They asked the following questions (english translations from ISSP documentation):

Suppose the government suspected that a terrorist act was about to happen. Do you think the authorities should have the right to…

• Detain people for as long as they want without putting them on trial? 2006: 53 % yes – 2011: 50 % yes
• Tap people’s telephone conversations? 2006: 85 % yes – 2011: 67 % yes
• Stop and search people in the street at random? 2006: 58 % yes – 2011: 44 % yes

This constitutes a clear drop in support for security measures that invade privacy and civil liberties, quite the opposite of what we  would expect. This supports the impression of the response that seemed to amaze international media and bloggers  (f.ex. Glenn Greenwald, Huffington Post, AFP). Virtually no cries for tightening of security, revenge or a “decisive response” as we would expect if this had happened in the United States.

Professor Anne Lise Fimreite from the University of Bergen and researcher Magnus Ranstorp at the Swedish Defense Academy attribute this to the decisive political leadership calling for openness and democracy in the days following the attack. The mantras that has been repeated over and over have been the two quotes “We will meet terror with more openness and more democracy” and “If one man can show that much hate, think of how much love we can show” from Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and Labour MP Stine Renate Håheim respectively.

As a Norwegian myself, I do feel a sense of positive nationalistic pride in this development. Still, the numbers are quite high, and the Parliament did decide to adopt the European Data Storage Directive after intense debate. The struggle to defend civil liberties is far from a given victory.

Participants have been recruited through the political party organizations (at least I was), and appear to only have the option of buying or selling “stock” in our own party and/or government coalition. I assume part of the reason why we are restricted to our own party is the need for keeping the results secret to avoid incentives for strategic attempts at driving up the predicted value.

Unlike the Iowa experiments, this experiment is not conducted with “real money”. Each participant is given a number of virtual credits, and as far as I know there is no winning prize. This does of course give weak incentives towards predicting results accurately. If the  result wasn’t being kept secret until election day, we might even have a serious adverse incentive to manipulate the predicted result to give our party “wind in the sails” towards the election. Such secrecy seems to be maintained, though, also to the extent of not letting us know the predictions made on other parties.

It seems highly likely to me, though, that the weak incentives for “winning” will cause party member participants to systematically overvalue their own party’s election result, especially when unable to also “invest” in other parties. The only alternative to holding “stock” in your own party is not holding stock…. i.e. having inert credits.

Of course it would possibly be likely that such a bias is so systematically distributed that it can be predicted and controlled for trhough discounting by some factor. Still I can’t help but think that there would be a chance for better predictions if we were either allowed to “invest” in all parties or had actual economic incentives to “win”.

In any case it’s interesting to see new methods of prediction getting tested. The Iowa results look rather good.

Fremskrittspartiet has always been a party critical to immigration and foreign cultural influence. It may not be quite fair to compare them with Jörg Haider in Austria or Gert Wilders in the Netherlands, but to a certain degree they play on some of the same fears.

In a project paper I previously posted on this blog, one of the few clearly significant correlations I could find in the occasionally rather contradictory voter mass of this party was between the propensity to vote for FrP and a scepticial attitude to foreign culture. In previous elections they have gained much whenever immigration and scepticism to foreign cultures has been allowed to become a dominant topic in the election campaigns

At the moment, foreign influence on Norwegian culture is one of the hot topics in Norwegian politics. But the election is still many months off, and it will take hard work, skill and some luck for Fremskrittspartiet to be able to keep this topic alive all the way until September, but if they manage it they might actually be able to make their ambitions for government power somewhat more credible than they are today.

And with so much to gain, I suspect that Fremskrittspartiet will give it a go. Besides the general comments about islamization, party leader Siv Jensen has also recently launched (verbal) attacks at a university college for allowing an imam that denies Holocaust to speak to students and the government for letting international agreements get in the way of expelling suspected Iraqi terrorist-supporter Mullah Krekar.

We may be looking at a season of political debate that might become very ugly indeed…

Further reading:

• This blog: “Who votes for Fremskrittspartiet?“
• Dagbladet.no [in Norwegian]: “- Kampen mot radikal islam er vår tids viktigste“
• NRK.no [in Norwegian]: “-Sivs beskrivelse er langt fra sann“
• Dabladet.no [in Norwegian]: “Siv Jensen advarer mot snikislamisering“
• Daniel Pipes blog: “How many islamists?“

What’s the logic behind this? Well, if you sum up the benefit every member of society would get from an election outcome, the number could become quite big, compensating for the low likelihood that your vote is the one that will decide. Thus if the cost of voting is rather low, it might still be worth it. This actually sounds rather reasonable. Perhaps voting might be rational.

The perceived benefit society could get from voting is of course limited by how much you actually believe candidates will follow through their policies. Also, the benefit of voting might have to be discounted by a factor reflecting to what degree you believe the election will be fair. This might explain why the big proportion of the voters that don’t participate still aren’t necessarily selfish either.

It gives me solace to know that I now have a scientific vay to explain that people that vote aren’t stupid and people in general aren’t necessarily selfish.

“Society is like a ship, and everyone must be prepared to take the helm.”
(Henrik Ibsen, An enemy of the people,my translation.)

Those of us who hold deliberation (in any form) to be an important prerequisite for informed decision making, would also be interested in the topic of how deliberative functions in society can be improved.

James Fishkin has been one of the most quoted political scientists concerned with the topic of deliberation. He’s a normative scientist, concerned with the benefits that can be reaped from encouraging more democratic debate throughout the population. He has proposed new democratic institutions, such as deliberative opinion polls, or more grandly the thought of a universal “Deliberation Day” (Ackerman & Fishkin 2003). But both of these rest on one very important assumption, that  “[...]most citizens would be glad of the opportunity to play a serious role in important historical events” (Fishkin 1991:9). And this is an assumption Fishkin seems to take lightly. But is it realistic?

John R. Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse  have done extensive research on what processes American voters actually want. And one of their conclusions is that “People want to turn political matters over to somebody else because they do not want to be involved themselves[...]“(Hibbing & Theiss-Morse 2002:85). In general, people want “ordinary people” to have more of a say, but they themselves don’t wish to be involved, and prefer to be left alone (Hibbing & Theiss-Morse 2002:129). They sum this up as follows:

“The last thing people want is to be more involved in political decision-making: They do not want to make political decisions themselves; they do not want to provide much input to those who are assigned to make these decisions; and they would rather not know the details of the decision-making process [...]This does not mean that people think no mechanism for government accountability is necessary; they just do not want the mechanism to come into play except in unusual circumstances” (Hibbing & Theiss-Morse 2002:1-2)

People are concerned that they might be taken advantage of by special interest groups and elected officials that reap personal gains at the expense of society. Subsequently they find support for more public involvement to be high when it is presented as the only option to rule by a self-centered elite. But that doesn’t mean they want to be continually involved. The ideal government is according to the common man one that governs with the best interest of society in mind, but that doesn’t require much involvement from its citizens – a non-self-serving elite (Hibbing & Theiss-Morse 2002:130). Interestingly enough, Fishkin (1991:54-55) himself makes a similar point – that the public doesn’t seem to have a wish for participating as much as possible in democracy. He cites a survey that quite clearly shows that increases in direct majoritarian control through plebiscite actually seems to reduce the voter turnout and make the public less involved.

This is a challenge to theories of rational behaviour. Given that politics have an impact on our lives, why should we not want to decide as much as possible? One reason may be that we find our own impact on politics to be so little that it doesn’t justify our own involvement. Spending five hours in political processes won’t get us five hours’ worth of more favourable outcomes for us personally. And politicians should be very bad indeed to justify in personal gain for you to give up a major part of the life you have chosen for yourself and go into politics full time.

This basic assumption seems to be something many political theorists forget to take into account. Most people are happy leaving decisions to a system they trust. And I believe the kind of systems Fishkin suggest presupposes a high level of trust that your opinions will be taken seriously.  If this is true, what we have to start looking at is how to improve trust in politicians and how to improve the deliberative processes inside the governments we already have.

Sources

Ackerman, Bruce, & James S. Fishkin (2003) “Deliberation Day”. In James S. Fishkin & Peter Laslett (Eds.), Debating Deliberative Democracy. Malden: Blackwell, 7-31

Fishkin, James S. (1991) Democracy and Deliberation. New Directions for Democratic Reform, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Hibbing, John R., & Elizabeth Theiss-Morse (2002) Stealth democracy: Americans’ beliefs about how government should work, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

I analyzed the FrP voters according to the so-called “FrP code” presented by Norwegian Author Magnus Marsdal in the influential book FrP-koden. He claims that the success of FrP can be explained by the tension between a left-oriented cultural elite and a group of disgruntled voters identifying themselves with working class values. These are perceived to have little education and a low income, to be xenophobic and sceptical to the government and people in power. Marsdal employs mostly univariate analysis and anecdotal evidence to support these claims. I performed a regression analysis, testing these and a few other hypotheses, concluding that both low education, low age, scepticism to government and scepticism to immigration seems to increase probability of voting FrP. However, the tests of statistical reliability indicate that there are groups of voters that are very poorly predicted by these indicators, appraently voting FrP for some other, unexplained reasons.

With the analysis now referenced by Norwegian media (which unfortunately doesn’t seem to have been publicized in its entirety) it seems that these theories are strengthened. There is a core group of young, lowly educated, xenophobic voters sceptical to government, but there are also significant groups of voters who don’t fit this pattern.

I believe this to be the result of extremely successful populism by FrP, recruiting voters on the basis of popular issues, not on commitment to their policies as a whole. This allows them to recruit voters that aren’t really that interested in political issues in general, but feel strongly about single issues. For example they have recruited many Christian conservative voters in south and southwest Norway by being staunch supporters of Israel, even though the mass of their voters don’t agree. But that mass of voters probably don’t give a damn about Israel and are content with voting FrP because they agree with the party on their favourite issues.

I might not think this is a good way to do politics, but I have to admit it works in terms of getting votes.

If you want to read the entire paper, entitled “Decrypting the FrP Code – a multivariate analysis of FrP voters”, you may download it in PDF format: Decrypting the FrP code (PDF)

My interest in the paper is not so much the substantial content as the nice reminder it was to me as an aspiring political scientist to still keep a critical eye towards papers that at first eyesight appear to have a thorough empirical basis. I don’t think I’d have noticed the flaws these two scientists did.

The paper is well worth a read for anyone interested in quantitative methods.

Read Kai Arzheimer’s post and both papers here.