School Election 1997, National Study

Since 1989, school elections have been conducted in upper secondary schools in relation to parliamentary and municipal elections. The present data file is from the survey conducted during the school election in 1997. Students attending participating schools were first asked to vote in the school election, then they were invited to participate in the survey.

In addition to the information concerning voter turnout and centile support for various parties, variables describing the municipality the school is placed in were added. In practice, this entailed adding variables concerning the environment of the school, specifically, information concerning the municipality, such as population density and share of the population that has emigrated from countries outside the Nordic region. The purpose was to facilitate inquiries of the impact of environmental factors in determining the political preferences of the students.

The school election surveys started as a loosely formulated idea during the parliamentary election of 1989. IBM expressed the desire to build a framework around the school elections, equivalent to that which they had already developed around parliamentary and municipal elections. NSD - Norwegian Centre for Research Data wanted to use the schools' ebd-equipment and the statistics program NSDstat to conduct a national election survey of students of upper secondary schools. The two ideas were commonly organized and the project was promised substantial media coverage through NRK's election coverage and text-TV. The project "School Election '89" was a success, and was followed by equivalent projects for subsequent elections. The mock election of 1997 was to all intents and purposes conducted in the same manner as its predecessors. NSD - Norwegian Centre for Research Data and IBM have been the organizers of the school election and the national survey. The project has received valuable support from the Ministry of Church Affairs, Education and Research (KUF)

For access to the dataset, see: http://www.samfunnsveven.no/data/skolevalg/