Rune Karlsen

University of Oslo · Department of Media and Communication

An unusually large number of political scandals left their mark on Norwegian politics in 2023. Most of the scandals involved conflicts of interest for current and former government ministers, and they led to several Cabinet resignations and dismissals. The local elections in September were a big win for the two main parties on the right of Norwegia...

Following the 2021 parliamentary election, which was a big win for the centre‐left, Norway has a governing coalition of the Centre Party and the Labor Party, led by Prime minister (PM) Støre of the Labor Party. The government faced various challenges in 2022 and fell dramatically in public standing, according to public opinion polls. The main diffi...

The main political event in Norway in 2021 was the Storting (parliamentary) election in September. After eight years of rule by a Conservative Party/Høyre Prime Minister, the 2021 election was a decisive win for the centre‐left. However, it was a win by a fragmented group of five parties, only two of which ended up forming the new government. Despi...

We investigate how inequalities in political media use develop throughout election campaigns, and in particular whether social media use helps counterbalance traditional news consumption gaps. Using a four-wave individual-level panel survey of the Norwegian 2017 national election campaign, we run a series of latent growth models to investigate whet...

Communication professionals are increasingly found within government ministries. Based on classic work on bureaucracy and recent literature on mediatisation and personalization, this article develops two ideal types: the government information provider and government spin doctor. These ideals are constituted by six dimensions: recruitment criteria,...

Access to resources, wealth, and power positions varies systematically with membership in social categories. This article asks what role the elites themselves – as holders of power and regulators of access to influential positions – can play in maintaining, but also changing, the demographic composition of elites. Drawing on a unique survey among t...

Valgkamper handler om å vinne velgernes gunst på velkjente saksfelt: skatt og avgift, skole og utdanning, helse, distriktspolitikk og samferdsel, og i nyere tid innvandring og klima. I 2021 er bakteppet for valgkampen en lang periode med pandemi og unntakstilstand samt stor oppmerksomhet om distriktspolitikk og reformer. Hvordan vil den se ut i et...

The growth of ministerial advisors is often seen as a mean to increase control over the bureaucracy. However, to fully understand politicization it is important to focus not only on the actual number of ministerial advisors, but also on their type of party-political background and their actual role within the ministry. The article presents results...

People increasingly turn to social media to get their daily news updates. Still, we are only beginning to understand how this development affects people’s perceptions of consumed news stories. The article reports on an experiment designed to investigate the effect the distribution of a news story in social media (Facebook) has on news message credi...

How is government affected by including populists in a governing coalition? We investigate if populist political parties behave "normally" when they attain power, or if they govern differently from mainstream political parties. Empirically, we use survey data from 282 ministerial advisers from three cabinets in Norway. Our conclusion is that populi...

We investigate the often-stated, but disputed claim in the political science and political communication literature that increasing media choice widens inequalities in political knowledge. The assumption is that in a high-choice media environment, the politically interested will consume more news while the uninterested will avoid such content, lead...

In this chapter, we examine how voters relate to the local political public sphere through a study of the 2019 Norwegian local election. We ask whether local media and personal networks contribute to what we call “local political orientation”, measured by the degree to which voters consider local issues to be important for their vote choice and usi...

The well-known “high-choice news avoidance thesis” and the alternative “network structure perspective” stipulate somewhat conflicting expectations about news consumption in today’s digital media systems. Based on annual survey data from Norway, the article examines news avoidance from 1997–2016, a period when digitalization processes transformed th...

Scholars claim that civil servants are increasingly having to engage in media management and be aware of how events are presented in the press, with this media awareness being said to threaten civil servants’ traditional bureaucratic values. In this article, we argue that media awareness is unevenly spread in public bureaucracies, and rather is con...

Ministerial advisors have become an essential aspect of executive branches worldwide, thus making the ministerial advisor office a potential route for young politicians aspiring to an expanding political class. The article studies which professions ministerial advisors migrate to following their ministerial careers, how ministerial advisors’ post-m...

The article compares the careers ministerial advisors before and after politics. Under study is a cohort of 139 ministerial advisors that served in Norwegian governments 2001 to 2009. The results show a post-ministerial migration out of politics, decreases in the shares working in central and subnational government, and increases in the shares work...

Pressure from the media affects the daily work of bureaucrats and induces ‘media stress’, with potentially critical effects on the quality of public policy. This article analyses how bureaucrats’ daily work has been adapted to the media (‘mediatised’) and which groups of bureaucrats experience the most media-stress. Reporting the results of an orig...

We address changes in support for quota policies, with an emphasis on corporate board quotas, among Norwegian elites. Applying theories of policy feedback and framing, we investigate whether changes in attitudes towards quotas correspond to changes in beliefs about the causes behind male dominance. The analysis rests on two comprehensive surveys fr...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0267323119861513 Decision-making in public bureaucracies should be guided by rules and formal procedures, securing predictability, impartiality and fair decisions. Studies show that public bureaucracies are highly mediatised – but knowledge about media impact on political outcomes is scarce. In this ar...

Scholars have argued that government agencies face a complex web of reputational concerns regarding how they are perceived by multiple audiences who prioritise different dimensions of their work. Drawing on social identity theory, we argue that civil servants are concerned about the reputation of the agency for which they work, but also about other...

This article contributes to both the scholarly debates on the controversies over gender quotas and the body of knowledge on framing effects through an investigation of whether national elites, individuals in top positions across 10 sectors of Norwegian society, are susceptible to positive framing of corporate board gender quotas (CBQs). Elites are...

Emotions, such as anger and fear, have been shown to influence people’s political behavior. However, few studies link emotions specifically to how people debate political issues and seek political information online. In this article, we examine how anger and fear are related to politics-oriented digital behavior, attempting to bridge the gap betwee...

How do political leaders politicise welfare state “reform pressures”, e.g. unemployment, ageing or globalisation, in election campaigns? Competing expectations range from no politicization at all to a clear and unbiased coupling between pressures and intended policy responses. Eighteen speeches held by prime ministerial candidates at election-year...

Welfare states are exposed to a host of cost-inducing ‘reform pressures’. An experiment implemented in Germany, Norway and Sweden tests how various reform pressure frames affect perceptions about the future financial sustainability of the welfare state. Such perceptions have been shown to moderate electoral punishment for welfare reform, but little...

The article investigates the relationship between Norwegian MPs and their home constituency. The approach is based on the concept of constituency representation, which combines representational focus and constituency service. The data used in the empirical analysis comprise both surveys and in-depth interviews with MPs. It shows that MPs have multi...

Political appointees from different parties from that of their minister—cross-partisan appointees (CPAs)—are increasingly found in the core executive. Ministerial advisory scholarship has overlooked CPAs, while the coalition governance literature sees them as ‘spies’ and ‘coalition watchdogs’. This article argues theoretically and demonstrates empi...

The personalization of politics has received much attention in both the political science and political communication literature, but the focus has almost entirely been on party leaders and prime ministers. This study investigates the personalization of ministerial communication in Norway, a type of decentralized personalization. It combines a surv...

In this article, we take issue with the claim by Sunstein and others that online discussion takes place in echo chambers, and suggest that the dynamics of online debates could be more aptly described by the logic of ‘trench warfare’, in which opinions are reinforced through contradiction as well as confirmation. We use a unique online survey and an...

The number of party employees is increasing, but to what extent and in what sense are party employees integrated into their parties? Based on the literature on party change, the article identifies three important dimensions ‒ ties, tasks, and career plans ‒ and constructs a typology of four ideal types of party employees – technical assistants, par...

Political appointees in executive government have received increased scholarly attention in recent years. However, few studies have covered non-Westminster systems, and apart from classifications that systemize variation in assignments, theorizing about appointees has been limited. Using large-N survey data, the article finds three distinct roles a...

Social media have the potential to influence power relations in political parties as they allow individual candidates to campaign more independently of the central party. In this paper, we scrutinize the relationship between individualization and digital social media in a study that combines the 2013 Norwegian Candidate Survey with candidates’ Twit...

This book examines whether parties’ ability to channel voter interests into political institutions has in fact declined in the wake of decline of party membership figures and the increase of state finance of parties. It first looks at relevant empirical studies to summarize what we already know. Second, it presents an in-depth study of Norwegian vo...

One of the defining characteristics of the increasingly essential social networking sites is the network structure of the new medium. Opinion leaders are essential for the flow of communication in networks and consequently should be crucial for the flow of communication on social networking sites. Hence, to assess the political role and impact of s...

This article addresses the relationship between latent predispositions and political campaign communication. We propose that political values are decisive in a voter’s calculation of which parties she may consider voting for, constituting his or her party set. Furthermore, we argue that the theory of issue ownership contributes to explaining the ch...

Election campaigns are central to political life as well as to the study of political communication and provides much empirical knowledge about the processes of mediatisation and mediation of politics. Most often studies focus on the campaigns featuring the national top politicians. However, most elections campaigns in Western democracies are run b...

Election campaigns are central to political life as well as to the study of political communication and provides much empirical knowledge about the processes of mediatisation and mediation of politics. Most often studies focus on the campaigns featuring the national top politicians. However, most elections campaigns in Western democracies are run b...

The individualization of politics is usually studied in relation to party leaders. Using new data from the Norwegian Candidate Survey 2009 and in-depth interviews with 29 top candidates, in this article we study whether candidates in the Norwegian 2009 parliamentary election ran party-centred or individualized campaigns. We distinguish between the...

The article addresses the influence of U.S. online campaign practices on West-European party organizations. The empirical case is the Norwegian Labor Party: To what extent did Labor adopt the online practices of the Obama campaign, and in what sense was the online strategy adapted to fit existing campaign and organizational structures? Based on the...

Influential theories of the welfare state predict policy stability. However, scholars report that significant reforms have occurred in the last decade or so. Also, in spite of apparently stable public support, reforming governments are rarely punished at the polls. This paper aims to understand better how party politicians deal with the fundamental...

ET USEDVANLIG STERKT MEDIUM? EN EKSPERIMENTSTUDIE AV POLITISKE TV- OG RADIOREKLAMER Tidligere forskning har i liten grad funnet støtte for at TV er et usedvanlig sterkt medium. I litteraturen finner vi likevel et skille mellom dem som tillegger selve mediet stor betydning for hvordan et budskap mottas, og andre som hevder at budskapet er viktigst....

There is little empirical evidence for the claim that political advertising on television has a stronger effect than advertising through other media channels. In this article we study to what extent and in what sense political advertising on television has a stronger effect than political advertising on radio in an experimental study of 147 young v...

It is often argued that new technology will increase centralization of political parties but Internet-based technologies, especially the social media, provide individual candidates with opportunities to run campaigns more independently of the central party. This article argues that the effect of new technology depends on the contextual characterist...

This article addresses the fragmentation of political communication in the context of Norwegian election campaigns. The fragmentation thesis refers to two distinguishable, interrelated tendencies: New technology providing incentives to tailor campaign communication to specific voter categories, and the audience fragment due to increasing number of...

In the last decade or so the influence of the new information and communication technologies has received increasing attention in studies on election campaigning. However, little has been done to link the influence of ICTs on campaigning with the extensive literature on the impact of technology on society. My main concern in this paper is to relate...

This article addresses the Internet as a campaign communication channel, and the approach is to explore voters' use of the Internet for electoral information in the contemporary Norwegian campaign. Theoretically it is argued for a distinction between party-controlled and uncontrolled online communication channels, and this distinction proves import...

In the digital age it is claimed that political parties do not have the capacity to deliver the advanced technical services that modern campaigning demands, and that much of the campaign work is better handled by political consultants. Based on the 'hybridization' view of campaign change, the article explores to what extent ICTs increase the need f...

The article examines the role of ICTs in election campaigns, and approaches this topic through a study of party internet strategy in the 2005 Norwegian parliamentary campaign. Studies on web campaigning typically focus on websites. The approach in this article is to go behind the sites and explore how the parties utilize and assess the internet as...

Political communication is said to have entered a n ew stage or phase, characterized by the use of new information and communication technologies (ICTs). Internet and the new digital media offer the parties a direct channel to the electorate, and giv e incentives to tailor campaign communication to particular identities and voter groups. The paper...

The article argues that the theory of issue ownership must be reformulated for use on multiparty systems. The theory, as formulated by Petrocik (1996), claims that the parties' issue ownership is the critical constant between elections. The parties can achieve a strategic advantage by emphasizing owned issues during the campaign. The aim is to make...