The Political Parties and The Municipal and Regional Reform, 2014-2019

The project was part of a larger project, where the purpose was to analyze the municipal and regional reforms from the initiative in 2014-15 until the mergers were implemented by new year 2020. The purpose of this subproject was to map the parties' role in this reform. In this connection, interviews were conducted in the party organizations at central level and county level. The main question is to what extent the party organizations functioned as a link between the local and central level in the parties, when it comes to municipal reform. This applies to both participation and influence from the bottom up, and coordination from the top down. The data consists of transcripts of 15 qualitative interviews with employees in five political parties.