure than its 19th- and 20th-century versions critically analysed by Jürgen Habermas’. In analysing how this structure develops, it is crucial, in our view, to take into account how the network aspects and the affordances of SNSs influence the development of the public sphere. Far from being a purely technology-driven perspective, however, we acknowledge that these aspects of the digital communication structure interact with and are combined with other social, cultural and political developments, such as the restructuring of traditional media and media politics. In our analysis, we emphasize the institutional conditions embedded in digital media and the implication of these conditions for the social organization and the symbolic structure of the public sphere. In the first part of the chapter, we develop a sociological perspective of the public sphere, as distinct from normative perspectives. We then go on to outline the core structural features of digital media – network structures and affordances – that are crucial to understand the types of institutional change that they may lead to. In the main bulk of the chapter, we explore the types of changes that are visible in the Norwegian public sphere, in its social organization and its symbolic structure. This analysis is based on a series of empirical studies carried out between 2011 and 2015. We end with a discussion of how the digital public sphere fulfils the assumed functions of a public sphere in relation to deliberation, the forming of opinions and mobilization. We also point out some central challenges for the future.

5.1 A Sociological Perspective of the Public Sphere As argued by Benson (2009), there is a need to move beyond normative models of the public sphere to develop theoretical and conceptual approaches that enable empirical researchers to analyse ongoing changes (2009, p. 175). Benson argues for an institutional approach that emphasizes the structural features of media systems and the role of the state in regulating journalistic practices (cf. Hallin & Mancini, 2004). While we do not disagree regarding the importance of state policy and changes within media structures in shaping and changing the public sphere, the point of departure for our argument lies elsewhere. We need to conceptualize the specific institutional conditions produced by new media through their technical design and the modes of communication they enable in order to fully grasp how the public sphere is changing.

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A sociological conception of the public sphere does not ask what the ideal qualities of the public sphere should be, who should participate and what forms the ideal discourses should have. On the contrary, it enables looking at the public sphere as a social phenomenon and provides the conceptual tools for explaining how digitalization transforms the structural and institutional basis of the public sphere and how these changes impact the participants, discourses and symbolic structures of the public sphere. For our purposes, the public sphere can be defined as comprising the institutional communicative spaces that facilitate public discussion and the formation of public opinion. The public sphere is not unitary but consists of a manifold of communicative spaces. These spheres are not equal in terms of political impact, and it is usual to distinguish between mainstream vs. counterpublic spheres. In addition, if ideally access to the public sphere is universal, many exclusionary mechanisms inhibit equal access to and participation in the public sphere, such as mechanisms based on class, ethnicity or gender. A sociological perspective of the public sphere needs to differentiate its cultural, institutional and structural layers. The public sphere is a cultural phenomenon; it is not only discursive but is shaped by and filled with institutions, organizations of communication and regulation. In such a conceptual scheme, ‘public opinion, which is the sea inside of which civil society swims’ is ‘the middle ground between the generalities of high-flow discourse and the ongoing, concrete events of everyday life’ (Alexander, 2006, p. 4). Following Alexander (2006), we consider the communicative institutions of civil society as being composed of the communication media, public opinion polls and civic associations7. Media institutions not only respond to opinion but also structure and change it. Institutional and structural changes affecting the media also transform the types of interaction and discourse taking place in the public sphere. In complex and differentiated democratic societies, civil society and the public sphere have to be conceived analytically, as functionally separated spheres independent from the other social spheres (economic, political, religious, family). At the same time, in a concrete sense, the public sphere is deeply interpenetrated with the rest of society and connected to activities in other spheres (Alexander, 2006, pp. 193–194). Viewed from such a perspective, ‘politics is a discursive struggle’ (Alexander, 2006, p. 233). The stakes of the communicative interactions taking place in the public sphere – through the media, in public forums and civic associations – are different conceptions of justice, of the ‘good life’, of the promises of universalizing solidarity. The public sphere is the space where struggles for realizing the promises of universalizing freedom, equality and solidarity – entailing redistribution, recognition and

7 As mentioned above, public opinion polls are also part of the communicative institutions of the civil sphere in Alexander’s conceptualization. We have chosen to omit this element here.



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incorporation or inclusion – take place. But the public sphere is not only an institutional realm. It is also a cultural realm constituted of networks of meaning that are built upon distinctive symbolic codes. This symbolic dimension is critical in constituting the sense of belonging to and participating in a democratic society (Alexander, 2006). In what follows, we will point out core features of digital media that might lead to changes in how the public sphere functions as an institutional and cultural realm.

5.2 Institutional Change and Digitalization Changes in communication media have profound implications for the historical development of social institutions and human values (Innis, 2008). This has been the case both for the invention of printed media and of audio and visual media in the past. Communication technologies impact social institutions and values by structuring time and space. Space-biased media in the form of digital communications entail a democratization of access to information and to the means of information production, undermining the cultural monopoly of knowledge and information that has been predominant with previous communication technology (print and electronic mass media). Such a transformation of the technological infrastructure of communication is not without far-reaching consequences in terms of the institutional structure and functions of the public sphere. The rise of a ‘networked information economy’ (Benkler, 2006) has revolutionized the media political economy. The emergence of digital interactive media has been enabled by the rise of the networked and computer-mediated mode of communication that has radically transformed the ways information is produced and consumed. Whereas mass media communication required centralized means of information production and large investments in physical capital, networked media are based on decentralized and relatively cheap personal computers interconnected through the Internet. In contrast to mass media production of information, which required high levels of capital concentration, networked media are synonymous with the decentralization and democratization of the means of production and distribution of information, knowledge and culture. The networked information economy improves the capacities of individuals to produce information, to cooperate with others in loose non-hierarchical networked communities and to cooperate in formal organizations outside the market sphere. Decentralization and network connections have also opened possibilities for nonmarket production and consumption of information and large-scale cooperative efforts exemplified by initiatives such as Wikipedia. Taking advantage of the networked information economy, SNSs have experienced tremendous development during the past few years. Two features of SNSs are crucial to understand how they instigate institutional and cultural change: their affordances and their network structure. SNSs usually provide a digital architecture for interactive

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communication along three types of integrated ‘affordances’ (Boyd, 2011): profiles, lists of friends and communication tools. Profiles constitute the space where gathering and conversation take place. To some extent, social media users control their profile by regulating who can have access to it. Profiles may be public (as is the case with Twitter) or semi-public (Facebook). Friend lists materialize and publicly display the social graph and the audience of the social media user. They have a social and strategic function; in choosing who to confirm as a friend, social media users consider both the costs and benefits of rejecting a person. Friend lists are the ‘imagined audience’ or ‘public’ of the social media user. Communication tools allow generally public, semi-public and private forms of communication. Public and semi-public communication tools (such as comments on a person’s Facebook wall or addressing a tweet to a given user) enable mediated public encounters. In addition, these communication tools enable combinations of communicative patterns ranging from oneto-one to many-to-many. The concept of affordance allows conceptualizing the relationship between media technology and social interaction, avoiding the Scylla of technological determinism and the Charybdis of radical constructionism. The concept of affordance captures the complex relationship between media and technology on the one hand and social interactions on the other hand. Whereas media and technology are social and cultural products, technological artefacts set limits on the potential usages of media and technology allowing for a variety of practices in response to these affordances. Each form of media embodying a set of technologies is characterized by a set of affordances that enable, limit and structure communication practices without predetermining them. The second fundamental characteristic of SNSs is to link people within a digital network. Social networks are important because individuals and groups derive benefits from their underlying social structure. One of the powerful functions fulfilled by networks is to bridge the local and the global, allowing local phenomena to be spread across the entire network and to produce global effects. However, this bridging ability is dependent upon the structural characteristics of the network. One structural characteristic is the degree to which the social network mixes strong and weak ties (Granovetter, 1973). Digital social networks combine two types of structural network effects that at the same time constrain and enable social processes: small-world effects and rich-get-richer effects. Small-world effects are the result of the small-world structure of social media where individuals are linked to clusters of friends and the clusters are linked to each other through a few individuals or links (Watts, 1999). Rich-get-richer effects result from the combination of the specific network structure of the Internet due to the hierarchy of pages’ popularity and the way search engine algorithms work. The World Wide Web’s structure is characterized by a scale-free network (Barrabàsi, 2003; Lewis, 2009; Newman et al., 2006) that is typically associated with a ‘power law’ distribution of the nodes of a network according to their degree (the number of links attached to a node). The rich-get-richer phenomenon, expressed by the ‘power



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law’ distribution of popularity (of web sites) in digital networks, is due to the extreme imbalances characterizing the phenomenon of popularity: whereas few of us achieve fame, most of us remain anonymous. Social media, as a result of small-world and richget-richer effects, consists of highly connected networks and highly hierarchized networks where everybody is connected to everybody through weak ties and people bridging structural holes but where few are very popular and visible (in terms of friends and links) and most are not very popular and consequently not very visible. When people are connected by a network, they may influence each other’s behaviour and decisions, giving rise to social processes where individual behaviours are aggregated through the network to produce collective outcomes. Information cascades are one of those social processes occurring when people make decisions sequentially, are able to observe others’ decisions in order to draw rational inferences from those decisions and imitate those decisions based on their inferences. Many social phenomena, such as fashion, the popularity of celebrities and bestsellers and the spread of technological choices and news, are characterized by information cascades. The small-world network structure of social media is conducive to information cascades because users can easily observe what their connections do and make inferences and decisions based on those observations, which in turn are propagated further along the network. In line with the theoretical perspectives outlined above, we examine the impact of digitalization on the public sphere along a set of dimensions. Our point of departure is Peters’ (2008a, b) conceptualization of the public sphere as consisting of a given social organization, a symbolic structure and a set of functions. In order to analyse the social organization of the public sphere under the condition of digitalization, we use Alexander’s (2006) conception of the civil sphere as a conceptual tool and look at changes in communication media and civic associations. We also discuss changes in citizens’ participation and changes in social and organizational hierarchies. We then look at changes to the symbolic structure of the public sphere, with an emphasis on how the new public diversity enabled by digital media might impact the construction of shared or disruptive meanings and symbols within the Norwegian public sphere. The question about how changes in organization and in symbolic structures are related to changes in the functions of the public sphere is treated in the conclusion of the chapter.

5.3 Changes to the Social Organization of the Public Sphere Analysing the social organization of the public sphere implies looking at the central institutions that serve as channels for expressing opinions, at the participation by different types of groups and citizens and at the hierarchies that are established between institutions and citizens and among institutions. Traditionally, the mass media has

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been the main institutional vehicle for regulating and enabling expression within society. In a broader perspective, as pointed out by Alexander, both civic associations and opinion polls form channels for citizens to express opinions. With the rise of digital media, a change in the role and relationship between these three channels of expression – mass media, civic associations and opinion polls – is imminent. In this chapter, we draw together a set of analyses based on several large-scale empirical studies from the Norwegian context in order to examine changes in the social organization of the public sphere as they are visible in the Norwegian case. The studies comprise a series of population- representative surveys on social media use and civic and political participation carried out in 2011, 2012 and 20148, each time with 5,000 respondents. We also make use of data from two surveys on free speech that were carried out in 2013 and 2014, with samples drawn from the ethnic majority and the ethnic minority populations, as well as of a survey of journalists9. The Free Speech project also comprised several qualitative components, such as a qualitative interview study among highly active discussants with an ethnic minority background and an interview study among Norwegian editors and debate editors. Finally, we draw on a content study of Twitter during the 2013 parliamentary election campaign. Taken together, these studies provide a unique opportunity to analyse the impact of digitalization on the Norwegian public sphere.

5.3.1 Changes in Communication Media In modern democracies, edited news media have played a crucial role as gatekeepers of the public sphere and have to a large extent regulated access by different groups, actors and institutions. With digitalization comes a transformation of the role of the media that has been characterized in terms of an evolution from ‘gatekeeping’ to ‘gatewatching’ (Bruns, 2009). Whereas gatekeeping designates the control exercised by media professionals (journalists, editors, owners) over the production process of information and consequently over what is published and made available to the public, gatewatching implies a weakening in the importance of such moderation and an increasing reliance on the public as selectors and filters of content. The emergence of gatewatching is visible in the emergence of arenas of expression outside of edited media where individuals may freely express themselves either with some moderation, such as on collaborative sites (e.g. Wikipedia), or without any moderation, such as on

8 Within the project Social media and the new public sphere. Consequences for democracy and citizenship, funded by RCN – VERDIKT. 9 Within the project Status of Free Speech in Norway, funded by the Free Speech foundation. More information on the project can be found at www.ytringsfrihet.no. For a more thorough description of the data, see Enjolras, Rasmussen and Steen-Johnsen (2014).



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Figure 1: The three most important channels for accessing online news, by age. 2011 Note: Of those who consume online news, the figure shows the percentage who mark each channel as one of the three most important channels for accessing news. Not shown in the figure: those who access online newspapers directly (90%), those who access Twitter for news (5%), those who access blogs for news (4%), those who access organizational web pages for news (10%) and those who access RSS feeds for news (4%).

SNSs (e.g. Twitter). Classical journalism has traditionally had a normative self-understanding where impartial renderings of reality and information as service to the public were considered as basic values. Digital media challenges this traditional conception of journalism because journalism’s position within people’s ensemble of information sources loses its importance. At the same time, the features of digital media open the possibility for everybody to act as a journalist. The audiences of journalism are becoming more fragmented as people have the ability to choose and customize their media consumption. Audiences are more mobile, able to make individual choices and possess capacities enabling them to actively produce or transform information. Data from Norway do indeed demonstrate a displacement in the monopolist role of the media in bringing news and information to citizens. As Figure 1 shows, as early as 2011 Facebook was already prominent among the young generation when it came to accessing news. This development poses a double challenge to traditional media; on the one hand, the role of the media in agenda setting and gatekeeping is weakened. On the other hand, the displacement of readership from offline to online platforms, ushered in by third party channels, seriously weakens the potential for generating income from advertising. As Figure 2 shows, the  percentage of the population that reads a newspaper on a daily basis has been remarkably stable for the last 15 years. However, the current challenge in Norway, as in most of the Western world, has been the declining readership of print media and the concomitant increase in online publications.

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Figure 2: Readership of print and online newspapers on an average day in the years 2001–2014 (aged 9–79). percent Note: Statistics downloaded from Norwegian Media Barometer and SSB/medienorge.uib.no. The categories are not mutually exclusive, and readers of print newspapers may also have read online newspapers.

Most importantly, young readers are abandoning print papers faster. Among the 16–44 age group, print readership declined 30 percent from 2002 to 2012, while online news reading increased by 40  percent (SSB/medienorge.uib.no). This rapid loss of young readers is causing widespread concern in the newspaper industry. Economically, the press has largely relied on a mix of subscriptions, advertising and subsidies. However, online newspapers generate income instead through advertising, and until recently access to content was free for readers. Free access has been blamed for the crisis in the industry, which is desperately trying to find viable digital revenue models (Omdahl, 2013; Ottosen & Krumsvik, 2012). Between 2013 and 2016, several national and regional newspapers have moved towards paid access to news articles. The agenda-setting function of the traditional media is also partially challenged, as the agenda of the public is no longer necessarily mediated by the agenda of the media. Likewise, politicians and political organizations have direct access to the public through SNSs without needing to influence the media agenda. Empirical evidence (Enjolras et al., 2014) shows a complex relationship between an SNS like Twitter and the traditional news media. On the one hand, the political use of Twitter in election campaigns appears to be highly correlated with news media events (such as TV debates), and a significant proportion of political tweets link to news. On the other hand, both individuals and political parties appear to have been able to generate cascades of information on Twitter that diverge from the agenda of the mainstream media. Political communication on SNSs seems to reinforce the two-step flow



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of communication (Lazarsfeld et al., 1944; Enjolras et al., 2013) when interpersonal communication is no longer synonymous with face-to-face interaction. The interview study from the Free Speech project about how Norwegian news media conceived of and strategically handled digitalization showed that both editors and journalists took an ambiguous attitude towards digitalization and its concomitant change processes (Larsen & Ihlebæk, 2014). On the one hand, digitalization triggers innovation, new ways of researching news stories and communicating with the public, as well as new ways of targeting content. On the other hand, digitalization challenges quality journalism by eroding established business models and by introducing new, more quantitative measures of quality, thus threatening the role and function of the media. The outcome of these change processes is yet uncertain. The traditional media is in a period of transition and in need of viable new economic models but still possesses institutional resources and communication skills. As pointed out by Hallin and Mancini (2004), national media systems also differ in terms of media policies, political integration, economic models and the status of journalism as a profession, all of which are factors that might influence change processes related to digitalization. In their conclusions regarding eventual changes to the Nordic Media Welfare State, Syvertsen et al. (2014) concluded that in terms of its main tenets, the model remains largely intact. An interesting point, however, is whether cultural representations of the ongoing change processes may have an impact on the outcome of digitalization processes. Alexander et al. (2016) argue that the cultural representations that are forged by the media crisis in various contexts will strongly influence the future trajectories of classical journalism.

5.3.2 Changes in the Role of Civic Associations and in the Expression of Public Opinion Digital media also facilitate new forms of democratic participation and engagement by rendering large-scale collaborative democracy easy and costless through ‘wiki tools’ or SNSs. As put by Noveck: ‘in a web 2.0 world ordinary people can collaborate with one another to do extraordinary things’ (2009, p. 37). Digital media enable a new era of collaborative democracy that is not limited to the confrontation of different viewpoints but seeks to impact decision making. In this sense, mobilization through digital media may function as a new form of opinion poll, which serves to make the opinions of citizens visible to the political system. Collaborative democracy may have a democratizing effect by giving ordinary citizens – collaborating online and affecting political decision making – an influence that traditionally has been reserved for organized lobbies, interest groups and civil society organizations. The combination of affordances and effects giving way to modular, flexible, mobile and decentralized forms of communication and interaction allows people to coordinate their actions that

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cohere and aggregate via the play of information cascades across digital networks into mass mobilization or protest that manifest both online and in the real world. Many examples of such cascades and mobilizations have been observed locally, nationally and even globally in recent years. Our series of Norwegian surveys on people’s use of social media have demonstrated that social media is an important channel for mobilizing citizens to various political campaigns and demonstrations, particularly the young (Enjolras et al., 2012; Enjolras et al., 2013). In our 2012 survey, one out of four people under 26 had participated in at least one national protest group on Facebook (as compared to 11 percent in the rest of the population), and almost as many had participated in local or international protest groups (2013, p. 95). In the same study, Facebook emerged as the most important information channel related to offline demonstrations for all participants under 54 years of age, on a par with mass media in the population as a whole (2013, p. 101). Another interesting finding was that civil society organizations and Facebook networks were equally important in mobilizing citizens to offline demonstrations. This shows that while civil society organizations are still important in mobilizing citizens to demonstrations and activism, Facebook represents a powerful alternative information structure that mobilizes new subsets of the population, that is, the young and those with a lower education level. In Norway, mobilizations that have been initiated and spurred through social media include such different examples as mobilizations for peace marches in support of Gaza, protests against particular asylum decisions and the very encompassing mobilization in the aftermath of the terror attacks against the governmental quarters and on Utøya in 2011. These are fundamentally conditioned by the affordances and networks embedded in digital media. While one might argue that this development has enhanced the capacity of the ordinary citizen to express his or her political opinion, it raises questions about the future of civil society organizations and about their future role as channels for engagement and giving voice. Rightly used, however, digital tools may also enhance the capacity of civil society organizations to create engagement and to mobilize voice (Steen-Johnsen & Enjolras, 2014). Still, there is a more fundamental question about how channels for raising voice that do not in themselves include a representative element might impinge on democracy as a whole.

5.3.3 Changes in Participation and in Social Hierarchies The digital media has contributed to a process of democratization of access to the public sphere, reinforcing individualized forms of political and civic participation. ‘The new social operating system’ (Rainie & Wellman, 2012) is one of networked individualism where individuals may meet their social, emotional and economic needs through their involvement in sparsely knit networks of diversified social relationships rather than through belonging to a few densely connected communal groups. This



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tendency is accentuated and partly driven by the transformation affecting the communication and media system. In its most basic sense, this question concerns whether civil society is undergoing a fundamental change from collective to connective action (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012), implying a move towards the individualization of civic engagement. A traditional logic of collective action is associated with the modern social order of hierarchical institutions and membership groups in which a common collective identity in the group is essential. In late modern societies, formal collective action organizations are losing their influence over individuals, and group ties are being replaced by large-scale, fluid social networks (Bennet & Segerberg, 2012). The study of participation in public debate via digital media in Norway indeed shows that many use it to express themselves and to participate in debates. In a survey on freedom of speech in Norway, 50 percent stated that they sometimes express their opinion through social media (Enjolras & Steen-Johnsen, 2014b, p. 171). If the question is more narrowly defined as debating political and societal issues, 35 percent of the population claims to have participated using digital platforms (Enjolras et al., 2013, p. 120). The main contribution of digital media as compared to offline debate is to enable participation by groups with lower income and less education (2013, p. 125). Still, there are social differences between social media platforms; for example, Twitter has an overrepresentation of younger men with higher education. Moreover, a clear gender divide persists. With the exception of political debate on Facebook, women are underrepresented in debates on all social media platforms. The Freedom of Speech survey underpinned this fact by showing that women were more prone to self-censorship in expressing their opinions compared to men (Enjolras & SteenJohnsen, 2014a, p. 46). The interplay between the process of democratization of access to the public sphere and the dynamics of information propagation characterizing digital networks mediated by the affordances of SNSs thus also impacts the social hierarchy of the public sphere. If influence in the public sphere is still the result of factors such as prominence (public visibility) and authority or prestige conferred by skills, status and credibility, new mechanisms influence the degree of influence obtained by different actors in the digitally enabled public sphere. These changes may have an important impact on the role of traditional news media as gatekeepers of public debate and thus on their power. In her interview study with editors in the news media, Ihlebæk (2014) demonstrates that the facilitation of public debate has become an area of great strategic importance for news media in the digital age and that use of the Internet and social media has become imperative for spreading content and finding new voices. She also shows how new dilemmas concerning implementing the appropriate level of editorial control have arisen. Ihlebæk points out that the digital transformation has been positive for the freedom of speech and the plurality of voices in the public. At the same time, the influx of new voices and the nature of online debate puts more pressure on debate editors in terms of making difficult decisions quickly regarding the limits of free speech and how offensive utterances should be handled. Editors

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have become more dependent on being attentive to the public and on using them as gatewatchers and distributors of content. The combination of network effects and the working of algorithms such as PageRank (used by search engines to measure the popularity of a digital site) or EdgeRank (used by Facebook for inferring the degree of visibility of a given post in a user’s feed based on, among other things, the user’s social network) generates a new social structure within the digitized public sphere driven by the rich-get-richer effect that reinforces the prominence of visible or popular sites or users. The digitized public sphere therefore constitutes a social space where new forms of power relations develop and where new digital elites (bloggers, digital personalities) have acquired influence and status. The hallmark of digital influence is that it is not necessarily grounded in traditional resources (such as organizational, symbolic and economic resources) but relies to a larger extent on digitized social capital and communication skills. A study of the use of Twitter in the 2013 parliamentary election campaign in Norway indicated a parallel reinforcement and a levelling out of established power structures. While those who gained the most attention on Twitter were the two leading political parties, some of the smaller parties were able to attract more attention for their political postings than might have been expected (Enjolras et al., 2014). Studies have also shown the importance of new types of opinion leaders (cf. Lazarsfeld et al., 1944) – young, politically interested people with broad digital networks and a high level of activity in social media. These people play an intermediary role between politicians and citizens by propagating political messages (Enjolras et al., 2013). Digitized communication thus enables new modes of social organization within the public sphere, both in terms of who participates and how and in terms of changing the roles and power of established institutions  – first and foremost the role of the media and the political parties. While the developments described here indicate democratization both in terms of presentation and representation (Rasmussen, 2008), the development is still complex and contradictory.

5.3.4 Changing Symbolic Structures in the Public Sphere Digitalization also contributes to changing the symbolic boundaries and the symbolic forms that dominate within the political public sphere. This is both a question of what types of participants are included in public debate and what types of arguments, forms and values are accepted. Above, we pointed out that the emergence of digital media in Norway has opened a space for public expression for a large number of ordinary citizens and that people do make use of this option. One might therefore conclude that the boundaries of the public sphere in Norway have been widened. However, the Free Speech study (Enjolras et al., 2014) indicated some mechanisms related to self-censorship and to responses to experiences of harassment and threats as part of online debate might lead to less participation among some groups. In par-



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ticular, ethnic minorities reported that they have become more cautious about participating in public debate after having experienced online harassment (Staksrud et al., 201, p. 21). Even though this group did not receive more harassing comments than the rest of the population, the comments they did receive were to a much greater degree related to their identity – their ethnicity, religion, nationality and skin colour. Along with Honneth (1995), one might argue that society is to an increasing extent characterized by struggles for recognition, where universal democratic values are put up against the value of particular cultures or identities. The findings of the Norwegian Free Speech study do indeed indicate identity-based struggles and the demarcation of boundaries based on ethnicity, religion or gender. On the one hand, this phenomenon can be attributed to the ongoing pluralization of Norwegian society from the 1980s on due to immigration. On the other hand, the particular form that these kinds of struggle take may be attributed to specific characteristics of social media venues, in particular the forms of expression that they allow and their inherent capacity to blur boundaries. Concerning form, a new form of literacy  – between orality and literacy  – is emerging as a result of SNSs’ affordances and the practices they have generated. As shown by Ong (2002), the oral and written forms of expression and thought differ in many respects, having far-reaching consequences for consciousness, experiences and society. Speech is considered to be more performance-oriented and less informational than writing, and speech presupposes the co-presence of an audience, whereas writing involves a ‘fictional’ or ‘imagined’ audience. Digitally mediated communication occurring on SNSs may be thought of as promoting the development of a culture of ‘oral writing’ where the audience is at the same time potentially interactive and copresent but also imagined and the message is more reminiscent of the performativity of the speech act than of informative script, even if the written medium is used. The result of a streaming media radically oriented to the ‘now’, relating to a plurality of media and promoting the emergence of a culture of written orality is a form of communication that in many cases is more reminiscent of an aesthetic performance and experience (a work of art) than of a rational deliberation. For example, the political use of Twitter is not only informative and based on rational arguments but is often ironic, a public performance with 140 characters conveying an opinion via the play of metaphors and paradox often tainted with humour and linking to more informative or illustrative (photo, videos) content (Enjolras et al., 2014). Concerning boundaries, digital media provokes a displacement and a blurring of the boundaries of the two main dimensions of the public/private distinction (Weintraub (1997), visibility and collectivity. The line delineating the public and the private can be defined based on a spatial or a political understanding of the public. The spatial understanding of the public is connoted by the visible: the public (the street for example) is visible to all, whereas the private (the home) is not visible. In contrast, the political understanding of the public emphasizes the dimension of general (public) interest. From this viewpoint, the public is what is of interest for the public

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and is what requires publicity. Traditionally, these two dimensions of visibility and publicity have been linked. With digital communication – because gatekeepers who made visible what they considered of general interest no longer have the same importance – a decoupling between visibility and publicity occurs: what is visible is not necessarily of public interest. What is private in the sense of personal and was traditionally hidden becomes public, visible, exposed in public. In addition, private and intimate concerns and experiences, such as those relating to family life, gender and sexual preferences, increasingly take on a public and political meaning. Thus far, the larger cultural consequences of these changes in the forms and boundaries of the public sphere remain unclear. On the one hand, there is a pluralization of the voices, forms and identities that are included in the public sphere, and the potential for the ordinary citizen to express emotions, feelings and viewpoints has increased. On the other hand, there is the question of whether the emergence of these less rationalized and stylized forms of discourse have decreased the potential for solving identity-based struggles and the potential for collective learning. A central part of this question is whether we see a fragmented or an integrated public sphere across sub-spheres. In our concluding section, we address the question of how digitalization leads to potential changes in the functions of the public sphere and the potential dilemmas that ensue.

5.4 Conclusion: the Functions and Dilemmas of the Digital Public Sphere According to Peters (2008a, b) the public sphere may be described through its functions, its social organization and its symbolic structure. In this chapter, we looked into the two latter dimensions and pointed out a set of institutional and cultural changes in the Norwegian public sphere linked to the emergence of digital media as a communication channel. Overall, digital media and particularly SNSs have generated a process of democratization of access to the political public sphere. The gatekeeper function of journalists and media editors is weakened; many more are able to publish different types of content, to express their opinions and to experience in practice their freedom of speech (Enjolras & Steen-Johnsen, 2014b). New forms of mobilizations and participation are also being developed through the use of digital media (Enjolras et al. 2013). This process of democratization has also provoked a displacement of the power structure underlying the public sphere, whereby new gatewatchers have emerged and the agenda-setting function is no longer the monopoly of the media. At the same time, the boundaries between the public and the private spheres have become increasingly blurred, and the symbolic structure of the public sphere – its content, form and style of communication – has evolved towards new communicative practices we have labelled the ‘culture of written orality’ that is



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more performative than informative and more expressive than rational and that may include major struggles over identities and practices. These analyses paint a complex picture of the functions of the new public sphere in allowing for deliberation, the forming of opinion and the mobilization of citizens’ voices (Peters, 2008a, b). On the one hand, one might argue that given the increased participation by many, the potential for collective and collaborative processes may have enhanced both deliberation and voice. On the other hand, there is the question of the forming of new types of hierarchies outside of established institutions and of the emergence of cultures of deliberation that might lead to conflict, spirals of silence and withdrawal by some groups. We would like to point out two problems that might pose particular challenges for the public sphere as an arena for deliberation, voice and the formation of shared meaning (Alexander, 2006) – the problems of fragmentation and of representative democracy. The problem of fragmentation. While the digitalization of the public sphere has led to pluralization and an increase in representation in the sense that more participants, topics and styles are present in public discussion, the impact on presentation, that is, the shared deliberation over common issues (Rasmussen, 2008), is less clear. The emergence of social media entails a diversification of communication, which is partly linked to anonymity, quasi orality, diversity of communication platforms and the diversity of inter-textual connections between forums (2008, p.  77). A crucial question linked to the normative evaluation of the digital transformation of the public sphere is whether the possibilities for self-selection, personalization, individualization and expression of identities embedded in the affordances of digital media end up creating a fragmented and polarized landscape of political discussion or whether the network effects described earlier will entail the emergence of shared discourses across sites and guarantee the unity of an encompassing political public sphere. The problem of representative democracy. Another question linked to the normative assessment of the digital transformation of the public sphere is its impact on the functioning of the representative institutions of democracy. The decline of broadcast journalism allows a direct form of communication between politicians and the electorate by bypassing the gatekeepers, one where new political celebrities are able to set the agenda. To what extent this form of democratization of access to the public will contribute to the reinforcement of the trend towards ‘audience democracy’ (Manin, 1997) or to the initiation of new forms of relationships between representatives and citizens in moving towards a more participatory democracy is yet unclear. For Manin (1997), audience democracy is characterized by the personalization of the relationship between politicians and citizens. The function of mediation exercised by political parties has been replaced by broadcast media, and whereas voters’ loyalty used to be the result of affiliation with political parties based on socio-economic and cultural characteristics, in audience democracy the support of the electorate is shifting constantly and is increasingly dependent upon the image of candidates in broadcast media. The enlargement of the participatory public space through the lowering of

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barriers to access and the possibility of direct interaction with elected representatives enabled by digital media may result in new forms of direct political participation. However, new forms of impression management and self-presentation are made available through digital media’s affordances that are mobilized in the service of political communication and may reinforce the working of audience democracy. The digital transformation of the public sphere has had a profound impact on the ways ideas are disseminated and debated, how opinions are formed and how identities are expressed in modern societies. It has also affected the exercise of citizenship and the functioning of our democratic institutions. By conceptualizing this transformation in terms of institutional change impacting both the social and symbolic structures of the public sphere, we have identified some of the fundamental ongoing trends characterizing the digital public sphere. The directions and lasting effects of these changes are ambiguous, as these transformations still embody the potentiality of positive and negative developments for democracy and citizenship. 

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Enjolras, B. & Steen-Johnsen, K. (2014b). Ytringsfrihet og sosiale medier. In Enjolras, B., Rasmussen, T. & Steen-Johnsen, K. (Eds.). Status for ytringsfriheten i Norge. Hovedrapport fra prosjektet. Oslo: Fritt Ord, ISF, IMK, FAFO. Ihlebæk, K.A. (2014). Balansekunst. Publikumsdeltakelse og tilnærminger til redaksjonell kontroll. PhD.-dissertation. Oslo: University of Oslo. Innis, H.A.. ([1951] 2008). The bias of communication. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Jacobs, R.N, & Townsley, E. (2011). The space of opinion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Granovetter, M. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78,1360–1380. Hallin, D.C., & Mancini, P. (2004). Comparing Media Systems. Three Models of Media and Politics. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. Hjarvard, S. (2013). The mediatization of culture and society. London: Routledge. Kant, I. ([1784] 1991). An answer to the question: what is Enlightenment? In Reiss, H.S. (Ed.) Kant Political writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Khon, M. (2000). Language, power, and persuasion: towards a critique of deliberative democracy. Constellations, 7(3), 408–429. Larsen, A.G. & Ihlebæk, K.A. (2014). Journalistikk i en digital tidsalder. In Enjolras, B., Rasmussen, T. & Steen-Johnsen, K. (Eds.). Status for ytringsfriheten i Norge. Hovedrapport fra prosjektet. Oslo: Fritt Ord, ISF, IMK, FAFO. Latour, B. (2005). From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or how to make things public. In Latour, B. & Weibel, P. (Eds.), Making things public. Atmospheres of democracy. Cambridge: MIT Press, 14–44. Latour, B. & Weibel, P., (Eds.) (2005). Making things public. Atmospheres of democracy. Cambridge: MIT Press. Lazarsfeld, P.F., Berelson, B., & Gaudet, H. (1944). The people’s choice: How the voter makes up his mind in a presidential campaign. New York: Columbia University Press. Lewis, T.G. (2009). Network science. Hoboken: Wiley. Lipman, W. ([1925] 2005). The phantom public. New York: Transaction Publishers. Lyotard, J.F. (1979). The postmodern condition: a report on knowledge. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. Manin B. (1997). The Principles of Representative Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mouffe, C. (2000). The democratic paradox. London: Verso. Newman, M., Barabàsi, A.L., & Watts, D.J. (2006). The structure and dynamics of networks. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Noveck, B.S. (2009). Wiki government. Washington: Brookings Institution Press. Omdahl, S.E. (2013). Digitaliseringens dilemmaer. In S.E. Omdahl (Ed.)Journalistikk og demokrati. Hvor går mediene? Hva kan gjøres? Oslo: Fritt Ord. Ong, W.J. ([1982] 2002). Orality and literacy. The technologizing of the word. London: Routledge. Ottosen, R. & Krumsvik, A..H. (2012). Digital Challenges on the Norwegian Media Scene. Nordicom Review 33(2), 43–55. Peters, B. (2008a). The meaning of the public sphere. In Wessler, H. (Ed.) Public deliberation and public culture. The writings of Bernhard Peters, 1993–2005. New York: Palgrave Macmillan., 33–67. Peters, B. (2008b), On public deliberation and public culture. In Wessler, H. (Ed.) Public deliberation and public culture. The writings of Bernhard Peters, 1993–2005. New York: Palgrave Macmillan., 68–118. Rainie, L. & Wellman, B. (2012). Networked. The new operating system. Cambridge: MIT Press. Rasmussen, T. (2008). The Internet and Differentiation in the Political Public Sphere. Nordicom Review 29(2), 73–84.

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Signe Bock Segaard

6 The Institutional Anchoring of Social Media Venues as Arenas for Local Political Communication. Perceptions by Voters and Politicians 6.1 Introduction10 In today’s digital world, there are no obstacles preventing conversation and the flow of information in terms of time or space. This is the case across the whole world. Information and communication technology infrastructure are global and are considered two of the most important drivers of development and growth (United Nations, 2015). However, there are many prerequisites for such a positive impact, and not all countries have equivalent conditions to ensure this. Nordic countries, however, are in a special category of frontrunners, and according to the World Economic Forum and INSEAD (2015, p. 13) this has been the case for several years: Europe is home to some of the best connected and most innovation-driven economies in the world. In particular, the Nordics-Finland (2nd), Sweden (3rd), Norway (5th), Denmark (15th), and Iceland (19th) – continue to perform well. Indeed, these five countries have featured in the top 20 of every edition since 2012.

This ranking refers to what extent information and communication technologies (ICTs) play a significant role in ‘supporting inclusive growth’ (World Economic Forum & INSEAD, 2015:3) and is based on the Networked Readiness Index 2015 that consists of indicators at different levels and in different sectors. Looking in more detail at the Nordic countries, it is not only at the societal, governmental and business levels that ICTs are implemented as driving forces but also at the individual level. In particular, social media play a prominent role in the way many people communicate and get information in everyday life (Enjolras, Karlsen, Steen-Johnsen, & Wollebæk, 2013). With specific attention to one Nordic country, Norway, this article focuses on to what extent this status of ICTs as prominent channels for information and communication at different levels is reflected in people’s attitudes to communication in the local political sphere. I ask how politicians and voters perceive social media venues as communication channels and to what extent they recognize social media venues as suitable arenas for local election campaigns.

10 The literature review, the methodological approach and analyses are partly based on previous work by the author (Segaard, 2015). © 2017 Fredrik Engelstad, Håkon Larsen, Jon Rogstad, Kari Steen-Johnsen This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.

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The conditions for communication between politicians and voters seem to be changing. This is not only due to the overall status of ICTs in society but the dynamic between offline and online media and between old and new media that creates a landscape characterized by an abundance of information and communication channels. This can be understood in light of what Streeck and Thelen (2005) call ‘layering’, which implies an institutional anchoring of arenas for local political communication via a process. A new technology is developed, and people – politicians and voters – assume an attitude toward it. They converge in terms of their aims and the way in which they use the new technology. This forms the basis of an institutional process. If the institution – in this case social media as an arena for political communication between voters and local politicians – is accepted and active, it will regulate the behaviour of the actors and the behaviour will in return affect the institution. This implies a mutual influence between the behaviour and the institution (Barley & Tolbert, 1997, p. 94). Furthermore, the institutionalizing is about the expectations and perceptions of what arenas and channels for information and communication should be. Such expectations and perceptions will be significant for the institutional process because they guide people’s behaviour, and it is through behaviour and underlying norms that institutions are established and maintained (Barley & Tolbert, 1997, p. 94). This approach to institutionalizing builds on neo-institutionalism’s understanding of an institution as an relatively stable constellation of formal and informal procedures, norms, values and understandings that exhibit some regularities and that constrain the behaviour of the institution’s members (Peters, 2005, pp. 18–19). In relation to this article, such an approach implies an assumption that social media venues as arenas for political communication over time will involve a constellation of actors – politicians and voters – who integrate and influence each other through formal and informal structures. In this way, social media are maintained as a communicative political institution. An underlying premise for an institutional perspective on political communication in social media is that social media, just like other types of media such as newspapers and television, may be considered as an (potential) institution in the political sphere, as an arena for information sharing and communication between politicians and voters. It is well known that television is an established communicative institution for Norwegian political parties, individual candidates and voters. However, local newspapers have traditionally been and still are the most important information sources for voters in local election campaigns (Karlsen, 2011b, 2009a). Talking about the most important medium may, however, veil the fact that people – voters as well as politicians – usually use more than one medium to collect and share political information. The Internet and social media are relatively new arenas and may be used alone or in combination with other arenas for information and communication purposes (Segaard, 2013). In local election campaigns, it is the youth who use the Internet most as a political information platform. However, the Internet has become more important for all voter groups and politicians in the last decade (Karlsen, 2011b).

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This development has resulted in different ideas of the democratic value of the Internet and social media as political communicative institutions, which is the point of departure for this article.

6.1.1 Institutionalization of Social Media Venues as Political Arenas The rapid expansion of social media and the public’s enthusiastic reception and use of it in everyday life seemed to promise an imminent revitalization of democratic processes. Social media venues provide a vehicle that allows people to get together and develop communicative communities in a virtual public sphere (Grönlund, Strandberg & Himmelroos, 2009). Social media are presumed to enable communication between citizens and politicians, a place to discuss issues and share opinions to a far higher degree compared to conventional means (Papacharissi, 2009; Shirky, 2008). In other words, social media could become an important arena for the public to debate political issues, where the voices of individual voters and politicians can be heard. But social media can also help campaigning politicians mobilize support and voters, thus enhancing their electoral chances in a direct way (Karlsen, 2011a). While expectations remain high in some places, the empirical evidence that social media are indeed such participatory political arenas has yet to manifest itself. Political communication online is still very often unidirectional, flowing from the parties and leading candidates to the voters (Karlsen, 2009b, p. 9; Strandberg, 2008) and is something that principally engages the already politically active (offline) (Segaard & Nielsen, 2013). The reasons for this state of affairs stem from the digital divide perspective that emphasizes the socio-economic hallmarks of the actors and their political interests  – the reinforcement hypothesis (Norris, 2001). This hypothesis states that the use of digital tools reinforces the democratic divides between specific socioeconomic groups of citizens; the already empowered groups – the socioeconomically privileged groups, especially men – become even more empowered. Although the research has provided many answers in addressing this issue, there are still gaps. While observers have focused on the use of social media, little is known about actors’ perceptions of social media as platforms for political communication. However, to fully understand the institutional process, one should also take actors’ perceptions into account, as they may be significant in terms of affecting their actions and thus the institutional anchoring of social media venues as arenas for political communication. This is because behaviour reflects underlying understandings of the media as a technological platforms of communication (Orlikowski & Gash, 1994). Previous research has failed to show whether the non-realization of the touted democratic benefits of social media is due to the actors having different perceptions. If social media venues are going to be generally recognized arenas for political communication between politicians and voters, both groups of actors need to recognize them as such. That is to say that social media as arenas for political communication should be institutionally

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anchored with the central stakeholders, voters and politicians. This article attempts to remedy this situation with its focus on voters’ and politicians’ perceptions of social media. If social media are ever going to become significant platforms for political communication between politicians and voters, both groups will need to perceive these media as a useful means of communicating (Jakobsen, 1960, p. 3). In other words, if the voters primarily consider social media as vehicles for private conversation or entertainment, it will not be easy for politicians to reach them via this method and get their message across. In this study, social media are represented by examples such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Flickr. In exploring the institutional anchoring of social media venues as political communicative arenas, the article asks to what extent politicians and voters consider social media as suitable arenas for communicating and exchanging political information. In doing this, the article maps voters’ and politicians’ perceptions of social media. Furthermore, the article discusses these perceptions in answering two underlying questions: Do voters and politicians tally with each other in how they view social media? Do the perceptions of voters and politicians have similar explanations at the individual level with regard to central background factors, such as gender, age, socioeconomic status and competence with new technologies? The article explores these questions in light of the neo-institutional perspective of rational choice that explains ‘the existence of the institution by reference to the value those functions have for the actors affected by the institution’ (Hall & Taylor, 1996: 13; see also Segaard, 2010). It is about the actors’ perceptions of the utilitarian value of social media in a political communicative context. The context of the study is Norway. More than 90  percent of the Norwegian population has access to the Internet at home, and three out of five participate in social media (Statistics Norway, 2012). The young and middle aged have the highest involvement, but it is quite high – and increasing – among seniors. These statistics put Norway in the vanguard of the global information society (Eurostat, 2016). Social media, it is safe to say, are now an integral part of everyday life for most people in Norway. It should therefore be expected that users see social media as an important information and communication tool and as useful for many things, such as entertainment, private relationships and politics. The population density in Norway is relatively low and many places are geographically rather inaccessible; more than half of the 428 municipalities are small, with fewer than 5000 inhabitants. This makes social media particularly useful as a means of local political communication. It is also a fact that more than one third of the adult population have participated in at least one debate on the Internet; 22 percent have participated in at least one debate on Facebook (Enjolras, 2013, p.  119). The overall conclusion in recent Norwegian research regarding the political use of social media is that the reinforcement hypothesis is not confirmed in Norway (Enjolras et. al., 2013). In this sense, the Norwegian case may prove useful as a critical case in the use of social media as a vehicle enabling com-



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munication between voters and politicians. One implication of such a critical case perspective is that if people – voters and politicians – are expected to value social media as useful platforms for sharing information, exchanging opinions and engaging in discussions on political matters, they would certainly be expected to do so in the Norwegian case. More generally, it implies that social media venues may be considered institutions for local political communication in Norway. Moreover, given the assumption that because Norway is a leader other countries will follow, it is reasonable to assume that the results may be valid for comparable countries. The study is based on data from two identical questionnaire batteries concerning the views of voters and politicians on social media. The questionnaire batteries were used in two quantitative surveys, one of the general population (the voters) and one of political candidates in the 2011 local elections. The data – which reflect the same context, the same time period and identical battery items – give a unique opportunity to investigate the main question of this article – whether social media are perceived as suitable platforms for political communication. The following section presents the framework of the study. It presents theoretical arguments for how to approach social media venues as institutions and reviews the main conclusions of previous research on social media as a political tool. The review forms the basis of the empirical hypotheses of the study. After presenting the methodological design and the dependent variables, voters’ and politicians’ views about social media are analysed. The concluding section summarizes the main results regarding the status of social media venues as arenas for political communication and discusses to what extent these new media are considered to be anchored as institutions for local political communication between politicians and voters.

6.2 Framework and Expectations 6.2.1 Rational Actors within Political Institutions To understand the institutional process of social media venues becoming arenas for local political communication between politicians and voters in terms of common practices, norms and understandings, it may be useful to examine rational choice institutionalism (Hall & Taylor, 1996; Peters, 2005). Rational choice institutionalism contributes to understanding how and why social media may be anchored among politicians and voters because it highlights what may motivate stakeholders’ behaviour and use of social media in a political context and thus the establishment of social media venues as communicative institutions. The main argument in rational choice institutionalism is that ‘human behaviour is instrumental in its nature and based on strategic calculation given an aim of utility maximization in relation to a specific goal’ (Segaard, 2010, table 15 [author’s translation]). In relation to this article, this implies an assumption that social media may be

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established as a common communicative institution through a process of adaptation if voters and politicians perceive social media to be a useful way of communicating. The expectation of lower transaction costs is thereby considered to be the key driving force of the institutional process. In a political communicative context, transaction costs may refer to accessibility, time use and political influence compared to other media and information channels, such as television, radio, newspapers and husting events. It is rational for voters and politicians to prefer social media if they consider social media to be the most accessible, to require less time to use and/or to give the highest benefit with regard to influencing the political debate and the actors involved in the debate. The assumption implies an implicit comparison to other information and communication arenas; however, it does not mean it may be rational to prefer one arena only. The rational choice perspective involves an instrumental approach to the concept of utility and to the question of the institutional anchoring of social media venues as arenas for local political communication between politicians and voters: –– Social media will become institutionally anchored among politicians as arenas for information and communication if they perceive social media to be useful means for communicating their politics and for reaching and convincing voters. –– Social media will become institutionally anchored among voters as arenas for information and communication if they perceive using social media to be an easy way to become informed about political matter and to communicate their political statements. Due to the lack of previous research focusing on politicians’ and voters’ perceptions and expectations of social media, for the present purposes a close relationship between attitudes and actual behaviour is assumed. This assumption is based on institutional perspectives and social cognitive perspectives, such as the technological frames model of Wanda J. Orlikowski and Debra C. Gash (1994). The key argument of this model is that an understanding of people’s interpretations of a technology is critical to understanding their interaction with it. To interact with technology, people have to make sense of it; and in this sense-making process, they develop particular assumptions, expectations, and knowledge of the technology, which then serve to shape subsequent actions toward it. (1994, p. 175)

Like Orlikowski and Gash, I also find it appropriate to consider the actors in question as members of different social groups – voters and politicians – each of which shares some common features. As two distinct groups, voters and politicians may have different interpretations of social media that are constrained by their different knowledge bases, objectives and the wider context. Therefore, it is likely to find incongruence in technology frames between voters and politicians. According to Orlikowski and Gash (1994:180), incongruence can lead to misunderstandings and difficulties



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interacting and communicating and therefore failure in the institutional process of social media as arenas for political communication. Congruence is an important condition of successful communication between voters and politicians and thus the institutional anchoring of social media as arenas for political communication. However, given the view that politicians act strategically and rationally and that ‘politicians’ belief in the power of media increases their motivation and effort to appear in media’ (Cohen, Tsfati & Sheafer, 2008, abstract), it is expected that their perceptions reflect their experiences with voters’ actual behaviour and views. Therefore, it is hypothesized that consistency develops between politicians’ and voters’ respective views on what they consider to be appropriate platforms for communicating with each other. This expectation is in accordance with the concept of strategic calculation in rational choice institutionalism perspective. One objection to this collective perspective on voters and politicians is that they are individuals and that people’s characteristics and traits influence media perceptions and behaviours. Papacharissi and Rubin (2000, p. 180) underline the complexity of factors that determinate actual media use: ‘Certain social and psychological factors, along with perceptions of the medium, should influence Internet use’. I agree – and indeed argue – that even if technological frames are a social phenomenon, they are individually held as well. This means that individual characteristics and traits such as gender, interests and competence may affect how a person perceives and uses social media in a political context. The analysis takes this perspective into account when the two groups are analysed separately in light of demographic, socioeconomic, political and ICT-related factors. The question is whether the social media frame is affected by individual background factors.

6.2.2 Previous Research on Social Media and the Implications of Individual Factors With this rational approach in mind, this section draws on previous research on the actual political use of social media and formulates some expectations about voters’ and politicians’ perceptions of social media in light of individual background factors. Since Pippa Norris introduced the reinforcement hypothesis in 2001, international research on political Internet communication and later on social media has almost unanimously concluded that there is no reason to expect the unique democratic potential of the online media to engage broad swathes of the public to automatically manifest itself in political communication. On the contrary, Norris argues the use of new media in the political space reinforces rather than reduces existing political inequalities between different groups of citizens (e.g. Enjolras & Segaard, 2011; Fuller 2004; Sipior & Ward, 2005; Strandberg, 2008; Torpe, 2007). The reinforcement argument has undoubtedly proven its value, but the fact that times change – as do the technology available and people’s use of it – justifies new

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studies. This is especially the case in Norway because of the changes in the underlying conditions of inequality in access to and use of the new technologies. The question of accessibility is almost irrelevant in Norway, and the reinforcement argument is no longer confirmed by Norwegian empirical research (Enjolras et al., 2013, pp.:52, 130). The conclusions of previous Norwegian studies are pertinent in this regard. The literature has found that the normalization of social media as communicative platforms for most Norwegians has impacted communication in general and communication within the political sphere in particular. Rune Karlsen (2011a) found that Norwegian politicians used social media extensively in the run-up to the 2009 national election. Social media receive a lot of public attention, although only a minority of voters actually visited politicians’ blogs or examined their Facebook profiles. This finding – that politicians are more prone to use social media than voters – was confirmed in a study by Segaard and Nielsen on election blogs during the 2011 local elections. Politicians particularly use election blogs to communicate party-related information and to debate with other politicians (Segaard & Nielsen, 2012). Politicians writing election blogs are overwhelmingly male; however, in the use of social media with a private profile in the local election campaign, there were no gender differences among politicians. The researchers also found that young politicians are more likely to use social media than senior politicians and that politicians with a specific focus on young voters are bigger users of social media than their colleges. Furthermore, all other things being equal, high ICT competence seems to have a positive effect on politicians’ use of social media in election campaigns, while education, income and political experience do not seem to matter as much. On this basis, the researchers conclude the use of social media in political campaigns may have a democratic effect on which of the politicians get to speak in public. This conclusion is supported by Danish studies as well (Hansen & Hoff, 2010, p. 19). Regarding the voters and the population in general, recent Norwegian research on the political use of social media among young people found that social media venues are in fact operating as arenas for exercising active citizenship, although the use of social media as political tools is reserved to the few (Enjolras & Segaard, 2011). Moreover, people who use one online arena for political purposes are likely to use others as well (Enjolras et al., 2013, pp. 119–120). Social media do mobilize new groups to get (more) involved in politics as well. People with little political interest grow more interested over time from using social media. Overall, and looking at the political use of all kinds of social media and especially Facebook, gender does not seem to matter. However, in some social media venues, such as Twitter and blogs, the political debate is dominated by male users. Compared with other arenas hosting political debate, participants overwhelmingly tend to be younger people. The effect of education varies depending on the kind of political activity on social media. In general, education does not seem to have a significant effect on the political use of social media (for details, see Enjolras & Segaard, 2011). In more general terms, previous research has shown that Norwegian voters are indeed in the vanguard in using electronic tools



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in democratic processes. One example is the trials with Internet voting in the local election in 2011 and the national election in 2013 where voters’ use of and support of Internet voting was very high (Segaard, Baldersheim & Saglie, 2012; Segaard, Christensen, Folkestad & Saglie, 2014). The main reason for this is that voters’ view Internet voting as an easy and practical way of voting. In other words, voters use Internet voting because it is a rational way of voting. To sum up and to make clear the expectations about the implications of individual characteristics and traits, the reinforcement hypothesis is in general not confirmed by the Norwegian data; the political use of social media does not seem to support expectations created by the digital divide perspective to any great extent. Nevertheless, the most politically active people offline, who have a high degree of political interest, are still the most frequent users of social media for political purposes. However, the political use of social media does stimulate the political interest of people who originally had little interest in politics. Moreover, gender has no impact when looking at voters’ political use of social media in general, including Facebook, but on other social media, male debaters are in the majority. The significance of age and education level are more noticeable but in a way that is inconsistent with the reinforcement argument. Given our framework, similar correlations between these individual background variables and perceptions of social media in a political context are expected. To what extent this is actually the case will be clarified in empirical analyses. Overall, the expectation is that Norwegian voters and politicians view social media in a similar way, and more specifically that they to a great degree consider this new media platform as a suitable shared arena for exchanging political information and communicating. In other words, social media is expected to be considered as an important and useful institution for political communication. The analysis relies on the belief that the frames of social media as a new technology for political communication provide a background for understanding actual behaviour and the use of social media, that politicians act rationally and that Norway is a critical case.

6.3 Measuring Perceptions of Social Media The study builds on empirical data derived from two quantitative surveys carried out in the weeks after the Norwegian local elections of 2011. Local elections at the municipal and county level are held every fourth year, and voter turnout is typically about 64  percent. A web-based questionnaire was addressed to all local politicians who were standing for election at the municipal and/or county level in the region of Sogn and Fjordane and who had a publicly11 accessible e-mail address. Seventy  percent

11 Found using Google or through the political parties.

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Table 1: Statements measuring perceptions of social media as political platforms. NO.

Statement

1

Social media are important platforms in political election campaigns.

2

Social media are chiefly platforms for private conversations.

3

Social media are more apt for entertainment than for political debate.

4

I prefer to participate on hustings rather than to debate in social media.

5a

I prefer to write a letter to a newspaper rather than posting a letter on social media.

5b

I prefer to read a politician’s letter in a newspaper rather than on social media.

of all politicians standing for election had such an address. In total, 780 politicians answered the survey (a response rate of 40 percent). Given that the region of Sogn and Fjordane has only small and medium-sized municipalities, the results of this survey can be generalized to many local politicians in small and medium-sized municipalities in Norway with a publicly accessible e-mail address12. Moreover, as there is no argument for saying that local politicians in Sogn and Fjordane are more technologyoriented than politicians elsewhere in Norway, the results of this study may be interpreted as a ‘basic’ picture of Norwegian local politicians’ perceptions in general. In small municipalities, the perceived need for new channels of information and communication can be assumed to be smaller than in municipalities with bigger and more heterogeneous groups of citizens. However, this assumption is only partly confirmed by Norwegian research on political communication that states that the impact of municipality size has weakened over the last decade because municipalities have become more alike in their perceptions of the communication requirement (Haug, 2008, p. 112). The other dataset comes from the Local Democracy Survey 2011 (LDS 2011), a representative population survey at the national level (for details, see Bergh & Christensen, 2013). The analysis uses LDS 2011 data obtained verbally by telephone and in writing through the postal service. The respondents in the telephone survey all received a postal questionnaire with more questions to answer. The questions relevant for this study were included in the postal questionnaire; therefore, only the 1,068 respondents who took part in both parts are included in the analysis. They make up 60.2 percent of all respondents in the LDS 2011. The study uses a battery of five statements to measure voters’ and politicians’ perceptions of social media for entertainment, private and political use (see Table 1). Four of the statements were identical, while one (statement 5) was adjusted to fit a

12 For details, see Segaard (2013).



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voter’s and a politician’s perspective. This means that the I-person in statement 5a is a politician, while the I-person in statement 5b is a voter. The respondents were asked to respond to each of the statements by indicating their level of agreement on a fourpoint scale: ‘agree completely,’ ‘agree in part,’ ‘disagree in part,’ and ‘disagree completely.’ For statements 2–5, a high value (disagreement) indicates that social media are considered useful as political platforms, while the opposite is the case for the more general statement 1, which is without any objections. Statements 1, 2 and 3 are more general in nature, while statements 4 and 5 are more practical as they refer to the respondents’ preferences regarding their own participation in social media versus more conventional arenas for political communication. In accordance with rational choice institutionalism’s stress on the actors’ perception of the utilitarian value, it is the impression of usefulness at a general and practical individual level that in this sense is the key to understanding the implications of high or low perceptions.

6.4 Social Media as Suitable Arenas for Political Communication? In this section, the analysis will throw light on whether politicians and voters consider social media in a similar way and more specifically as apt arenas for political information and communication. As argued by the technological frame model, this is an important condition for using social media as successful communication arenas for politicians and voters alike, and thereby also a significant condition for institutional anchoring of social media venues as arenas for political communication. The last part of the section identifies the factors that determine the perceptions of social media as suitable arenas for political communication by analysing these specific views in light of central background factors at the level of the individual.

6.4.1 Voters’ and Politicians’ Perceptions Using the five statements presented in the previous section, the analysis will deal with voters’ and politicians’ perceptions of to what extent social media are suitable for political communication or whether social media are more appropriate for entertainment and private conversations. The percentages in Figure 1 reveal that voters and politicians share many of the same perceptions of social media, although there are some interesting differences. For example, both voters and politicians are divided between those who recognize social media as apt political arenas and those who do not. However, politicians are in general more likely to see social media as platforms for political communication. More than 80 percent of politicians agree that social media are important in election

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Figure 1: Voters’ and politicians’ perceptions of social media. percentage who partly or completely agree. ‘Don’t know’ responses are coded as missing values.Nvoter: 929–1026 Npolitician: 704–735

campaigns, while the figure for voters is 67 percent. From an overall perspective, this indicates that the majority of voters and politicians have largely the same view of social media as tools for political communication in that sense they are cognizant of the role of social media in a political context. However, this is when no objections are mentioned. When confronted with two popular ways of understanding social media  – as arenas for private conversations and arenas for entertainment  – slightly fewer than 50 percent of the politicians but 55–61 percent of voters agree that social media are better for these purposes. However, a large minority of both groups does not agree. In general terms, voters are slightly less focused on politics in social media than are politicians. Regarding the more practical perceptions and how voters and politicians actually prefer to be informed about and participate in political matters, it is obvious that they have the same opinion about hustings versus debates in social media. Slightly less than 70 percent prefer participating on hustings, while about one in three do not prefer hustings to debating in social media. Given the fact that very few actually participate in hustings, this finding can be interpreted as a marked preference for faceto-face meetings rather than online meetings or perhaps just as a ‘politically correct’ answer. When it comes to the use of newspapers versus social media, a significant smaller share of politicians prefer to write a letter to a newspaper (58%) than voters who prefer to read letters to the editor (76%), in comparison with postings on social media. This difference could be a sign of a challenge regarding practical implications:



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Table 2: Index measuring the perception of social media along a political/nonpolitical dimension, voters and politicians (descriptive statistics) Voters

Index*

Politicians

Mean

Std. deviation Skewness N

Mean

Std. deviation Skewness

N

4.87

2.135

5.60

2.095

746

0.226

1001

-0.006

*Minimum and maximum is 1 and 10, respectively.

the messages of political actors do not always reach their intended recipients, the voters. But it is also the case that the number of voters who disagree with the statement is relatively significant (24%). Looking at Figure 1, it is tempting to note the differences between voters and politicians and the fact that many have a positive opinion of social media as integrative political arenas. However, the differences are relatively small, and the proportion of voters and politicians who are more guarded in their praise is conspicuous. To conclude, it is somehow clear that voters and especially politicians to a certain degree recognize social media as apt arenas for political communication at the general level, while at the practical level they – especially voters – prefer conventional arenas. However, a relatively large share of both groups recognize the political communicative role of social media. To further explore voters’ and politicians’ perceptions of social media, a factor analysis of the five statements presented in Table 1 is carried out for both groups of actors. The principal components factor analysis of both indicator sets returns only one factor with an associated eigenvalue greater than one. This means that the data reveal a one-dimensional consideration of social media for both voters and politicians, which may be called a political/non-political dimension. In addition, a reliability test (Cronbach’s alpha) shows a high degree of internal consistency of the indicator set, which means that the five items measure the same concept (Tavakol & Dennick, 2011). However, the Cronbach’s alpha is slightly greater for the politicians than for the voters (0.803 vs. 0.793, respectively), indicating that politicians are more clear in their assessment of social media as political rather than a nonpolitical platforms than are voters. The further analysis of voters’ and politicians’ perceptions of social media will be based on the one-dimensional understanding of social media along a political/nonpolitical dimension. Based on the indicator set consisting of the five statements, two 10-point indexes have been constructed – one for voters and one for politicians. High index values indicate an understanding of social media as useful political platforms, whereas low values mean that this is not the case. Respondents who responded to at least three of the five statements are included in the index construction, and missing values are replaced by the average of the valid values. Table 2 presents each 10-point index by descriptive statistics.

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Looking at the results in Table 2, it is worth noting that the indexvoters is slightly right-skewed and has a mean below 5, while the indexpoliticians has a mean higher than 5 and is only very slightly left-skewed. This supports the overall conclusion that politicians in general and to a greater degree than voters recognize the role of social media as platforms for political communication, although a majority of both groups recognize social media as apt political arenas. The last point indicates a process of institutionalizing. In the next section, possible explanations for voters’ and politicians’ views of social media are explored.

6.4.2 Explanation of the Perceptions: the Implications of Individual Characteristics In the previous section, the analysis showed that voters’ and politicians’ views of the social media are rather similar, but also different in some ways. The question that remains to be explored is what explains voters’ and politicians’ respective views of social media. Based on the two indexes, indexvoters and indexpoliticians, regression analyses are carried out to determine whether certain demographic, socioeconomic, politics-related factors have an impact on opinions about social media as platforms for political communication. The rationale for choosing these specific background variables rests on earlier media research in general and research on the political use of social media more specifically, outlined in the previous paragraph. Table 3 shows the results of regression analyses (OLS) carried out separately for voters and politicians. Model 1 shows the extent to which demographic and socioeconomic variables affect opinions of social media as political platforms. In addition to these background variables, ICT competence is included in Model 2 because it could affect how one views new technology. Model 3 shows the importance of the attributes of voters and politicians. The voter-specific variables measure political interest and participation (general political interest and participation in the local 2011 election (voted/not voted)) and political use of Internet (the use of the Internet as an information channel during the local election campaign). The politician-specific variables measure the politicians’ familiarity with social media in a political setting (the use of social media with a private profile in the 2011 election campaign) and whether the politicians have a specific focus on young voters. Before going into detail, it is worth mentioning that the adjusted R-squares suggest that the explained variance is considerably greater when the politician-specific variables are introduced into the politician analysis but only slightly greater when voterspecific variables are introduced. For voters, it is the inclusion of ICT competence that has the greatest significance for the explained variance. Starting with the specific variables for voters and politicians in Model 3, the analysis shows some interesting results given the debate on the validity of the reinforcement hypothesis. The analysis reveals that political interest and participation



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in elections have no significant influence on voters’ opinions of social media. One implication of this is that social media as arenas for political communication does not ‘repel’ people with high or low interest. In that sense, social media may help to overcome the reinforcement effect. The only significant effect on voters’ perceptions comes from the issue of whether voters frequently used the Internet as an information channel during the election campaign. When controlled for other relevant conditions, the high frequency users are most likely to consider social media as apt platforms for political communication. This is not a surprise in light of previous research that states that experience with the communication medium is a strong predictor for the perception of its richness (Carlsson & Zmud, 1999). When it comes to the politicians, it is clear that social media use in the election campaign and an explicit focus on young voters increase the tendency to consider social media as political platforms of current interest. The last point, that is, focus on young voters, brings up the significance of the background variables because it ‘speaks to’ the result that young more than old voters tend to consider social media in the same way. Moreover, the analysis confirms the significance of age, although not only directly but also indirectly through the specific group variables, cf. the weaker but still significant effect in Model 3. The effect of age on voters’ and politicians’ perceptions implies a somewhat greater tendency of young people to judge social media as useful platforms for political communication. Unlike previous research on the political use of social media, our analysis indicates that female voters and politicians are indeed more likely to assess social media as relevant arenas for political communication than are their male counterparts. This is the case even when controlling for other factors. There are two possible explanations for this gender discrepancy. It is a fact that in absolute numbers Norwegian women are bigger users of social media in general, including Facebook, than men, and women may therefore be more familiar with social media as an information and communication tool at the everyday level. It may therefore be assumed that women’s experience with social media in everyday communication informs their view of social media as an apt arena for political communication. Furthermore, even if Norwegian women are not as visible as men in public debates due to lower active participation, this is not synonymous with being absent. Women’s use of the media may be more passive as ‘listeners’ to the political debates on social media sites, giving them another frame of reference against which to assess the suitability of social media in a political context. The results in Table 3 indicate that while household income has no significant effect on voters’ perceptions, in the analysis of politicians’ perceptions, income has a significant positive effect that gets even stronger when controlling for the politician-specific variables. High income would seem to correlate with a positive opinion of social media’s potential role as a political arena. The nonsignificant but negative effect of income on voters is as expected, whereas the positive effect on politicians is somewhat surprising given the Norwegian context. However, it is not more surprising

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 The Institutional Anchoring of Social Media Venues as Arenas

Table 3: What explains the views on social media as political platforms? (unstandardized B-coefficient (OLS))a

Indexvoters

Indexpoliticians

Model 1

Model 2

Model 3

Model 1

Model 2

Model 3

Constant

5.060

4.569

4.698

3.799

3.302

2.840

Genderb

0.470**

0.559**

0.576**

0.527**

0.530**

0.494**

Age

-0.024**

-0.013**

-0.011*

-0.035**

-0.030**

-0.015*

Education levele,l

-0.168

-0.335**

-0.331**

0.405**

0.345*

0.387**

0.022

-0.001

-0.008

0.151*

0.135*

0.150**

0.454**

0.411**

0.311*

0.236

c

Household income

f

ICT competence

d,l

Political interestg

-0.133

Voted in the local 2011 electionh

0.020

Used the Internet often as an information channel during the local 2011 election campaigni

0.234**

Used social media with a private profile in the local 2011 election campaignj

1.122**

A specific focus on young votersk

0.501**

Adjusted-R2

0.040

0.062

0.066

0.079

0.084

0.154

Nvoter= 928 Npolitician=710

**Significant at the 1% level *Significant at the 5% level A control for multicollinearity shows that the independent variables are linearly independent (tolerance ˃ 0.20). a

b

0=male, 1=female.

c

Centralized continuous variable

d

0=very bad, 1=bad, 2=good, 3=very good

0=no education, 1=primary and secondary school, 2=upper secondary school, 3=college/ university e

f

Six-scale variable, 0=0-199.999 NOK, 5=more than 1.000.000 NOK

g

0=no interest, 1=small interest, 2=some interest, 3=much interest

h

0=no, 1=yes

I

0=never, 1= seldom, 2=at least once a week, 3=every day

j

0=no, 1=yes

k

0=no, 1=yes

The distribution on the variable is somewhat skewed: very few respondents (voters and politicians) actually have a low value. l



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that it can be explained by the fact that politicians strong in resources have better opportunities to use more channels – a kind of digital divide factor. Regarding the two variables related to knowledge, highest education level and ICT competence, the analysis documents clear differences between voters and politicians. Education level has a significant effect on both groups, but it is opposite; politicians with high education levels consider social media a more relevant arena for political communication than their counterparts with fewer educational achievements. The opposite is the case for voters, where less well educated voters have a tendency to be slightly more positive. The discrepancy may be related to the conclusion in previous Norwegian research that social media do mobilize new voters in politics who often use social media only for political communication, while social media are often used as a supplement by politicians with plenty of resources but are rarely used by politicians with fewer resources. Unlike education level, the effect of ICT competence is positive for voters and politicians; high ICT competence promotes a view of social media as apt arenas for political communication. However, the effect is significant only for voters when controlled for group-specific variables. This indicates that the effect for politicians is of a more indirect nature but still real. However, it may also indicate that, independent of technological skills, most politicians recognize the political communicative role of social media. This is especially the case for politicians focusing on young voters, using social media themselves or just because it is politically correct to do it in light of ‘social forces, such as others’ attitudes and symbolic cues (Treviño, Webster & Stein, 2000:164). The fact that education level and ICT competence have opposite effects explains why the negative effect of education becomes stronger (significant) when controlling for ICT competence (Model 2).

6.5 Conclusions: Social Media Venues as Institutions for Political Communication This article has focused on social media and politicians’ and voters’ perceptions of it as an arena for local political communication. The reason for this focus is that society has experienced fundamental changes in how people communicate because of rapid developments in new technologies. The changes concern not only the practical use of communication technologies but norms, expectations and perceptions as well and thus institutional changes. In light of this and the widespread belief in the democratic political benefits of new communication technologies, the analysis has cast light on the extent to which social media is anchored as an institution for political communication between local politicians and voters. The technological frames model and the rational choice perspective within institutionalism have been used as reference points for the analysis. That is, the study gives credence to the argument that ‘an

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 The Institutional Anchoring of Social Media Venues as Arenas

understanding of people’s interpretations of a technology is critical to understanding their interaction with it’ (Orlikowski & Gash, 1994, p.  175). Moreover, it is assumed that before social media can provide a significant platform for political communication between voters and politicians, both groups must see social media as an appropriate vehicle for such communication and expect it to function as such. In this sense, both groups of political actors support social media as an institution for political communication and therefore recognize shared norms, rules and understandings. That is to say, the institutional anchoring of social media as an arena for local political communication is proceeding. According to the rational choice perspective, the driving force may be the experience of usefulness. In line with this, the main conclusion is that we have strong indications that the institutionalization of social media as a political arena is in progress. However, the question is how stable the institutionalization is. The analysis shows that many voters and politicians see social media in general as an appropriate platform for political communication and expect them to function as such, which seems to corroborate expectations of social media to constitute a shared arena for both voters and politicians. Furthermore, although in the overall picture voters’ and politicians’ perceptions of social media are not that dissimilar along a political/non-political dimension. Politicians are more likely than voters to recognize the role of social media as an apt platform for political communication. This difference may be related to different views on the power and richness of social media, as well as different views on ‘usefulness’ given the different roles of the two groups in a political context. Politicians act strategically according to their belief in the power of social media, while voters are more concerned about its practical aspects (Cohen, Tsfati & Sheafer, 2008). The study indicates that this is even the case for local politicians in small and medium-sized municipalities. Moreover, the fact that politicians – the stable supply side of political communication  – are more interested in social media means that social media will be used in such a context. And the fact that a great portion of voters, especially the young, recognizes social media as an appropriate political channel indicates that there is an audience – a demand side – and that this audience may well get bigger in the future. All together, these findings call attention to a process of institutionalizing that is anchored in the central actors’ perceptions of what is useful. Nevertheless, even if many voters and politicians recognize the potential political communicative role of social media, it is not without provisos. The provisos are, for instance, related to a preference for more conventional arenas for political communication, such as newspapers and face-to-face meetings. It seems obvious to interpret this finding as a sign of a ‘want all’ mentality in contrast to an ‘either/or’ mentality. In terms of institutionalizing, this observation refers to institutional change through layering, which means a change that ‘can set in motion path-altering dynamics through a mechanism of what we might think of as differential growth’ (Streeck & Thelen, 2005, p.  23). The practical explanation for layering and differential growth may be that for many actors it is rational to prefer more than just one arena for political com-

References 

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munication, depending on the aim and scope of the communication relevant to the matter of context. They may not consider old and new media as mutually exclusive channels for information and communication but as complementary. The media may be complementary in the sense that they are used to reach different audiences or that they are used for different kinds of information and communication. However, what is interesting in light of the discourse on the democratic potential of new media is that the analysis indicates that social media may function as arenas for overcoming some aspects of the reinforcement effect in the traditional political sphere, meaning that social media as an institution for political communication does not reinforce common democratic divides. Some groups of voters who are often not very visible in traditional offline political communication, such as women, young people and less well educated people, have a stronger tendency to perceive social media as a suitable arena for political communication. This finding is important in light of the representative democracy argument that social and demographic representation is related to the representation of different attitudes and interests (Skjeie, 2014:15). In this way, the maintenance of the institutionalizing of social media as political arenas has democratic legitimacy. Furthermore, in contrast with the research on new media use, the study shows that political interest has no effect on such perceptions (Kim, Wyatt & Katz, 1999). These findings are suggestive because they indicate that social media, unlike more conventional media institutions, may have the potential to become an institution for political mobilization among groups that traditionally are left out of or at least are less visible in political arenas. It is an optimistic conclusion that contrasts with much of the research but is nonetheless confirmed by data on the perceptions of social media from a frontrunner, Norway, in the diffusion and use of new technologies in general and of social media in particular in everyday communication. It appears that the institutional anchoring of social media as an arena for political communication may complement other institutions of political communication and in that way be a contribution rather than a replacement.

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Fredrik Engelstad

7 Strategic Communication and Institutional Change Far-reaching changes in communication patterns in modern societies have created new structural transformations of the public sphere. Most visibly, the emergence of social media is constantly altering modes of opinion formation amongst the public (Rasmussen, 2009; Enjolras & Steen-Johnsen, this volume). Less visible but hardly less significant is the emergence of professionalized, strategic communication. The phenomenon is ubiquitous and far from new, but it has seen an explosive growth all over the Western world. The present discussion is focused on the Nordic neo-corporatist model, with Norway as the prime example. A simple indicator of the increase in professional communication is the number of information officers in the Norwegian civil service, which has tripled since 1995. Similar growth has taken place in the private sector. At the same time, the number of journalists has been declining since 2010; therefore, the balance between journalism and strategic communication is being altered. It is a common complaint that strategic communication is basically distorted by special interests, leading to manipulation of the public. This was forcefully expressed by Jürgen Habermas in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, in which he denounced the public relations (PR) industry along with the advertising business ([1962] 1989, p.  193ff). Habermas’ concerns have been repeated on a broad scale, ranging from academics (e.g. Allern, 2001; Callahan & Schnell, 2001; Davis, 2003) to official reports (Difi, 2011) to the hilarious comedy film Wag the Dog (Levinson, 1997). However, the opposite case can also be made: The enormous broadening of communication patterns in modern society, paired with the professional ethos of PR communicators (Grunig, 2011) have made citizens better informed and thus better able to make rational decisions on their own behalf. At the same time, professional communication must have strategic elements in order to reach its target groups. In this view, strategic communication contributes to broadening democracy. Which of these descriptions is the most valid? Democracy is a many-splendored thing; therefore, the question must be narrowed down and contextualized. Moreover, effects on democracy can hardly be assessed on a purely empirical basis but require discussion of relevant institutions and mechanisms and their preconditions. This means on the one hand specifying relevant actor groups and how their interests are structured and on the other hand the normative regulations and the norm conflicts that they encounter. Only then is it possible to draw inferences about the effects on democracy. The theory – or rather theories – of the public sphere developed by Jürgen Habermas is the natural point of departure for this discussion. By its combination of empirical and normative analysis, Habermas’ theory of the public sphere is the most ambitious endeavor up to now. Since the original publication of Structural Transformation, © 2017 Fredrik Engelstad, Håkon Larsen, Jon Rogstad, Kari Steen-Johnsen This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.



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Habermas has rephrased and revised his theory in several steps. In the following, the main focus will be on Habermas’ normative conception of the public sphere but with explicit reference to empirical descriptions of the field of strategic communication (also discussed in Engelstad, 2015). Is the theory of communicative rationality sufficient, or should it be complemented by other conceptions? The analysis proceeds in three steps: (i) a brief discussion of the Habermasian theory of the public sphere and of communicative rationality, (ii) empirical examples based on interviews with PR consultants and some of their counterparts and (iii) reflections on professional ethics.

7.1 Dynamic Elements of Change The growth in strategic communication is to a large extent created by the interaction between at least four salient groups: citizens as public, the news media, enterprises and bureaucracies and political actors. (i) Citizens. To a much greater extent than only a few decades ago, most people insist on being informed about issues concerning their daily lives, interests and rights. The extension of claims to information in the Norwegian Patient Rights Act provides an example. A contrast to the present situation is the quality of the information from governmental agencies in the mid-1980s about the effects of the Chernobyl incident. Flagrantly inadequate and even partly misleading, this mode of information is deemed unacceptable today (NOU 1986:24). (ii) The media have changed radically during the last decades (Eide 1984, 2002). Shortly after 1970, the Norwegian press loosened its ties to political parties and ideologies and redefined its mission as critical vis-à-vis powerful instances of all kinds. The result was greater independence and growth in investigative, even aggressive, journalism. (iii) Large enterprises encounter growing pressures regarding their contributions to corporate social responsibility and therefore their legitimacy (Ihlen, 2013; Barland, 2014). They need to explain and defend their dispositions and inform about future activities. In part, this is a reflection of the more critical press. Furthermore, many enterprises are spending significant resources on branding themselves as responsible social actors. The perceived need to improve the public image is copied from the private sector to the public sector (Wæraas, Byrkjeflot & Angell, 2011). (iv) Political decision making has become more complex due to technical issues, international trade cycles and transnational agreements and conventions (Østerud, Engelstad & Selle, 2003). This creates a need for popularization and simplification vis-à-vis the public. When political parties struggle over voter support, it is no longer sufficient that prominent politicians stage their own charisma to appeal to the public. These groups have in common not only that their interaction contributes to the growth of professionalized communication but also that it is linked to a set of democratic justifications: Citizens demand information. The news media is critical to power holders. Large organizations in the private and public sectors increase their informa-

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tion to the public. Politicians seek closer contact with their electorate to explain their policies. It is difficult to imagine pertinent improvements to democracy without such processes. More and better information also implies that communication has a strategic element. Yet, whether potentials for broadening democracy are fulfilled remains an open question. Strategic communication may undermine democratic deliberation in the public by the manipulation and distortion of facts. It follows that the net effects on the quality of democracy remain uncertain.

7.2 Habermas on the Public Sphere The crucial idea in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is the conception of the public sphere as a social field in its own right and not only as an appendix to politics. The public sphere is ascribed a double meaning, as a meeting place for enlightened discussion among citizens and as a channel for opinions and interest articulation vis-à-vis the government. Conversation unrestricted by convention and censorship pointed towards social arrangements based in reason and common interests. After the early enlightenment stage, the public sphere underwent drastic changes from the mid-nineteenth century, according to Habermas. The press became commercialized in a strong sense. Distinctions cherished by early liberal thinking between private and public and between economy and politics became blurred. At the same time, corporatist relationships emerged based on cooperation between interest organizations, along with increased state governance of the economy. The result was characterized by Habermas as a refeudalization of the public sphere, whereby free deliberation between citizens was replaced by bargaining and alliances among the top leadership in the core social sectors. During the 1970s, Habermas made a decisive break with the early Frankfurt School, replacing their historical–critical approach with an explicit normative theory founded on basic social community anchored in communication (Introduction, this volume). In the Theory of Communicative Action (1984, p. 99), Habermas set up three criteria for communication to be rational: actors should be able to justify that their utterances (a) live up to claims of truth, (b) are set forth with a sincere intention and (c) are compatible with general norms. These theoretical claims led to a partial revision of the theory of the public sphere based on normative structures of everyday patterns of communication and the requirements they demand of the participants. A decade later, in Between Facts and Norms ([1992] 1994), Habermas’ new conception was applied to a broad reinterpretation of political institutions in modern society. The increasing complexity and therefore the fragmentation of the public sphere as a ‘very complex network stretching out to a large number of overlapping international, national, regional, local, and subcultural arenas’ was acknowledged (Habermas, 1996, p. 373). In a modern society, the mass media does not constitute a



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threat to a well-functioning public sphere but rather constitutes a precondition for its functionality. However, the broader the public of the mass media, the more abstract it is (ibid.). What counts is what everyone is able to recognize and identify with. In the 2000s, Habermas returned anew to the role of the mass media in the public sphere, arguing for the direct relevance of the three claims of communicative rationality against possible objections that his theory is too general for practical application in a modern democratic society (Habermas 2006, 2009). As a point of departure, he used empirical studies confirming that the standards of communicative rationality are effective in interaction at the group level and argued that they may be applied as a critical standard to the public sphere, even if there is a great distance between small groups and the macro structures of the public sphere. Whereas commercialized mass media was regarded as a problem in Structural Transformation, Habermas now explicitly underlined its central position in a modern democracy. Does this simply mean that he had given up his earlier critical perspective? The answer is not obvious. His former criticism of modern media focused mainly on the pressures from external interests on the press, in combination with the dependence on advertising: The ‘transformation of the public sphere into a medium of advertising was met halfway by the commercialization of the press’ (1989, p.  189). Thirty years later, he acknowledges that the media can be more autonomous in regard to external pressures. Relatively recent changes in the Norwegian press, referred to above, are a good example. However, commercialization has an additional dimension. The need to secure income by selling newspapers to the public influences the way that news is selected and shaped. This aspect, however, remains in the background. The media is also a significant power holder. In line with standard media research, Habermas points to three forms of media power – influence over the agenda, selection of subjects and the angle of presentation. Even if the media is necessarily exerting power, he assumes that power is neutralized if two conditions are fulfilled: ‘… journalists operate within the guidelines of the public task of a “free” press and of an “independent” media system, as laid down by the constitution’ (2009, p. 169), while at the same time citizens have the possibility of participating in the public formation of opinion (2009, p. 171). As long as the media has editorial independence from owner interests, like all others its power will be mitigated by the rules of the game of the public sphere. These underlying ‘rules of the game’ are shaped by the three criteria of communicative rationality. Utterances in the public sphere are exposed to criticism from different parties and are judged against general norms of objectivity in public debate. Thanks to the ‘force (Kraft) of the better argument’, the public sphere has a purifying effect on the argumentation. Even if lobbyists, spokespersons, advocates and experts have strategic interests in the public sphere, strategic communication from powerful actors is bound to be measured up against norms of communication (Habermas 2009, p. 161). ‘And once the established rules constitute the right game – one that promises the generation of considered public opinions  – then even the powerful actors will

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only contribute to the mobilization of relevant issues, facts, and arguments’ (Habermas 2006, p. 420). Even though Habermas has developed a more realistic image of political and communicative processes than that in Structural Transformation, his new conception invites discussion. The most important to be treated here is the applicability of the norms of communicative action to fields where strategic communication is dominant. With Habermas’ turn to the theory of communicative rationality, several of the constituent traits of the modern media were relegated to the background. Interpretation in the light of institutional theory pointing to the multiplicity of regulations and roles would have made them more visible. The media consists of necessarily commercial actors whether or not they are independent of the economic interests of their owners, something that systematically guides conceptions of ‘news’. The professional journalistic gaze is used to prioritize information that is selective, simplified and saleable. Communication in the public sphere differs markedly from an ideal speech situation. Relevant roles are embedded in strategy and power. Rhetorical techniques are unavoidable for arguments to be accepted; they must be presented in a way that makes them recognizable and understandable for a large and heterogeneous public. Professionalized roles with their specific norms and strategies have developed alongside professional communication, both in independent agencies and in communication departments, and they obviously are not independent of employers. It follows that not only have journalists and communicators opposite interests, but their role relations imply that conflict is institutionalized. When Habermas denounces this as a serious problem, a core assumption is that his three criteria based on communicative rationality may be generalized and transferred into an institutionalized arena such as the public sphere. But this is in no way a given. In this connection, a serious question is raised regarding Habermas’ criterion of truthfulness. Intuitively, truthfulness implies enlightenment regarding all relevant aspects of a given issue. But in cases where strategic considerations become decisive, specific role demands become dominant for politicians and professional communicators, just as they do for journalists. An ideal norm of truthfulness becomes impractical if it cannot grasp these features. This spills over on claims on truth. If truth is conceived as more than a collection of isolated facts, it demands interpretation, and thus the space for negotiation is opened.

7.3 Empirical Specification The differentiation of what was once conceived as one original public sphere into a mosaic of sub-institutions pointed out by Habermas (1996) and by many of his critics (e.g. Negt & Kluge, 1993 [1972]; Fraser, 1992) means that the relevant set of actor groups is widened. Communication flows in many directions, not only from citizens



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to political authorities but between state agencies, interest groups, large economic enterprises and the public. Therefore, communication flows become impure, simultaneously embracing a multiplicity of topics and actor groups. In the following, ambiguities in professional communication are described via excerpts from a set of in-depth interviews with Norwegian top-level professional communicators in the private and public sectors, as well as with high-level civil servants. In addition to their present professional position, the majority of the interviewees have had long experience in various positions in the public sphere as journalists or in related occupations. The interviews were conducted in 2012–2013 in cooperation with Trygve Gulbrandsen and Ingvil Eriksen (see also Engelstad, 2015). The informants are identified by the letters A to N and their organizations by double letters (AA, etc.). The exposition follows the four groups distinguished above, with a main focus on strategic communication in lobbying and political marketing.

7.4 Citizens: Flows of Communication In a modern society with a comprehensive welfare state and increasing citizen rights, political governance presupposes active participation of citizens when policies are implemented. Local and national governments are dependent on private actors presenting information they control, in order to set up political regulation. A simple example is setting limitations on CO2 emissions, whereby the government has to rely on information from relevant enterprises in order to have a realistic picture of what the problem looks like (Skodvin & Gullberg, 2011). A former communication director in the civil service follows up: ‘The presence of communication officers in government is a clear advantage. External focus is strengthened and citizens understand more.’ Citizens for their part have become much more vociferous in their demands for information from government and enterprises ranging from tax authorities and transportation services to social security and health care (Andreassen & Skjøld Johansen, 2003). Increasing demand for information also raises expectations concerning the quality of the information presented to the public. Likewise, private sector enterprises are dependent on the exchange of information with citizens. One field in which the demand for information has increased significantly is crisis handling; this is particularly true vis-à-vis the public as customers and consumers. All organizations are faced with crises from time to time – enterprises and hospitals and political parties. In large enterprises, it has become commonplace that crises must be handled professionally, as outcomes are always unpredictable. This also opens power struggles between the media and communicators regarding how the problem is to be defined. An often cited concern in early Habermas is that modern communication patterns reduce the public to passive consumers (1989, p. 159ff). These examples point

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in a different direction. Increased communication makes it possible for users to be active and to demand more and better information. Another contrast to the early bourgeois public sphere is that its emphasis on open conversation had as its counterpart a closed and autocratic state administration. In modern society, this is replaced by active information provided to citizens by the state or by enterprises. Even if this means that democracy is widened, the picture remains somewhat ambiguous. Organizations have an interest in defending their reputations (Meyer & Rowan, 1977). The professionalization of communication also means the professionalization of biased and misleading information. Struggles over definitions of situation, what is ‘really going on’, will never cease, even when confronted with the norms of objectivity underlined by the later Habermas.

7.5 Ambiguities of Media Pressure ‘I believe the single factor for us politicians that has changed most during the years I have been active in politics is the relationship to the media,’ former prime minister Kjell Magne Bondevik (2002) observed early in the 2000s. With the transformation of the press from its predominant party affiliation to a position as critic of social and political power holders in society (Eide, 1984, 2002), investigative journalism became dominant. This creates a pressure on both enterprises and civil service – both targets of investigating journalism – and increased consciousness about the need to professionalize information functions. At the same time, professional culture gives journalists a basis for hunting in bands. The head of the communication department in a directorate puts it like this: When you stand in the middle of the storm you have to be alert all the time. You have to be good at giving good advice. … You have no idea what this is about before you have experienced 60 journalists on the phone before nine o’clock (F).

Media and communication officers remain in a constant competitive relationship despite and because of their common professional background. In many ways, the two groups have similar frames of understanding and use the same techniques of presentation – selective exposition, positive and negative loading and struggling over the agenda. Among journalists, the competitive relationship leads to considerable scepticism vis-à-vis communication officers, illustrated by a survey by the Oslo chapter of the Norwegian Communication Association (2010). According to the survey, 69 per cent of journalists expressed low trust in communication officers in the private sector. The figure was slightly higher as regards the public sector (Opinion/Nordstat, 2010). To some extent, this may be compensated by a mode of checks and balances between the media and powerful organizations. At the same time, the relationship between the media and the communicators is messy; common interests are also



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present, further elaborated below. Many communication officers are former journalists; they know each other, can use the other party for their own purposes and know the limitations of their counterpart. Even if their roles are different, the head of communication department E wants to maintain a trusting relationship with journalists, like most people in similar positions. Therefore, a special mix of trust and distrust emerges. Asked about how confidence is built, he replies: By consistently acting fairly, telling what you can, and saying why you can’t tell, and not being too pedantic about how journalists are expected to work. (E)

Institutionalizing checks and balances, which at the outset is problematic, becomes even more difficult if the division between the two roles becomes vague and difficult to grasp.

7.6 Lobbying: Tactics, Rhetoric, Reputation Large organizations in many ways behave as political actors. They have an interest in influencing the environment within which they operate. A characteristic trait in the Norwegian neo-corporatist system is that business and interest organizations exert influence by participating in public fact-finding missions and advisory committees. At the same time, the significance of lobbying has increased considerably during the last decades. Most descriptions of lobbyism have focused on direct contacts with decision makers (Gulbrandsen et al., 2002; Gullberg & Helland, 2003). However, the effects of such contacts also depend on the argumentation and debates going on in parallel in the media. To achieve strategic influence, enterprises and organizations must behave and be perceived not only as strategic; they must be seen as responsible and legitimate (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Merkelsen 2013). Their presence in the media and in public debate confirms organizations as serious, as it does when they act according to self-interest. Lobbying is most efficient when it occurs in interplay with the media. Media coverage affects general perceptions of what is important and relevant and of which problems require a solution. The DD Association is a large professional organization with strong interests in political decisions within its field. Asked whether she is involved in lobbying politicians, the head of the communication department replies: No, not as much as people assume. We don’t have much contact with Parliament but mostly with ministries and directorates. (D)

This does not mean that targeting political decision makers is of little relevance. Contact with ministries and directorates is mostly about minor issues and details, problems that can be solved backstage. When larger issues are on the agenda, they

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are lifted up to the political level and channelled through the media. This challenge D, a former journalist, knows how to tackle. My strength is mostly on the tactical level. We work together on the basis of common experiences, and I come in with knowledge of how media are working. And of course, about openness – how far you can go. (D)

The rhetorical quality of messages, how they are shaped and emitted, must of course be credible. However, for a large organization such as the DD Association tactical aspects are at least as important. In order to function in the public sphere, the message must be presented at the right time and place. What garners the most attention? Should the chairperson of the association appear on television, or will sending other representatives, such as shop stewards at a lower level, have a better effect? The Head of Communication E is operating in a broader field, but he makes a similar point: ‘We are doing a lot of lobbying vis-à-vis politicians, ministries, or the Financial Supervisory Authority,’ but indirect strategies are often more efficient than direct contact with decision makers, even if the former does not preclude the latter. It is important to be present in as many channels as possible and exploit the possibilities for alliances inside and outside the communication industry. ‘We try to engage large customers, offshore companies, etc. If you don’t have any friends it’s difficult to achieve influence’, E says, and alliances may well include the opposition parties in parliament (see also Gullberg & Helland, 2003). Equally important is to exploit the professional fellowship with journalists and to understand what they want in order to convince. We go out to scold the authorities in newspapers DN and Finansavisen … We are working continuously with journalists in order to try to convince them about the effects of irrational regulations. (E)

Communicators and journalists also have common interests in what is interesting news to the media. What is described here need not be seen as manipulation; the strategy is fully compatible with openness about the desirability of change in policy frameworks. ‘It’s important to make our PR instruments visible, that’s the challenge in the struggle for better [political] regulations’ (E). Results are not achieved in secret but by placing information where it is most efficient. Here, another aspect of the ambiguous interplay between communication officers and the media comes to the fore.

7.7 Civil Service and Politics: Information, Initiative, Reputation In his observations on the pressures from the media on politics, former Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik added that the flow used to run not only from media to politics



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but also the other way. But ‘as the press hardly reports any more from Parliamentary debates, requirements of active “sales work” have increased enormously, in order to reach out with political standpoints’ (Bondevik, 2002). Changes in the direction of sales work are also noticeable in the civil service. Section leader M, from a ministry with high media exposure, points out that communication is easily perverted by goal displacement: The message from the top is that the more media exposure, the better. The communication department is working closely with the politicians, and they expect things to happen quickly. Large fact-finding missions suffer… they become fictitious processes; the main thing is to build argumentation that is ideologically acceptable. (M)

Increased communication influences not only regular working processes but also the tasks themselves, what may be termed issue displacement. Issues that are easily presented to the public are prioritized, whereas difficult and complex matters with low public appeal are pushed into the background. Policy information potentially becomes policy development (Difi, 2011). Paradoxically, the civil service is adopting communication techniques from the private sector, even though the public sector is not exposed to market competition (Wæraas et al., 2011). With intensified communication flows from the ministry, politics to an increasing extent includes building the image of political personalities. When the minister has a main focus on public visibility, the distinction between professional tasks and politics is weakened, M points out. However, the Secretary General of the NN ministry is less reserved. Making the minister visible in the public realm serves as a sign that the ministry achieves its goals (N). As such, it may be seen as a democratic quality. But with increasing focus on personalities in politics, the divisions between civil service and politics also become more unclear; an unintended consequence is that borders between political roles in ministries and parties become more diffuse. Therefore, ministerial communication departments are drawn into power struggles in party politics, M maintains.

7.8 Politics for Sale? Lobby activities that originated in the private sector have recently had contagious effects on the public sector. There is no trace of federalism in Norwegian constitutional practice; counties and municipalities are subordinate to the state. Nevertheless, the last years have seen several striking examples of local politicians seeking assistance from communication agencies to strengthen their position in political planning processes at the national level. Transportation policy is a field where national and regional interests are prone to collide. In a well-organized stunt which engaged the national press as willing observers, 50 mayors in Eastern Norway together boarded

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the train to Oslo to focus attention on their demand for double track railways in their region (Aftenposten 15.10.2012). Likewise, by engaging a prominent communication agency the small municipality of Vik achieved a privileged position in the National Transportation Plan when it was adopted by parliament (NRK Brennpunkt 3.9.2013). Political initiatives via communication agencies may also originate in the population and among social movements. The agency HH Communication regards this as one of its tasks, among other things, to organize communicative ‘events’, which are quite similar to social movement demonstrations. Communication is not limited to the identification of target groups but engages persons and groups who are committed and have direct interests in a given political issue. The head of HH agency explains: What we do now is to create a method to map people’s commitment and underlying driving forces. We try to draw a link back to the customers we are working for, and find the point that triggers commitment. … The conception must be robust and be adaptable to different arenas, whether digital, or TV or press, or open meetings. (H)

Drawing a parallel between a communication agency and a social movement may seem strange. However, HH Agency has engaged in demonstrations that just as well could be adopted by ‘progressive’ action groups. One example is the building of a group of stakeholders to lobby for expensive measures of freeway security; another is the establishment of a broad alliance aiming at reductions in energy consumption in the office buildings of large enterprises. Both issues could have been launched by idealists; here, it happened on a commercial basis. The examples pinpoint the ambiguity of professional communication, even if the pecuniary aspect is quite modest. H underlines that the agency is playing with open cards, that the commercial profit is very modest and that above all the success of such actions is dependent on trust among participants as well as from outside observers. This is not about cheating, but that one has an issue which is important, and that one wishes to present to politicians – then it becomes a matter of getting access, not of packaging the message. Politicians have their own communication officers, and they know this just as well as external actors. (H)

It is easy to draw a line here to Structural Transformation (1989, p. 181ff) and point out that even political activism has become a commodity in the market. Yet, the examples cited may signify both negative and positive consequences for democracy. At the same time, they demonstrate that professional communication potentially reaches all groups and all levels in political processes.



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7.9 A Model of Contradictory Relations The examples in the foregoing sections amply demonstrate that strategic communication in the public sphere, despite a high degree of rationality in many respects, is imbued with ambiguities and lack of transparency. This is not because actors do not live up to their professional obligations but on the contrary because they do. That is not necessarily an argument against the theory of communicative rationality but an argument for introducing complementary perspectives. One alternative to be explored below is the conception of contradictory relations in communication. There is a long tradition for understanding professional communication as adversarial activity (Barney & Black 1994), justified by the conception of modern capitalist society as an adversarial society and a liberal interpretation of the freedom of expression. The point was clearly stated by one of the informants, the head of the communication department in a large enterprise. We make continuous tactical evaluations. This is parallel to what lawyers do in the courtroom: emphasize what is to our advantage. (E)

In courts, contradictory viewpoints and conflicting definitions of situations constitute a salient part of the roles as prosecutor and defence attorney. At best, what emerges from this exchange are assumptions, facts, fragments of truth. Truth in the extensive sense of full coverage of a given issue is out of reach. In the courtroom, the prosecutor and the defence attorney have a disinterested aspiration to win the case, but they also have a professional self-interest in the result. This may seem cynical, but admittedly it is the best that can be achieved. Likewise, in the public sphere communication from important social actors purposely is one-sided, as when describing actual facts. The task of critical media is to test the credibility in the flow of information and argumentation from powerful social actors. But one-sidedness is equally true for the media and their mode of operation, as it is for lawyers. The understanding of the news value of an issue in the media and the way they angle conflict and select elements that turn the issue in a given direction is no less coloured by self-interest (Bjurstrøm, 2013). In addition to their professional drive, the media investigates in order to sell newspapers and if possible to increase their market share of readers, listeners and viewers. Communicators, however, must balance truthfulness with the interests of the employers they represent. Referring to Frank Deaver (1990), Barney & Black (1994) distinguish four levels of truth/untruth below the normative adherence to truthfulness: (i) truth telling as a matter of convenience, (ii) persuading by selective information, (iii) non-truth without intent to deceive and (iv) intentional deception. Deception may be white lies justified by an acceptable purpose or blatant lies.

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In Deaver’s model, the parameters of public relations ethics lies [sic] below the first group of fact tellers but somewhere along the continuum that accepts selective, persuasive techniques, but would require extraordinary justification for using outright deceit (Barney & Black, 1994, p. 245).

The difficult balance between truthfulness and employer interests has been debated for a long time in PR literature. A classical contribution is Grunig’s conception of PR, when at its best, as two-way symmetrical communication between enterprises and their publics (Grunig & Hunt, 1984), even if this ideal is difficult to realize in practice. Pietzka (2011) argues for a dialogical conception of PR as an alternative to a dominant practice of advocacy, whereas Ihlen & Haugen (2009) raise a general critique of the parallel between communicators and lawyers. With a broader theoretical bent, Leeper (1996) points to a parallel between Grunig’s conception and Habermas’ theory of discourse ethics. Jensen (2001) and Meisenbach (2006) turn Habermasian discursive ethics into a normative framework for PR. Finally, a related approach springs out of corporate social responsibility (Ihlen, Bartlett & May, 2011). Common to these contributions is that they take a general viewpoint. Deviances from norms are not denied but without confronting the ambiguities and actual norm conflicts that unavoidably emerge in the practice of PR. Below, challenges to a dialogical model created by conflicting interests will be illustrated by a few cases.

7.10 The Problematic Openness If opposite strategic interest is a source of conflict between journalists and communicators, it also stretches into their different understanding of truthfulness and truth. Both groups hold openness and transparency as basic values in their professional activity, and there is no reason to doubt their sincerity. ‘The presence of communication officers in the public sector represents a step forward’ says former communication director C; ‘external responsibility is increased, and citizens’ understanding is improved.’ Openness also serves employer interests and may even yield strategic advantages. In the words of communication director E, If a journalist catches me lying, I’m finished; my main asset is trust. […] We do not operate undercover, as the RR Association often does. We go out in the press and make it clear that we’re taking a fight. (E)

Nevertheless, ambiguity is close at hand. Given the unavoidable limits to liberty of expression, openness can never be absolute. The communications director of the large AA municipality puts it this way: Openness is our mantra. […] One does not have to tell everything, but we must not disguise the facts. (A)



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Even if limitations on openness need not imply ethical problems or conflicts between the media and communications departments, these statements invite reflection. In the two following cases, conflict comes out neatly. The first has to do with the CEO of a financial enterprise who was publically suspected of irregularities. Openness was then no more the guideline of the communication department. The CEO was made inaccessible; it would have been unwise to be open then. We went in with anti-tank defence, and closed all openings. No, no openness in that situation. But as an organization the main rule is that openness is important to us. (E)

Does this describe the distortion of truthfulness to the point of concealing the truth or just a well-founded attempt at shielding the CEO from being the victim of the predatory press? Here, the roles of defendant and attorney become obvious. Journalists and communicators are prone to interpret the situation very differently and act on that basis, with the possible consequence that the facts of the matter will not be disclosed to the public. An even stronger norm conflict is the following: A company with international branches was accused of price cooperation. However, the formal sanctions vary considerably across countries. This situation put the communication department in a painful position: In Norway the right strategy would have been simply to pledge guilty. But the implication of this strategy would have been being put in jail in the United States, penalties of many millions, and embargo on doing business in the US. (B)

Here is a normative conflict of a different kind, one concerning whether Norwegian or American legislation should have priority, given the obligations and burdens on the involved parties in the two countries. The communication department in this case chose silence. Their choice may seem obvious given the extremity of the possible reactions. Regarded from the side of the media, this would in most cases be interpreted as pure opportunism and be reported even if the practical consequences might seriously hit innocent people connected to the enterprise.

7.11 A Farewell to Normative Theory? Cynical as they may seem, citing such examples does not signify a farewell to normative considerations and normative theory. Actors in the court are subject to the specific ethics of their profession. The same is true for communicators and journalists. In practice, norms vary both in their subject matter and in preciseness, but there is no reason to assume that they are void. What is at stake is not so much whether professional ethics in communication can be justified along the same lines as those

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of lawyers in a court case (Ihlen & Haugen, 2009) but that the contradictory model reflects actual practices stabilized by institutional regulations. Surprisingly, Habermas does not mention professional ethics in his discussion of modern media (2006, 2009). Instead, he goes directly to the theory of communicative rationality for a normative framework. Likewise, Leeper (1996) and Meisenbach (2006) operationalize discourse ethics directly into ethical codes of conduct. But this theory is too general to be of relevance to professional actors in the public sphere. Both in terms of scope and normative content, salient differences exist between general ethical theories and professional ethics. In their ethical considerations, actors refer to norms and practices established in their professions. Professionals may even be expected to perform actions that otherwise are forbidden, such as performing surgery on other people (Barney & Black, 1994; Grimen, 2006). This is not to discard the value of the theory of communicative rationality but rather to locate it more precisely in the landscape of institutional structures, supported by reflections on professional ethics. A felicitous example of such a constellation is the direct inspiration of Habermas’ theory in relation to the amendment to the Norwegian Constitution of Article 100 on freedom of expression (NOU 1999: 27; Kalleberg, 2014). In that case, the theory and its application are on the same level of generality, at a distance from the specific workings of professions and social institutions. At the same time, the general theory is at odds with institutional structures where actors are guided by specific roles, and filling these roles implies very specific and limited obligations. Professional ethics consist of institutionalized norms reflecting the commitments of professionals to their clients and dynamic processes of interpretation linked to these arrangements. In this context, the theory of communicative rationality serves better as a metatheory. Without confounding the theories of Habermas and John Rawls (Pedersen, 2012), a parallel may be drawn to the two-step procedure where Rawls (1970) distinguishes between a basic principle of equal liberty and a secondary principle of difference. In that case, informed by its principles, actors come together and discuss what a professional code of ethics should look like. Here, general rules for deliberation apply, such as (i) norms of free speech and open discussion, virtually without limits; (ii) participants have a good society as a common goal and (iii) actors do not represent specific interests but deliberate about the social good based on general conceptions. In the case of professional ethics in the public sphere, they have to consider general values of openness and truthfulness. Then they must balance these with the legitimate interests of clients, be they linked to social rights, privacy or special goals and strategies. For instance, the value of openness stands in contrast to the protection of anonymous sources in the media and to business strategies of enterprises. How limited can information become without being unacceptably distorted? How are the interests of third parties balanced against the interests of clients or the public? Out of such deliberations, professional codes of conduct are institutionalized.



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7.12 Core Elements in Professional Ethics Professions, as discussed here, are conceived more broadly than the ‘old’ professions of medicine or law, informed by broad academic traditions. But they are more restricted than occupational groups in general; they must employ specific knowledge and be organized in some sort of common association able to express professional standards recognized by a large majority of practitioners (Grimen, 2006). A common characteristic of professions is that they have a principal–agent structure (Arrow, 1985; Petersen, 1993). Professionals are the agents of their clients or principals; even though they are supposed to be the servants of their clients, their special body of knowledge enables them to know what is in the ‘best interests’ of their principals. If professional ethics are well-developed, they are institutionalized with four formal elements: (i) general statements of the value of the profession, (ii) a specified code of conduct, (iii) one or more bodies of control and (iv) a system of sanctions. As institutions also have informal, cultural components, the formal elements must be complemented by normative reflection. A code of conduct is necessarily formulated in general terms and must be interpreted with considerable discretion. Moreover, the values of the profession involve obligations to third parties and to society at large. This means that professions potentially must handle norm conflicts in the relationship between their principals and society at large. Given that the professions differ in their objectives and in their obligations, their professional ethics are differently specified. In the case of journalists and communication consultants, both are strategic in the sense that they aim at formulating messages in order to achieve maximal effects, in the former case by presenting ‘news’ of a broad appeal and in the latter by shaping formulations that explain their intentions and actions and further their best interests. In the news media, as a general rule, the formalization of professional ethics is elaborate, and in the Nordic region this is especially so (Engelstad, Larsen & Rogstad, this volume). In Denmark, media ethics are anchored in legislation, whereas in Norway they are handled by an umbrella organization comprising the national associations of journalists, of editors and of media enterprises (Norsk presseforbund). Both the code of conduct (Vær varsom-plakaten) and the sanction system (Pressens faglige utvalg) are administered by the umbrella organization, something that guarantees compliance by all actors and legitimacy in the public. The code of conduct is quite precise in its orientation to third parties, that is, people who are interviewed or mentioned in news stories, while questions about the social relevance of news production remain unspecific. A few peculiarities should be noted here. The news media does not have a clearly specified principal; the principal could be said to be society at large, readers/ viewers or the newspaper/media company. This equivocality yields a high degree of professional autonomy, allowing the profession to a large extent to define its own premises. Accordingly, tensions between the principal and society become vague; after all, which are the relevant instances and considerations to be taken into

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account? This is relevant for the selection of and angling of news; issue displacement often occurs as a by-product, as a move from a given political problem to the actors’ ability to cope with the ‘media logic’. Moreover, the strong position of the code of conduct invites the unintended consequence of making journalists ‘work strictly by the book’, whereby the space for ethical reflection is unintendedly overshadowed by formal rules. Take then the case of communicators. The question arises whether they should be regarded as a profession (Gulbrandsen & Eriksen, 2014), despite broad attempts at professionalization, mainly in the US (Grunig, 2011; Pietzca & L’Etang, 2001). On the Norwegian scene, they fulfil the criteria mentioned above, even though the group is still at a relatively low level of institutionalization. The authority of professional associations of communication is moderate, and even if codes of conduct do exist, they are quite unspecific, while systems of control and sanctions are virtually absent. However, this does not preclude relatively intense normative discussion in the profession, as indicated above. But irrespective of whether the contributions side with the adversarial model or a dialogue model, they are limited to the organizational level; they are directed to the enterprise and not the profession. In contrast to the situation in the media, there is no instance that can bind the profession as a whole, whether by an overarching professional organization or by legislation. Even if codes of conduct reflect good, albeit vague, intentions (for Norwegian codes of conduct, see: KOMM, 2016; Kommunikasjonsforeningen, 2016), ethical reflection in the profession remains individualized. At the same time, the presence of principals, be they employers or customers, is constant. This makes it difficult to avoid the fact that the tension between powerful principals and society is tilted to the advantage of the principal. Therefore, the relationship between the media and professional communication is not only dominated by diverging interests but also by significant differences when it comes to professional ethics. The media has a strong formalized apparatus but relatively weak traditions in relation to ethical reflection. A glance at the field of communication gives the opposite impression of weak institutionalization but quite creative informal debates on ethical challenges to the profession. Conflicts between the two groups are not mitigated by these differences.

7.13 Coda Even if Habermas has changed his interpretation of the public sphere in modern society, his main focus still remains on the transformation from the original bourgeois public sphere to the mediatized version of the late twentieth century. But starting in the 2000s, a new institutional change is taking place; new modes of communication in the public sphere engender less transparency, contain more normative conflicts and make ideal speech situations a distant goal. This institutional transformation

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calls for a broadening of normative perspectives; even if they are improved, key issues will remain unsolved. Nevertheless, they are the best option available. Pointing to the limitations of Habermas’ theory of communicative rationality does not denounce its significance. On the contrary, it represents a salient step in the establishment of language and speech acts as constitutive to social theory in a line from Wittgenstein to Searle to Habermas. Yet, the theory may be overburdened, as Habermas is guilty of doing when he applies it directly to the public sphere. This move rests on an under-specification of the public sphere, in tandem with a sort of implicit general equilibrium model. Given that the public sphere is constituted of a network of institutions with different modes of functioning and patterns of change, they also embrace specific roles and considerations that may be at odds with the theory of communicative rationality. Due to external shocks, technological change, globalization and endogenous factors such as cultural changes, the ‘rules of the game’ as Habermas calls them are always in a state of disequilibrium. Consequently, the specific norm sets connected to the different parts of the public sphere are in flux. This may be taken as an argument against the linkage of normative and positive theory in the work of Habermas or even as an argument that he denies the significance of social conflict. None of these are suggested in the present exposition. There are certainly good reasons for exploring the dynamics of the public sphere without reference to normative theory, but that is no argument against connecting the two types of arguments. Concerning the question of conflict, the issue is easily misspecified. Habermas of course does not deny the ubiquitous presence of social conflict, but he abstains from formulating a theory of conflict. A misguided implication might be that he then should give up his basically consensual idea of communicative rationality. The alternative explored here is that in highly differentiated societies these basic norms must be complemented by specific norm sets springing out of the special place and functioning of the various social sectors. Political issues are not brought to rest by the force of the better argument. Even if social analysis is rightly informed by normative considerations, conflicting norms are just as unavoidable as conflicts of interests. Finally, this leads to the question raised in the introduction: Is the growth in strategic communication a threat, or does it after all point towards a widening of democracy? The answer remains partly open, as before: It depends. The present discussion has brought up discomforting examples and indicated that existing rules of the game of the public sphere are insufficiently specified to give a definite answer. It has also indicated that the challenge does not lie primarily in strategic communication but in the triangle of interplay between communication strategies, political ambitions and media activism. At the same time, it is difficult to conceive improvements in the functioning of democracy without increased communication and expansion of the public sphere. This is one of the challenges to democracy and what it is about.

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Ihlen, Ø. & A.O. Haugen (2011) Epler og pærer? Om analogien melom kommunikatører og advokater. In M. Medersen & J.M. Madsbu (Eds.) I verdens rikeste land. Samfunnsvitenskapelige innganger til norsk samtid. Vallset: Oplandske bokforlag. Ihlen, Ø, J. Bartlett & S. May (Eds.) (2011). Corporate social responsibility and communication. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell Jensen, I. (2001). Public Relations and Emerging Functions of the Public Sphere: An Analytic Framework. Journal of Communications Management, 6, 133–147. Kalleberg R. (2014). Scholarly texts’ influence on the 2004 revision of the Norwegian Constitution’s Article 100, In: K. Gammelgaard & E. Holmøyvik (Eds.) Writing Democracy. The Norwegian Constitution 1814 – 2014. Oxford: Berghahn. KOMM (2016). https://www.abelia.no/bransjeforeninger/komm-sertifiserte-kommunikasjonsbyraer/radgiverplakaten/ Kommunikasjonsforeningen. (2016) http://www.kommunikasjon.no/bransjen/etikk Leeper, R.V. (1996). Moral Objectivity. Jürgen Habermas’ Discourse Ethics, and Public Relations. Public Relations Review, 22: 133–150. Meisenbach, R. (2006). Habermas’ Discourse Ethics and Principle of Universalization as a Moral Framework for Organizational Communication. Management Communication Quarterly, 20, 39–62. Merkelsen, H. (2013). Legitimacy and Reputation in the Institutional Field of Food Safety: A Public Relations Case Study. Public Relations Inquiry, 2, 243–265. Meyer, John W. & B. Rowan, Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony. American Journal of Sociology, 83, 340–363. Negt O. & A. Kluge (1993 [1972]). Public Sphere and Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. NOU 1986:24. Tiltak mot kjernekraftulykker. Delutredning 1: Erfaringene etter kjernekraftulykken i Tsjernobyl. NOU 1999:27. Ytringsfrihed bør finde sted. Opinion/Norstat (2010). Stolhet og fordom? En undersøkelse om journalister og kommunikatører sine oppfatninger av egen profesjon og hverandre. Pedersen, J. (2012). Justification and Application: The Revival of the Rawls-Haberrmas Debate. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 42, 399–432. Petersen. T. (1993). The Economics of Organization. Acta Sociologica, 36 (3), 277–293. Pietzka, M. (2011). Public Relations as Dialogic Expertise? Journal of Communication Management, 15, 108–124. Pietzka, M. & J. L’Etang (2001). Public relations and the question of professionalism. In R.L. Heath (Ed.) The Sage Handbook of Public Relations. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Rasmussen, T. (2009). The Significance of Internet Communication in Public Deliberation. javnost – the public, 16(1), 17–32. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Skodvin, T. & A.T. Gullberg. (2011). Cost Effectiveness and Target Group Influence in Norwegian Climate Policy. Scandinavian Political Studies, 34, 123–142. Solumsmoen, D. (2012). Kan medieutfordringen håndterers? Stat og styring, 2012(2),:31–32. Thelen, K. (2011). Beyond Comparative Statics: Historical Institutional Approaches to Stability and Change in the Political Economy of Labor. In Glenn Morgan, John Campbell, Colin Crouch and Ove Kaj Pedersen, red., The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Institutional Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wæraas, A., H. Byrkjeflot, & S.I. Angell (Eds.). Substans og fremtreden. Omdømmehåndtering i offentlig sektor. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Østerud, Ø., F. Engelstad, & P. Selle (2003). Makten og demokratiet. Oslo: Gyldendal Akademisk.

Part III: Aspects of Freedom of Expression

Olav Elgvin and Jon Rogstad

8 Religious Threats and Institutional Change in Norwegian Mass Media

8.1 Introduction In the last several decades, Western countries have seen many public debates on the relationship between freedom of speech and religious sensibilities (for an introduction to the topic of religion in the public sphere, see Mendieta, 2011). Different questions have been raised, such as: Should media outlets avoid publishing material that might be offensive to religious believers, or should they disregard such sensibilities? Should this be regulated by law or by informal norms in the media? Does it have any value in itself to publish material that might be offensive to believers, or should it only be done when deemed necessary for other reasons? This debate became widespread in the West after the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses in 1989. Following the publication of the book, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa (i.e. a judicial ruling in Islamic theology) in which he ordered Muslims all over the world to kill both Rushdie and others who were involved in the book’s publication. One of the very few actual victims of this fatwa was William Nygaard, the Norwegian publisher of the book, who was shot but survived (for accounts of the events see Austenå, 2011; Isungset, 2010; Malik, 2012). In the years following the 9/11 terror attacks, controversy erupted again. In 2004, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered because of the film Fitna, which he made together with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an ex-Muslim activist of Somali descent (for a scholarly account, see Buruma, 2007). In 2007, an issue of almost global concern occurred when the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten published 12 cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. The controversy also became significant in Norway when the Christian weekly Magazinet printed a facsimile of the cartoons. This subsequently led to riots by Muslims all over the world. The Norwegian and Danish embassies in Syria were torched, and many people lost their lives (Klausen, 2009; Kunelius, Eide, Hahn, & Schroeder, 2007). This turn of events made the normative questions of freedom of expression almost existential in nature. If using the right to freedom of expression could lead to people getting killed, was it then right to exercise the right? The question resurfaced again in the beginning of 2015 with the attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris on 7 January and a shooting at a seminar on freedom of expression in Copenhagen on 14 February. In the Paris incident, two attackers armed with automatic rifles made their way into the Charlie Hebdo © 2017 Fredrik Engelstad, Håkon Larsen, Jon Rogstad, Kari Steen-Johnsen This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.



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offices and killed 12 people. Charlie Hebdo had consistently published cartoons and caricatures of the prophet Muhammad and was therefore singled out as a target by many jihadists. Even though the two attackers were killed, the Al Qaida-affiliated group Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula claimed responsibility for the attack and stated that it was an act of revenge ‘for the honour of the prophet Muhammad’. Some analysts have since claimed that the attackers might have had more strategic goals as well (Cole, 2015). By sowing mistrust between French society and the Muslim population of France, an attack could potentially help Al Qaida gain new recruits in France (and maybe in other European countries as well). Be that as it may, the attack on Charlie Hebdo made it necessary for European media outlets to think through their publication policy regarding material that might be considered offensive to religious believers. In Copenhagen, the shooting took place during the Art, Blasphemy and Freedom of Expression seminar at the Krudttønden cultural centre. A man, assumed to be Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein, wounded three police officers and killed one civilian. Among the speakers was Lars Vilks, who became well known after the cartoon crisis as he was one of the artists. Our aim in this article is to discuss these developments in light of the research on how institutions can be affected by critical events and/or external shocks, seeing the Norwegian mass media as a type of institution. In recent years, there have been cases in which young Muslim men have uttered threats against media outlets and journalists in the name of Islam. Our empirical area of focus is how actors in the Norwegian media react to such threats. Do the threats lead to changes in how journalists and editors make use of their freedom of expression? In other words, did events such as the Muhammad cartoons, demonstrations in Oslo and threats against journalists lead to institutional changes regarding what the mass media choose to publish? The data consists of a survey of people working in media institutions, qualitative interviews in media institutions and field observations of the trial of a young Muslim man convicted in a Norwegian court of threatening journalists and researchers.

8.2 Critical Events, Discourse and Institutional Change Before proceeding, we will explain our theoretical approach and the terms we use throughout the chapter. The first is institutional change, which has often been studied through the lens of how external shocks affect an institution and its practices under the assumption that an institution would be resistant to change unless something changed in the external environment. In recent years, however, a competing perspective has gained ground. Mahoney & Thelen (2009) and others have promoted a perspective looking at how institutions can gradually change as a result of internal factors as well. Mahoney & Thelen define an institution first and foremost as an arrangement of power that distributes resources (ibid.). This definition allows them to

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develop a theory in which competition for power and resources can change an institution from within, even in the absence of an external shock. One problem with this theory, though, is that it relies on a narrow definition of institution. If an institution is mainly an arrangement that distributes resources or power, can the media then be said to be an institution? There is no doubt that the media also distribute power and that many actors and stakeholders have vested interests in what the media does or does not do. However, power distribution is not the formal raison d’être of the media. What, then, is to be understood as an institution? In accordance with the introduction to this book, we see institutions as coordinating mechanisms, which in some sense are predictable entities that regulate behaviour through formal and informal rules. In other words, an institution is a socially constructed system of norms regulating behaviour, with relatively clear boundaries between them and other systems. Such a definition has in recent years been employed in the influential work of Ostrom & Basurto (2011), for example. Following such a definition, the media can indeed be regarded as an institution. Functionally, the media has a role in regulating behaviour (Silverblatt, 2004). Indeed, the media can be regarded as one of the key institutions in a deliberative democracy. Deliberative articulation requires the media to bring different voices to the public. Habermas’s ideal of constitutional co-authorship implies that a competent democracy contains parties that are willing, and have the opportunity, to express their views and promote their interests. Furthermore, the media in Norway is a rulebased system: some of the rules are formal and laid down in the Norwegian criminal code, such as freedom of expression. Other rules are non-judicial but upheld by journalists and the media themselves through their own internal ‘court’ (Norwegian Press Complaints Commission, PFU). PFU is the complaint commission of the Norwegian Press Association, which has all large mass media institutions as members. There are also informal or unspoken rules and norms at play among journalists and editors concerning what is acceptable conduct. When we employ the term institutional change in this chapter, what we are interested in is changes in the norms within the mass media. Our approach to institutional change in this chapter is largely in line with what Vivien Schmidt has called ‘discursive institutionalism’ (Schmidt, 2010). The distinguishing trait of this approach is that discourse and ideas are given an important role in bringing about change. If institutions change, it is often because there are people within them who want these changes to come about (even though many changes may also be unintended). According to theories such as Mahoney & Thelen’s, people want institutional changes to come about because of their (more or less) objective interests  – power, economic gain, etc. Under discursive institutionalism, however, it is acknowledged that preferences and ideals may be about more than objective interests. Even though power and ‘objective’ interests are real and important, they are translated into actual preferences through discourse and interpretation. Electoral studies, for example, show this rather clearly. Contemporary voting still follows



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class divides. Belonging to a certain social class makes it much more likely to vote for certain parties. Still, this process is not deterministic. For material interests to be translated into political preferences, life circumstances and life experiences must be interpreted through discourses and ideas (Kitschelt & Rehm, 2014). Being a manual worker makes it more probable that you will vote for parties on the left or for parties on the far right. Circumstances that are more or less similar may thus lead to different political choices depending on how these circumstances are interpreted through discourse. This means that when we are looking for traces of institutional change in the Norwegian mass media, we are interested in the discourses and ideas that can be found among the practitioners, as they are likely to have an impact on how they act. In this chapter, we explore how institutional discourses and practices in the Norwegian mass media are shaped by some very specific occurrences. To denote these occurrences, we are using the term critical event (Das, 1995; Rogstad & Vestel, 2011; Sökefeld, 2006). The concept is very much in line with Kingdon’s (2003) ‘window of opportunity’, which captures a situation in which rather small events can create a change in the political direction. It is also useful to approach the idea of a critical event in light of Paul Pierson’s Politics in Time (2004). Based on two key concepts – ‘path dependence’ and ‘positive feedback’ – Pierson highlights how historical conditions are crucial in order to understand the social dynamics in a political field, with particular attention to the importance of timing (ibid. 54). A significant question is how events can initiate processes that can be very difficult to change once they have started because they become increasingly self-reinforcing. According to Pierson (ibid., p. 44), there are four essential features, as follows. 1. Multiple equilibria – implying that a wide range of outcomes is possible 2. Contingency – small events may have significant impact 3. Timing and sequencing – when an event takes place might be crucial with regard to the impact 4. Inertia – Positive feedback leads to equilibrium, which is resistant to change One interesting dimension is how events in a given situation or seen from a particular point of view can seem pretty insignificant yet become significant. Accordingly, there is a type of mild constructivism in the sense that it is not the event itself that makes it critical with the potential to create change but the meaning an event is given. The term ‘critical events’ has been used to describe events that are forceful enough to create new compass points, new perspectives and new temporal divisions, such as between a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. The crucial question asked in this chapter is how critical events related to religiously framed threats challenge the media in terms of attitudes and practices regarding religion and religious topics. We explore whether such critical events become a reference point for new and durable patterns of behaviour. In line with the discursive institutionalist approach, our guiding assumption is that the impact of a critical event is dependent on how it is interpreted and given meaning in the surrounding discourse. Given Norway’s recent history, the paradig-

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matic critical event bar none shows this clearly. This event was not a case of Muslim extremism or religiously framed threats against a secular society. The terror attacks of 22 July 2011 were in some ways the opposite: they were attacks by a member of the extreme right against the Norwegian political elite for their perceived friendliness toward Muslims. To understand the relationship between critical event and institutional change through discourse, we present some of the literature on the effects that this event had. Even though Norwegian society as a whole, with its peculiar social bonds and networks of mutual trust, is a very different type of institutional complex compared to the mass media, it is still relevant to assess how a critical event such as a terror attack can affect attitudes and/or behaviour. There are two key quantitative works on the impact of 22 July; both ask whether the attacks changed attitudes and/or affected public trust. The first is by Jakobsson & Blom (2014), who studied attitudes to immigrants in particular. The second article is After Utøya: How a High-Trust Society Reacts to Terror – Trust and Civic Engagement in the Aftermath of July 22 (Wollebæk et al. 2012) and highlights the relationship between public attitudes and trust. The authors advance two hypotheses. They call the first the ‘end of innocence hypothesis’, according to which terror attacks create a culture of fear and diminish public trust. The competing hypothesis is called the ‘remobilization hypothesis’. In this case, acts of terrorism strengthen the sense of cohesion and allegiance to collective values. The analysis is based on studies of the impact of 9/11 (Putnam, 2002; Sander & Putnam, 2010), even though both the attacks and the surrounding societal context were different from what happened in Norway. In the United States, public trust was already waning by 9/11. Norway is characterized by a high level of civic engagement and high levels of public (horizontal) and institutional (vertical) trust. The empirical analysis indicates an attitudinal change in Norway post 22 July 2011. Levels of trust increased, both at the institutional level and the personal level (Wollebæk et al. 2012, p. 35). Nor were people more anxious about the possibility of new terrorist attacks. When it comes to civil commitment, the results are less consistent. If we look at trust, a slight increase was noted. All the same, Wollebæk et al. agree with Putnam (2002) and his findings in the United States. The attitudinal impact was greater than the behavioural impact. However, this conclusion can be qualified: Members of the research team that studied civil commitment in 2012 made a separate study of changes in electoral participation after 2012 and found what they call an “Utøya effect” among young voters (Bergh & Ødegård, 2014). The effect could be explained by young people’s stronger identification with their Utøya peers but also because people of that age are more impressionable. Whether the Utøya effect will last is an open question. In Sander & Putnam’s (2010) study, the changes were impermanent; within the space of six months, attitudes had largely reverted to their pre-11 September 2001 state. That said, they did note a generational difference. The stronger civic engagement of people who were young in 2001 seemed to be of a permanent nature. The US and Norwegian findings would therefore seem to suggest that a criti-



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cal event such as a terror attack can lead to change but that change is more likely to be permanent among the young. Another issue is that the discursive interpretation of the attacks probably had an effect. The discursive response in Norway, epitomized in a speech given by the then prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, was to emphasize ‘more openness, more democracy’. As a response from below, ordinary Norwegians also arranged a ‘rose parade’ in Oslo three days after the attack, in which 200,000 people carried roses to show solidarity and commitment. This discursive interpretation of the event is probably part of the reason why levels of trust in Norway increased after the attacks. Given a different discursive response – for example, an increased public focus on threats or policing – levels of insecurity might have increased and not trust. The last concept that needs elaboration is religion and religiously framed threats. This is our ‘explanatory variable’, threats that are made in the name of Islam against the mass media. In the article title we have used the term religious threat for the sake of simplicity and brevity. This formulation is not unproblematic, however. It remains open to debate whether these threats are actually grounded in religion. Are they caused or influenced by religious beliefs, either in the individual or in the larger social group that the individual belongs to? Or are these threats caused by other kinds of conflicts – political, social, etc. – and merely expressed in an available religious language? See Pape (2005) and Pape & Feldman (2010) for a discussion of this in relation to suicide terrorism. As we see it, the jury is still out on these questions in the literature on radicalization among Muslims in the West. Throughout the article, we will therefore use the term religiously framed threat. It is important for our purposes that these threats are expressed in a religious language and are often perceived as religiously grounded by the media or the public at large. This means that these threats contribute to a sharpening of the debate on religion and freedom of expression, even though they may reflect other kinds of conflicts. This process is in accordance with the Thomas theorem: ‘If men believe something to be real, it becomes real in its consequences.’

8.3 Data and Study Design In our empirical approach to institutional change in the mass media as a result of religiously framed threats, we employed several sources of data. One data source was a 2013 survey of people employed in the Norwegian media. It was part of a larger research project on the state of freedom of expression in Norway (Enjolras, Steen-Johnsen, & Rasmussen, 2014). The survey covered the Norwegian population in general, but a subsample targeted people employed in the media in particular – editors, cartoonists/illustrators and journalists (members of the trade union for Norwegian journalists, Norsk journalistlag). The participation rate was 21.7 percent or 1,613 members. This survey contained items designed to establish whether jour-

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nalists/editors/illustrators had received threats and whether this affected what they wrote or published. The survey also contained questions concerning normative beliefs – whether it should be allowed to scorn religion. In addition, we conducted 12 qualitative interviews with journalists, editors and cartoonists from various Norwegian media outlets. These interviews were conducted between August 2013 and February 2014. We supplemented these interviews with material from other research publications exploring (both quantitatively and qualitatively) how the Norwegian mass media covered Islam and religion in recent years. The last source of data was observation of the trial of Ubaydullah Hussain in the winter of 2014. Hussain is a young Norwegian Muslim man of Pakistani descent who was convicted for threatening the journalist Nina Johnsrud. This data material has some limitations and does not allow for robust causal inference. The survey is not longitudinal and does not explore developments in attitudes over time. Nor have we conducted a historical exploration of institutional change in the Norwegian media over time. However, we have rich and varied data material from a certain point in time. This allows us to make qualified assumptions and interpretations. What is it reasonable to assume about institutional change in the media following religiously framed threats? It is important to note that the data for this study were collected prior to the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January 2015, so our data missed an important critical event, an event that might have affected discourses and practices in the Norwegian mass media. In order to include these later developments, we therefore supplemented our primary sources of data from the ‘first wave’ with observations of how publication policy changed (or did not change) in Norwegian media outlets following the attacks on Charlie Hebdo.

8.4 Religiously Framed Threats and Coverage of Religion in Norwegian Media We begin our analysis by presenting the kind of religiously framed threats made against Norwegian media. The trial of Hussain is a good starting point. His lawyer, Jon Christian Elden, said in court that the trial was a test of society’s ability to deal with a multi-religious societal reality, thus drawing a line between legal free speech and illegal threats. In other words, the Hussain trial might serve as an example of a critical event. The act in question was an email sent by Hussain to Nina Johnsrud, a journalist at the Norwegian daily Dagsavisen (translated from the Norwegian email printed in Dagbladet 25 October 2012):



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The article is received by both known and unknown brothers, and it is NOT well received. It has set minds ablaze that you have pried into people’s privacy, and you must not be surprised if something or someone pops up in your private life too! With words or actions, I don’t know! This is not a threat, just useful information for your own good. – Ubaydullah Hussain (27)

Hussain here employed a rhetorical trope that has become a staple among Norwegian Muslim radicals: ‘This is not a threat, but…’. The man who coined this phrase was Mohyeldeen Mohammad, a young Norwegian Muslim of Iraqi descent and one of the first to champion radical Muslim causes in the Norwegian media. At a demonstration against the publication of a cartoon on the front page of Dagbladet in 2010, he warned of grave consequences, a possible terror attack on Norwegian soil, and said: ‘This is not a threat, but a warning’ (see Akerhaug, 2013 for an account). The somewhat older Irfan Bhatti, an ex-criminal of Pakistani descent who had for some time been the social glue of the radical fringe of young Norwegian Muslims (ibid.), repeated the phrase at a new demonstration in 2012. Hussain said the same thing in the email to Johnsrud. One way of understanding the use of the rhetorical trope is that it is an attempt to utter a violent threat (which is forbidden by law) without actually uttering the words that would count as a threat in terms of the law. Did these threats by Ubaydullah Hussain, Mohyeldeen Mohammad and Irfan Bhatti influence the reporting of religion and religious groups in the media? Before turning to the survey and interviews with editors and journalists, it can be illuminating to take a quick glimpse at the actual coverage of Islam, religion and religious groups in the Norwegian media. This may provide background for interpreting the results in the survey and the interviews. As part of his Master’s thesis on the antiIslamic political right in Norway, Lars Erik Berntzen analysed coverage of Islam and Muslims by Norwegian media (based on these keywords: Islam, muslim, hijab, burka, niqab, moské, Allah, muhammedaner, jihad, hellig krig, snikislamisering, islamisering, Eurabia) (Berntzen, 2011). Berntzen found a steady increase in the coverage of Islam until 2011. A more recent analysis was done by Knut Lundby and Ann-Kristin Gresaker (2015). They analysed the extent to which religion was covered in four major Norwegian newspapers (VG, Aftenposten, Stavanger Aftenblad and Arbeiderbladet/Dagsavisen) in 1988, 1998 and 2008. This analysis did not show any dramatic increase in the coverage of religion: 483 articles in 1988, 643 in 1998 and 614 in 2008. As the authors acknowledge, each individual year might have had more or less coverage than the surrounding years. Still, the relative stability of the numbers implies that Norwegian media do not cover religion to a much larger extent today than before. But even if the general coverage has not seen a dramatic increase, the authors do note a large increase in the coverage of topics related to Islam (with the exception of Stavanger Aftenblad).

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These raw numbers, however, do not say much about the nature of the coverage: Was it negative, positive or neutral? Such an analysis concerning the nature of the coverage was performed in a 2007 Master’s thesis in media studies by Sindre Storvoll (Storvoll, 2007). He analysed all the relevant articles that addressed either Islam or Christianity during Christmas 2005 (19 December 2005–4 January 2006), Easter 2006 (10–24 April) and a ‘constructed week’ from the spring of 2006, where he picked a Monday from one week, a Tuesday from the next, etc., in order to avoid biased coverage resulting from a specific event. Based on a total of 550 articles, the conclusion was unequivocal: while Christianity was covered in a manner that was more positive than negative, Islam was covered in a manner that was more negative than positive (ibid.). Another Master’s thesis, defended by Odd Aksnes in 2011, addressed the coverage of Islam in the Norwegian daily Aftenposten during the course of a year (Aksnes, 2011). Aksnes also interviewed some of the journalists who worked on these issues in Aftenposten. According to Aksnes, questions relating to Islam were seen as newsworthy first and foremost whenever there was the possibility of a clash between the values or behaviour of Muslims and dominant values in Norwegian society. These works point in the same direction: coverage of Islam and Muslims has been increasing over the last 10–15 years and seems on balance to be more negative than positive. Given that we, for the purposes of this chapter, define an institution as a system of rules and norms, it is also relevant to mention that the formal rules regulating criticism of religion became more lax during these years. In 2009, the Stoltenberg government proposed modifying the ban on blasphemy in the Norwegian penal code, a ban that had for all practical purposes never been applied in Norway, at least not since 1933. The Stoltenberg government proposed that ‘hateful qualified attacks against religions and world views’ should be punishable. The initiative, though, seems not to have come from political groups associated with the rights of Muslims or minorities but from the agrarian Centre Party, which sought to defend traditional Christian values (Brekke, 2009). However, this resulted in a massive public backlash against the government, and the end result was the opposite. The Norwegian parliament decided to remove all bans on blasphemy or attacks against religion or religious groups. The formal rules regulating the Norwegian media system therefore formally changed during these years. Even though the new penal code (including the right to commit blasphemy) was not formally introduced until 2015, it has been clear to all ever since 2009 that religion was not to have any special protection in the law. A conclusion to be drawn from this is that the Norwegian media, overall, does not seem to refrain from criticizing religion, Islam or Muslim groups. The data actually point to an increase in the problematizing coverage of topics related to Islam during recent years. The religiously framed threats that have been made have not succeeded in suppressing problematic coverage of Islam as such. If there has been any change, it has not been to refrain in general from covering topics related to Islam in a critical manner. However, what might nevertheless have changed is the manner of the coverage  – not whether Islam or religion should be reported critically but how it should



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be done (see also Steen-Johnsen et al. 2016 for a similar observation). Certain topics might be avoided, and criticism might be couched in one form but not another. The interesting question, then, is whether journalists and editors frame coverage differently because of the threats? In order to answer this question, we need to turn to the survey and the interviews.

8.5 Norms, Values and Perceptions of Threats The survey contained items on the normative opinions of people working in the media. One item was designed to establish whether the respondents thought expressions of speech that mocked or ridiculed (Norwegian: ‘håner’) religion should be ‘accepted’ in the media. This way of formulating the question – asking whether something should be ‘accepted’ and not whether it should be ‘allowed’  – does not measure people’s formal legal opinions but rather how they feel about something in daily life. It is nevertheless somewhat surprising, at least based on what one might expect from following the public debate on these issues, that a substantial minority of people working in the media actually do not think that mockery of religion should be accepted in the media. Only half the respondents agree that mocking religion should be accepted; 30  percent assert that it should not be accepted, and 20  percent are undecided. However, among the journalists, a larger percentage (60 percent) thinks that mocking religion should be accepted. As mentioned, we have no data to compare with earlier points in time, as this is the first survey of its kind of journalists and editors. What it shows, however, is that the norms and values related to these matters are not unequivocal among Norwegian journalists and editors. It seems to be a matter of genuine disagreement. Is it a matter of principle to be allowed to mock religions? It must also be noted that the general population is even more critical of mockery of religion than people working in the media (only 17 percent of the general population think mockery of religion in the media should be accepted). In the qualitative interviews, all the informants adhered to the majority view of the journalists. Freedom of expression was seen as a value that should trump other considerations if there were conflicts of interest. If it was a matter of public interest, it should be published. One journalist stated it like this: It is our job to publish, and we should never compromise on that. Then [if we compromise] we will have lost.

If we are to reconcile the results of the qualitative interviews with the results of the survey, it may seem like the ‘correct answer’ or official discourse among journalists and editors is that freedom of expression should always have precedence over other considerations. This is the view of the majority of the respondents in the survey. It

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Figure 1: Proportion who partly or totally agree that expressions mocking religion should be accepted. Percent (n=1187)

is also the case that, at least to our knowledge, no influential journalists or editors in Norway have stated publicly that other considerations should trump freedom of expression. In the setting of a qualitative interview in which the informant is sitting face to face with a researcher and might feel expected to give an ‘appropriate’ answer for someone of their profession, interviewees are also more likely to respond in what they see as a socially appropriate way. However, the survey reveals a significant minority of people working in the media think otherwise. This, however, seems to be a view or practice that has not been given a stamp of approval in the internal discourse among media practitioners. What the qualitative interviews also reveal is that alongside the mantra that freedom of expression should trump other considerations, the journalists and editors also acknowledged that the actual decisions as to whether one should publish or not had to be made again and again on a case by case basis. Our interviewees stated that material should be published if it was important to publish it. Our emphasis on ‘if’ in the last sentence is intentional. When one qualifies the importance of publishing something, one opens the possibility that threats might have an effect. A person who is affected by a threat will probably not say ‘I think it is important to publish this, and I am going to do so because of these threats.’ It is more likely that such threats will work through subconscious mechanisms. A story that could lead to negative reactions or threats may be regarded as ‘not really that important after all’ and would not be published. This conforms to the psychological theory of cognitive dissonance. When a thought is unpleasant and/or clashes with some other cherished principle, the dissonant thought will often be changed in an unconscious manner (Cooper, 2007). When the cognition ‘I should publish this’ clashes with the cognition ‘publishing this could have adverse consequences for me’, the result might be that one of the cognitions gets changed unconsciously. Instead of thinking “this is important but I don’t dare publish it,” one may end up thinking ‘I could publish this if I wanted to, but I don’t think it’s important enough.’ Marie Simonsen, an influential columnist with the daily Dagbladet, stated how this mechanism could work in an unusually frank manner.



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Figure 2: Proportion who express that fear of reactions from religious group affects their work. Percent (n=1187) On a bad day I am reluctant to write on a subject that I know could lead to an outburst of negative reactions. I think that “I can’t handle it today”. Even though I’ve become more thick skinned, it can still get under my skin. I do not want to sound whiny, because I have the best job in the world. But living with the realization that there are thousands of people out there who spend a lot of time on hating you is a special kind of feeling and something most people would like to avoid. (Interview in Vårt Land, 5 December 2013)

What Simonsen says here shows that awareness of negative reactions indeed may play a role in decisions to write or publish, even though she did not mention a religiously framed threat but negative reactions in general. On a normative level, it seems like few journalists or editors claim that threats can or should influence their decisions. But the awareness that publishing might entail negative reactions is nevertheless something that clearly exists among media practitioners, and this may impact publication policy in both conscious and unconscious ways. In order to assess whether threats may play a role or not, we can look at other items in the survey. In another question, the respondents were asked whether threats from religious groups affected their work. Of the journalists, only 2.1 percent said yes. This amounts to 19 people. This is a small number in relative terms. However, could it still be significant? The survey does not reveal whether these journalists really focused on religion and religious groups. If they did work regularly on stories concerning religion and religious groups, then the number could actually be regarded as high. But if they worked in other areas or answered ‘yes’ out of a general concern about religious threats, for example, then the number should be regarded as small in both relative and absolute terms. However, in the ‘cartoonists/illustrators’ category, the number saying their work was affected by threats is higher – as high as 8 percent. Even though this is also a small minority, it is still significant because almost 1 in 10 cartoonists or illustrators say they are affected by threats in their work. In several of the qualitative interviews, we could also trace an awareness of the possibility of threats among some informants. Some of them had taken measures to

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reduce the likelihood of hypothetical threats. One of them said this, as an evident matter of fact: I am obviously not friends with my children on Facebook.

The same informant, however, emphasized his duty as a journalist to never give in to threats. Even though he was aware of possible threats, he would probably have answered ‘no’ if he was asked whether these threats influenced his work. One way of interpreting the findings, then, is that journalists and editors do not receive many threats. Nor do they perceive themselves as being influenced by possible threats. What does seem to be more widespread, however, is a perception of the possibility of threats or violent reactions. In the section on theory, the impact of critical events, we pointed out, is often dependent on discourse and how it is interpreted. This means that a certain event – a religiously framed threat – may have an impact through the discourse to which it gives rise, even though the overwhelming majority of journalists, editors and illustrators had not received threats against themselves personally. The discourse among media practitioners seems to include threats or violent reactions as a possibility, even though it is not a widespread phenomenon in itself. Has this had an impact?

8.6 Traces of Change: (Not) to Publish for the Sake of Publishing As we outlined in section 4, rather than waning, critical coverage of Islam in the Norwegian media has been on the rise. If there has been a change in publication policy as a result of religiously framed threats, it is not about whether to publish critical stories related to Islam but about how to publish. In principle, it is possible that critical coverage of Islam could have been expressed in other forms – possibly in a more overtly mocking and/or harsh form – without such threats. Our main source of data in this regard is the qualitative material, in addition to the observation of actual publication policy in the media. According to several informants, some norms and perceptions concerning the publication of offensive material do seem to have changed. Publication of a caricature of the type that Dagbladet published in 2009 would not happen today, according to some of our informants. Apparently, Dagbladet did not have very strong journalistic reasons for publishing the cartoon. A senior editor in one of the papers put it like this: I believe that was the last time that someone published a caricature just for the sake of showing “hey, we can do it.” Just for making a point. I am reasonably sure that no editors would do something like that today.



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This implies a change in norms in recent years. The freedom of expression should not be used just to make a point but should be used prudently. But are there specific types of content that are censored? The qualitative interviews indicate that journalists and editors may censor themselves when it comes to how they publish things (the form) but not when it comes to what they publish (the content). Criticism of religion, even ridiculing of religion, gets published, and articles and news questioning or criticizing religion or religious groups are frequently published. However, cartoons and images seem to be a particularly sensitive area. Some cartoons and images are just not published. One famous cartoonist, Finn Graff, said in the aftermath of the murder of Theo van Gogh how far he would be willing to go in his cartoons: There is a limit, [and the limit is] when you get to the point that you get your head cut off. (Finn Graff)

The data for this article were collected prior to the Charlie Hebdo attacks, as mentioned in the introduction. After this attack, some called for collective publication of the cartoons of Charlie Hebdo as an act of collective solidarity. But in the Norwegian media, most of the big newspapers chose not to publish the cartoons of Charlie Hebdo in a flaunting or provocative manner following the attacks. Some newspapers published smaller facsimiles of some of the cartoons as illustrations to news stories about the attacks well inside the newspaper. Other papers, like VG, the largest newspaper in Norway, chose not to publish the cartoons at all. How should this be interpreted? Was it the result of prudence, or was it rather the case that editors did not dare publish the cartoons, even though they might have thought they should have? One of the arguments in favour of caution was that it would not be the best reaction to these attacks to fill the front pages of the media with caricatures of Muhammad. A mass publication of the cartoons could be perceived by Muslims as a collective punishment or revenge instead of a tailored response to the actions of a few extremists. This, for example, was the line taken by the British paper The Independent (January 8), which pointed out that just as Christians had no need to apologize for the terror carried out by Anders Behring Breivik, nor should Muslims be held responsible for the terror in Paris. Collective publications of Muhammad cartoons out of ‘solidarity’ could have had the paradoxical effect of giving the terrorists what they wanted, to antagonize Muslim populations in the West. This interpretation is in line with the self-understanding of some of the media actors we interviewed for this study, well before the Charlie Hebdo attacks. At that time they expressed that they had learned their lesson and would not publish such cartoons today just for the sake of publishing them. They anchored this assessment in the distinction between what should be allowed to publish and what is wise to publish. Even though most Norwegian newspapers did not publish the cartoons of Charlie Hebdo in a flaunting manner, most media outlets and commentators displayed strong support for Charlie Hebdo in the weeks following the attacks. This support did

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not entail complete agreement with all the editorial choices of Charlie Hebdo. Rather, it was emphasized that one could not compromise on the right to publish the kind of things Charlie Hebdo published. It may seem like the kinds of cartoons Charlie Hebdo had published were perceived to be more important after the attacks; they were no longer seen just as provocations but as publications that actually had a mission in themselves. The Norwegian daily Aftenposten, for example, stated as follows the day following the attacks: Satire and the satirical cartoon has a special and valuable role in the open democracies. Nothing can to same degree as good satire disrobe persons in power of their authority, and few are able to pose challenges like a good cartoonist can. (Aftenposten, 8 January 15)

But this support for satire and for Charlie Hebdo and its cartoons was not accompanied by widespread publication of those cartoons. It is reasonable to assume that it had significant ‘news value’ at the time of the attacks to publish the cartoons that the attacks were all about. If a lone dog-loving madman had attacked Charlie Hebdo because they had published a cartoon of a dog that resembled his own dog, it is safe to assume that most newspapers would have published the cartoon of the dog in question (the probability for retaliation from other dog lovers would probably be rather small). But in this case, it did not happen. What seems to be a play here, then, is a decision not to publish that was not based on a consideration of whether the cartoons were newsworthy or relevant to the case in question. A more reasonable interpretation is that the Norwegian media outlets chose not to publish these cartoons because the importance of publication was weighed against other considerations. These other considerations need not have been about their own security, of course. They may have been considerations about the public response, for example, would it lead to antagonism between different social groups? Still, the publication policy in this case seems to have followed a logic in which considerations other than freedom of speech were given priority. At the same time, developments after Charlie Hebdo also followed the pattern we have detailed in the article in another manner. Even though the cartoons of Charlie Hebdo were mostly not reprinted, Norwegian media outlets were full of critical coverage of Islam following the attack. For example, the two newspapers that generally cater to Norway’s cultural and academic elite, Morgenbladet and Klassekampen, both printed long feature articles in the months following the attacks that asked the simple question: ‘Is Islam the problem?’ (Morgenbladet, 16 January; Klassekampen, 1 April). These articles showed that criticism of Islam and of Muslim groups was by no means censored in Norwegian media but rather the contrary. Cartoons and pictures religious Muslims might deem especially offensive, however, do not seem to get published as often as before. As this article is being written, it is 10 years since the newspaper Magazinet published the Mohammed cartoons and one year since the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack.



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Moreover, during the last year there have been more acts of terror, including the attack at the Bataclan in Paris. One of the Danish cartoonists, Lars Vilks, is clear in his assessment of developments within the mass media. A year to the day after the Charlie Hebdo incident, he criticized the media for having given in to Charlie Hebdo terrorists. Freedom of speech is now regulated by fear, Vilks said on the NRK radio program, Kulturnytt. There is fear and dread. When it comes to mass media, especially newspapers, which will publish cases because of the risk-calculation you make, so you accept the terrorists’ demands. And all publications that might be offensive are actually in principle stopped. (Vilks interviewed on Kulturnytt, 7 January 2016)

Eirik Bergesen, who is head of the satire site Opplysningskontoret, and Kjersti Løken Stavrum, chair of the Norwegian Press Complaints Commission (PFU), were interviewed on the same program. Both agreed with Vilks and his analysis. The trends in both Norway and Denmark are similar. According to Bergesen, several comedians were ready and waiting to stand up after Charlie Hebdo, but the mass media were simply not going to allow that kind of humour: It’s not the comedians who are afraid, it’s the media.

Each editor, Stavrum added, is responsible for their employees and families: I know editors who do not want to risk exposing their employees unnecessarily.

It is obviously important to ask what ‘unnecessarily’ means in this context, in particular when confronting this practice with the idea that freedom of expression should be exercised. At the same time, it should not come as any surprise that editors sometimes do fear that terror might hit one of their employees, colleagues or friends. Consequently, it might not always appear to be worth the risk of putting someone’s life in danger.

8.7 Institutional Change Through Changes in Discourse The main finding that emerges from the data is that criticism of religion or coverage of religions and religious groups is not affected in a dramatic way by threats. Religion and religious groups are still covered extensively and often in a questioning or critical way. However, certain forms and types of content are avoided, especially pictures or cartoons that are seen to be liable to provoke lots of negative reactions. How does this relate to the theory of critical events and institutional change? Our interpretation is that critical events such as the much-publicized religiously for-

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mulated threats against journalists do seem to influence the informal norms of the Norwegian media system. Given that very few journalists or editors seem to have experienced threats themselves and that very few say they are affected by threats in their work, threats as critical events have probably had an impact through the discourse they give rise to. When a discourse emerges in which threats are a possible (but improbable) consequence of publishing offensive material, it makes an impact. To put it somewhat more provocatively: threats work. While Dagbladet published a caricature on their front page in 2009, it would probably not happen today. The internal norms seem to have changed. The principle of freedom of expression is held in high regard, but a more prudential approach to the principle seems to have gained ground. According to our informants, the right to scorn or mock religion should only be exercised if or when it serves an important purpose and not just for the sake of doing it. Still, the case of Charlie Hebdo shows that offensive cartoons often do not get published, even when it would have been ‘newsworthy’ to do so. Should this be regarded as self-censorship or rather as a prudent response? Perhaps the right answer is that it is both.

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Sissel C. Trygstad

9 Opposing Forces: On Whistleblowing in Norwegian Working Life The introduction of legal provisions and their subsequent practical application provide a useful basis for studying institutional change. Institutional change may reveal antagonisms and tensions within existing institutional arrangements and at the same time mobilize quests for power when trying to establish new arrangements. Particularly if the new arrangement is controversial, supporters and opponents of ‘the new’ will employ strategies to influence the outcome. In this chapter, I discuss changes that were highly controversial, the legal amendments that aim to reinforce the freedom of expression of employees and the legal protection of employees who act as whistleblowers. I argue that the changes have mobilized power, which is a crucial dimension when it comes to explaining the changes or lack of changes in an institutional process, which in our case is management’s handling of whistleblowing cases.

9.1 Expanding the Field for Workplace Democracy Whistleblowing is usually defined as ‘the disclosure by organization members (former or current) of illegal, immoral or illegitimate practices under the control of their employers to persons or organizations that may be able to effect action’ (Miceli et al., 2008; Near et al., 2004; Near & Miceli, 1985, p. 4). The definition includes internal and external whistleblowing, for example, to report wrongdoing to authorities or media outside the organization. In addition, when the focus is on ‘public interest’ whistleblowing, for example, reports of wrongdoing that clearly affect organizational or social interests wider than personal or private ones, the definition is useful. Pursuant to the amendment to Section 100 of the Norwegian Constitution, adopted in 2004, and the incorporation of provisions on internal and external notification in the Working Environment Act in 2007 (WEA, 200513), employees shall be protected against retaliation from their employer when giving internal or public notification of seriously censurable conditions if they do so in an appropriate way. Although Nordic countries share several common features and are usually referred to the Nordic model of labour relations, Norway is so far the only Nordic country to give employees the statutory right to notify. Together with the United Kingdom, Norway has the most

13 The Whistleblowing sections in the WEA; §§§2–4, 2–5, 3–6 were effectuated 01.01.2007, but the reference is still WEA 2005. © 2017 Fredrik Engelstad, Håkon Larsen, Jon Rogstad, Kari Steen-Johnsen This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.



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extensive whistleblowing legislation in Europe (Lewis & Trygstad, 2009; Vandekerckhove, 2010). The amendments follow a tradition of workplace democracy, two core concepts of which are participation and co-determination. Participation and co-determination are central concepts embedded in the Norwegian and Nordic models of labour relations. Therefore, these statutory provisions follow a path reaching far back in time and culminating in 1977 with the adoption of the Norwegian Working Environment Act (WEA). Kalleberg (1983) has argued that the WEA was essential in the progression to a more egalitarian society and was a key instrument to promote democracy in the workplace. The amendments can also be seen as extending transparency and the general public’s access to inside information. However, new provisions may mobilize resistance and quests for power, which in turn may affect their interpretation, practical application and effects. The proposal for provisions on notification was especially controversial in the Norwegian debate in the early 2000s. Interests were mobilized and articulated both prior to and after the legal amendments were introduced. While the amendments were welcomed by trade unions, they were met with strong criticism from employer organizations, which feared that greater protection of freedom of expression and new protective measures for whistleblowers would undermine the employee’s duty of loyalty and in the private sector ultimately harm another central part of democratic order, namely property rights (Engelstad, 2015, p. 39). The amendments may also be said to contradict trendsetting organizational models and management strategies that had prevailed over time, with a strong emphasis on managerial prerogative, committed employees and loyalty. This paves the way for a situation where even the content of a new arrangement may counteract the ideal of more democracy. Therefore, the question to be discussed in the following is a simple one: Have the legal amendments made whistleblowing more frequent, effective and safe, and in what way can institutional theory explain the findings?

9.1.1 Methodology This chapter uses data from four different whistleblowing surveys covering the entire Norwegian labour market (Bjørkelo, 2010; Fritt Ord Foundation, 2013; Matthiesen et al., 2008; Trygstad, 2010).14 These surveys were conducted after the legislative changes in the WEA and contain questions about the whistleblowing process. In addition, I use data from the Level of Living Survey by Statistics Norway, which in 2006 contained questions concerning whistleblowing. The Level of Living Survey was conducted before the incorporation of provision on internal and external notification in the WEA in 2007. The data used illustrate the whistleblowing processes, whistle-

14 See Table 1 for further details.

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blowing activity, whistleblowing efficiency and whistleblowing sanctions. Whistleblowing activity refers to those who have observed serious wrongdoing in the last 12 months and have reported the misconduct to someone with power to take action. Whistleblowing efficiency refers to whether it helps or not to blow the whistle, while whistleblowing sanctions refer to retaliation against whistleblowers. One of these studies (Fritt Ord Foundation, 2013) also includes questions concerning freedom of expression. In addition, I use data from a survey among Norwegian trade union representatives in Norway during autumn 2014 (hereafter the TU survey). In the TU survey, trade union representatives were asked if they know the whistleblowing legislation and how they evaluate the effect of the new sections in WEA 2005. The same questions were asked in Skivenes & Trygstad (2010), which makes it possible to compare data over time. I also refer to other relevant studies in which whistleblowing and the freedom of expression have been addressed. In the next section, I use Scott’s (1995) definition of institution as a starting point and discuss changes in the regulative pillar before discussing the empirical findings in section 3. In section 4, the findings are discussed in light of the institutional theory of change, followed by the conclusion in section 5.

9.2 Institutional Change Institutional change in the form of revision or the introduction of new statutes has the purpose of either reinforcing an established practice or establishing new practices and actions. The first form of change is commonly seen as easier to accomplish (Scott, 1995; Pierson, 2004; Mahoney & Thelen, 2010). The changes in the constitution and in the WEA are foremost to be considered as strengthening already existing rules and practices. According to Scott, institutions consist of three pillars: “cognitive, normative, and regulative structures and activities that provide stability and meaning to social behavior. Institutions are transported by various carriers  – cultures, structures, and routines – and they operate at multiple levels of jurisdiction.” (Scott, 1995 p. 33)

The pillars represent structures and activities that are intended to bring stability and meaning to social contexts. In this chapter, I focus on the regulative and normative pillars. Legal amendments are related to the regulative pillar, while ‘new’ organizational models and management strategies can be placed in the normative pillar. Within the normative pillar, norms, values and roles are seen as providing a structure for actions undertaken by the actor as well as the organization. Values define an ideal standard that the actions are assessed against, while norms define how ideal actions can be achieved (Grosvold, 2010). Taken together, norms and values show how we can reach the defined objectives in a way that will be deemed appropriate (Scott, 1995, pp. 37–38).



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9.2.1 Changes in the Pillars According to Scott, these two pillars often mutually support each other. With regard to the introduction of strengthened protection of freedom of expression and the right to give notification, however, it appears that this may have provoked tensions in both pillars and at the same time provoked powers and interests that may pull in different directions. It seems that the legislator’s intentions offend prevailing norms that give strong emphasis to efficiency, reputation and control in enterprises. This tension makes Mahoney and Thelen’s (2010) typology of change relevant. They distinguish between displacement, layering, drift and conversion. Engelstad (2015) relates the two first changes to the introduction of new rules to the institution, ‘either by new rules or replacing new ones or by new rules serving as a supplement to the old ones” (ibid., p. 38). Drift and conversion concern forms of reinterpretations of existing rules, changing the impact of institutions even if their formal setup remains unchanged (ibid.). While the legal amendment in the WEA were new rules, the changes in the Constitution was rather a supplement to the former § 100. According to Engelstad (2015), layering or displacement could therefore be possible outcome. The regulative pillar is based on formal statutes, agreements, policies and principles that constitute the framework for social actions. This pillar is also based on the implementation of potential sanctions in cases where statutes or agreements are violated (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Scott, 1995). They state what are to be considered acceptable and unacceptable acts by the social partners. In this chapter, I focus on employees’ right to disclose, which regulative changes direct and impose restrictions on. At the same time, these provisions may contradict other key premises, such as managerial prerogative and the duty of loyalty.

9.2.2 Freedom of Expression The right to free expression is an essential precondition of democracy. Participating in discourse is deemed important for strengthening individual development and competence (Pateman, 1970, 2012; Elvestad, 2011, p. 130). Pateman is concerned with how participation promotes educational, intellectual and emotional development, and the workplace is seen as a key arena for training in politics (Pateman, 1970, p. 42–43). The general right to free expression is protected by Section 100 of the Constitution and by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). In principle, employees enjoy the same freedom of expression as everybody else (Elvestad, 2011, p. 31). Grounds must be given for restricting the freedom of expression of employees and not the other way round. Moreover, the government White Paper (St. meld. nr. 26 (2003–2004), p.  14) states that employees are likely to have a special motivation to participate in public debate when they possess specialized knowledge in a field that is discussed and debated. Furthermore, it is pointed out that

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freedom of expression is essential in light of society’s need for information and open discourse. After the amendments were adopted, The Parliamentary Ombudsman ascertained that Section 100 of the Constitution provides stronger protection of the right of employees to free expression than does the ECHR and that the right of employees to free expression now accords with a direct interpretation of the Constitution.15 While the purpose of the new Section 100 was to strengthen the right of employees to free expression, the provisions on notification were introduced to protect employees against accusations of disloyalty.

9.2.3 On Employees’ Right to Disclose From a historical perspective, it could be argued that statutory provisions have required employees to report wrongdoing in organizations since 1956, when the provision of safety representatives was incorporated into the Norwegian Environment Act (Skivenes & Trygstad, 2015). The inclusion of the concept of ‘whistleblowing’ is, however, new, as are the sections concerning whistleblowing. The background for giving the right to notify a statutory basis lies in the recognition that challenging people in power within an organization may involve the risk of retaliation (Bjørkelo, 2010; Skivenes &Trygstad, 2010; Brown et al., 2008; Bakken & Dalby, 2007). Employers and employees may have varying and contradictory interests, which can affect how notifications of censurable conditions are handled. This is a major reason why the provisions on notification were incorporated into the WEA in 2007. It has been argued that whistleblowing as a concept should be limited to external whistleblowing (Haglunds, 2009), but as stated by Miceli et al. (2008), internal and external whistleblowing are rather to be seen as two sides of the same coin. Empirical findings show that employees report misconduct internally, most often to their immediate supervisor, before reporting the issue outside the organization (ibid., Trygstad et al., 2014). For grounds for whistleblowing to exist, something censurable must be occurring. This is commonly defined as acts or conditions that are illegitimate, immoral and/or illegal (cf. the definition given by Near & Miceli et al., 1985). The question remains, however, how the criteria of illegitimacy, immorality or illegality should be understood and interpreted. The preparatory works for the provisions on notification in the WEA state that censurable conditions include violations of relevant legislation or breaches of ethical codes of conduct. It is therefore specified that ‘by censurable conditions are meant not only criminal (i.e. punishable) acts, but also contraventions of other legally defined prescriptions or prohibitions’ (Ot. prp. nr. 84 (2005–2006) p. 37).

15 Somb. See e.g. 19 April 2013 (case no. 2012/1031).



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Breaches of ethical codes of conduct refer to such codes that have been issued by the enterprise in question or norms generally accepted in society (ibid.).16 According to WEA 2005, an employee has ‘a right to notify concerning censurable conditions at the undertaking’, which covers both internal and external whistleblowing.17 Section 2–4(2) of WEA 2005 provides that the employee must ‘follow an appropriate procedure in connection with such notification’, but notwithstanding this, there is ‘the right to notify in accordance with the duty to notify or the undertaking’s routines for notification’. Further, reporting wrongdoing to union representatives and/or the health and security inspector and to supervisory authorities, for example, the Norwegian Directorate of Labour Inspection, is always regarded as appropriate.18 Section 2–4(3) of WEA 2005 places the burden on the employer to prove that notification was not made in accordance with this section. Section 2–5 of WEA 2005 prohibits retaliation against an employee who invokes or attempts to invoke Section 2–4. If there is reason to believe that retaliation has occurred, it is assumed to have taken place unless the employer ‘substantiates otherwise’. Irrespective of the fault of the employer, compensation is available if the court thinks it reasonable in all the circumstances.19 In relation to facilitating notification, Section 3–6 of WEA 2005 requires employers to ‘develop routines for internal notification or implement other measures that facilitate notification concerning censurable conditions … if the circumstances in the undertaking so indicate’. In this chapter, I focus on Sections 2–4 and 2–5.

9.2.4 Freedom of Expression Versus the Managerial Prerogative The legal amendments to the Constitution and the WEA during the past decade have provided double protection to employees. Simultaneously, the changes are at odds with another key principle in Norwegian working life, the managerial prerogative, which is also part of the regulative pillar. Despite the fact that the right to free expression has been reaffirmed, there are nevertheless limits to the matters for which employees may exercise this right. These restrictions stem from the duty of loyalty that we all have by virtue of our employment relationship. The requirement for loyalty will vary according to the position one occupies in the hierarchy. Freedom of expression is clearly restricted by proximity to the top management. The reason is the risk that the person who makes the disclosure will be identified with the enterprise, despite

16 This is in contrast to ‘... conditions that the employee holds to be censurable in light of his or her own political or ethical convictions are thus not encompassed by this provision’ (ibid.:50). 17 Section 2–4 (1) of WEA 2005. There appears to be no definition of censurable conditions. An earlier proposal that specifically mentioned that the right was to notify the public was not implemented. 18 Proposition No. 84 to the Odelsting (2005–2006), p. 40. 19 Section 2–5(3) of WEA 2005.

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any assurances that this person speaks only on his or her own behalf (St. meld. nr. 26 (2003–2004), p. 104). In the public sector, proximity to the political leadership is an essential factor when it comes to loyalty. The further one moves away from the political leadership, the greater the freedom of expression and vice versa. Assessments of whether an expression is loyal or disloyal will be made in light of ‘a reasonable balancing of concerns for protecting the employee’s right of free expression against concerns for protecting the employer’s interests’ (Elvestad, 2011, p. 131). In this context, Olsen (2014) underscores the following elements as key issues in such a balancing act: the risk of identification with the employers, the truth of the disclosure, the form of expression, concerns for the public interest, the purpose of the disclosure, whether the disclosure is made internally or externally, whether the disclosure is in line with enterprise regulations and whether it conflicts with the employer’s legitimate interests. As a main principle, however, it will take quite a lot for an expression to be restricted by the duty of loyalty to an employer (Olsen, 2014, pp.  252–253). Further, the concept of loyalty is multi-dimensional. One employee might have loyalty obligations towards colleagues, the union and the users or to the public in general (Skivenes & Trygstad, 2010). One obvious effect of legislation is to emphasize that loyalty is not one-dimensional. It involves contradictions that may create tensions. We will describe relevant amendments below. This may explain why the process leading up to the statutory right to disclose activated embedded tensions within this pillar to the fore. On one side were the employers’ organizations, which saw no need to introduce a statutory right to disclose.20 Two arguments were used. The first one referred to the democratic tradition that characterizes Norwegian working life. It was claimed that the legal provisions were unnecessary in light of prevailing legislation and practice. In terms of the legal aspects, it was pointed out that whistleblowers already enjoy legal protection.21 It was argued that prevailing practice showed that disclosing censurable conditions entailed little risk in Norwegian working life. The second argument against the statutory provisions was closely linked to the duty of loyalty and the managerial prerogative. The employers’ organizations feared that a statutory right to

20 Including NAVO (now Spekter), HSH (now Virke) and NHO. 21 According to Section 12 of the previous Working Environment Act, an employee shall not be exposed to harassment or other forms of improper conduct. Section 54G of the Act also prohibited any retaliatory action against employees who have submitted complaints or in other ways have expressed an intention to address matters related to violations of the anti-discrimination provisions in the Act. This provision applied to all forms of retaliation by the employer, and Section 16 imposed an obligation on employees to notify the employer, the safety representative and to an adequate extent also other employees about ‘errors or deficiencies that may represent a risk to life and health’ (Ot.prp. nr. 49 (2004–2005), p. 130).

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disclose would act as “encouragement to persons who fail to act in accordance with the requirements for loyalty, but pursue their own objectives through such acts.”22 The employer standpoints were opposed by those who claimed that the proposal for provisions on disclosure did not go far enough. These included the Parliamentary Ombudsman and professional associations, such as the Norwegian Nurses Organisation and the Union of Education Norway. Again, arguments linked to democracy in general and freedom of expression in particular were being voiced. It was pointed out that “legal protection of whistleblowers is necessary”.23 Reference was made to the conflict between freedom of expression and the duty of loyalty to employers and to how employees are often made subject to a duty of confidentiality in matters that the public has the right to be informed about. The different statements that appeared in the hearing round and the vigorous media debate accompanying the preparation of the provisions on disclosure demonstrate how interests and power became mobilized. It can be argued that the discussion on whistleblowing has revived tensions associated with loyalties and management prerogatives on the one hand and the freedom of expression of employees and democracy on the other. As will be discussed in section 4, both ‘camps’ could draw support from the normative pillar. But first, let us examine the findings.

9.3 Findings Several studies have concluded that demographic variables such as gender, length of service, education, etc. do not seem to have a great impact either on who blows the whistle or the outcome (Miceli et al., 2008; Skivenes & Trygstad 2010; 2015). Skivenes and Trygstad (2015) find that institutional arrangements at the workplace make a difference. The presence of trade union representatives at the company level and whistleblowing procedures increases the probability of success when reporting wrongdoing. While trade union representatives can function as a safety net, whistleblowing procedures seem to contribute to predictability in whistleblowing processes (Skivenes & Trygstad, 2015). But even in enterprises where these institutional arrangements are present, whistleblowing can be risky. The obvious explanation is that whistleblowers can challenge power structures and harm powerful people inside and outside the organization. According to Lukes (2005), power can be exercised through hegemonic processes and legitimation of power can be exercised through cultural and normative assumptions. Power can be used to ensure that conflicts never arise, at least not in ‘public’,

22 https://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dokumenter/otprp-nr-49-2004-2005-/id396602/?docId=OTP2004 20050049000DDDEPIS&q=h%C3%B8ring%20lojal%20varsling&navchap=1&ch=11. 23 (https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dokumenter/horing-nou-2004-5-innstilling-fra-arbeid/ id96309/).

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and in our context, that wrongdoing remains under-reported, or if reported, it is not dealt with in an appropriate way. Or it could influence the type of wrongdoing that is seen as appropriate to report. In this section, I turn to findings from different surveys on whistleblowing in Norway to discuss whether the legal amendments made whistleblowing more frequent (in terms of increased activity), efficient and safe.

9.3.1 Norwegian Surveys In the last decade, a number of studies addressing whistleblowing and the conflict between the requirement of loyalty and freedom of expression have been undertaken in Norway. In the public sector, there has been discussion related to limitations of freedom of expression among civil servants (Trygstad, 2015). A 2014 survey completed by members of the Norwegian Nursing Association, the Union of Education Norway and the Police Federation of Norway, where the overwhelming majority work in the public sector, points to some challenges. Approximately 40 percent of the respondents stated that the top management had imposed increasing requirements of loyalty on them in recent years (Oslo redaktørforening/infact, 2014). Studies also show that attempts are made to restrict employee freedom of expression by way of communication rules and work contracts (Trygstad, 2015). A total of 34 percent of all Norwegian employees fully or partly agree that their opportunities to refer to their workplace in a public forum are restricted by the work contract they have entered into with their employer. This pertains to employee statements that do not violate a statutory duty of confidentiality. A lack of data makes it difficult to form conclusions about the trend, but the Parliamentary Ombudsman has expressed his concern about the growing number of procedures and policies in the public sector that seem to restrict and violate the freedom of expression. 24 More data are available when it comes to whistleblowing. Table 1 summarizes the main points in the surveys that have encompassed the entire labour market, across sectors and industries. All these have included mapping and analyses of self-reported whistleblowing and the consequences of this activity. Thus, the basis of the analysis is the reporting by employees of their experience of censurable conditions in the workplace. Table 1 reports findings concerning the whistleblowing process. As mentioned above, whistleblowing activity refers to the proportion of employees who have witnessed censurable conditions during the last 12 months and disclosed them. Whistleblowing efficiency refers to whether the whistleblowing partly or totally solved the

24 https://www.sivilombudsmannen.no/pressemeldinger/behov-for-a-styrke-offentlig-ansattesytringsfrihet-article4166-3004.html

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Table 1: Norwegian research on the whistleblowing process (percent) Level of living survey 2006. N=9200

Matthiesen et al. 2008, N=1604

Trygstad 2010, Bjørkelo N=6000 2010, N=2539

Fritt Ord Foundation 201325, N=1161

Response rate

66

23

47

47

WB* activity

77

55

53

51

50

18

13

WB efficiency WB sanctions

12

57

62 59

54 13

*Whistleblowing

problem. Whistleblowing sanctions refer to the proportion of employees who have received sanctions during or after their whistleblowing.25 Table 1 shows variations in whistleblowing activity (those who have observed serious wrongdoing in the last 12 months and have reported the misconduct to someone with power to take action) but also a relatively high degree of stability around such factors as the effectiveness of disclosure and the use of sanctions. With the exception of the Level of Living survey from 2006, the definitions used in the other surveys are similar. Research shows that the definitions used for censurable conditions and whistleblowing have a major impact on the findings (cf. Skivenes & Trygstad, 2012). In the surveys conducted by Matthiesen et al. in 2008 and Trygstad in 2010, the level of whistleblowing activity is nearly identical. It is a bit higher in the survey from 2013, but the change is not dramatic. This stability indicates that there has been no major increase in whistleblowing activity over this time span. As regards whistleblowing efficiency (whether it helps to blow the whistle), the results are relatively similar over a period of a little more than five years. In other words, when it comes to efficiency, no significant changes over the time span are found. Here, the findings from the investigations of the Fritt Ord Foundation (2013) are similar to the two others. In terms of the proportion of employees who have faced retaliation because of their disclosures, we see a range from 12  percent (the lowest) to 18  percent (the highest). The latter study had a low response rate of 23 percent, indicating that these data should be interpreted with some caution. It is still worth noting that the findings reported here give no indication that the proportion of employees who face retaliation is significantly decreasing in Norwegian working life.

25 Reported in Trygstad & Ødegård (2014). 

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Figure 1: Do TU reps think that the legislation has made any difference (those who agree or partly agree)? (Percent, N=1062/990) (Source: Trygstad 2010, TU survey 2014).

9.3.2 Has the Legislation Made any Difference? Trade union representatives are given a central role in the whistleblowing process. Notifying trade union representatives (and health and safety delegates) is also considered appropriate. In our survey from 2010 (Trygstad, 2010), we asked trade union representatives if they knew the whistleblowing legislation; 20 percent answered that they knew it well. In the TU survey (2014), it was 30 percent, an increase but not that substantial. Trade union representatives were also asked if they thought the whistleblowing legislation had had any impact upon the whistleblowing process. Figure 1 indicates stability. The proportion of trade union representatives that agree or partly agree with the statements “The WB legislation has made it safer to notify” and “The WB legislation has made it easier to notify” are almost identical at 44 percent in 2010 and 45 percent in 2014.

9.3.3 Findings in a Comparative Perspective Unfortunately, no comparable whistleblowing studies have been conducted in other Nordic countries, but when compared to most findings published internationally, whistleblowing activity in Norway can be described as high; giving notification is frequently effective, and employees face retaliation more rarely than is reported in other studies. Since the 1980s, studies in the USA undertaken by the Merit Systems Protection Board have indicated that more than half of all federal employees have

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observed censurable conditions in the organization where they are employed, and approximately 30  percent of them have filed a report. In other words, those who remain silent outnumber those who file notifications (Miceli & Near, 2006). Table 1 shows that in Norway, whistleblowing activities vary from 77 percent to 53 percent. Norway also stands out in terms of reactions, as a smaller proportion of whistleblowers experience sanctions. A study among civilian and military personnel at a large US air force base showed that a total of 37  percent of whistleblowers had been subject to sanctions (Near et al., 2004). Furthermore, Rothschild and Miethe (1999) found that two out of three whistleblowers experienced sanctions due to their actions. Table 1 indicates that in Norway, around 13 per cent of those who blow the whistle experience retaliation. Similar numbers are found in research for the Francis review of whistleblowing in the National Health Service in England (Lewis et al., 2015). In terms of the effectiveness of whistleblowing, Norwegian findings are also different from those observed elsewhere. Even though research findings here are more limited, Van Scotter et al. (2005, quoted in Miceli et al., 2008, p. 25) found that 26 percent of whistleblowers reported that the censurable issue had been partly or fully resolved. Miceli and Near (2002, p. 463) found that 31 percent of their respondents reported that, in their opinion, their whistleblowing had been effective in the sense that the censurable issue had been addressed or most likely would be addressed. In Table 1, we see that half of the whistleblowers or more answer that the wrongdoing was addressed for the better. An Australian study of whistleblowing in the public sector (Brown et al., 2008) shows findings more similar to those reported in Norwegian research. This study is the largest of its kind to be undertaken in Australia to date and one of the largest in the world. The data material includes a questionnaire-based survey of more than 7,600 civil servants employed in 118 public agencies. The findings are especially interesting in our context. Approximately 7 out of 10 respondents had experienced a censurable situation, and 6 out of 10 assessed this situation as ranging from quite serious to extremely serious. A total of 39 percent of those who had witnessed a censurable situation chose to report it. The main reasons for not reporting included the conviction that it would serve no purpose, or they feared reprisals, especially if the management was involved in the wrongdoing. Based on available knowledge, it is reasonable to conclude that whistleblowers in Norway are less frequently exposed to retaliation and that whistleblowing is more effective than what is indicated by findings in international literature. Skivenes and Trygstad (2015; 2010) link this difference with institutional structures in industrial life and argue that institutional arrangements in the workplace may promote whistleblowing activity and efficiency and reduce the risk of retaliation (Skivenes & Trygstad, 2015). It is reasonable to assume that the WEA, which encompasses the bulk of Norwegian industrial life, as well as collective agreements and extensive cooperation between trade unions and employers’ organizations locally and nationally all con-

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tribute to making more room for this type of expression of opinion than is the case in countries where such frameworks are partly absent. That said, not all Norwegian employees are covered by collective agreements, and not all employees are unionized. Therefore, whistleblowing in Norway could be a risky activity.

9.4 Discussion In light of these findings, we need to ask: What can explain the relative stability observed in the effectiveness of whistleblowing and the proportion of employees exposed to retaliation? And how can we explain the stability in the assessments that trade union representatives make of the provisions on whistleblowing? Except for the data from the Level of Living survey from 2006, the empirical material was collected in the period immediately after the provisions on notification in the WEA came into force in the winter of 2008, and the same issues were last studied in the autumn of 2013. This provides us with a time span of a little more than five years. Our findings give no grounds for assuming that the whistleblowing activity has increased or that whistleblowing has become more effective or safer during this period. We have also seen that trade union representatives give nearly identical responses when asked to assess whether the legal provisions in 2010 and 2014 have made whistleblowing safer and simpler. It is therefore difficult to conclude that the provisions on giving notification have had a major impact on whistleblowing processes in Norwegian working life. Nor do we have any basis for asserting that tolerance for critical expressions and whistleblowing has increased in working life, although comparatively speaking Norway does have a working life in which more people give notification, where notifications are more effective and where fewer employees face retaliation. I have related the legal amendments to changes in the regulative pillar. According to Scott (1995), the normative pillar tends to reinforce the regulative one. The development of the notification institute is interesting because in principle one could assume that reinforcement of the freedom of expression and new provisions on notification should have helped to: i) increase the whistleblowing activity and the effectiveness of notifications and ii) increase the safety of the whistleblowers. The emphasis on the freedom of expression of employees and their right to give notification of censurable conditions can in many ways be regarded as a further regulation of key premises in the model applied in working life – participation and co-determination. Is the explanation for this stability some sort of institutional inertia? Is it a result of a decoupled process? Or can we reasonably relate it to countermeasures by actors with strategic interests who are fearful of an interpretation of freedom of expression in general and of the provisions on notification in particular that would lower the threshold for using media or the public as a channel for disclosures and thus challenge the managerial prorogative? These possible explanations are discussed below.

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9.4.1 Institutional Inertia? The legal provisions were adopted by Parliament in 2004 and 2006. Institutionalization, however, is a time-consuming process. A period of five years is a short time when it comes to institutional change. It might therefore be tempting to claim that the provisions on disclosure still remain at what Tolbert and Zucker (1996) designate ‘the habitualization phase’. We can only reflect on the institutionalization of a structure or a scheme after the fact, when it is taken for granted and represents part of a doxa. A sign that new arrangements are becoming institutionalized is the presence of a habitualization process, a situation where members of an organization interpret and understand various concepts in an approximately similar way. Concepts are filled with a distinctive set of values that help imbue arrangements or structures with a character and identity; notions and expectations are formed. The habitualization phase is a critical stage in a process of institutionalization, and its outcome partly depends on who within an organization and in society as a whole chooses to act as supporters, spokespersons and promoters of the new order (ibid.; Trygstad, 2004). Legal enactment alone is no guarantee that a provision will become embedded in an organization, in the sense that institutionalized expectations are formed regarding the nature of disclosure and how it should be handled (Tolbert & Zucker, 1996). We cannot exclude the possibility that the strengthened protection of the right to free expression and the new provisions on disclosure are at such at stage, but as underlined, these provisions were not entirely new or completely open to be filled with a value of their own (Selznick, 1997). As pointed out above, through laws and agreements employees enjoyed freedom of expression in working life even before this right was confirmed by the new Section 100; nor could employees previously be punished for giving notification of serious and censurable conditions in the workplace. Norwegian working life has also been characterized by a large degree of individual and collective participation that has been justified with references to reasonableness and fairness, although this has also been expected to help promote efficiency. At the same time, it would be naïve to assume that freedom of expression in general and the right to notify in particular was an all over institutionalized as practice and without any risk in all Norwegian enterprises before the legal changes. Studies also show that the Nordic model of labour relations is hard to identify in industries in private service sectors, such as cleaning, hotels and restaurants and parts for retail (Nicolaisen & Trygstad, 2015; Berge et al., 2013). This brings us to the next possible explanation. As pointed out by Pierson (2004), new institutional arrangements may fail if the implementation cost is high.

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9.4.2 Decoupling? Is the stability a result of decoupling in the sense that the legal changes are neglected or avoided in order to maintain stability and control? As pointed out by Meyer and Rowan (1977), it is important that organizations act in line with what is considered appropriate in the field. One strategy that may be in use is decoupling. Formal structure is disconnected from practical action: one may communicate one thing but act in another way (Meyer & Rowan 1977, p. 352; Johansson, 2002, p. 4). In the last decade, there has been widespread and increasing attention devoted both to the right of employees to free expression and to whistleblowing in general. This is shown by, for example, the number of media reports on these topics (see Trygstad, 2014, 2015). Nevertheless, could an alternative explanation be that those who are to handle matters related to disclosures and whistleblowing employees have only limited knowledge of the legal provisions? As already mentioned, the provisions are indeed little known. In 2010, only 17  percent of managers responded that they were well familiar with the WEA’s provisions on notification. Managers in the private sector were clearly and significantly less aware of these provisions than were their colleagues in the public sector. In 2014, trade union representatives were asked the same question (The TU Survey). By then, the proportion who responded that they were well familiar with these provisions had risen to 30 percent, but well over onehalf responded that they were only partly familiar with them, and 15 percent had no knowledge of these provisions at all (Trygstad et al., 2014, p. 71). Insufficient knowledge about the legal amendments might lead to the absence of discussions on the nature of notifications and how such matters should be addressed. Another explanation for the stable picture might be the consequence of a managerial strategy to prevent employees from blowing the whistle.

9.4.3 Countermeasures According to Scott (1995), the normative pillar can be regarded as an operationalization or interpretation of features of the regulative pillar. Others are concerned with elucidating how various actors may mobilize interests and power within apparently established institutions, in particular if the regulative aspects of the institutions encompass elements of discretionary judgement (Mahoney & Thelen, 2010, p.  19). The right to free expression and the provisions on disclosure provide room for interpretation. The limits of what will be deemed acceptable or unacceptable expressions and acceptable or unacceptable restrictions may fluctuate. As pointed out by Engelstad (2015, p. 51), when it comes to institutional change layering holds a privileged position: ‘Old and new elements may follow different paths’. Processes of change or institutionalization will tend to ‘mobilize partisanship’ (Schattschneider, 1960, in Johnson, 2003) or give rise to opposition.

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Such processes activate and reveal the potential for power held by various actors and groups of actors. We have regarded the strengthened protection of the right to free expression and the provisions on notification as a continuation of key institutional elements in the Norwegian model of labour relations, with an emphasis on participation and co-determination with reference to reasonableness and fairness. In this perspective, an institutionalization of the legal amendments in line with the legislator’s intentions, which emphasize the democratic dimension, would represent a further reinforcement or sedimentation or what Mahoney and Thelen (2010) refer to as ‘layering’, in which institutional change ‘grows out of the attachment of new institutions or rules onto or alongside existing ones’ (ibid., p. 20). If this is the case, it seems reasonable to assume that we would have seen even more people blowing the whistle, succeeding in rectifying censurable conditions, and that even fewer of them are met with retaliation. Our data do not show any of this. The answer may be that the changes in the WEA 2005 and the amendment in the Constitution could be an example of a mix of layering and displacement. Engelstad (2015 p. 38) shows how the interplay between the coexistence of old and new rules may bring about four different types of situations. The first is ‘reinforcement’, where old and new rules serve the same goal but together they are even more efficient. The second is ‘watering down’, which characterizes a situation where the old rules are more viable than the new ones introduced to modify the old ones. The third is ‘transposition’. New rules contribute surprisingly to the emergence of new bargaining situations. The fourth is ‘constant conflict’, which seems to be the situation we are dealing with in our context. Instead of complementing existing rules, the new rules lead to persistent tension, where either new or old rules are winning in the long run. This would help us to understand the apparent stability in our material and the attempts to imbue the provisions with a content that breaks the clear linkage with democracy and freedom of expression. The proposal for new provisions on notification was controversial, while the legal provisions are open to a degree of discretionary judgement; they should be regarded as legal standards. Legal standards refer to a concept implying that ‘norms external to the concept itself decide how the concept should be interpreted and applied’ (Gisle, 2012). Such norms can be embedded in society, in business practices or in morality. A typical feature of such standards is that their content tends to change in pace with social development, and this will have consequences for their application by the courts of law and other judicial bodies (ibid.). Oliver (1991) has pointed to the fact that enterprises, or in our context employers, are more likely to ignore a new scheme or structure if the ‘likelihood of “getting caught” is very low…’ (Oliver, 1991, p.  156). To ignore legal changes is nevertheless more risky if the changes introduced pull in the same direction and if their rationale is in accordance with established norms and values. As pointed out above, our case is not clear cut in that sense.

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Even though the law states that it is illegal to retaliate against employees who submit an appropriate notification, discretionary judgement will invariably be involved in deciding: i) whether the notification describes a censurable condition and ii) whether the notification has been submitted in an appropriate fashion. This provides some latitude for actors who wish to thwart a process in which the public is increasingly involved in drawing attention to errors and deficiencies in the work organization. Further, it may be argued that the changes made latent conflict manifest by vitalizing the issue concerning workplace democracy and the managerial prerogative. Mahoney and Thelen (2010) discuss how key drivers of change (or no change) could remain latent if the rules, or in our context the provisions, are ambivalent, unclear or contested. In consequence, the content of a new scheme may partly contravene the desire for more democracy. We have pointed out that the employers were opposed to a statutory right to notify, with reference to two arguments. First, whistleblowers already enjoy protection under the WEA and are thus legally safe. Second, there was some apprehension that this would undermine the employee’s duty of loyalty. The concerns about a weakened duty of loyalty may have carried most weight. The provisions on disclosure can be said to be marked by all three issues. We can find a good example of ambivalence and lack of clarity when it comes to what should be regarded as censurable conditions and what should be considered as appropriate notification (Trygstad et al., 2014). Strategies adopted by the employers and their emphasis on loyalty must also be seen in light of the models of organization and management principles that have prevailed in Norwegian working life in recent decades. In this context, we have pointed to the emphasis on the managerial prerogative, the reduction in the number of management levels and a focus on efficiency and reputation as some features that may be of importance in this regard. In the private sector, human relations (HR), human resource management (HRM) and lean construction have had a major impact. In the public sector, new public management (NPM) has had an impact on organizational structures and management principles, but lean production has also been introduced in public enterprises (Macann et al., 2015). These models have been propagated through international establishments and acquisitions in Norwegian working life as well as through itinerant recipes for organizational design, and they have spread across countries and continents as ideals (Røvik, 1992, 1998) or as what Røvik describes as institutionalized standards. Although different, the models share a number of clear features. The flattening of organizational hierarchies is a key dimension of many of these changes since the 1990s. A reduction in the number of management levels has been a feature, even in the local authority sector. In 2012, more than one third of all Norwegian municipalities had no management levels between the chief municipal officer and the service-producing unit, while almost the same proportion had one management level (Blåka et al. 2012, p. 79). This shows that a large proportion of all municipal employees are in close proximity to the top management and the political leader-

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ship. Thus, flatter hierarchies alter the requirements for loyalty but may also change the need for governance and control, as these reductions in organizational hierarchies also necessitated the delegation of authority and new forms of control. Direct management through clear rules and instructions has to a large extent been replaced by more indirect or disciplinary forms of control. Such forms include management by objectives and individual agreements or contracts between the employer and the employee. Increasing the employees’ sense of responsibility and loyalty to the development and growth of enterprises and their activities becomes a key issue (Byrkjeflot & Angel, 2008; Hagen & Trygstad, 2007). When seeking to focus on efficiency and building a reputation, it may be deemed important to avoid divergent statements and inconsistencies (Brunsson, 1994; Byrkjeflot & Angell, 2008). Restricting unwanted public disclosures will result in predictability. Employees who are openly critical of an enterprise’s official strategy or who point out errors or shortcomings may create unanticipated situations for the management. In a government enterprise, the public or politicians may request reviews or justifications. Requirements for loyalty may therefore be strongly communicated. As pointed out earlier, findings show that attempts are made to restrict employees’ freedom of expression by way of communication rules and work contracts. Being in control of what is said in public about an enterprise’s internal affairs, its products or services will be a key strategy to avoid loss of efficiency in the form of noise and will also be a decisive factor in building reputations (Trygstad, 2015; Hagen & Trygstad, 2007). The stability in whistleblowing activity, efficiency and sanctions can be read as a situation characterized by constant conflicts and tensions between the normative and regulative pillar, as well as conflicts and tensions among central elements inside each pillar. However, assuming a more hostile environment in general with increased emphasize on loyalty, has the amendment actually prevented a decrease in whistleblowing efficiency and an increase in retaliations towards whistleblowers? Further research is needed to answer this question.

9.5 Conclusion In this chapter, I have discussed the impact of changes in the amendments in Section  100 of the Norwegian Constitution and the incorporation of provisions on internal and external notification in WEA 2005 on the whistleblowing process. Have the legal changes made whistleblowing more frequent, more efficient and safer? Changes in the legal framework are a useful basis for studying institutional change or the absence of change. Data presented in this chapter show a rather stable picture. Several explanations are discussed. One is related to the fact that institutionalization is a time-consuming process. A period of five years is a short time when it comes to institutional change. One could argue that the provisions on disclosure still remain in

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the habitualization phase (Tolbert & Zucker, 1996). Although I do not want to exclude this explanation, I believe that conflict and tension can be just as important dimensions to understand the findings. I have related the legal changes to Scott’s (1995) regulative pillar. The legal changes can be seen as contradictory to another central element in this pillar, namely the managerial prerogative. At the same time, the legal changes follow a tradition or path of workplace democracy, which could be related to the normative pillar. However, workplace democracy has also been characterized by extensive participation, and codetermination has been challenged by organizational models and management strategies adopted among Norwegian employers during the last decades. These models and strategies have emphasized the managerial prerogative, committed employees and loyalty. These are dimensions that may contradict with employees who blow the whistle and focus public attention on organizational wrongdoing. The legal changes seem to have activated tensions in both the normative and the regulative pillars and activated powers and interests that may pull the pillars in different directions. Instead of a situation where old and new rules serve the same goal, I argue that we seem to have a situation of ‘constant conflict’. At this point, it seems like the legal changes lead to persistent tensions, although they do not always manifest. Conflict and tension can explain the apparent stability in our material and the attempts to imbue the provisions with content that breaks the clear linkage with democracy and freedom of expression.

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Pierson, P. (2004). Politics in Time: History, Institutions and Social Analysis. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rothschild, J., & Miethe, T.D. (1999). Whistle-blower disclosures and management retaliation. The battle to control information about organization corruption. Work & Occupations, 26 (1), 107–128. Røvik, K.A. (1998). Moderne organisasjoner. Trender i organisasjonstenkningen ved tusenårsskiftet. Bergen: Fagbokforlaget . Røvik, K.A. (1992). Institusjonaliserte standarder og multistandardorganisasjoner. Norsk Statsvitenskapelig tidsskrift, 8(4), 261–284. Scott, W.R. (1995). Institutions and Organizations. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications Skivenes, M., & Trygstad, S.C. (2010). When whistle-blowing works: the Norwegian case. Human Relations. 63()7, 1071–1097. Skivenes, M., & Trygstad, S. C. (2015). Explaining whistle blowing processes in the Norwegian Labour Market – power and institutional factors. Economic and Industrial Democracy, 1–25. St. meld. nr. 26 (2003–2004). Om endring av grunnlovens §100. Tilrådning fra Justis- og politidepartementet. White Paper (nr. 26, 2003–2004:14) The Norwegian Constitution, article 100. (Den norske Grunnloven) Tolbert, P.S & Zucker L.G (1996). The Institutionalization of Institutional Theory. In Clegg, S.R, Hardy, C., & Nord, W.R. (Eds.), Handbook of Organization Studies, pp. 175–190, Thousand Oaks: Sage. WEA (2005) The Working Environment Act of 17 June 2005 No.62 amended by Act of 23 (arbeidsmiljøloven). Trygstad, S.C. (2004). Fra rettighet til nytte? Det kommunale bedriftsdemokratiet møter New Public Management. PhD Thesis. Bodø/Trondheim: NTNU. Trygstad, S.C. (2010). A right to blow the whistle. Oslo: Fafo-report 2010:18. Trygstad, S.C., & Ødegård, A.M. (2014). Varsling i arbeidslivet. In Staksrud, E., Steen-Johnsen, K., Enjolras, B., Gustafsson, M.H., Ihælebak, K.A., Midtbøen, A.H., Sætrang, S., Trygstad, S.C. og Utheim, M. (Eds.). Holdninger og erfaringer i befolkningen. Resultater fra befolkningsundersøkelsen 2014 (pp. 202–221). Oslo: Institute for Social Research. Trygstad, S.C., Skivenes, M., Røed Steen, J., & Ødegård, A.M. (2014). Evaluering av varslerbestemmelsene. Oslo: Fafo-rapport 2014:05. Trygstad, S.C. (2015). Ytringsfrihet i arbeidslivet. Sosiologisk tidsskrift, 23(1–2), 29–59. Vandekerckhove, W. (2010), European whistleblower protection: tiers or tears? In Lewis, D.B. (Ed.) A Global Approach to Public Interest Disclosure. London: Edward Elgar.

Part IV: The Arts in the Public Sphere

Håkon Larsen

10 The Public Sphere as an Arena for Legitimation Work: The Case of Cultural Organizations The institution of art is surrounded by constant legitimation work, as many artists and organizations are in need of financial support in order to continue their work. This is especially true in Scandinavia, where most of the culture sector is funded by the state or by municipalities. In addition, the institution of license-financed public service broadcasting is in need of legitimation work, as it cannot be taken for granted that we need publicly funded media organizations. Although Scandinavia in general and Norway in particular, are relatively stable societies characterized by neo-corporatism and reformism (Engelstad & Hagelund, 2015), cultural organizations need to intensify their public performances of legitimacy in times of change, as the citizens needs to be reminded of why these organizations are important and need to be preserved. Where changes in the surroundings of organizations lead to articulation work (Strauss, 1985b) internally, in terms of the various actors of the organization articulating to each other in an implicit way what the organization is doing, changes also lead to an intensification of legitimation work externally, as being visible and perceived as legitimate in the public sphere is crucial for the survival of cultural organizations as publicly funded organizations. Due to the processes of digitalization, cultural omnivorousness, and cultural and economic globalization, the public will not take these organizations as given. These profound changes in the social surroundings of publicly funded arts and media organizations lead to an intensification of their legitimation work. As will become evident in the analysis, defining and emphasizing a societal mission has become important for cultural organizations performing legitimacy in the public sphere. Through this emphasis, both the state and the organization get to explain to the citizens why the organization deserves public funding. Although the core activities of the organization may remain quite similar, the public display of legitimacy is changing, and the public sphere is becoming an important arena for the organization’s legitimation work.

10.1 Legitimacy and Sociology Legitimation is a concept widely used in the social science literature, especially in political science and organizational studies. In fact, from the mid-1990s one of the most important questions in organization studies became ‘How do organizations acquire, manage and use legitimacy?’ (Greenwood, Oliver, Sahlin, & Suddaby, 2008, p. 17). The foundations for such a turn towards the study of legitimacy was, nevertheless, already laid in the late 1970s and early 1980s by the hugely influential articles © 2017 Fredrik Engelstad, Håkon Larsen, Jon Rogstad, Kari Steen-Johnsen This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.



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by John Meyer and Brian Rowan (1977), and Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell (1983), who laid the groundwork for the neo-institutional approach in sociology. According to this approach, ‘organizations are influenced by their institutional and network contexts […] and they are isomorphic with their institutional context in order to secure social approval (legitimacy), which provides survival benefits’ (Greenwood et al., 2008, p. 6). Although this school has been important for theorizing how institutions are ‘macrolevel abstractions, […] independent of any particular entity to which allegiance might be owned’ (DiMaggio & Powell, 1991, p. 15), it is weak when it comes to agency (Hall & Taylor, 1996; Jepperson, 1991; Larsen, 2016b; Schmidt, 2008) and social change (Mahoney & Thelen, 2010; Schmidt, 2008). Another strand of sociological theory concerned with legitimacy is French pragmatic sociology (Bénatouïl, 1999; Guggenheim & Potthast, 2012). With their sociology of critical capacities, Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot (1999) have developed a theory of legitimation. When engaging in public deliberation and trying to reach an agreement on how to define a situation, to legitimate one’s own arguments and to critique those of others, Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) argue that we relate to one of six common worlds and that each world corresponds to an order of worth, with its own grammar, structure and tools that actors can use when engaging in legitimation work. ‘Work’ is a term that has been employed in important ways by a range of sociologists engaging in cultural analysis. In addition to studies of legitimation work (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006; Larsen, 2014b), sociologists have studied such cultural work as boundary work (Lamont & Molnár, 2002), adaptation work (Hegnes, 2015), relational work (Zelizer, Bandelj, & Wherry, 2012), medical work (Strauss, 1985a), articulation work (Strauss, 1985b), emotional work (Hochschild, 1979) and face-work (Goffman, 2005 [1967]). Work has proven to be a helpful concept to be employed when seeking to capture the meanings of actions and social processes. Legitimation is one of the most important processes for contemporary cultural organizations, and actors from different social spheres participate in this work.

10.2 Legitimation Work in the Culture Sector In this chapter, I analyse how legitimacy is enacted through interaction in a discussion of the legitimation work of specific arts and media organizations in Scandinavia. I am concerned with the cultural work involved in the process of maintaining support for these organizations and in particular how legitimacy is performed in the public sphere. The discussion is grounded in empirical studies of the public service broadcasters in Scandinavia (Larsen, 2010, 2016a), the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet (NNOB) and the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra (OPO) (Larsen, 2014b), in addition to other examples from cultural policy debates. The contemporary legitimation of arts and media organizations depends on several performers and audiences

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engaging in legitimation work; the organizations are being legitimated through a dialogue between the organizations, the state, the art world and the citizens. As the organizations themselves, the state and the art world all have an interest in successful legitimation work, a key player is the general public in that whether the legitimation work is successful depends on the citizenry perceiving the work of the organizations as worthy of public support. As a consequence, much of the legitimation work occurs in the public sphere, which in its most basic definition ‘refers to […] the practice of open discussion about matters of common public concern’ (Jacobs, 2000, p. 2). Actors from the art world, the organizations and the state all communicate in the public sphere through mass media and social media. In arts and media organizations, the major players engaging in legitimation work are the CEOs, the directors of communication, and the leaders of the artistic departments. The major players in the political field, in the case of the culture sector, are – in addition to the government and the parliament – the Minister of Culture and his/her political advisors. In the art world, the major players are the leaders of the artists’ organizations, editors of art and culture magazines and influential individual artists who participate in public debate. In addition to these players, researchers, intellectuals, and think tanks are important actors. In Scandinavia, it is common that researchers are used as experts by the ministries. They also give talks at seminars, discussing cultural policy and the culture sector, and voice their opinions in public debates. I now turn to the empirical cases and discuss what characterizes legitimation work as it appears in the Scandinavian culture sector, where most of the funding for the major organizations comes from the state.26 These organizations are therefore dependent on being perceived as legitimate among large sections of the public (as opposed to only the private funders, as is the case in countries such as the US, where the state acts as a facilitator in art policy),27 as this helps the state in justifying the continuation of financial support of the organizations. The state is thus also dependent on the organizations’ legitimation work to help legitimate spending public money to uphold them (granted that the government in power and/or the majority of the parliament find this to be a good idea). In addition, the content producers not employed by these organizations are dependent on the legitimation work of the organizations, as they

26 As with the cases discussed in this paper, in 2011, 77 percent of the NNOB’s income and 87 percent of the OPO’s income came from the state (Larsen, 2014b, p. 457). The public service broadcasters are funded through a license fee initially paid by everyone in possession of a radio receiver and later a television set and now in some countries everyone in possession of a computer or hand-held devices capable of receiving audio-visual content. They are thus publicly funded, although not directly by the state, as the national parliaments only decide the size of the fee. The income from the license fee ‘… accounts for 92–98 percent of the revenues’ (Roppen, Lund, & Nord, 2010, p. 136). 27 ‘The Facilitator State funds the fine arts through foregone taxes – so-called tax expenditures – provided according to the wishes of individual and corporate donors; that is, donations are tax deductible’ (Hillman-Chartrand & McCaughey, 1989, p. 48).



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need organizations that will buy and perform their work. In the case of opera, ballet and symphonic music, the content producers are of course mainly composers, librettists, directors and choreographers but also all the other specialists involved in the production of such high-cost art forms (Becker, 1974; Peterson, 1976) (although most of them will already be employed by the organization). In the case of broadcasters, much of the content production is in-house, but they also buy and order productions, such as drama series, from external production units. Participants in the freelance television and movie business therefore have an interest in maintaining such a broadcaster (the Norwegian public broadcasting organization Norsk rikskringkasting (NRK) is the largest media organization in Norway). I will start the discussion by looking into what characterizes the communication between the state and the organizations.

10.3 Communication Between the Organizations and the State As cultural organizations receiving public funding have to apply to the Ministry of Culture for funding, a formal and direct communication between the organizations and the state is the yearly funding application. After the money has been allocated to the organization, they receive a letter from the government that states what the Ministry of Culture expects in return. The Ministry of Culture started the practice with allocation letters in the 1990s, and it has become one of the most important tools for governing cultural organizations (NOU 2013:4, p. 299). The details in these letters have spurred some controversy in Norway in the 2010s, as the government stated in 2011 and 2012 that they expected the performing arts organizations receiving public funding to start planning special performances celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Norwegian constitution in 2014. Several theatres and the NNOB protested loudly in the public sphere,28 as they perceived this as an undue government interference in their artistic work, thus limiting their artistic freedom and breaching the Arm’s Length Principle. This is a crucial element of cultural policy (Mangset, 2013), especially in countries where the state acts as a patron in arts policy (Hillman-Chartrand & McCaughey, 1989).29 This means that the government provides finance while the specialists maintain and develop the professional standards of the art world. Even though the NNOB is funded directly through the Ministry of Culture and thus is in line with the Architect State, where funding decisions concerning arts organizations are made by politicians and bureaucrats and the state tends to support

28 Scenekunst.no (2012): ‘Spesielle forutsetninger for tilskudd’, 11.1., Klassekampen (2012): ‘Protest mot innblanding’, 3.5., Haakon Flemmen. 29 ‘The Patron State funds fine arts through arm’s length arts councils. The government determines how much aggregate support to provide, but not which organizations or artists should receive support’ (Hillman-Chartrand & McCaughey, 1989, p. 49).

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the arts as part of its social welfare objectives (Hillman-Chartrand & McCaughey, 1989, p. 50), this controversy nevertheless shows that the Arm’s Length Principle is crucial for arts organizations, no matter the funding source. According to the Norwegian cultural policy scholar Per Mangset (2013), most countries in Europe today, including Norway, are somewhere between the Patron State and the Architect State. For state-funded arts organizations to have artistic credibility, it is of the utmost importance that the money from the state does not come with demands regarding what content the organizations should produce. Simultaneously, the trustworthiness of the government’s cultural policy is dependent on its service to the arts and society and not the state. Both are achievable if the government operates at an arm’s length distance from these organizations. One of the harshest critics of the allocation letter from the Ministry of Culture was the CEO of the NNOB, Tom Remlov. He nevertheless said in an interview (with the author) that they had planned a 200th anniversary performance on their own initiative before the controversy with the Ministry of Culture. This shows a commitment to serving one’s own nation as an integral part of being a national arts organization. At the same time, it signals agency on the part of the organization in that they refuse to take directions from the government. That the interests of the organization and the government coincide is portrayed as a coincidence. By stating that they wanted to put on a performance celebrating the 200th anniversary, the NNOB was able to express both a commitment to society and to artistic freedom. In the 2013 letter from the government to the performing arts organizations, it is only specified that organizations that plan to put on special performances in 2014 are encouraged to report this to the Ministry when applying for funding for 2014. Even though it was the same government, a coalition between the Social Democratic Party, The Socialist Left Party and the Centre Party, who provided funding in 2011, 2012 and 2013, there was a new Minister of Culture providing the money for 2013 and signing the allocation letter. Through this minor adjustment of the content of these letters, the government was able to uphold its policy; at the same time the new Minister of Culture was able to re-establish good relations with the organization and the art world. This is an example of cooperative legitimation work between an organization and the state. Both the organization and the government were able to save face with these slight adjustments in the communication. Through engaging in legitimacy repair, the new Minister of Culture was able to obtain the goodwill of the performing arts organizations just by making minor adjustments, and the organizations got their way without the government having to abandon their policy altogether. Through witnessing this co-operative work being played out in the public sphere, the art world will probably also be relieved, as the arm’s length distance between the state and the arts organizations is kept intact. An important element of the initial critique by the organizations was exactly that the state did not respect the Arm’s Length Principle. In 2014, the NNOB staged two new performances: a ballet version of Henrik Ibsen’s play Gengangere (Ghosts), and an opera version of Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt. The



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artistic directors at the NNOB stated that ‘[a] critical attitude to the heritage we carry with us is a way to honor the tradition. To preserve the tradition, we must challenge it’.30 By relating to major works in the Norwegian literary canon as part of its 2014 schedule, the NNOB showed a commitment to society, and by relating to the works in innovative ways it also showed a commitment to the art world (although the artistic acclaim for the productions was modest). And by staging these performances the NNOB was able to satisfy the government’s wishes.

10.4 Societal Mission Another example of cooperative legitimation work, where the organizations and the state pull in the same direction is through defining and emphasizing the organizations’ societal mission (samfunnsoppdrag) as a rhetorical element in their legitimation work. Most state cultural organizations in the 21st century define a societal mission that guides their activity. It is portrayed as a contract they have with the public regarding their contribution to society, legitimating these organizations with reference to the civic world (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006) and making them serve a higher purpose than the organization itself. The CEO of the NNOB has written an article in a Norwegian cultural journal, arguing that cultural organizations throughout Europe emphasize serving society by fulfilling a societal mission and that this is a new way of legitimating such institutions as opera houses, symphony orchestras and theatres in the 21st century (Remlov, 2012). He is right that this has become an important concept in summing up the role of these organizations in society. In this concept lies a commitment to serving not only the art world but also society at large. In Norway, it has been emphasized as part of state cultural policy that all cultural organizations receiving funding should define a societal mission that should guide their organizational work (NOU, 2013:4, p.  301). The latest major report on overall cultural policy delivered to the Norwegian Ministry of Culture has a separate chapter dedicated to the societal mission of cultural organizations. The committee behind the report suggests that organizations funded through the state budget shall formulate a societal mission in ‘dialogue and negotiation with the funding authority […]’ (NOU, 2013:4, p. 302) and that this ‘must be a public affair, and something that is subject to continuous debate in the public sphere […] It must be a contract that is agreed upon by the cultural institution, its political subsidiaries and the interested public’ (NOU, 2013:4, pp. 298–299). According to the report (NOU, 2013:4, p. 300), the notion of a

30 http://www.osloby.no/oslopuls/kunst_og_scene/Ibsen-blir-ballett-og-opera-7514615.html accessed, November 10 2014).

(last

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societal mission has been important in the museum sector since the 1990s, although it has not been clear what it means for a museum to have a societal mission. The NNOB, the OPO, the Norwegian National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design (The National Museum) and the Norwegian public service broadcaster, Norsk rikskringkasting (NRK), all emphasize their societal mission as part of their legitimation work (Larsen, 2014b). For the NNOB, a societal mission entails presenting […] opera, ballet and concerts of high artistic standards, representing a broad spectrum of expression and being available for as broad an audience as possible. We shall, as the only national and nationwide institution in our art form, contribute to the development of the nation’s opera and ballet productions (NNOB, 2010, p. 2).

And for the OPO, the fact that they are trying to make classical music relevant for the common people is their societal mission,31 in addition to their ‘function as a greenhouse for Norwegian music, Norwegian composers, conductors, and soloists’.32 The director of The National Museum, Audun Eckhoff, states in the foreword of the strategy document for 2011–2016 that [t]he museum’s societal mission defines its basis for existence and the responsibility that lies in collecting, maintaining, exploring, and passing on collections within the Norwegian and foreign art history from the middle ages until today. The mission is also about how we create and organize the meeting between human beings and art.33

When it comes to the NRK, it launched ‘societal mission’ as a key term in its strategy document for the period from 2007–2012. It was given the following definition by former CEO John G. Bernander in the document’s foreword: ‘… “samfunnsoppdrag” points to NRK’s special responsibility as a public service broadcaster and the special task we have in the Norwegian media environment. NRK is expected to deliver content with a quality and breadth that no other media enterprise in Norway can or will match’ (NRK, 2007, p. 2). The notion of samfunnsoppdrag has in many ways replaced the word folkeopplysning (‘enlightenment [of the people]’),34 which was considered an impor-

31 http://oslofilharmonien.no/kunder/oslofil/oslofil.nsf/pages/publikumsdissing-eller-samfunnsoppdrag (last accessed June 12 2015). 32 http://oslofilharmonien.no/kunder/oslofil/oslofil.nsf/pages/kulturens-samfunnsansvar (last accessed May 24 2013). 33 http://www.nasjonalmuseet.no/no/nasjonalmuseet/om_museet/strategi_2011-2016/ (last accessed June 12 2015). 34 “Enlightenment (of the people)” is a direct translation of the Norwegian word folkeopplysning; the “of the people” is intended to distinguish the term enlightenment from its broader notion, related to the age of enlightenment and enlightenment philosophy, and the use of parentheses to not distance it too far from the definition of enlightenment provided by such philosophers – the phrase “popular education” might give more meaning to an English audience’ (Larsen, 2011b, p. 45).



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tant part of NRK’s mission in its earlier days, especially when it still had monopoly on television in Norway (Larsen, 2010).35 That these organizations are formulating and emphasizing societal missions can be seen as a result of pressure from its surroundings, especially the political sphere. Such pressures can in the language of neo-institutionalism (Powell & DiMaggio, 1991) be labelled isomorphism. This particular case can be seen as coercive isomorphism, which ‘results from both formal and informal pressures exerted on organizations by other organizations upon which they are dependent and by cultural expectations in the society within which organizations function’ (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983, p. 150). In addition to the ‘pressure’ from the funders, the society at large also exerts pressure on these organizations in terms of important values in society being projected onto the organizations. Social scientists have concluded that cultural hierarchies are less prevalent than in previous decades (Featherstone, 2007; Peterson, 1992; Peterson & Kern, 1996), particularly in Norway (Skarpenes, 2007; Ytreberg, 2004). Scandinavian countries have a long tradition of egalitarianism (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Sejersted, 2011), and it is expected that even high-culture organizations like opera houses and symphony orchestras should seek to be inclusive and not only communicate with the elite. By not seeking to be an inclusive arena with active strategies for recruiting new audience members, the traditional high-cost arts organizations would make it hard for themselves to maintain legitimacy amongst the citizens. It is therefore in their self-interest to communicate that they are an arena for the whole population, serving the society at large rather than just the art world. An effective way of communicating this rhetorically in the 21st century is by defining a societal mission. Although the inclusive ambitions are made more explicit when the organizations are performing legitimacy, it is not as if these inclusive ambitions are a new construct. Ever since its creation, the NNOB has been an inclusive opera house for the whole country. It was created in 1958 as a national touring opera with its base being the largest theater in Norway at the time, Folketeatret (the People’s Theatre). This was an Oslo theatre for the working class established on the initiative of the Norwegian Labour Party (Dahl & Helseth, 2006, p. 164). And when the discussion on whether to build a new opera house began in the 1990s, it was important that the facility should be a multi-purpose one (Røyseng, 2000), meaning that it should not be a facility only for opera, ballet and classical music but also for concerts with other musical expressions and for a whole range of other events. And broadcasters in the public’s service have, of course, always had a societal mission. Even though public service broadcasters had a more paternalistic attitude towards its audiences in its earlier phase, it has

35 Commercial broadcasting was introduced in Norway in 1987, with TV3 transmitting via satellite from London. NRK’s biggest competitor, the commercial public service broadcaster TV2, was established in 1992.

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since day one had a threefold mission of ‘informing, educating, and entertaining’ its audience (Larsen, 2011a; Syvertsen, 1999). That societal missions are made important when arts and media organizations, as well as cultural policy actors, perform legitimacy in the 21st century can be seen as a gradual institutional change (Mahoney & Thelen, 2010), motivated by both external and internal factors (Alasuutari, 2015; Goodstein, Blair-Loy &Wharton, 2009; Schmidt, 2008). These inclusive ambitions are made part of organizations’ legitimation work not only out of strategic interests to satisfy funders. Organizational actors are also passionate about their work and want as many people as possible to experience the art and culture they represent out of a belief that it will enrich their lives (Larsen, 2016b). In fact, organizational actors who are motivated by passion just as much as strategic interests are better equipped for achieving success when performing legitimacy in the public sphere (Alexander, 2011; Schmidt, 2008).36 Among the inclusive strategies of the NNOB and the OPO, one is to bring young audiences from multicultural parts of Oslo to attend performances. The OPO also has ‘adopted’ a school orchestra in the multi-ethnic working class neighbourhood of Tøyen in Oslo, with the musicians mentoring the pupils. As a sign of how important the societal mission is for these organizations, the NNOB actually formulated the goal that the opera house audiences should reflect the demography of modern Norway (NNOB, 2010). The management of the NNOB knows as well as the rest of us that this is highly unrealistic, but it nevertheless signals an attitude that is beneficial in satisfying the public and the politicians through its legitimation work. The NNOB writes in its annual report for 2011 that the goal of representing the demography of modern Norway ‘has lowered the threshold for a broader audience and given us a reputation as an open, diverse and inclusive institution’ (NNOB, 2011, p. 11). Such a demystification of high culture has been a driving force in the legitimation work of state-funded organizations in the 21st century (Larsen, 2014b). The most important feature of such inclusive legitimation work is that audiences feel that entering the opera house or the symphony hall is a real alternative when they want to engage in leisure activities. This does not mean that the actual organizations have to emphasize this in everything they do internally. Neither does it mean that they have to make this a central issue in their communication with the art world. To the contrary, practicing double talk (Brunsson, 2002) in their emphasis on being inclusive is probably the best way to go about it. In this way, they can maintain the focus on artistic quality in their internal articulation work and can keep on with the inclusive legitimation work externally.

36 According to Alexander (2011, p. 85), ‘[m]eaning must seem to come from the actor if it is to seem authentic, not from scripts, props, power, or audience’. Jon Elster (1989) has argued along similar lines when discussing wage-bargaining. For references to norms of justice to have an effect, Elster argues, they must be credible to the bargaining parties. If they were only hollow statements, no effect would follow.



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To avoid loud public protests and de-legitimation, it is beneficial for organizations to be perceived as both relevant and sympathetic by a large proportion of the population. An important part of the legitimation work is therefore to make sure that one is visible in the public sphere in a way that corresponds to the dominant values of society. As Norway is an egalitarian country where cultural hierarchies are not considered legitimate (Haarr & Krogstad, 2011; Skarpenes, 2007; Skarpenes & Sakslind, 2010), being inclusive is considered important for these organizations. That the actual audiences are still recruited from the segments of the population with high economic and cultural capital (Bjørnsen, Lind, & Hauge, 2012; Mangset, 2012; Storey, 2003) does not lead to the conclusion championed by the Norwegian editor and writer Kristian Meisingset (2013) that the organizations should give up their inclusive strategies. Rather, keeping up the inclusive work is crucial, as it signals a commitment towards society at large. The organizations might nevertheless have trouble satisfying the art world with this inclusive legitimation work, as we can assume that the art world is more interested in the artistic quality of the productions than in the organizations’ ability to communicate with the common man.

10.5 Satisfying the Art World In order not to lose too much legitimacy in the art world, it is important for the organizations to protest when they perceive that the arm’s length distance is threatened, as the previous example of the allocation letters illustrated. Nevertheless, both the NNOB and the OPO have received criticism from the art world regarding their season programming, among other things for not putting enough emphasis on contemporary music in general and on contemporary Norwegian music in particular. In 2011, the NNOB received criticism from several opera professionals for not prioritizing newly written Norwegian operas in their repertoire,37 and a music critic in the daily newspaper Aftenposten criticized the OPO for trying too hard to reach young audiences with the 2012–2013 season programme. This led the CEO to respond in a blog post on the orchestra’s website, arguing that the main responsibility of the orchestra is ‘to satisfy its core audience, but that it is also dedicated in trying to reach new audience groups, including those who are not familiar with the codes of the Concert Hall and do not know all the terms of the music insiders’.38 This work to reach new

37 Dagens Næringsliv (2011): ‘Knapt med kommers-kroner’, 9.6., Aftenposten (2011): ‘Hardt ut mot operasjefen’, 22.6., Ann Christiansen. Klassekampen (2011): ‘Feit dame står for fall’, 25.6., Ida Karine Gullvik. Klassekampen (2011): ‘Vil eksperimentere mer’, 6.7., Ida Karine Gullvik. 38 Oslo-Filharmonien (2011): ‘Den vanskelige påminnelsen’, Odd S. Gullberg. Available from: http:// oslofilharmonien.no/internet/oslofil.nsf/pages/den-vanskelige-paminnelsen (Accessed 19 February 2013).

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audiences is an important part of the orchestra’s societal mission, according to the CEO (Larsen, 2014b). Also the NRK has the most difficult audience to please among content producers, television and film professionals who deliver out-of-house content. On several occasions, the NRK has been criticized for producing too many of its drama productions in-house and thus not helping to stimulate a vibrant national television industry.39 It is argued that as a public service broadcaster NRK has a responsibility to ensure it is possible to make a living of working in television drama in Norway as part of its accountability as a publicly funded organization. This is about to change, as Thorhild Widvey, the current Minister of Culture representing the Conservative Party (Høyre), presented a white paper on public service broadcasting in June 2015 in which one of the policy goals is that 35 percent of the NRK’s production should come from out-ofhouse sources in 2016 and 2017, with an increase to 40 percent in the years to follow (St.meld., nr. 38 (2014-2015), p. 121). A common aspect of the legitimation work of the NNOB, the OPO and the NRK, in addition to Trondheim Symphony Orchestra (Larsen, 2014b), is to be inclusive and have the goal of reaching as many people as possible with (parts of) its content. This helps legitimate the relevance of the state-funded organizations to broad segments of the audience. But as this section has shown, both the content producers and the intellectuals express difficulty with this attitude. Because the rhetorical skills and professional affiliations of these groups give them easy access to the edited public sphere, their voices get heard. These groups possess hermeneutic power and can use it to solicit co-operation from the organizations in their display of authoritative power (Alexander, 2011). This is important in that it helps balance the legitimation work between the inclusive and the exclusive, which is essential in simultaneously satisfying all the publics.

10.6 The Public Sphere as a Key Arena for Legitimation Work Although the organizational actors and actors from the state and the art world have formal and informal channels for direct communication with each other, a crucial part of the communication is that which occurs in the sphere where private people

39 Dagbladet (2012): ‘Krever avklaring NRK-debatt’, 30.11., Anders Fjellberg. Dagens Næringsliv (2012): ‘Krever Rossiné’s avgang’, 3.12., Bjørn Eckblad. Dagbladet (2012): ‘Tristessen NRK drama’, 7.12., Øystein Karlsen. Aftenposten (2012): ‘Filmregissører krever avtale med NRK’, 7.12., Jan Gunnar Furuly. Dagens Næringsliv (2012): ‘Skaperstorm’, 4.12., Dagens Næringsliv (2012): ‘Ingen jobb for gamle menn’, 8.12., Hans Petter Sjølie. Aftenposten (2012): ‘Vi har for lav tillit’, 8.12., Jan Gunnar Furuly. Dagens Næringsliv (2012): ‘Hvorfor legge ned NRK Drama’, 27.12., Terje Gaustad. Aftenposten (2013): ‘Ny dramasjef til ha originalt innhold’, 18.6., Kjersti Nipen.



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come together as a public (Habermas, 1989, p. 27). In addition to showing a presence and maintaining an awareness of organizational’ relevance, this also gives the opportunity for an interested public to gain insight into the process of content production and the financing of these organizations. Then we as members of the public can watch how our tax money is spent. But our role is not merely as spectators. In addition to participating in the debates ourselves, we can also protest or support development in these organizations by attending/not attending the performances taking place in these arenas and/or by consuming the media content they produce, in addition to making cultural policy a priority when we cast our votes in the next political election. When the art world is dissatisfied with the content performed by these organizations or these organizations are dissatisfied with the cultural policy of the government, they voice their criticism in the public sphere, as it forces the government or the organizations to participate in discussions to defend their policies or to promote new initiatives. In order to uphold legitimacy for the particular organization and the specific art world it represents, it is crucial that parts of the legitimation work take place in the national edited public sphere, as this helps in gaining sympathy from large audiences, which all players are dependent on (even though the art world might be reluctant). As much of the cultural policy debates take place in a national public sphere, how one discusses these issues is influenced by the cultural traditions of each respective country, as actors relate to national cultural repertoires of evaluation (Lamont & Thévenot, 2000) in their legitimation work. How much criticism is generated due to changes in the organization’s work or in cultural policy is also subject to national variation. In a study of public service broadcasting (Larsen, 2008), I found that the Swedish broadcaster Sveriges Television (SVT) and Swedish cultural policy are criticized and corrected in the Swedish national public sphere to a much larger degree than is the case with NRK and Norwegian cultural policy in the Norwegian national public sphere. Although NRK seems more obsessed with ratings as the foundation of its legitimacy than is the case in Sweden (Larsen, 2008, 2010), when SVT applied a commercial logic in communicating with the public in terms of it thinking of target groups in its programming, this triggered massive criticism in the Swedish public sphere, among other things in terms of the petition ‘No soap operas instead of news’. The petition was signed by 17,000 young citizens protesting SVT’s strategy to reach young audiences and in doing so prioritizing entertainment instead of educational programming in its content offerings (Larsen, 2008; TT, 2006).40 This is correlated with the fact that both the managers at SVT (Larsen, 2010) and Swedish cultural politicians (Larsen, 2011b) focus upon the idea of public service broadcasting and its

40 This was the biggest protest against SVT’s programming in the history of the media organization. The protest resulted in the News- and Society editor promising to develop at least one new magazine on foreign news and several new programs on societal issues in 2007 (Larsen, 2008; TT, 2006).

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contribution to democracy in their legitimation rhetoric. As they draw on a deliberative model of democracy (Larsen, 2014a) infused with Habermasian normative ideas (Habermas, 1996) in justifying the role of public broadcasting in society, it is hard to legitimate a focus on target groups and ratings as part of the programme strategy of the public service broadcasters. The citizens want SVT to anchor its activity in the civic world and not the market world or the world of fame (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006).41 Due to the massive protests, SVT actually withdrew the strategy targeted at reaching young audiences. One of the first things the newly appointed CEO of SVT, Eva Hamilton, did after she entered the position was to state that SVT should serve the whole population and not put a special emphasis on specific segments of the audience. In other words, its activity should be anchored in the civic world rather than in the world of fame (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006). She repaired the legitimacy damage that her predecessor Christina Jutterström created and thereby seized an opportunity to show vigour. The legitimacy damage became an opportunity for Hamilton to engage in legitimacy repair, as was also the case with the Norwegian Minister of Culture in adjusting the formulation in the allocation letter to the performing arts organizations. Legitimacy repair is important for organizations at the same time as it represents an opportunity for the individual leaders of organizations to come off as vigorous. Legitimacy repair as part of legitimation work is important for organizations, governments or ministries in that it is an opportunity in times of crisis to show vigor. It is especially helpful for individuals who are newcomers in position of power in organizational hierarchies. Another example of legitimacy repair occurred in the transition of ministers of culture within a political process of suggesting and eventually deciding on whether Norway should pass a law on fixed book prices. Anniken Huitfeldt, the Minister of Culture (2009–2012) in the Centre-Left coalition government, started the process by initiating an externally produced report on the Norwegian book industry. There were two applicants for this mission; one was a group of university researchers (of which I was a member) and the other was a consulting company consisting of economists working on competition issues. The mission was assigned to the latter. This spurred criticism from the book industry,42 as they were certain that the conclusion would be that free book prices would be beneficial. A large part of the industry supports a law on fixed prices, as they perceive this as an important cultural policy tool to uphold a broad production of Norwegian language publications. As a consequence of this criticism, the minister decided on a second report. This was to look into the situa-

41 Dividing an audience into target groups is in line with the logic of the world of fame, according to Boltanski and Thévenot (2006, p. 183). 42 Morgenbladet (2012): ‘En betenkning om bokbransjen’, 6.-12. 1., Håkon Gundersen. Bok og samfunn (2011): ‘eller elfenbeinstårnet enn Adam Smith’, 8.9., Dag H. Nestegard.

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tion in Europe, analysing how countries with fixed and free book prices compared on specific policy goals. The mission was assigned to the group of university researchers. After we delivered our report (Rønning, Slaatta, Torvund, Larsen, & Colbjørnsen, 2012), the minister was still uncertain about how to proceed. To avoid making a decision, she wanted to initiate a third report that was to specifically look into the e-book market, as this was not an explicit part of the mission of the two initial reports. On 21st September 2012, Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg made some changes in his government and appointed the 29-year-old political talent Hadia Tajik as Minister of Culture, relocating Huitfeldt to be Minister of Labour. One of the first things Tajik did was to state that she would not have a third report and would move forward as fast as possible with the process of creating the law. This was an opportunity for her to come off as a vigorous minister, while simultaneously helping repair legitimacy among the major players in the book industry. In September 2013, there was a general election in Norway. As the Stoltenberg government was not re-elected, the newly appointed Minister of Culture in Erna Solberg’s conservative coalition government, Thorhild Widvey, early on promised that the law would not be realized, which made her come off as a strong defender of liberal values and as demonstrating a clear alternative to the former government. As can be seen from these examples, showing vigor shortly after taking political office is important for the individual politician, particularly if it is in line with what the majority of the actors affected by the particular policies argue for (Tajik) or the core values of the political ideology to which one’s party adheres (Widvey).

10.7 Conclusion Organizations dedicated to such high-cost art forms as classical music, the visual and performing arts in a society where there is a tradition for the state to support most parts of institutionalized culture are in need of broad public support in order to exist. If not perceived as relevant by a large number of the audience their future is threatened. In an age (Featherstone, 2007; Peterson, 1992; Peterson & Kern, 1996) and country (Haarr & Krogstad, 2011; Skarpenes, 2007; Skarpenes & Sakslind, 2010; Ytreberg, 2004) where cultural hierarchies are not salient, these arenas are not worthy of support if they are primarily seen as sacred institutions of high culture (DiMaggio, 1982). Nevertheless, the fact that they produce and maintain cultural expressions that are deemed qualitatively good by experts makes them worthy of maintaining, as it helps uphold not only the quantity in cultural expression but also the quality in the cultural magnitude on offer to the public. It is not their position on top of the cultural hierarchy that makes them worthy of support; it is rather their contribution to the expansion of high-quality cultural expressions available to the citizens for consumption. That they deliver high-quality cultural products follows from the fact that they

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have been defined so by experts, such as members of grant commissions and editors, in line with the Arm’s Length Principle. State subsidies are legitimized in that the organizations are dedicated to expensive cultural expressions that would not exist without public support. Processes of digitalization, omnivorousness and globalization are leading the policy actors to change the communicative discourse (Schmidt, 2008) employed when performing legitimacy in the public sphere. But this does not necessarily lead to a decline in state support for the arts. The state now acts more as a market corrective than a guarantor of high culture. It seeks to uphold a plurality in high quality cultural expressions, rather than securing the future of those on top of a cultural hierarchy. An important element in the organization’s legitimation work is to get in contact with a large audience, for example by actively recruiting new audience members. Both the organizations themselves and the government providing support for the organizations benefit from such inclusive legitimation work. The main challenge is to uphold the legitimacy in the art world. If the organizations are no longer perceived as relevant by the content producers, it is hard to argue that the state should uphold its support of high-cost arts organizations that are not deemed as good by the experts. Furthermore, their legitimacy on the international arena may be weakened. Being perceived as high-quality arts organizations by an international audience is in the interest of both the organizations and the politicians as it makes both come off as culturally advanced, which enhances the organizations and the nation’s cultural credibility. One way to achieve the inclusive ambitions and simultaneously uphold artistic credibility is to continue with the demystification of high cultural institutions as public spaces and arenas for experiencing art without compromising on the content being displayed or performed. As identified in this chapter, a particular form of legitimation work is co-operative legitimation work, which points to actors engaged in the legitimation of particular organizations acting in concert in (re)negotiating what the ideas and practice of the organization should be. The CEOs of particular arts organizations and the Minister of Culture can, for example, engage in co-operative legitimation work by changing their minds slightly in public to provide for an opportunity for both to save face. As both parties benefit from keeping a friendly relationship, it is important to manage to voice one’s opinion in public without abandoning the opportunity for the other part to save face when adjusting his or her original statement. They must cooperate in their facework (Goffman, 2005 [1967]). Another feature of legitimation work is legitimacy repair. When the art world perceives the authorities as approaching the policies related to their world in a way that harms the world, it is important for the people in charge of the policies to be able to restore the legitimacy. Shortly after taking office as Minister of Culture or CEO of a cultural organization is a particularly good time to engage in legitimacy repair, especially if the relationship with the key players in the art field has been damaged prior to entering the position.

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An important aspect of legitimation work in the culture sector is for all the actors to negotiate an appropriate balance between the inclusive and exclusive ambitions in public communication about the organization’s mission, so that the art world finds the work of the organization credible, the politicians find the organization worthy of support and the public find the organization relevant. As has been demonstrated in this chapter, the public sphere has become an important arena for engaging in such negotiations. For cultural organizations in the 21st century to remain important, they must perform legitimacy in the public sphere as part of their continuous legitimation work.

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Part V: Religion and Institutional Change

Inger Furseth

11 The Return of Religion in the Public Sphere? The Public Role of Nordic Faith Communities The public role of religion has been a recurrent topic of debate in the sociology of religion. This debate gained momentum with José Casanova’s book Public Religions in the Modern World (1994) in which he claimed that a worldwide deprivatization of religion was taking place. Only a few years later, Peter L. Berger (1999) argued that large parts of the world were characterized by desecularization, even if Europe continued to be secular. In 2006, Jürgen Habermas labelled modern, Western societies as postsecular (Habermas, 2006). The question that forms the title of Titus Hjelm’s (2015) book Is God back? is indeed pertinent in debates on the public sphere in Nordic countries. During the past decades, new interfaith infrastructures have emerged in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Iceland that enable a great variety of faith communities to participate as civil society actors in the public sphere. Whereas the Nordic Lutheran majority churches previously had hegemonic positions in the public sphere as it related to religious issues, new channels of communication have developed that change the ways in which faith and worldview communities act in the public sphere. The emergence of the new religious infrastructure also seems to have implications for the type of religion that is present in the public sphere. This chapter will map these developments and attempt to explain them. In the following, we outline the Nordic religious landscapes and the theoretical perspectives that are used. The development of the Nordic interfaith infrastructure is then described, including some critical issues that this development has raised. We then conclude with a discussion of various explanations for the institutional changes that are outlined.

11.1 Nordic Religious Landscapes A recent study of the public role of religion in the five Nordic countries since 1980 showed both changes and continuity as they relate to the role of religion in the state, politics, media and civil society (see Furseth, 2015; Furseth, forthcoming)43. The Nordic religious landscapes are changing, with a relative decline in the Christian religion and growth in religions outside Christianity, especially Islam. Sweden, Norway

43 NOREL was a Nordcorp project, funded by The Joint Committee for Nordic Research Councils for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NOS-HS), KIFO Institute for church, religion and worldview research and Uppsala University. © 2017 Fredrik Engelstad, Håkon Larsen, Jon Rogstad, Kari Steen-Johnsen This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.



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and Denmark are becoming more religiously diverse than Finland and Iceland. The amount of people outside any faith community is also steadily growing. The relationship between the Nordic welfare states and religion is undergoing transformations, with separations and looser ties between the states and the Lutheran majority churches, except in Denmark. Despite this development, the Nordic states continue to be involved in religion in various ways (Käärianen, 2011; Kühle, 2011; Kühle et al., forthcoming; Petursson, 2011; Pettersson, 2011; Schmidt, 2015). In the political sphere, there has been an increase in the invocation of religion in parliamentary debates during the past decades, especially in Denmark, and a tendency to link religion to a growing number of political issues (Lindberg, 2013, 2014, 2015; Lövheim et al., forthcoming). There is also a slight increase in the coverage of religion in the press, albeit not as much as expected, and a growing mediatization of religion that has affected the ways in which religion has been framed in the news media and in the popular media (see Gresaker, 2013; Lundby, this volume; Lundby et al., forthcoming; Lövheim and Lundby 2013). The focus in this chapter is one segment of civil society, namely the faith and worldview (secular humanist) communities. According to Casanova (1994), the deprivatization of religion has to do with a growing tendency among churches and other religious institutions to reject their assigned space in the private sphere and participate as civil society actors in public debates on what is common good in society and how the state should act on specific issues. In Habermas’ (2008) outline of postsecular society, he also addresses ‘religious voices’ in the public sphere. An important empirical question, then, is: How has the new interfaith infrastructure changed the ways in which faith communities in Nordic countries participate in the public sphere? Why are faith communities of interest in a study of the Nordic public sphere? As noted in the Introduction, the Nordic countries are neo-corporatist in the sense that they are thoroughly organized with state involvement on several levels, including the area of religion. All the countries have some form of official registration of faith communities, even if registration practices vary by country (and faith communities outside the majority churches are free to remain non-registered). Many faith communities receive public funding. An important question is whether the Lutheran majority churches should be seen as part of civil society in situations when they are more or less semi-autonomous from the state. The Nordic countries are often lumped together as examples of state–church systems. However, Denmark is now the only country with a traditional state church. In fact, religion and state were separated in Finland in the early nineteenth century, and the formal separation between the Lutheran majority church and state took place in Sweden in 2000. There is a growing separation in Norway, and very loose ties in Iceland. Nevertheless, the Lutheran majority churches continue to have ties to the state in various areas. At the same time, they tend to behave much in the same way as other faith communities both at national and local levels, for example, in their statements on public policies. The Lutheran majority churches, except the Danish one, will therefore be viewed as part of civil society here.

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11.2 Theoretical Perspectives Until the 1980s, secularization theories dominated the sociology of religion. There are numerous secularization theories, but Casanova (1994, p. 11–39) divided classical Weberian secularization theory into three theses that will be used here. The first fundamental thesis states that modernization implies the differentiation and emancipation of the secular spheres from the religious sphere. The second thesis states that the consequence of differentiation is the decline and the eventual disappearance of religion, and the third thesis claims that another consequence is the privatization and marginalization of religion in the modern world. In Jürgen Habermas’ (1989 [1962]) book on the public sphere, he largely followed Weber’s idea that modernization implied differentiation. While religion provided overall sets of values in pre-modern times, these values were fragmented in modern times. For the public sphere to be emancipatory, it must be separated from the economy and religion, and religion did not play any role in the development of the bourgeois public sphere. Later, Habermas argued that discourses can include talk about the truth and the rightfulness of religion, but religion would not serve emancipated communicative action in any fundamental way (Habermas 1982, 1984). In Habermas’ early work, secularization implied differentiation, religious decline and privatization. Several scholars objected to Habermas’ view of religion as anathema to rational critical discourse. The argument was that Habermas interpreted religion as ‘a monolithic and reified phenomenon’ (Dillon, 1999, pp. 290–291) and ignored the various philosophical influences upon it (Fiorenza, 1992, p. 74). His polarization of reason and religion prevented an understanding of reasoned debates within various religious traditions of doctrine, interpretations and scripture. Critics also focused on Habermas’ view of the public because he normatively excluded religious voices and overlooked the fact that religion often seemed to constitute part of the public (Calhoun, 1992; Casanova, 1994; Herbert, 1996; Zaret, 1992). The ‘return of public religion’ as an approach in sociology actually appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s with Robert N. Bellah’s claim that in order to survive, all societies must have a civil religion (Bellah, 1967, 1975; Bellah & Hammond, 1980). In the mid-1980s, Philip E. Hammond (1985) raised the question if the secularization thesis was viable at a time when new religious movements grew and there was an Islamic revolution and conservative Christians who sought political power. A decade later, neo-secularization theorist José Casanova (1994) argued that there was support for the core thesis in secularization theory and that an irreversible historical process of religious differentiation had taken place in the West. There was also support for one of the sub-theses, namely that there was a continuing religious decline at the individual level, especially in Europe. However, he questioned if institutional differentiation necessarily led to the third sub-thesis, the marginalization and privatization of religion. Based on historical sociological studies of public religion in Spain, Poland,



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Brazil and the United States, Casanova concluded that since the 1980s a widespread process of ‘deprivatization’ of modern religion had taken place throughout the world. Habermas’ (2006, 2008) work on post-secularity further stimulated the debate on religion in contemporary society. His concern was not just to understand the public presence of religion but the ways in which secular and religious people can co-exist under conditions of post-secularity (Habermas, 2006, 2008, 2011, 2013; Habermas & Ratzinger, 2007; Habermas et al., 2013). Religious and secular actors must be willing to learn from each other as they enter into dialogue. In order for mutual learning to take place, religious statements made in the public sphere must be transformed into general language, and secular actors must be willing to understand religion and not treat religious statements as irrational (Habermas & Ratzinger, 2007; Habermas et al., 2013; Holst & Molander, 2015). Critics have focused on several aspects of Habermas’ theory of postsecular society (see Calhoun et al., 2013). One issue is his understanding of religion as ‘the totalizing trait of a mode of believing that infuses the very pores of daily life’ (Habermas, 2006, p. 8), which shows that religion becomes severed from practical reason, social context and everyday experiences. Another issue is Habermas’ notion that the constitutional state should ‘act considerately toward all those cultural sources – including religion – out of which civil solidarity and norm consciousness are nourished’ (Habermas, 2006, p. 27). Scholars have pointed out that states are seldom neutral to religion but that they often prefer the religion they know best (Barbalet et al., 2012; Fox, 2007). More recently, Habermas has admitted that his concept of post-secularity is ‘ideas that are still in flux’ (Habermas, 2013, p.  347). The question is what the term actually means. In Habermas’ attempt at clarification in 2008, post-secularity seems to imply three different but interrelated phenomena: 1) the mere co-existence of religious and secular communities within the constitutional state, 2) the role of churches and religious organizations as ‘communities of interpretation’ in the public arena and 3), the citizen’s ‘consciousness of the phenomenon of the public presence of religion’ (Habermas, 2008, p. 19–20). Post-secularity does not imply a re-sacralization of modern society or that individuals and societies undergo revivals and become more religious, as noted by Casanova (2013, p.  28–34). It seems that Habermas tends to emphasize the understanding of post-secularity as a certain form of consciousness (Habermas, 2008, p. 21, 2013, p. 348). However, this definition raises questions about its usefulness in empirical studies and shows the endemic problems of relating philosophical studies to their empirical basis (Lima, 2013, p. 57). Inspired by the work of Casanova, Berger and Habermas, there has been a greater focus on the role of religion in the public sphere (Ferrari and Pastorelli, 2012; Lefebvre and Beaman, 2014; Nynäs et al., 2012; Woodhead and Catto, 2012). One way of studying this broad topic empirically is to focus on civil society. There are two theoretical reasons and one empirical reason why a study on civil society is particularly useful. One is that Habermas (1989) located the public sphere between the state and civil society. Later, he included churches and religious organization alongside inter-

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est groups and social movements as typical civil society actors who express demands and translate them into political issues and arguments that are debated (Habermas, 2008). Another reason is that Casanova (1994, p.  228–229) saw the participation of civil society religious organizations in public debates where they addressed issues of common good and public policies as signs of deprivatization. A focus on civil society is helpful in assessing if these theories are useful in the case of Nordic countries. The empirical reason is that it is of interest to know how the emergence of the new interfaith infrastructure changes the ways in which the faith and worldview communities participate in the Nordic public sphere.

11.3 Studying the Presence of Religion In the Public Sphere Faith communities are organizations with a wide variety of aims and functions. They are sites of religious fellowship and worship, ritual performances, teaching, social gatherings, welfare services and so forth. Many faith communities also tend to coordinate their interests by forming various bilateral and multilateral umbrella organizations, where some are intrafaith (one religious tradition) and others are interfaith (several traditions)44. The following will provide an overview of the development of interfaith initiatives and organizations in the five Nordic countries before some critical issues relating to their role as civil society actors are addressed. Before doing so, two issues will be clarified. One has to do with the kind of public communication the faith communities conduct in the public sphere. Due to the differentiation of the public sphere, media scholar Terje Rasmussen (2008, pp. 78–81, 2013, p.  100–101) suggests that it is useful to distinguish between two dimensions related to the topics, style and participants involved that serve different democratic functions. The ‘presentational dimension’ has to do with the deliberation over shared issues by central figures who serve as the voice of a group of people. It presents a public agenda and its ideal is rational discourse based on reasoning and argumentation. This dimension is central in the work of Habermas. For example, the mass media have a presentational dimension, as they generalize communication, apply recognizable genres and refer to a limited number of issues. The ‘representational dimension’ refers to the variety of topics, styles and groups that participate that often reflect everyday life and culture. The Internet and social media serve this dimension more than the presentational one, as there is little generalization of themes and styles.

44 The terminology to describe relations among different religious groups varies between interreligious (often used among Catholics) and interfaith (often used among Protestants in referring to interactions between two religious groups, such as Christians and Jews)(Halafoff 2011, p. 128). We use the term interfaith here, as we discuss both bilateral interactions, such as Christian-Muslim dialogue, and multilateral interactions between several groups.



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Another issue is to determine when religion is present in the public sphere. German sociologist Jens Köhrsen argues that in order for religion to be present in the public sphere, it is not enough that religious actors communicate in the public sphere, but the content of their communication must be religious in the sense that they refer to ‘a supernatural, transcendent reality’ (Köhrsen, 2012, p.  280). Such a restrictive view of what is considered the presence of religion may lead one to miss several communications that indicate such a presence. A religious group that speaks for the rights of religious minorities to practice their religion in state institutions by using human rights language would, for example, fall outside his definition of the presence of religion in the public sphere. Swedish media scholars Mia Lövheim and Marta Axner (2008) drew on Köhrsen and developed a fourfold typology that distinguished between: 1) religious actors who perform religious communication, 2) religious actors who perform non-religious communication, 3) nonreligious actors who perform religious communication and 4) non-religious actors who perform secular communication (Lövheim & Axner, 2008, p. 39–40). The benefit of their typology is that it shows the variety of ways in which religion may appear in the public. As this article discusses the public role of faith and worldview communities, the approach here is to draw on Lövheim & Axner’s typology and view religion to be present in the public sphere when 1) religious actors address religious issues, as when Muslim communities demand the right to open Muslim schools, 2) religious actors address non-religious issues, as when the majority churches oppose restrictive refugee policies and 3) non-religious actors address religious issues. An example of the latter is when secular citizens debate the use of religious symbolism in public. By relying on a relatively wide approach to determining when religion is present in the public sphere, there is a possibility of detecting a variety of issues that faith and worldview communities address.

11.4 A Growing Nordic Interfaith Infrastructure45 The academic debate on the role of religion in the public sphere includes a broad range of issues. The approach here is to focus on the faith and worldview communities and determine if they have a greater public visibility than they previously had. While the Nordic Lutheran majority churches tended to have hegemony in the public sphere concerning religious issues, what new channels of communication have developed during the past three decades? More specifically, what interfaith initiatives and

45 This section is based on a study conducted by Lars Ahlin, Kimmo Ketola, Annette Leis-Peters, Bjarni Randver Sigurvinsson and Inger Furseth (see Furseth et al., forthcoming).

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organizations have emerged at the national level in the Nordic countries? And what are some of the issues these organizations have promoted? The growth in interfaith initiatives in the Nordic countries is part of a larger international trend. Some have grown out of the older Christian ecumenical movements and some are new. While the first interfaith initiative on an international level took place in Chicago in 1893 with The World Parliament of Religions, European national and local interfaith initiatives began to appear in the 1970s and have experienced rapid growth since the 9/11 terrorist attack in New York in 2001 (Eck, 2001, p. 366–370; Dinham et al., 2009; Griera, 2012, 2013; Griera & Forteza, 2013; Halafoff, 2011, 2013; Haynes & Hennig, 2013; Pearce, 2012; Weller, 2009). In addition, numerous multilateral and bilateral initiatives, groups and organizations exist in all the countries, especially at local levels, but they are not discussed here.

11.4.1 The Pioneers – the Christian Umbrella and Ecumenical Organizations The idea of joining forces to represent a cluster of faith communities in the Nordic countries emerged first in various Christian minority churches, while the majority churches often joined later. The formation of ecumenical organizations began in Norway (1902, Norwegian Dissenter Council), followed by Finland (1917, Finnish Ecumenical Council) and Sweden (1918, The Free Church Cooperation Committee). The development came somewhat later to Denmark (1933, The Council of Evangelical Free Churches) and Iceland (1979, Ecumenical Committee of Christian Associations in Iceland), perhaps because the amount of minority churches was smaller in the latter two countries. Common features for the early bodies were focus on formal religious doctrine and identities and top-down national structures where the participants, mostly clergy, participated as representatives of their churches. Their goals varied, as some functioned as interest organizations, in particular for the minority churches. Others aimed at dialogue and understanding across different Christian traditions, and yet others focused on peace and social justice. Many combined all these goals. The Christian minority churches were the first religious body to initiate cooperation and dialogue, even if they only included other Christian churches. The organizational models they formed seem to have been models for other religious umbrella organizations and interfaith bodies that developed later.

11.4.2 Umbrella and Worldview Organizations The formation of umbrella and worldview organizations outside Christianity developed in two waves, the first during the 1930s–1950s, and the second during the 1970s– 1990s. The first group to establish an umbrella organization was the Jews. The first organization for secular humanists came in Finland (1937, Federation of Freethinkers



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in Finland) and Norway (1956, Norwegian Humanist Association). The latter is the largest in Nordic countries with more than 80,000 members in 2015. Secular humanist associations did not appear until 1979 in Sweden (Swedish Humanist Association), 2008 in Denmark (Humanist Society) and 2013 in Iceland. Jews have a long history in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland. The first Jewish congregation was approved according to a Danish royal resolution in 1682, and the first rabbi was hired in Copenhagen in 1687. Jewish congregations were established in Sweden in the 18th century and in Norway and Finland in the nineteenth century. Jewish umbrella organizations emerged in Finland and Sweden in the 1940s– 1950s. The fact that no Jewish umbrella organizations exist in Denmark and Norway may be related to the German occupation of these two countries during WWII, when Jews were sent to German concentration camps and murdered, leaving their congregations extremely small during the postwar years. The second wave of umbrella organizations appeared first in Sweden in the 1970s, in Norway in the 1990s and even later in the other countries. The members of these organizations consisted primarily of religious minorities of immigrant descent and native converts. The largest organizations were the Islamic umbrella organizations. In 1974, United Islamic Associations in Sweden was formed, and in 2015 it consisted of five organizations. The other countries only have one or two Islamic umbrella organizations. The Islamic Council of Norway was formed in 1992, while it took more than a decade until the Finnish Islamic Council and the Confederation of Muslims (Denmark) were established. During the second wave, Buddhists also formed umbrella organizations, albeit much smaller than the Islamic organizations. The first came in Norway (1979, the Buddhist Association), followed by Sweden (1993, Sweden’s Buddhist Cooperation Council) and Finland (2009, Finnish Buddhist Union). Although holistic spirituality is often perceived to be a relatively unorganized field, the Holistic Society (Holistisk Forbund) was formed in Norway in 2002. It was a somewhat different initiative, as the members were individuals and not faith or worldview communities. The formation of these umbrella and worldview organizations reflects the presence and history of faith and worldview communities outside Christianity in the different countries. These organizations have largely used the organizational models provided by the ecumenical movements by forming top-down, national structures. During the past decades, they have organized dialogue initiatives, promoted understanding across ethnic and religious differences within their own ranks and represented their religious and worldview traditions in multi-faith organizations. They have also functioned as interest organizations that have lobbied the state and local governments on particular issues. It is no surprise that the first second-wave organizations emerged in Sweden, which has the highest immigration rates in the Nordic region. The fact that they appeared earlier in Norway and are larger and stronger than in Denmark and Finland may be related to the public funding of faith and worldview communities in Norway,

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which is the most generous in the Nordic countries. In contrast, such communities receive little public funding in Denmark. A contrast is Iceland with far fewer such organizations than the other countries, which reflects the low immigration rates and higher religious homogeneity here.

11.4.3 Interfaith Organizations Most Nordic interfaith initiatives and organizations emerged in the 1990s, although some appeared earlier. The early initiatives tended to come from the Lutheran majority churches and were bilateral. The first multilateral organization at a national level was established in Norway in 1996, while similar bodies came after the turn of the century in the other countries. The only country without a multilateral interfaith body is Denmark, although there are several bilateral bodies there. In 1996, a Norwegian group called Action for Religious Freedom in School protested the Christian emphasis in the teachings on religion in public schools. Their initiative led to the formation of The Council for Religious and Life Stance Communities (STL) (Eidsvåg et al., 2004; Leirvik, 1993; Sender & Jenssen, 2013). The council consisted of one member each from most faith and worldview communities, including the secular humanists and the holistic society. STL has addressed national and local governments on important issues for religious and worldview minorities, such as equal treatment in public institutions. It has formed a leadership forum and arranged interfaith seminars and meetings. Finnish multilateral dialogue gained more attention immediately after 9/11 2001, when President Tarja Halonen invited Christian, Jewish and Islamic leaders to a joint meeting. Soon thereafter, the Forum of Religious Leaders was formed (see Illman, 2006a, 2006b, 2007, 2010.) In 2011, another interfaith organization was founded, the Cooperation Forum for Religions in Finland, which also consisted of members from the three monotheistic religions. The forum aimed at fostering peace, interfaith dialogue, equal treatment, mutual respect and cooperation and promoted action against extremism. It has attempted to influence political decision making on issues such as religious education and the rights of minority children. Interfaith organizations came later in Iceland. Based on an initiative from the Bishop’s office in the Church of Iceland, The Forum for Interfaith Dialogue was formed in 2006. The forum was multilateral and has arranged bimonthly meetings with religious leaders and an annual seminar. It has addressed the government on issues agreed upon by all members. Although Sweden was early with the formation of umbrella organizations, the multilateral Swedish Interreligious Council was not formed until 2010. Since then, the council has functioned as a forum for religious leaders and has promoted interfaith activities. It has addressed issues such as freedom of religion and the role of religion in peace building and has spoken against anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, religious vio-



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lence and violence against religion. So far, the council has had weak organization with little funding and hardly any infrastructure and has met only twice annually. The interfaith initiatives in Denmark did not emerge until the late 1990s, and they are bilateral. One example is the Christian Muslim Forum for Dialogue (2006). The Church of Denmark has also developed bilateral cooperation with the Buddhists, the Hindus and the holistic spirituality community.

11.4.4 Presentational Communications on a Variety of Issues In many ways, the formation of ecumenical, worldview, umbrella and interfaith organizations demonstrates the incorporation of religious minorities in the corporative structures of each country. New religious minorities largely form organizations in similar ways as the older minorities did decades earlier. They also show the emergence of an interfaith infrastructure, where representatives from various faith communities, such as mosques or Buddhist temples, come together to form joint organizations. These organizations address a variety of issues. First, most of them raise issues that concern their members, where they make statements in the media and lobby the state and local governments to promote their cause. One issue that has been particularly important for the minority churches and that has been addressed by some of the early Christian bodies is public support for private Christian schools. Other issues that typically concern interfaith organizations are equal treatment in public institutions, religious education in public schools and the rights of minority children. Second, all these organizations address dialogue and understanding across different religious traditions. Several umbrella and worldview organizations promote understanding across ethnic and religious differences among their members. Representatives from the different bodies also participate in leadership forums and interfaith seminars, meetings and other initiatives to promote mutual understanding. Third is the question of issues relating to general social ethics, such as peace and social justice, issues that Köhrsen (2012) and Lövheim and Axner (2008) typically characterize as non-religious. Some of the ecumenical organizations and interfaith organizations raise these issues. One example is the Cooperation Forum for Religions in Finland that aims at promoting peace, equal treatment, mutual respect, cooperation and work against extremism. Another example is the Swedish Inter-religious Council that emphasizes freedom of religion, peace building, anti-Semitism, fighting Islamophobia and fighting violence. Altogether, these bodies undertake communications on typical religious issues and a variety of social and ethical issues. Most of these organizations are top-down structures with a centralized leadership structure, and the members are representatives of various faith and worldview communities or umbrella organizations. The predominant dimension of their public communication seems to be ‘presentational’ (Rasmussen, 2008, p.  78–81, 2013, p. 100–101). The organizations deliberate over common issues via their leaders, who

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serve as the voices of people from a certain religious tradition or all traditions. Some organizations have a policy of only issuing statements on topics supported by all the members. This approach implies that there are lengthy debates before statements are made and that they are careful to issue statements only on a limited number of topics. A common feature for these organizations is that they present public agendas where they use recognizable genres to issue statements and participate in public debates. It is reasonable to argue that the presentational dimension of their communications in the public sphere serves different democratic functions. First, they channel certain demands directed at political decision makers that often become the object of public debate. Second, they make statements and participate in public debates on more general social and ethical issues relating to the common good of society. The formalized and centralized structures have several benefits, such as securing funding and building an organizational apparatus to run the activities. It is also helpful in dealing with state and local governments, as the governments will know whom to contact. In the case of Norway, for example, ecumenical, worldview, umbrella and interfaith organizations are contacted by the government to voice their views on new legal proposals that will potentially affect them. This organizational model is also helpful when organizations participate in public debates or contact state and local governments to lobby (Furseth et al., 2015). Nevertheless, there are potential weaknesses related to this form of organization, such as the tendency to focus on formal religious doctrines that exclude smaller minorities (Wuthnow, 2007, pp.  286–314). For example, both ecumenical organizations and umbrella organizations primarily tend to include relatively like-minded members. In Sweden, Shia and Sunni Muslims have formed separate organizations. The secular humanists are included only in the STL in Norway and are excluded from similar organizations in the other countries. In many ways, these organizations manifest inclusion and exclusion among various faith communities. There are also national differences in the development of the interfaith infrastructure. As noted, all the countries have multilateral interfaith bodies at the national level, except Denmark, where bilateral organizations and initiatives dominate. The main explanation for this difference is related to the particular relationship between church and state in Denmark. The Danish state is the head of the Church of Denmark, which leaves Denmark as the only Nordic country with a state church system. In the other countries, processes of separation between church and state and internal democratization in the majority churches have taken place. A result is that these churches have internal democratic bodies that represent them when dealing with the state, local governments and other organizations (Kühle et al., forthcoming). Due to the close ties to the state and the lack of internal democratization, the Church of Denmark lacks bodies to represent it in other bodies at a national level. This is possible at a local level, where parish clergy may represent the Church of Denmark in a local interfaith initiative. The issue of representation continues to be a hindrance for the Church of Denmark in engaging in national ecumenical and interfaith bodies.



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11.5 Critical Issues The various ecumenical, worldview, umbrella and interfaith organizations participate in the public sphere in various ways that fall under Casanova’s category of deprivatization of religion (Casanova, 1994, p. 228–229). However, there are some critical issues that may challenge their functions as voices in public debates about the common good. Some of these will be briefly mentioned in this section. One issue is representation. In many cases, national and local stakeholders look to interfaith organizations and councils as partners in dialogue and consultation (Griera, 2013; Weller, 2009). The question is who the interfaith organizations and councils represent. Which faith communities are included and which are excluded in these bodies? As shown above, some faith communities are excluded on the basis of doctrine. An additional question is how representative the religious leaders are who meet on behalf of their faith community in various umbrella and interfaith organizations. While some are democratically elected, others are appointed. Another question is whether interfaith dialogue is primarily an elite phenomenon (Griera, 2013; Weller, 2009). Interfaith bodies at the national level usually but not always reflect the formal leadership of the faith and worldview communities, which tends to be male. There are some exceptions: The majority churches in all Nordic countries have women bishops, and Lena Larsen was the leader of the Islamic Council Norway during 2000–2003, which is unique from an international perspective. Despite these exceptions, there is an underrepresentation of women and young people in the leadership of these organizations (Furseth et al., 2015; Grung, 2013). These questions are related to the role of faith communities in civil society. Is it reasonable to assume that interfaith bodies contribute to democratization if they are not based on democratic procedures? It may be that democratic procedures tend to favour men, and a more activist form of selection will ensure broader representation, as proposed by Norwegian theologian Anne Hege Grung (2013). However, this hardly solves the democratic problem of representation in these organizations.

11.5.1 The Role of Public Stakeholders Another issue is the role of the state and public stakeholders (Hennig & Haynes, 2013). Studies have shown that state and local governments have engaged with and facilitated interfaith initiatives (Amir-Moazami, 2011; Griera, 2013; Halafoff, 2011, 2013; Weller, 2009). There seems to be a growing political interest in these organizations in Nordic countries as well. Who takes the initiative to form interfaith structures and organizations, faith communities or public stakeholders? Our study suggests that the first initiatives tend to come from the faith and worldview communities. The majority churches are particularly active in all the countries in establishing bilateral bodies and in some cases,

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multilateral bodies. For example, several forms of interfaith dialogue in Sweden result from initiatives by the Church of Sweden. In other cases, the faith and worldview communities outside the majority churches take the initiative, which was the case with the formation of the STL in Norway. Nevertheless, the state and other public stakeholders also play a role in the interfaith field. Several studies show that the state and local governments ‘partner with’ faith communities and interfaith organizations for various purposes (Amir-Moazami, 2011; Beckford, 2010; Griera, 2013; Halafoff, 2011, 2013; Hennig & Haynes, 2013; Weller, 2009). In Nordic countries, state and local governments are involved in various ways, from demonstrations of public support, facilitation and funding to active participation. Some Nordic states are, for example, present at interfaith events, which was the case in Iceland in 2006 when the President of Iceland gave an address at the founding meeting of the Forum for Interfaith Dialogue. In other instances, the state takes the initiative. One example is from Norway, where the government played an active role during the Muhammad cartoon crisis in 2006, as they involved imams and the Islamic Council Norway to avoid riots (Grung, 2013, p.  220; Grung and Leirvik, 2012; Leirvik, 2013, p.  194–195, 2014, p.  153–154, Rogstad, 2007, p.  47). Swedish studies show that the municipalities in some cases initiate the formation of interfaith bodies at the municipal level (Nordin, 2014; LeisPeters, Middlemiss, Lé Mon & Nordin, 2015). Once these bodies are formed, the state and local governments tend to play a role in facilitating their activities, such as providing buildings, funding and in some cases administrative support. What motives do public stakeholders have in interfaith initiatives? One possible motive is to mobilize religious leaders to find compromises to prevent conflict and extremism (Engelstad et al., 1999; Halafoff, 2011, p. 134–135; Wuthnow, 2005, p. 293). Another motive might be to govern religion by controlling religious minorities, especially Muslims, and transforming them into moderate and liberal citizens (Beckford, 2010; Amir-Moazami, 2011; Griera, 2012; Haynes & Hennig, 2013; Martikainen, 2013b). This raises the question of the proximity between religious and state actors in the interfaith field. Do the interfaith bodies tie the faith and worldview communities closer to the state? If so, what consequences and dilemmas do closer ties imply? A recurrent conflict between the state and the faith communities in the Nordic countries is the question of whether state laws on gender equality should be implemented in the faith communities, even in the case when the faith community in question has religious doctrines against female leadership, such as the Roman Catholic Church. Another conflict is when faith communities provide welfare services and simultaneously openly critique the public policies that cut such services and thereby create the need for private welfare services (Martikainen, 2013b). There are several examples of the dilemmas that close ties between religious and state actors may pose.



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11.6 Public Participation by Religious Actors So far, this chapter has outlined the emergence of a new interfaith infrastructure in the Nordic countries during the past decades. How has this development changed the ways in which faith and worldview communities participate in the public sphere? First, this infrastructure seems to facilitate the public participation of a variety of small and large faith and worldview communities. Interfaith cooperation enables faith communities to pool their resources and use them for common purposes. Smaller churches, mosques and temples often lack individual and organizational resources to participate in the public arena. By forming bilateral cooperation, umbrella organizations and interfaith bodies, they pool their existing resources and sometimes access additional public resources. This is the case in Norway, where umbrella organizations and the national interfaith body (STL) receive sufficient public funding to employ fulltime general secretaries. In contrast, Swedish umbrella organizations access far less public funding for their activities. Second, the formation of bilateral cooperation, umbrella organizations and interfaith bodies seems to have increased the public participation of faith and worldview communities during the past decades. Small faith communities will often refrain from participating in public debates due to a lack of expert knowledge. While they usually do not have people with extensive knowledge on various religious, social, ethical and political issues, the umbrella organizations and the interfaith bodies often do. This will frequently lead to more statements on a growing number of issues. While faith communities traditionally tended to focus on typical ‘religious issues’, such as religious education, abortion and sexual ethics, the umbrella organizations and interfaith bodies have broadened the range of issues they address to include refugee policies, peaceful co-existence, the environment, human rights and social justice. Third, the interfaith bodies seem to increase the chances of faith and worldview communities being heard. The fact that they represent large groups of members is crucial when they jointly take political initiatives, lobby national and local governments and promote their issues by making public statements. Many umbrella and worldview organizations and interfaith bodies also voice their views on legal proposals. In some instances, national and local governments contact them concerning specific issues or events. Nevertheless, several issues may challenge the democratic potential of these organizations, such as the procedures to select representatives, the underrepresentation of women and youth and the tendency to include like-minded faith communities and exclude others due to theological or ideological differences. On the one hand, the interfaith bodies are manifestations of how Nordic faith communities are incorporated into the larger society. On the other hand, they exclude smaller and less powerful religious minorities.

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11.7 Deprivatization of Religion Altogether, the emergence of the interfaith infrastructure in Nordic countries shows signs of the deprivatization of religion at the level of civil society, meaning that the faith and worldview communities are more visible in public than they used to be just a few decades ago. The implication is the weakening of one of the sub-theses in secularization theory, namely the privatization of religion. These trends correspond to other studies of Western countries (Ferrari & Pastorelli, 2012; Lefebvre & Beaman, 2014; Woodhead & Catto, 2012). Why has there been an emerging interfaith infrastructure in the Nordic countries during the past decades? These forms of institutional changes can be described as path dependency (Pierson, 2004), aggregate effects (Mahoney & Thelen, 2009) or a combination of both (Thelen, 2011). Path dependency refers to a situation where stability is the norm but where sudden ruptures appear that lead to new paths (Pierson, 2004). One rupture came with immigration and the establishment of new religious minorities. The larger amount of minority faith communities in Sweden, Norway and Denmark than in Finland and Iceland is due to higher immigration rates. With the establishment of the new faith communities came the potential for religious tension, and the faith and worldview communities took the initiative to form various bodies in order to secure communication and mutual understanding. The low number of interfaith bodies in Iceland is related to the low immigration rates and high religious homogeneity there. The formation of umbrella and worldview organizations and interfaith bodies was also related to the process whereby religious and worldview minorities began to demand equal treatment. These demands had to do with religious education in public schools, the right to wear religious symbols in public and equal treatment in the workplace and public institutions. There was simultaneously a growing awareness of the right to equal treatment, freedom of speech and other human rights issues. The Nordic countries’ contact with global laws on human rights strengthened the awareness of minority rights (Lövheim et al., forthcoming). The result was that the privileges of the majority churches were no longer perceived as legitimate as they once had been (Gustafsson, 1985). All these changes created pressure on the established political arrangements concerning religion. The transformations in the religion–state relations can therefore be understood in terms of path dependency. Other ruptures were the religious individualization and subjectivity and the growth of people who remained outside any faith community, which also contributed to the pressure on the established religion and state arrangements. The changes can also be explained as a form of aggregate effects, where certain parts of the arrangements are maintained, while new elements are introduced at the same time. Continuous smaller changes contribute to transforming existing institutions, which are layered (Mahoney & Thelen, 2009). The emergence of the interfaith infrastructure can also be understood as aggregate effects. At the time when many new



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faith communities were formed, the majority churches and other faith and worldview minorities, such as Jews and secular humanists, had already established ecumenical, worldview and umbrella organizations, which provided models for the new organizations. Once they were founded, they became incorporated into already established arrangements of how to conduct dialogue and interfaith cooperation, make demands and have contact with national and local governments. All these smaller changes contributed to the growth of an interfaith infrastructure in the Nordic countries. The changes in the relationship between religion and the state, particularly in Sweden, Norway and Iceland, can also be understood as aggregate effects. The pressures for change in these countries were not entirely external, as outlined above, but internal as well. During the twentieth century, the majority churches in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland had formed an internal bureaucracy and democratic structures at different levels. The formation of the general synods in these countries is of great significance, as it helped to establish these churches as more autonomous actors in relation to the Nordic states. The democratization processes also created an internal pressure on the state– church relationships. Because the churches were organized according to democratic procedures, they no longer felt that the state should have a say in internal affairs. The exception is the development in Denmark, where the internal democratization process in the Danish Folk Church has been much slower than in the other majority churches. This fact might explain the lack of internal pressure in this church to change church–state relations. We have previously seen how the weaker interfaith infrastructure in Denmark is also related to the organization of the Church of Denmark, which inhibits representation. However, the growth in bilateral initiatives between the Church of Denmark and other faith communities suggests that Denmark is slowly following the other Nordic countries in this area. Does the emergence of the new religious infrastructure and the growing public role of faith and worldview communities have implications for the type of religion that is present in the public sphere? In other words, what does the public presence of religion do to religion itself? In Nordic parliamentary debates and major newspapers, religion tends to become a controversial issue. Whereas conservative Christianity used to be ‘the bad guy’ in both of these arenas, Islam has increasingly been given this role. In contrast, religion is a feel-good matter in lifestyle magazines (Lundby et al., forthcoming; Lövheim et al., forthcoming). Many organizations discussed here have a focus on dialogue with the aim of creating mutual understanding and peaceful co-existence. In order to make public statements, they engage in internal debates to reach consensus or compromise or both. These organizational features will lead to gravitation towards the centre. In order to make joint public statements, they will tend to leave aside controversial aspects of their own religions and avoid conflictual topics, such as gender and sexual equality, international affairs and proselytism. Instead, they stress the shared aspects of different religions, for example, religion as a good in society and a matter of human rights, perhaps with an emphasis on the positive moral and therapeutic effects religion is supposed to have on individuals and society.

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In this sense, these organizations will tend to present a positive form of religion that resembles the lifestyle magazines rather than the more conflictual and negative form of religion that appears in political deliberations and the press.

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Hjelm, T. (2015). Is God Back? Reconsidering the New Visibility of Religion. London: Bloomsbury. Holst, C. & Molander, A. (2015). Jürgen Habermas on public reason and religion: do religious citizens suffer an asymmetrical burden, and should they be compensated? Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 18(5), 547–563. Illman, R. (2006a). Ett annorlunda du: Reflektioner kring religionsdialog (A different you: Reflections on religious dialogue). Göteborg: Makadam förlag. Illman, R. (2006b). Love, Responsibility, Otherness: Finnish Church Leaders on Interreligious Dialogue. In T. Ahlbäck, Exercising Power: The Role of Religions in Concord and Conflict (pp. 126–148). Åbo: Donnerska institutet för religionshistorisk och kulturhistorisk forskning. Illman, R. (2007). Words of Worth: Talking Religiously about Peace and Dialogue. Peace and Change, 32(3), 415–434. Illman, R. (2010). Mångfald, möten och misstro: religionsdialog i dagens Finland (Diversity, encounters and distrust: Religious dialogue in contemporary Finland). In T. Martikainen and V. Jalovaara (Eds.), Religionens återkomst: brytningspunkter i kyrkan, religionen och kulturen (pp. 97–104). Magma studie 4. Kääriäinen, K. (2011). Religion and state in Finland. Nordic Journal of Religion and Society, 24 (2), 155–172. Köhrsen, J. (2012). How religious is the public sphere? A critical stance on the debate about public religion and post-secularity. Acta Sociologica, 55(3), 273–288. Kühle, L. (2011). Religion and State in Denmark: Exception among Exceptions? Nordic Journal of Religion and Society, 24 (2), 173–188. Kühle, L., Schmidt, U., Jacobsen, B., Pétursson, P., & Pettersson, P. (forthcoming). Religion and state. In I. Furseth (Ed.) Religious Complexity in the Public Sphere. Comparing Nordic Countries. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lefebvre, S. & Beaman, L.G. (Eds.) (2014). Religion in the Public Sphere: Canadian Case Studies. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Leirvik, O. (Ed.) (1993). Fellesskapsetikk i et flerkulturelt Norge (Common ethics in a multicultural Norway). Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Leirvik, O. (2014). Muslims in Norway: Value Discourses and Interreligious Dialogue. Tidsskrift for islamforskning, 8(1), 137–161. Leis-Peters, A., Middlemiss Lé Mon, M. & Nordin, M. (2015). Religiösa organisationer och civilsamhället (Religious organisations and civil society). In M. Lövheim & M. Nordin (Eds.) Sociologiska perspektiv på religion i Sverige (pp. 106–122). Malmö: Gleerups. Lima, M.H. (2013). The Anxiety of Contingency: Religion in a Secular Age. In C. Calhoun, E. Mendieta & J. van Antwerpen (Eds.) Habermas and Religion (pp. 49–71). Cambridge: Polity. Lindberg, J. (2013). Religion in Nordic Party Platforms 1988–2008. Nordic Journal of Religion and Society, 26(2), 121–139. Lindberg, J. (2014). Politicisation of Religion in Nordic Parliamentary Debates 1988–2009. Politics, Religion and Ideology, 15 (4), 565–582. Lindberg, J. (2015). Religion in Nordic Politics as a Means to Societal Cohesion: An Empirical Study on Party Platforms and Parliamentary Debates 1988–2012. Studies in Religion and Society, 13. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Lövheim, M. & Axner, M. (2008). Mediatised Religion and Public Spheres: Current Approaches and New Questions.” In K. Granholm, M. Moberg, & S. Sjö (Eds.), Religion, Media, and Social Change (pp. 38–53). London: Routledge. Lövheim, M. & Lundby, K. (2013). Mediated religion across time and space. A case study of Norwegian newspapers. Nordic Journal of Religion and Society, 26(1), 25–44. Lövheim, M., Lindberg, J., Botvar, P.K., Christensen, H.R., Niemelä, K., & Bäckström, A. (forthcoming). Religion on the political agenda. In I. Furseth (Ed.) Religious Complexity in the Public Sphere. Comparing Nordic Countries. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Knut Lundby

12 Public Religion in Mediatized Transformations 12.1 Introduction There are three spheres of public religion nourished by media – the secular journalism sphere covering religion, the cultural sphere where elements of religion may become part of entertainment and popular expression and religious media run by religious institutions. In all three spheres, the media do not just disseminate or mediate religious messages or content. Rather, the workings of the media may change – and in the long run transform – religion. This thesis is the core of the theory of the mediatization of religion, to be explored in this chapter in relation to institutional theory. This chapter does not concern individual religiosity or spirituality unless it plays into the public sphere as public religion. What matters here is religion that becomes visible as part of the public sphere. The question is how public religion may be transformed in mediatization processes within each of the three spheres. This will be discussed with examples from modern Norwegian history and using results from a survey on media and religion conducted with a representative sample of the adult population in Norway in 2015.

12.2 Three Spheres of Public Religion The distinction between the spheres of journalism, culture and religious media builds on work by Stig Hjarvard (2012) and Mia Lövheim and Marta Axner (2015). They relate public religion to processes of mediatization in all three spheres. That religion in its public expressions through media may become changed or ‘mediatized’ is what is common to the three spheres. They are distinguished as parts of the overall public sphere: fact-based journalism in news media, fiction and cultural production in entertainment and popular media or targeted ‘religious’ discourse in specialized media. Lövheim and Axner indicate a fourth sphere of public religion, namely a digital space. However, digital technologies and aesthetics invade all the three named spheres, which Lövheim and Axner are aware of (2015, p. 49). I include digital aspects in all three spheres of public religion. The media production processes may be digital in all spheres, as is the case with multimodal, digital shaping of content. Further, networked social media may play a role in the interaction within all three spheres. As noted by Terje Rasmussen, with the Internet, the public sphere ‘became ever more interaction-oriented, inclusive and complex’ (2014, p.  1319). This applies to public religion as well as the political public sphere. Actually, the two are quite intertwined. In particular, coverage of religion in the journalism sphere usually has political implications. © 2017 Fredrik Engelstad, Håkon Larsen, Jon Rogstad, Kari Steen-Johnsen This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.



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12.2.1 The Journalism Sphere In covering religion, the journalism sphere sticks to the secular norms that news journalism refers to. This is the sphere that theories on the public sphere are primarily concerned with (Gripsrud, Moe, Molander, & Murdock, 2010). Hjarvard terms the activity in this sphere ‘journalism on religion’ that ‘brings religion into the political public sphere and subjects it to journalism’s dominant paradigms of facticity and public accountability’ (Hjarvard, 2012, p. 31). Lövheim and Axner state that the ‘form of media genres that operate here, mainly news journalism but also editorials, shapes religious content and puts pressure on religious actors to conform to criteria of newsworthiness and critical inquiry’ (Lövheim & Axner, 2015, p. 48).

12.2.2 The Cultural Sphere Lövheim and Axner hold that a ‘working definition of the “cultural public sphere” may include the kinds of media content and forms that are not primarily occupied with news and political debate but where ideas, values, emotions and pleasure are at focus’ (2015, p. 48). The actors in this sphere who involve themselves with religion may be fiction authors, filmmakers, musicians, entertainment producers in television, computer game designers or others in the creative industries. This sphere may include classical cultural expressions but relates primarily to popular culture that is visible in lifestyle magazines, television series, novels and films such as Harry Potter. Bits and pieces from various institutional religious traditions may be remixed with supernatural or secular elements into media productions. Hjarvard terms this form of mediatized religion ‘banal religion’, ‘the media presence of a variety of symbols and actions that implicitly and perhaps unwillingly may reinforce the public presence of religion in culture and society’ (Hjarvard, 2012, p.  35). Lövheim and Axner (2015, p. 49) also point to the work by Gordon Lynch (2012) on how religious symbols and themes in the cultural public space may give shape to public discussion about common and contested values, identities and issues.

12.2.3 The Religious Media Sphere The religious media sphere is the in-house public sphere within religious institutions. This media sphere may encompass religious books and journals, newspapers aimed at a particular religious readership, radio and television channels aimed at a religious audience and religious web pages and social media outlets. They may aim to ‘reach out’ but primarily function within their own faith communities. Hjarvard calls them ‘religious media’, combining mass media and social network media with a public presence. These are ‘media organizations and practices that are primarily con-

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trolled and performed by religious actors’ (Hjarvard, 2012, p. 28). Lövheim and Axner (2015, p. 47) comment that these media spheres embrace ‘counterpublics questioning secular values and norms in modern society’. However, they find the religious media sphere eroding as digital media technologies and transnational media networks open up to broader publics. Still, the type of public religion in this sphere is defined by the actor’s affiliation with a religious organization. Within the religious media sphere I include ‘religious programmes’, with devotions and worship that have been part of the Nordic public service broadcasting tradition (modelled after the British Broadcasting Corporation) since its beginning (Wolfe, 1984).

12.2.4 Public Religion The term ‘public religion’ was coined by José Casanova in his book Public Religions in the Modern World (1994), in which he distinguished public religion from private religion. Casanova’s work became a reference point for the debate within the sociology of religion on the increased visibility of religion in the public sphere (Lövheim & Axner, 2015). His definition invites a wider definition, as when Birgit Meyer and Annelies Moors in Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere (2006) argue to view religion as a practice of mediation. However, Casanova’s thesis has been contested. Jens Köhrsen (2012) thinks that definitions of religion that are too broad in studies of public religion overstate the impact of religion in the public sphere. For the purpose of this chapter, I see public religion as defined through the three spheres of mediatized religion. This is in line with David Herbert’s argument that the increased public presence of religion is made possible by the rapid development of media technologies, the liberalization of national media economies and the growth of transnational media spheres. However, it is important to add that ‘the public presence of religious symbols and discourses does not necessarily imply that these become more influential, but rather more visible, present, and hence available for mobilization, contestation and criticism in the public sphere and among various micro-publics, by both religious and non-religious actors’ (Herbert, 2011, p. 627).

12.2.5 Mediatization of Public Religion Public religion may be transformed through the media it relies on for its symbolic circulation in public communication. This is the essence of the thesis on ‘mediatization of religion’ in regards public religion. The mediatization of religion has been a scholarly focus over the last decade (e.g. the special issues of Northern Lights 2008; Culture and Religion 2011; Hjarvard, 2013, Ch. 4; Lundby, 2013; Lövheim, 2014). This research has been spearheaded in the Nordic countries (Hjarvard & Lövheim, 2012).



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In the mediatization of religion, the constraints and opportunities for communication provided by various media come to change and shape the actual aspects of religion. The mediatization of public religion implies moulding of religious imagination in society and of interpretations and interactions over religion in the public sphere. Thus, the mediatization of religion changes religious institutions in terms of the interplay with media institutions. This is consistent with institutional theory underlining how institutional change takes place in the interplay between institutions (Mahoney & Thelen, 2009). The mediatization of religion demonstrates, within this particular domain, the general interrelation between the characteristics of and changes in the media and changes in other institutions or fields in culture and society. The mediatization of public religion challenges existing religious authorities as the media themselves gain authority over religion in public communication. At the same time, the media may allow new religious voices to be heard. In Norway, religion has become more visible on the news media’s agenda and more contested in the media. Coverage of conflicts over Islam is a case in point (Lundby & Gresaker, 2015). In general, the processes of mediatization give media an ‘active performative involvement and constitutive role’ in social conflicts (Cottle, 2006, p. 9, emphasis in original). The media influence the ways in which religion is represented in the public realm, how citizens interpret religious dimensions of social conflicts and how conflicts themselves get amplified and dramatized in various ways (Eskjær, Hjarvard, & Mortensen, 2015).

12.2.6 Mediatization and Secularization The mediatization of religion relates to secularization. On an institutional level, secularization implies that religious institutions lose their previous influence over other institutions in society. It is a contested concept within the sociology of religion. There are some defenders of classic secularization theory implying the decay of religious institutions as modernity progresses (Bruce, 2011). However, moderate and more nuanced theories dominate (Furseth & Repstad, 2006, pp. 82–96), partly inspired by the new visibility of religion in the public sphere. The Belgian sociologist of religion Karel Dobbelaere (2002) recommends a distinction between societal secularization, organizational secularization and individual secularization. On the societal level, secularization and mediatization may be regarded as two grand processes of change or transformation of culture and society, on par with globalization and individualization. The concept of institution that is applied in this book comes close to organizational secularization. This matches mediatization theory on a meso level (Hjarvard, 2014b). At this level of analysis, the focus is on the interrelation between concrete religious institutions and specific media institutions. At this level, one may observe how religious institutions relate to media by establishing their own outlets in a religious media sphere and how they are treated

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by and relate to the secular journalism sphere. Bits and pieces from texts and traditions originating in religious institutions may also be picked up in the cultural sphere of the media. The issue of authority comes to the fore. Religious institutions try to keep authority in the public sphere through their own voices in the religious media sphere. However, those listening may be few in number. In the journalism and cultural spheres where audiences are bigger, the authority of religious institutions is subsumed under the authority of the secular news media or is played with in the entertainment media. I previously studied the dimensions of secularization by checking programme topics on church and religion on the radio and on television in the early 1970s in a thesis on secularization in the Nordic countries (Lundby, 1974). The dimensions of secularization employed were: 1) privatization of religion; 2) religious and ideological pluralism and 3) contests over influence between majority church and anti-church positions. I will apply this study as a baseline for empirical discussion of changes in the three spheres of mediatized religion in Norway. The transformations of the majority Church of Norway and the dominant public service broadcaster NRK since the early 1970s tells a 40-year story of secularization and mediatization (Lundby, 2016).

12.3 Nested Institutions Religion and media are both generalized institutions in continuous change. In this book series an ‘institution’ is understood through macro regulations of social behaviour on the meso level by organizations, groups and individuals. Institutions rely on formal rules and regulations. As important may be the interpretations of the formal framework, that is, the normative and cultural-cognitive aspects. The discourses around the formal institutions are influencing religion as well as media.

12.3.1 Religion and Media as Institutions Vivien Schmidt (2008) tries to capture the dynamics of institutional change by looking at the discourses institutions engage in. She applies her approach to institutions within the political field. However, all fundamental functions performed via discourse that Schmidt identifies apply to religious and media institutions as well. The cognitive function of discourse helps in understanding how these institutions are meant to work. The normative function of discourse covers the many discussions on what religion should be and what media should do. Similarities also occur in the two interactive dimensions Schmidt describes. The coordinative function of discourse points to the need for a common language within religious communities and between media producers and their audiences. For both these institutions, the communica-



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tive function of discourse concerns the ability to communicate in the public sphere. There is a ‘logic of communication’ that explains how institutions change or persist, Schmidt (2008) argues. This comes close to the ‘media logic’ in institutional mediatization research to be explained below. Institutions vary in their scope and often take on a nested character, as pointed out in the introduction to this volume. This is certainly true of the two institutions we focus on here. ‘The media’ is an institution, ‘the press’ is an institution and a newspaper may be an institution (Eide, 2008). It depends on the level of analyses. Media institutions on various levels are nested into each other. It is similar with religion. A faith community is a local institution nested into larger institutional structures and finally into ‘religion’ as a generalized institution. This chapter tries to see how ‘media’ and ‘religion’ are nested into each other in processes of mediatization. The institutions of media and religion take different shapes within the three spheres of mediatized religion. Briefly, in the religious media sphere the religious institutions are churches or other religious organizations, and the media tend to be small and specialized and under the control of the religious organizations. In the cultural sphere, religious institutions are not directly visible, as the media institutions are the producers, playing with symbolic elements that are picked from a range of religious traditions. In the journalism sphere, the media institutions are the strong player, while the religious institutions act as sources or become objects of critical coverage.

12.3.2 Institutional Change – Changing Configurations Representations of religion in the media shape discourses and influence social interaction. The visibility of religion in the public sphere, then, may be a crucial part of the ongoing transformations of religious institutions. The shaping of public religion is rather dependent on the media. This implies that transformations of the media system  – like the emergence of digital, networked communication  – have consequences for religious institutions. The media are themselves transformed through the process of mediatization. Three phases of this institutional transformation have been identified in the northwestern part of Europe. Up to 1920, the media were instruments of other institutions (although the party press in Norway lasted until the 1970s). Between 1920 and 1980, the media emerged as a cultural institution, most prominent in public service broadcasting. From 1980 onwards, the media developed their dual position as a semi-independent media institution on the one hand while they became integrated into institutions like politics and bureaucracy, religion and sports on the other hand (Hjarvard, 2013, pp. 23–27). The media ‘provide a public sphere for society’s reflection on itself’ (Hjarvard, 2014b, p. 216 emphasis in original). The media become involved with various institutions in society and may be implicated in processes of institutional change simply due to the import and export of cultural symbols and practices from one institutional

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order to another (Thornton & Ocasio, 2008, p. 105) that takes place in mediated communication (Hjarvard, 2014a, p. 137). Symbolic and cognitive aspects play a prominent role in the culturally sensitive ‘new institutionalism’ (Colbjørnsen, 2014, p. 22; DiMaggio & Powell, 1991; Meyer & Rowan, 1977). This approach opposes the rational instrumental perspective on organizations and institutions, in line with the ‘logic of appropriateness’ suggested by March & Olsen (2004). They see this logic in human action driven by rules of appropriate or exemplary behaviour, organized into institutions. Over time, such ‘rules’ and practices may be integrated into larger configurations or ‘institutional regimes’. Institutional regimes are changing. Mediatization is a nonlinear process of qualitative shifts from one institutional regime with its particular configuration to another, for example, broadcasting from a public monopoly during the mid-1990s to broadcasting in the deregulated and digital age of the early 2000s (Hjarvard, 2014b, pp. 219–220).

12.4 Mediatization as a Theory of Institutional Change Mediatization research has been closely related to studies of the public sphere. In the early 1930s, Ernest Manheim was the first European thinker to use the term ‘mediatisierung’ to explain the transformation of mass-mediated societies. Manheim was ‘a forerunner of Habermas in describing the rise of a public sphere since the 17th century’ (Averbeck-Lietz, 2014, p.  109). Habermas applies the term ‘mediatisierung’ to institutions that are mediating between citizens and the state via parties, unions and/ or the mass media. Indeed, in Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1996 [1962], p. 74), Habermas ‘sees the whole power structure of society “mediatized” in the (enlightened) public sphere of the late 18th and early 19th centuries’ (Averbeck-Lietz, 2014, pp. 109, 112). However, Habermas applies here a more generalized concept of media and mediatization than Ernest Manheim introduced 30 years earlier. Manheim (1979 [1933]) was concerned with media as mass media to understand Public Opinion and its Social Sources, as the title of his book would read in English. Therefore, he introduced a concept of mediatization that is close to contemporary usage (Averbeck-Lietz, 2014, pp. 111–112).

12.4.1 Change and Transformation Contemporary mediatization research ‘tries to capture long-term interrelation processes between media change on one hand and social and cultural change on the other’ (Hepp, Hjarvard, & Lundby, 2010, pp. 21–23). This is basically a media sociological approach. Mediatization is a concept ‘with which to grasp media and societal change’ (Krotz, 2009). However, mediatization implies long-term changes.



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While changes in communication processes are continuous, the long-term and lasting consequences may rather be termed transformations. Mediatization is a process in history. However, there are mediatized moments or events and intense situations where one may sense the unfolding transformation (Hepp, Hjarvard, & Lundby, 2015; Lundby, 2014). All communication with technical media implies constraints and opportunities, as senders and receivers have to relate to the affordances of the medium. Changes in conceptions and understanding between partners in mediated communication may have consequences for the institutions they are part of. This is ‘normal’. Mediatization, on the contrary, occurs when the interchange between media and in this case religion transform the involved religious institution over time as it has to adapt to the logic and workings of the media in its communication in the public sphere.

12.4.2 The Institutional Approach in Mediatization Studies The theory of mediatization is actually a theory of institutional change or transformation. Mediatization is a process of incremental shifts, with technological media intervening in more and more of the ongoing interaction in society, adding up to fundamental transformations (Mahoney & Thelen, 2009, p. 2). There are three perspectives on mediatization; a cultural one, a material one and an institutional one (Lundby, 2014). In a review of mediatization research by Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt, the institutional approach is regarded as the strongest because it covers the exercise of institutional power in high modernity with a clear historical narrative on the role of the media. Mediatization is then seen as a double-sided development where the media gain their own institutional strength and at the same time become involved in most other institutions in society that become dependent on media for their ongoing operations (Livingstone & Lunt, 2014, p. 713). The Danish media sociologist Stig Hjarvard is the key proponent of an institutional approach to mediatization (2013; 2014a; 2014b). He credits the Norwegian sociologist Gudmund Hernes as one of the early founders of mediatization theory. Hjarvard notes that although Hernes did not use the term himself, ‘his concept of the “media-twisted society” … is consonant in many respects’ with an institutional understanding of mediatization (2013, p. 8). Hernes published the first version of the ‘media-twisted society’ concept (1977a) the same year he launched his draft ‘towards an institutional economy’ (1977b). Hernes remarks that ‘from an institutional point of view the key question is how media change both the inner workings of other social entities and their mutual relationships’ (Hernes, 1978, p. 181; Hjarvard, 2013, p. 9). The media influence social institutions beyond the fact that all institutions today rely increasingly on mediated information and communication. Rather, institutions become dependent on media in their core functions.

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This process is characterized by a duality, in that the media have become integrated into the operations of other social institutions and cultural spheres, while also acquiring the status of social institutions in their own right. As a consequence, social interaction – within the respective institutions, between institutions, and in society at large – increasingly takes place via the media. (Hjarvard, 2013, p. 17)

The media gain their strength and display their functions in relation to other institutions, such as politics and religion.

12.4.3 Media Logic – Institutional Logics A ‘media logic’ is pointed out to grasp this interplay between the media and other institutions. Rodney Benson criticizes Habermas and many sociologists influenced by him for ‘taking the “media system” as given’ with a ‘supposedly invariant media “logic”’. He rather supports sociologists who observe variations in media logic (2009, p. 175). The same debate occurs among mediatization scholars. Hjarvard began with a straightforward concept of media logic as ‘the institutional and technological modus operandi of the media’ (2008, p. 113). Early on, David Altheide and Robert Snow had proposed this concept in the book Media Logic (1979) to denote the form of communication through which media present and transmit information. After criticism of this seemingly linear and unified concept of one single logic (Couldry, 2008; Lundby, 2009), Hjarvard emphasized that the term media logic is ‘a conceptual shorthand’ for the various ways media operate, ‘including the ways in which the media distribute material and symbolic resources and operate with the help of formal and informal rules’ (2013, p. 17). Hjarvard linked his argument to the new institutionalism, picking up on the theoretical framework of ‘institutional logic’ developed by Thornton, Ocasio, & Lounsbury (2012). The media logic may not in itself create institutional change. Change is generated in the relationship between the logic inherent in the operations of the media and the logic of the other institution in case. The relationship between media and politics is the most frequently studied, along with different relationships between ‘media logic’ and ‘political logic’ (Esser & Strömbäck, 2014; Strömbäck & Esser, 2014). Institutional logic in mediatization theory implies that institutional change or transformation is observed in the interplay between the institutional logic of the media and the institutional logic of another institution, for example, religion. The approach stresses the inter-institutional structures and the interfaces between institutions (Hjarvard, 2013, pp. 30–40; 2014a, pp. 136–138; 2014b, pp. 212–216).



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12.5 Researching Mediatized Public Religion How does one carry out mediatization studies? In their criticism of mediatization research (‘key concept or conceptual bandwagon?’), David Deacon and James Stanyer (2014) discuss the understanding of change. They find a tendency to see the media as causal agents where non-media factors are overlooked.

12.5.1 Diachronous or Synchronous Approach Further, Deacon and Stanyer find mediatization research to be weak in its attempt to capture and explain change over time. In reply, Hepp, Hjarvard and Lundby (2015) admit that mediatization research needs to include more explicit historical analyses. However, they see a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of Deacon and Stanyer, namely that mediatization research concerns one-sided effects. Hepp et al. remind us that mediatization is about the interrelation between changes in media and communication and changes in institutions or fields in culture and society. ‘Media are not necessarily the “driving forces” of transformations. There are other processes of change that might find their expression in media and communications, as with “individualization”’ (Hepp et al., 2015, p. 320). Mediatization is a transformative process between points in time. However, diachronous data are not always easy to obtain. There are also arguments for ‘synchronous’ analyses of mediatization that compare practices in different settings at the same time or that compare events or situations of intense transformations to times of inertia. Examples of the latter are moments when a certain media technology is appropriated in a certain context (Hepp et al., 2015, pp. 320–321). The distinction between diachronous and synchronous approaches to mediatization is not an either–or one. Both help trace the ongoing institutional transformation. This distinction in mediatization research resonates the double insight from institutional studies that on the one hand sudden breaches may change the set path (Pierson, 2004) and on the other hand that minor changes may amass to become visible transformations (Mahoney & Thelen, 2009). Institutions are changing by keeping some elements stable while new elements are introduced. This double move characterizes the media as part of the public sphere, as Engelstad shows in this volume.

12.5.2 Interaction in Mediatized Religious Environments Public religion exists in the said interrelation with media and media changes. The media work in relation to their audiences. People’s interaction with content that is represented in the media influence further editorial decisions in edited media through direct feedback or through sales and user statistics. People participate directly in

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social media, producing content as part of interaction through the media. Such interaction may stimulate mediatization processes. People may interact with media institutions on the basis of involvement in religious institutions. Mediatized public religion involves this double institutional setting.

12.5.3 Baseline for the Diachronous Analysis The baseline for the analysis of diachronous mediatization is taken from my study of secularization in public broadcasting in the early 1970s (Lundby, 1974), compared to the transformations of the dominant broadcasting institution and the majority religious institutions 40 years later. I also look for mediatized religion in contemporary history in my study of Norway (Lundby, 1985) in the Nordic research project on religious changes in the Nordic countries from 1930–1980, comparing a range of indicators in 1938, 1958 and 1978 (Gustafsson, 1987, 1985). This is followed by my research on media and religion in the Nordic project on religion in the public sphere from 1980 onwards, with emphasis on the years 1988, 1998 and 2008 (Lundby et al., forthcoming). 46

12.5.4 Baseline for The Synchronous Analysis A baseline for the analysis of synchronous mediatization of religion is provided by the patterns in interaction over religion in Norway. The Engaging with Conflicts in the Mediatized Religious Environments (CoMRel)47 project examines how religion in public spaces becomes thematised and enacted through the media and further articulated in social interaction within different institutional domains. A nationwide survey was undertaken in April 201548, displaying patterns of interaction between people and various media over religious topics in contemporary Norway. Such individual religious practices may refer to information and representations in the public sphere and also play back into the public sphere. Churches, mosques and similar religious locales are minor public spheres. Norwegians are, in general, not frequent attenders in such spaces. Only 1 in 10 do so every month. However, Norwegians occasionally attend transition rites at religious sites.

46 The NOREL project. Cf. Inger Furseth’s chapter in this book. 47 www.hf.uio.no/imk/english/research/projects/comrel/index.html. The project is part of the SAMKUL programme at the Research Council of Norway. 48 The survey was created with questions defined by CoMRel researchers and executed by TNS Gallup with a representative web panel of 1000 persons 16 years and older.



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Nearly 6 in 10 had been to a wedding, confirmation or funeral in their own religious tradition at least once in the year before they were interviewed. People need information and interpretations about religion for their ongoing interaction. Only 1 in 10 Norwegians confirmed in the survey that they had met or obtained information about religion in churches, mosques or other religious buildings during the last 12 months. Religion was talked about much more often in families (3 in 10), among friends (1 in 4) or at school or work (3 in 20). However, television and newspapers (print and digital combined) are the sources of information on religion for more Norwegians than face-to-face settings (1 in 3). Similarly, radio was the source on religion for 1 in 5. Even social media and websites were somewhat more frequently reported as the site for information on religion last year (by around 13 percent) than gatherings in religious buildings. Although churches and mosques are public places, Norwegians rather seek out public religion in the media, primarily mass media. That people actively search or passively come across religion in public media may not imply that they take this information into debates on religion in the public sphere. Of the survey respondents, 4 percent took part in one or several debate meetings over religion during the last 12 months, while 2 percent attended demonstrations related to religion. However, in debates over religion Norwegians may employ participatory media. While only 2 percent reported to have submitted one or more debate article to newspapers (regardless of whether it was a digital or print version) during the last year, 10 percent took part in debates on religion in social media and 6 percent wrote comments in digital newspapers or in discussion forums on the Internet. Therefore, the spheres of public religion are important to people’s interpretations and interactions over these matters. Within each sphere, the media in operation may change or even transform the representation of religion and thus influence the perception of public religion. How this occurs within each of the three distinct spheres is analysed in the following.

12.6 The Journalism Sphere Within the journalism sphere, religion is treated just as any piece of news, on the secular terms that dominate in newspapers and broadcasting. The mediatization of religion within this sphere mainly refers to the representation of public religion through the media selection of what is found to be worth making visible in the news and what is not.

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12.6.1 Media History: Changes Across Reader Cultures Norwegian newspapers differ more in their coverage of religion across the different reader cultures and political interests they represent than over time. Research data for the printed press are available at regular intervals from the 1930s until 2008. The conservative papers Aftenposten and Stavanger Aftenblad treated religion through a respectful coverage of the Lutheran Church of Norway, the then state church. Pietistic organizations within the Church of Norway attracted journalists from several newspapers to their annual leaders meeting in the mountains, where they made declarations on Christian morals that the media conveyed. This loyal approach by these newspapers lasted until the end of the 1970s. The liberal Dagbladet and the social-democratic Arbeiderbladet were more critical and directed their religious criticism primarily towards the institutional church (Lundby, 1985, pp. 188–189). The tendency visible in Aftenposten in 1978 to put more emphasis on the religiosity of individuals than on the church as an institution became stronger through the 1980s and 1990s into the new millennium. For all four newspapers, there was a sharp decline in coverage of the majority Lutheran church from 1998 to 2008. At the same time, coverage of Islam rose in much larger proportion than the immigration of Muslims should imply (Lundby & Gresaker, 2015; Lövheim & Lundby, 2013). A study of religion in the Norwegian press since 2000 shows how these media institutions have sharpened their secular watchdog function, with less respect for religious institutions (Døving & Kraft, 2013). The newspapers’ greater power implies an expanding mediatization in their treatment of religion.

12.6.2 Contemporary Survey: the Significance of News Media When Norwegians are asked in the CoMRel survey (cf. 12.5.4 above) which aspects of religion in the media they are most interested in, religion in news tops the list, followed by religion and politics. Therefore, for religion Norwegians rely heavily on the treatment in secular journalism. A majority look for religion to be discussed in this ‘hard’ part of the public sphere rather than in the softer cultural sphere. In the survey, 30  percent report discussing news on religion with others daily or weekly. There are variations according to media use. However, a general picture emerges; those regularly attending to the public sphere through mass media are keener to discuss news on religion than those who more infrequently use these public media. 49 For Facebook and other social media, there are no differences between those who use these personal media and those who do not when it comes to discussions of news on religion.

49 The questions on media use are broad, as respondents were asked about the use of various media in ‘the last seven days’.



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Discussions over news on religious extremism with others take place more often by those who give priority to international news than among those who prefer national or local news. Users of all kinds of mass media, including those who read news on the Internet, are clearly more inclined to discuss news on religious extremism daily or weekly than those who do not use these mass media. Again, only 8  percent report discussing news on religious extremism in social media during the last 12 months. No more than 3 percent of the respondents have done so in discussion forums or in news comments on the Internet in the last year. When people discuss news on religious extremism it is primarily with family and friends, and they get the news they discuss from the mass media rather than through social media. This gives significance and responsibility to the gatekeepers in the journalism sphere. The representations in the news media are more important for people’s discussions on religion  – particularly religious extremism  – than social media. And for the population in general, the media are far more important than the information gathered from churches, mosques and other religious buildings. (But, of course, that minority attending religious congregations frequently will gather more of their information and understanding from within the religious institution.)

12.6.3 Mediatized Public Religion in the Journalism Sphere The historical material shows an expanding mediatization of religion within the journalism sphere. The media institutions are gradually making more independent editorial assessments of religious matters; they are becoming less loyal to the religious institutions. The press no longer covers the majority church out of a respect for this institution, which to a great extent was the case until the 1970s. The newspapers seem rather to cater to the expanding diversity and individualisation in religion and spirituality within their readership.  Such editorial decisions are crucial for the information people gather on public religion. Despite the growth in social media, it is still the mass media that is the main source of information on religion. However, more decisive editing and coverage of the religious landscape implies a stronger mediatization.

12.7 The Cultural Sphere Public religion in the cultural sphere primarily relates to popular culture. This is the sphere where symbolic elements of religious traditions are played out. The mediatization of religion in this sphere is based in the reconfiguration of religious elements into media-adapted stories, thus transforming the images of religion in the public sphere.

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12.7.1 Media History: Popular Magazines In the studies of media and religious change in Norway, particular emphasis has been put on lifestyle magazines as expressions of popular culture. Allers and Hjemmet, two weekly magazines with wide distribution, were studied for the years 1938, 1958 and 1978. There were more articles on religion in 1978 than in the other two years (but not necessarily a larger share of the total number of pages). In 1958, the tendency was to be aware of modern magic; consequently, the two magazines did not carry horoscopes. In 1978, they both had horoscopes and articles on spiritism and magic. However, Hjemmet wrote more on Christianity in 1978 than before, but focused on personalities and extraordinary experiences of faith and not on Christianity as an institution (Lundby, 1985, pp. 189–190). Ann Kristin Gresaker’s research on lifestyle magazines since 1980 confirms a continued tendency toward alternative religiosity and astrology. In 1988, Christianity was still a main theme in a majority of the articles on religion, but it decreased by almost half in 2008. Women’s magazines, however, lost interest in Christianity (Lundby & Gresaker, 2015, p. 93). While the newspaper coverage of religion is geared towards conflict, Gresaker’s study shows that the lifestyle magazines rather take a ‘feel good’ approach to religion to cater to their markets. The mediatization of religion in the magazines appears through the construction of a soft, spiritual media world (Lundby & Gresaker, 2015, p. 104).

12.7.2 Contemporary Survey: Satire, Humour and Entertainment Ten times as many Norwegians give highest priority to politics compared to religion among a list of eight topical areas in the media. Of the CoMRel study respondents, 30 percent say politics is the area they are most interested in, while only 3 percent say they are most interested in religion. Entertainment is the top priority for 14 percent of the respondents. This is not surprising when ‘religion’ is singled out as a separate category. When asked in a different way about which aspects of religion the respondents find most interesting in the media, the picture becomes more nuanced. While ‘religion in news’ and ‘religion and politics’ relate to the journalism sphere, the two categories of ‘religion and culture’ and ‘religion in entertainment’ refer to the cultural sphere. While 14  percent of the respondents say they are most interested in ‘culture’ as an aspect of religion in media, no more than 7 percent rank religion in entertainment as a high priority. What connotations do people associate with a predefined category of ‘religion in entertainment’? Possibly, many keep religion and entertainment separate. People may not be aware of how bits and pieces from various religious and occult traditions are mixed into films and entertainment programmes on television and radio



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and also appear in the print media (Partridge, 2008). Religious imagination is brought into the cultural realm through the use of symbols, citations and metaphors. Religious satire and humour in the media is a controversial issue. It is enough to remind people of the caricature crisis in Denmark and Norway in 2005–2006 and the terror attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris in early 2015. Such incidents, of course, become hard news in the journalism sphere. However, religious satire and humour usually relate to the cultural sphere. The CoMRel study respondents were asked whether they think the media could or should cover religious issues in a satirical or humorous way. While 2 in 3 completely or partly agreed, 15 percent completely or partly disagreed. Those watching television were more positive than those who did not watch television in the ‘last week’. In this case, those who had been on social media were more positive than those who had not. Religious satire and humour may provoke people who adhere to a religion themselves. However, even among those who to a great degree or to some degree regard themselves as Christian, as well as among those belonging to ‘other religions’,50 a clear majority agreed that the media could cover religion in a satirical or humorous way. However, an even larger portion of those with a weak or no sense of belonging to Christianity or to other religions were in support of satirical or humorous coverage of religion (79 and 69 percent, respectively).

12.7.3 Mediatized Public Religion in the Cultural Sphere The mediatization of public religion follows other patterns in the cultural sphere than in the journalism sphere. Religion as a defined topic per se is not a priority interest in Norwegians’ media menu. Actually, religion is at the bottom of the list. When forced to answer in which media genre they are most keen to encounter religion, entertainment is at bottom of the ranking. This is an indication of the mediatization of religion in two respects. First, there is possibly among Norwegians a widespread understanding of religion as something particular, set apart for those who are ‘religious’. Second, people seem to turn a blind eye to all the references to religious traditions and spirituality in entertainment media. A range of symbolic elements from biblical sayings to kabbalah mysticism is remixed into pop music, films and drama series (see, for example, Halse, 2014). ‘What people want’ (Endsjø & Lied, 2011) of popular culture may turn out to be transformed symbols from Christianity, Judaism and other religious traditions. Such ‘banal religion’ (cf. 12.2.2. above) in popular and entertainment media is mediatized public religion in the cultural sphere (Lied, 2012). Religious references in popular media are usually indirect. However, satire and humour programmes may also have explicit references to religion. They imply media-

50 We had to lump them together due to the number of respondents.

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tization through the irony that redefines – and thus helps transform – religious traditions. Conflicts over caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad remind us how provocative such mediatized public religion can be to some religious groups.

12.8 The Religious Media Sphere The religious media sphere is the extension of religious institutions for in-group and outreach communication. The mediatization of religion in this sphere concerns the changing role and influence of religious authority that is based in religious organizations and institutions, as well as the changes in religious language and the changing interface of religious and secular arguments.

12.8.1 Media History: ‘Christian’ Publications and ‘Religious’ Programmes Comparing the years 1938, 1958 and 1978, there was an offensive of new religious (Christian) media institutions in Norway after the Second World War. A second Christian daily, a Christian weekly and several Christian publishing houses were established after 1945. Around 1958, Christian organizations established two radio stations transmitting abroad from Norway. When the broadcasting monopoly was broken in 1981, Christian organizations were among those most keen to start narrowcast radio stations. Still, the main emphasis in the religious media sphere in that period was on small and middle-sized publications. In 1980, 60 magazines with countrywide distribution had a total circulation of close to 1 million copies. These Christian publications doubled the total print run from 1950 to 1980. Parish magazines were also distributed all over the country. This expansion, however, took place in a more or less closed circuit within the religious institution (Lundby, 1985, p. 186). However, in the context of greater religious and secular diversity and the expansion in media systems, in particular with Internet and digital communication, the said Christian outlets moved to the periphery. This implies secularization as well as mediatization on an organizational or institutional level, that is, as external to the religious media outlets. However, there are also examples of internal ‘self-mediatization’, in particular when religious institutions like the Church of Norway adapt their presence on the web to fit with contemporary modes of communication (cf. Lövheim & Axner, 2015, p. 47; Moberg & Sjö, 2012). Regarding NRK’s ‘religious programmes’, mediatization has progressed from within. The Sunday worship and weekday devotions on radio P1 have existed since the 1930s (Lundby, 1985; Lundby & Gresaker, 2015). The transformation has been in terms of a gradual shift of authority from NRK’s loyalty to the religious institution



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towards a more self-confident editorial stand on these traditional programmes by the media institution. This internal self-mediatization is visible in NRK’s experimentation with format and expression within the ‘religious’ slots in an intended loyalty to listeners in a more diverse society (Lundby, 1974; 2016).

12.8.2 Contemporary Survey: in a Corner of the Public Sphere As noted above, no more than 3 percent of the CoMRel survey respondents listed ‘religion’ as the topic in the media they are most interested in. By this category many may think of worship and other ‘religious programmes’ on radio and television. But of all those who answered, only 1.5 percent reported religion as being their main interest and at the same time had worship and devotions as their first priority in terms of religion in the media. Nine percent found worship and devotions most interesting among the listed areas of religion in the media, while 17 percent reported ‘religion as moral reflection’ as their top priority if they would have to make a choice. For comparison and as a reminder, no more than 7 percent mentioned religion in entertainment as their favourite topic to the extent that they had to relate to religion in the media. Again, this may signal a distinction among respondents between entertainment in the cultural sphere and serious religious programming and reflection. However, the latter could well be part of the general cultural media sphere. In Norway, traditional ‘religious programmes’  – understood as worship, devotions and religious songs and music – are mostly aired on NRK’s radio channel P1. Some of these programmes also are given space on NRK television. In the CoMRel survey, we asked whether such proclamation programmes should be kept for the Christian tradition or opened to other denominations and religions. Of the respondents, 1 in 3 said that NRK should not transmit such programmes at all; 1 in 5 found that either all religions should have the same opportunity or they should have access in relation to their membership strength; 1 in 10 would keep all such religious programming for the Christian tradition and 1 in 4 wanted most of these programmes to be related to Christianity, as was the case at the time of the survey. All in all, more than a 1/3 of the respondents wanted to give priority to the Christian tradition; 1 in 10 did not want to answer this question or did not know what to say. The religious media sphere may last longer in print than in broadcasting, due to the history referred to above. This sphere also extends into Internet-based media. However, the Internet yields rather limited sources on religion. This is confirmed by a specific question on how often people visit various religious websites. While 2 in 3 never visit websites on Christianity, Islam or Judaism, 3 in 4 never go to websites on alternative religion, such as astrology and new age, or Eastern religions, such as Hinduism or Buddhism. The use of such sites is rather rare, with perhaps an occasional visit per year. Six percent go to websites on Christianity, Islam or Judaism at least a few times a month, while no more than 2 percent visit alternative religious websites.

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While web pages on Christianity, Islam or Judaism are usually published by religious institutions and are thus clearly part of the religious media sphere, sites on alternative or Eastern religiosity belong to the cultural sphere, as defined above.

12.8.3 Mediatized Public Religion in the Religious Media Sphere In the specific religious media sphere, institutional change takes place within the more limited or secularized role of the religious institutions in society. However, the mediatization of the religious public sphere in itself adds to the institutional change of this sector. The mediatization of the religious public sphere occurs via adaptations in two opposite directions. Either the specific media run by religious institutions become even more in-group oriented, as with much of the print outlets of Norwegian pietistic organizations or the religious programmes adopt a soft profile in order to communicate with a broader audience, as with the morning devotions on NRK. The Internet is a challenge to religious institutions. The religious media sphere may well stretch into this digital, networked realm, but established religious organizations may not be able to communicate beyond their own turf (Lövheim, 2008). Rather, there emerges an individualistic ‘third space’ of digital religion (Hoover & Echchaibi, 2012) with none or very weak connections to religious institutions.

12.9 Conclusion This chapter has explored, with examples from Norway, how the public sphere is changing in the interplay between religion and media. Various media work within different spheres of public religion – the journalism sphere, the cultural sphere and the religious media sphere. Institutional changes in all three spheres are here understood through processes of mediatization. Within the journalism sphere, distorted representations in the long run will help transform the conceptions of public religion among the population. The news media influences and shapes public religion through its representations. In the cultural sphere, the mediatized transformations take place through the remixing of symbolic elements from religious traditions into popular culture productions. In the religious media sphere, mediatization may occur either by religious institutions withdrawing from the larger public sphere or by adapting to it in ways that eliminate particular institutional distinctions and markers. Mediatization implies incremental shifts due to the expanding influence of the media within other institutions that over time add up to fundamental transformations. Here, the theory of gradual institutional change (Mahoney & Thelen, 2009) coincides with an institutional approach to mediatization (Hjarvard, 2014b).

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The distinction between the three spheres may become more blurred as the repertoire of available media expands. This occurs with the digitalization of ‘old’ media and the emergence of ‘new’ networked digital media, which make multimodal production across text, sound, image and graphics seamless. Audiences may become producers with no more equipment than cell phones, able to add to news media through ‘citizen journalism’. Social media platforms break down strict distinctions between public and private spheres. Personal digital media also blur the distinction between the three spheres of public religion, as people may take part in debates and exchanges across the three spheres. However, Norwegians rather get information and input on religion from mass media. For the population at large, churches and similar religious sites are very limited sources of religion. This implies that the representation of religion in the media, particularly the mass media, is crucial for people’s interpretation of and interaction with religion. Therefore, the forthcoming institutional changes in public religion must be related to the influences of the media and must be studied and understood across different mediatized spheres.

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Part VI: Afterword

Fredrik Engelstad

13 Afterword: A Viable Model of the Public Sphere? At the end of the Introduction a generic theory of the public sphere in institutional perspective was sketched (Engelstad, Larsen, Rogstad & Steen-Johnsen, this volume). Seven main dimensions, or building blocks, aimed to describe variations in the shape of different public spheres, were pinpointed. The foregoing chapters demonstrate that combinations of values on these empirical variables appear in clusters. It is widely outside the scope of the present volume to treat the totality of relevant elements, but the empirical studies presented here yield some significant indications of what one such cluster looks like. It should be borne in mind that the Nordic model is an ideal type. Its fruitfulness rests on a high degree of correspondence, but in no way identity, with the empirical Nordic societies. Conflict, inconsistencies and compromises are also necessary parts of societies labeled under the Nordic model. The ability to cope with such conflicts determine the viability of the model.

13.1 Institutional Elements in the Public Sphere The neo-corporatist state is a seemingly unlikely combination of a basic liberal orientation with high degree of state intervention. This is upheld due to long term development of democratic institutions, in tandem with a growing inclusion of groups excluded from the public sphere and the fields of power (Aakvaag, this volume). This is due to close – but in no way conflict-free – interaction with social movements, from the early feminist and labour movements of the late 1800s to contemporary neo-feminism and environmentalism. This also serves as basis for continuous negotiations between the state and broad interest organizations, most prominently in the labour market. Freedom of expression. State guarantees are a precondition for freedom of expression. At the same time it serves as a guarantee against abuse of power by the state. In Scandinavia legal protection of freedom of expression preceded the development of democracy (Engelstad, Larsen & Rogstad, this volume). Particularly in Norway, recent extensions of freedom of expression have occurred in two directions: On the one hand, in the constitutional responsibility of the state to secure information to the citizens, and on the other hand, in strengthened protection of the freedom of expression in working life (Trygstad, this volume). Nevertheless, the actual freedom of expression is negotiated; and to a certain extent it is under pressure. One source is skepticism and resistance among employers, not least in the public sector (Trygstad, this volume). Another is a blend of terrorist threat with public pressure, paired with demands for self-censorship among citizens (Elgvin and Rogstad, this volume). © 2017 Fredrik Engelstad, Håkon Larsen, Jon Rogstad, Kari Steen-Johnsen This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.



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Five institutional fields are singled out as the most salient sub-sets of the public sphere: media, research and higher education, religion, voluntary organizations, arts and culture (Engelstad, Larsen & Rogstad, this volume). These in turn may be divided into subspaces according to social class, gender or other elements. Emerging as a result of social differentiation, these five have their own mode of operation. On principle they may constitute parallel worlds, without significant interaction. Yet, minimal compatibility between the fields emerges by their degree of direct or indirect relevance to the lives of citizens. Continuous conflicts over religion and science, or art and morality are examples close at hand. Institutionalized integration. In the Nordic societies the five fields are in no way isolated instances, but serve as integrated parts of society, with both contact and potential conflict between them. A core source of integration is vertical integration via state regulation and economic support. This means that the fields are adjusting their mode of operation to common democratic norms for a pluralist society. A telling example is the Nordic majority churches. Even if the Nordic states are basically secular, all the variants of majority churches have close links to the state (Furseth, this volume). Still, conflict is constantly present, also over the legitimacy of given state policies, state subsidies and political recognition (Larsen, this volume). In addition, there are issues related to horizontal integration via mediatzation. The media are the single most powerful channel of communication. This means that their special mode of selection and presentation becomes contagious into other fields. A demonstration is given in the chapter on mediatization of religion (Lundby, his volume). Access to participation. Critical accounts of the public sphere have to a large extent focused on the tendency to exclusion along the lines of gender and social class; more recently ethnicity has been added on. The emergence of the social media has had a revolutionary effect on the access of ordinary citizens to fora for information and deliberation. This is true for the social media in general (Enjolras and Steen-Johnsen, this volume), but has taken on a special significance in the Nordic societies, where Internet coverage is the highest in the world. When specified to processes in local politics, a mix of traditional and electronic media turns out to be most potent; whereas the improved effects of internet participation for formerly marginalized groups as women, young people and those with low formal education still holds (Segaard, this volume). Values and normative specifications. The viability of democracy rests on general adherence to democratic values and constitutive rules. But these rules are set in motion in relatively exceptional cases. In a society with strong institutions, the dominant normative rules to a large extent reflect the institutional patterns. In practice, norms and values function at two different levels. Important sets of norms are tailored to the challenges posed to different occupations. Artistic norms or norms of the legal profession are obvious examples. Despite many common elements, different ethics of occupation may be incompatible, thus creating considerable conflict between groups. A much cited example is the constant tensions between the media and communica-

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tion officers (Engelstad, this volume). A consequence is that the normative consensus at the on the meta-level is not repeated at the more practical connection. Power struggles as sources of social change. Power struggles are normally fought over specific interests. But not seldom they shade into concerns of the shape of institutions as such. Media policy is a case near at hand. Questions of homogenizing tax exemptions for print media and electronic media is in one sense a minor question, on the other hand it implies the more principled question of equal treatment of widely different media, with possible large long term effects. Such dilemmas get a special force in the Nordic societies, with their dense institutional structures. On the one hand, these contribute to a high degree of stability. On the other hand, exactly this density invites a large amount of pressures and negotiations, with compromises and outcomes that in the long run may have destabilizing effects on the institutional structure. Hence, a question arises; can the Nordic model of the public sphere in the long run remain relevant, given that the Nordic societies are facing internal tensions as well as external competition?

13.2 A Viable Type of Public Sphere? Compared to most of the world, the Nordic model of the public sphere sketched here may seem odd, even anomalous. To answer the question whether it has a future, the reciprocal relationship between the public sphere and the socio-economic aspects of the Nordic model must be drawn in, while at the same time the internal sources of change in the public sphere must be taken into consideration. In both cases, the institutional perspective is relevant. Despite ambivalence and uncertainty, existing analyses indicate significant robustness of the political and economic aspects of the Nordic model (Thelen, 2014; Andersen, Dølvik & Ibsen, 2014; Engelstad & Hagelund, 2015). Strong support for the welfare state is a dominant feature of Nordic politics, notwithstanding unavoidable adjustments of its workings. This is highly relevant also to the future of the public sphere, as it gives high legitimacy to state intervention; even Nordic right-wing populism is in favour of the welfare state. However, general support for the welfare state is no guarantee against future changes, but rather it shapes them in decisive ways. A core feature of the strong Nordic state is its commitment to redistribution, not only concerning economic aspects but socio-cultural aspects as well (Engelstad, Larsen & Rogstad, this volume). The structure of these engagements is open to change, even if the commitment remains unaffected. Likewise, the liberal state is the prime defender of freedom of expression, not only in terms of its ‘negative’ qualities but also its ‘positive’ qualities. Nevertheless, the Nordic state, in common with other modern states, is acquiring more and more non-liberal traits due to threats of terrorism and organized crime. No clear predictions emerge from these observations, only



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that both the redistributive and the liberal facets invite struggles over interpretation and reformulation. To understand the challenges to the public sphere, these very abstract assumptions must be specified, at least down to the five institutions distinguished above. The following descriptions may be somewhat one-sided, but cover significant tendencies. (i) Drastic changes in media technology may lead to intensified commercialization, and it initiates discussions of changes in state support of the press and public ownership of public service broadcasters. (ii) State subvention of the arts and cultural production may change direction from support for avant-garde and ‘elite’ art to more popular forms of expression. (iii) Research and higher education is to a growing extent becoming internationalized, in parallel loosening ties to the national public and practical applications. (iv) As the field of religion is becoming more pluralized, it may to a certain degree be diluted, into core of humanist social values. (v) Voluntary organizations are becoming more professionalized as lobby actors, while grass root members are more concentrated on local activities. All of these changes are to a large extent influenced by state intervention, albeit not in a uniform way. Rather, they are closely connected to a normative, democratic conception of universalization and not least universalization of access. Why should the production of news be restricted to journalists or art be reserved for curators or research be restricted to the national realm or religious truth be represented by one denomination or representation be restricted to one organization? Undoubtedly, there is great strength in this argument. At the same time, it will be confronted by demands for professionalism. News must be trustworthy, art innovative, research critical, religion transcendent and organizations socially integrative. There is an equal strength in this argumentation. Hence, public policies must consider both lines of argumentation and will be met with opposition along both lines. This leads to a reflection if not a conclusion. The Nordic type of public sphere is viable to the degree that the institutions are stabilizing elements in society and the strong and liberal state retains its legitimacy. But how the various parts of the public sphere will develop in the future is hardly possible to predict. Even if institutions seem stable in the short run, an important reason why they change is that they are arenas for power struggles and thus for efforts to alter them.

About the Authors Craig Calhoun Professor of sociology, President of the Berggruen Institute, Los Angeles Olav Elgvin Senior researcher, Fafo Institute for Labour and Social Research, Oslo Fredrik Engelstad Professor (em) of sociology, University of Oslo Bernard Enjolras Research professor and research director, Institute for Social Research, Oslo Inger Furseth Professor of sociology, University of Oslo Håkon Larsen Researcher, Department of Archivistics, Library, and Information Science, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences Knut Lundby Professor of media studies, University of Oslo Jon Rogstad Research professor and research director, Fafo Institute for Labour and Social Research, Oslo. Adjunct professor Norwegian University of Technology and Science Signe Bock Segaard Senior researcher, Institute for Social Research, Oslo Kari Steen-Johnsen Research professor and research director, Institute for Social Research, Oslo Sissel Trygstad Research Director, Fafo Institute for Labour and Social Research, Oslo Gunnar C. Aakvaag Professor of sociology, University of Tromsø