Politics and Bureaucracy in the Norwegian Welfare State: An Anthropological Approach

The book aims to explain the emergence of the Norwegian—and to some extent, the Scandinavian—welfare state in historical and anthropological terms. Halvard Vike argues that particular forms of political grassroots mobilization contributed heavily to what he calls “a low level of gravity state”—a political order in which decentralized institutions make it possible to curtail centralizing forces. While there is a large international literature on the Nordic welfare states, there is limited kn...