Value Polarisation in a Norwegian Context: The Elite Versus the People in Attitudes to Gender Equality and Immigration

There are two main issues that the analysis in this paper seeks to answer. Firstly, we are interested in distance and proximity between groups in the wider population and the elite in the support for diversity and equality respectively. Is the elite generally more liberal than the wider population? For which groups in the elite and the population is the distance the largest and for which groups is the distance the smallest? Secondly, we investigate similarities and differences in attitudes to diversity and equality among the elite and the population. Are the differences in distance and proximity between the elite and the population the same regardless of whether the question is about immigration or gender equality? The analysis in this chapter lets us come some steps closer to understanding whether liberal value questions contribute to driving a wedge between the elites and the wider population, like both the public debate and the populism literature suggests. We build upon data from the Leadership Survey 2015, which repeats and develops the Power and Democracy Project’s Leadership Survey 2000. The foundation for the analysis in this chapter is answers to questions about the attitudes to immigration and gender equality among individuals in top positions within key sectors of society like politics, media, culture, academia, business and the state administration. The elites’ attitudes are subsequently compared with the wider population’s attitudes to the same questions, as they are expressed in the last Norwegian Election Survey – a representative survey of the Norwegian population conducted after the 2013 parliamentary election. These surveys are in other words executed at approximately the same period of time, the Election Survey in the autumn of 2013 and the Leadership Survey in 2015.