Power, Communication, and Politics in the Nordic Countries

Abstract

Is there a Nordic model for political communication?This is the question we pose in this anthology.It seems simple enough, but there are many answers.When we first invited our Nordic colleagues to this book project, we asked them to reflect on the changes that challenged the Nordic welfare states and their infrastructures for political dialogue and negotiations.We pointed to the technological shifts, the hybridisation of the media structures, and the fact that the Nordic countries had different experiences and handled crises differently in the recent past.While this book was in its final stages, a new crisis hit.During the global Covid-19 pandemic, both striking differences -such as differences in crisis management and crisis communication of the Nordic governments -and deep-seated similarities -such as the high trust level between governments and citizens -came to the fore.As the chapters of this book explore, if anything, the key to understanding Nordic political communication is to keep in mind both aspects: the systems are similar, but there are considerable differences between the countries in terms of history, cultures, languages, demography, and contemporary politics.The aims of the book are threefold.First, we want to present an updated and broad picture of Nordic political communication.In this respect, this book updates and expands Communicating Politics: Political Communication in the Nordic Countries, edited by Jesper Strömbäck, Mark Blach-Ørsten, and Toril Aalberg in 2008, which brought a much-needed systematic comparative perspective to Nordic political communication.Second, we aim to go beyond the comparative media models perspective.The media models remain important, but at the same time, we seek to explore and disclose the dynamics that underlie the theoretical framework.In order to do so, this book expands the field by including new actors, themes, theories, and research questions in Nordic political communication.The third objective is to show that both more comparative studies and more in-depth analyses are essential to understand the similarities and differences PREFACE Last, and very important, the research network UiO Norden funded a seminar where the ideas for the book were discussed, and the Norwegian Research Council has -through funding the POLKOM research group -contributed significantly to the funding of the book.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 90 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.