Norway has landed at the bottom of a list ranking the popularity of political party membership in countries around Europe. Only 5 percent of Norwegian voters now belong to any particular party.
“Folks care about issues, not parties,” Professor Knut Heidar at the University of Oslo told website forskning.no. Norway’s political parties, seven of which won enough votes at the last national elections to secure representation in Parliament, have collectively lost 30 percent of their members since 1980.
The study of party membership around Europe was carried out by researchers from the Netherlands, Germany and Italy and published in the European Journal of Political Research. It looked at membership numbers in 27 European countries and only four countries had lower rates of party membership than Norway: Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Great Britain.
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