The Norwegian voluntary sector in change: The impact of changes in organizational type, structure, and membership on local voluntary associations' political involvement

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to examine whether the political involvement of local voluntary associations has changed between 1999 and 2009, and if so what caused this change. The Norwegian voluntary sector has been in continuous development since the first voluntary associations emerged in the mid-1800s. As the voluntary sector has been an inherent part of the development of the Norwegian state and contributor to different policy fields, it interesting to study how changes in the voluntary sector affect the voluntary associations' political involvement. In order to generate sound hypotheses a historical examination of the developments of the Norwegian voluntary sector will be conducted. Together with a variety of different theoretical perspectives the hypotheses will be developed. In order to test the hypotheses thoroughly a descriptive analysis of the Hordaland-survey from 1999 and 2009 will be conducted, thereafter a longitudinal logistic regression model will be applied to test the effect of organizational type, structure and membership on political involvement on the municipal, district- municipal and state level. These models will also include time- interaction variables to determine the effect changes in type, structure and membership has on changes in political involvement. The analysis found very few significant results. However there were some variables with organizational type, structure and membership that did have an effect. Regarding the time- interaction variables an even lower number of significant results were found. The hypotheses generated with regards to the organizational type were strengthened by those findings that were significant. Similarly, the hypotheses generate for organizational structure were strengthened for those time- interactions that were significant. With regards to organizational membership however, the hypothesis regarding membership numbers was weakened. The other hypotheses for membership however were strengthened.