All ministers, representatives, permanent deputy representatives and deputy representatives with more than 100 days' seniority within one term are biographed. As far as it has been possible, all relevant biographical information has been collected for the period before and after parliamentary and/or government activity. The biographies mainly contain information about the representatives' background, political activity and membership/position in public and private bodies.
The archive is built with a table for each biography subject. The most central table is Background information. In this table, a record has been arranged with information for each representative: Name, year of birth, place of birth, etc. For the remaining tables, there are varying numbers of records for each person; for example, a person who holds ten public offices will have ten entries in the public offices table. The biographies contain the following topics:
Sikt's Archive of Politicians is a combination of the three time-limited politician archives that were developed at NSD: 1814-1905, 1905-1940 (with data up to 1989) and 1945-present. Below is the background of each of the three archives.
Within the framework of the Norwegian election research programme, measures were taken in 1965 to build up an archive of biographical information about parliamentarians and ministers. The initial work was done at Chr. Michelsen's Institute. The archive was later moved to the Department of Sociology at the University of Bergen, and significantly expanded. In 1968/69, an archive of state secretaries from the same region was also built up. NSD undertook in its work program for 1974-1977 to ensure the safe storage and updating of this material.
Work on the Archive of Politicians 1905–1940 began in the autumn of 1998 in connection with the improvement and updating of the Archive of Politicians1945-present. The main aim of this archive was to supplement the post-war archive so that in 2005 one would have two databases that biograph all representatives of the Storting in the first 100 years after the dissolution of the union.
The material is taken from the biographical works of Haffner (1915-1945) and Lindstøl (1814-1914). An important supplement has been the publications published by Statistics Norway after the parliamentary elections. The biographical works of Haffner and Lindstøl have been scanned by the Storting at the Storting archive. The arrangement is then carried out by NSD. The prose text from the biographies has been made machine-readable using OCR software. Furthermore, the text is divided by topic and transferred to data fields. The work took place after the breaking down of the material for the period after 1945, and based on the experience we had with the post-war period, we have tried to the greatest extent possible to set up the same subject and field division for both periods.
In 1985, the Storting in collaboration with Kunnskapsforlaget published the biographical work "Storting og Regjering 1945-1985". The editor of the work and administrative manager of the data collection project was dr.philos. Trond Nordby. In the autumn of 1997, Nordby approached the Storting with a proposal that preparations should be made for the publication of a sequel to this two-volume work. Nordby believed that one should aim to have a new biography published for the 100-year anniversary of the dissolution of the union, in 2005.
Nordby's initiative was investigated by a working group consisting of Marianne Fosland, Wenche Feedt Hagerup and Bjørn Rønning from the Storting, John-Erik Ågotnes and Atle Alvheim from NSD and Trond Nordby himself. The working group agreed that a project should be carried out, the aim of which was to coordinate and update the Storting's and NSD's data collections in order to obtain a better basis for the Storting's secretariat's work, for research and teaching and as a basis for publishing biographical overviews. The working group's project proposal was approved by the Storting's administration in June 1998.
NSD's Archive of Politicians for the period after 1945 was also inadequately updated. NSD's database was developed with statistical analyzes in mind, and was therefore poorly suited to extract information about individual representatives. Cand. polit. Sølvi Engebretsen became engaged in the position of project employee from February 1999. In collaboration with NSD, the old material was systematised, standardized and quality checked. A questionnaire was developed, both to gather information for representatives who had ended their parliamentary careers and to gather information about new Storting representatives.
The work of Sølvi Engebretsen is the basis for the new archive of biographies of Storting representatives after 1945, which at the same time replaced the old archive at NSD (Stortingsbiografidatabasen). The archive is updated at each election and representatives who have left the Storting are updated every two years. The Storting has published the biographies from this archive on its internet pages.
In 2001, biographical information was collected using a questionnaire. The previous major collection of biographical information took place in 1985. The 2001 form was sent to everyone who had been in the Storting or government after 1985 and to representatives who had been in the Storting or in government before 1985 and who were alive in 1985.
In the survey, which ended in May 2001, 852 responses were received, which amounts to 88%. The forms were generally well answered, with accurate and detailed information. The worst answered were the questions with tick boxes about position before and after parliamentary and government activity, and the question about highest completed education. The answers from survivors contained far less information than the answers from living, former representatives.
A detailed description of the 1814-1905 database's analysis and linking possibilities can be found in a note by Marianne Egernæs: "Stortingsmannsarkivet og Stortingsbiografiene" (from the series Internal Notes at NSD).
The politicians archive 1945-present contained far more information than the two older politician archives, which opens the door for far more comprehensive and detailed analyzes of recruitment to the Storting and Government in the post-war period. This particularly applies to analyzes of the representatives' political activity outside the Storting and Government (membership/office in public and private bodies). It is possible to carry out analyzes both at individual level and for various groups of representatives and ministers such as e.g. by party, region, gender, age etc. Analyzes can also be carried out for the entire period as a whole or for the individual parliamentary periods or governments separately. Another possibility is to study changes over time in recruitment and activity patterns.
At an individual level, it is also possible to map the representatives' and ministers' careers before and after they have been members of the Storting and government. The extensive information on political background from parties at local and national level and from interest organizations and public boards, councils and committees also enables, to a far greater extent than previously, analyzes of the total career pattern for the representatives, where one looks at the relative importance of e.g. profession, education, political activity and experience etc. for recruitment to the Storting or over time.
The composition and recruitment of the political elite has been seen as interesting to study for several reasons. Part of the motivation is based on the perception that the political elite should reflect the population's demographic, social and geographical composition, because such factors are expected to influence the policy that is pursued (background as an independent variable). Conversely, changes in the composition of the political elite have been interpreted as the result of which groups participate in the political decisions through elections, membership and activity in the political mass organizations (background as dependent variable). The latter is also an example of the usefulness of being able to study variation over time. As an alternative to studying the recruitment to the Storting, government and the office of state secretary together, one can of course also study variation in the recruitment to smaller institutional units, such as party groups, committees etc.
The material has provided the basis for a number of studies of careers, both internally through various political elite roles, and partly externally between the elite and society at large. Much of the debate in connection with such studies has revolved around the relevance of the politicians' background vs. political seniority to predict career opportunities. Questions such as: what significance does seniority have for the MPs' internal career? What is the significance of the Storting representatives' possible participation in the other elite arenas for achieving top positions in the Storting? Conversely: Does experience and seniority from the Storting and State Secretary offices matter for the filling of ministerial posts?
If we want to study in more detail changes that have taken place in the recruitment pattern over time, we can take an example from the debate about the tendency towards professionalisation of the role of politicians. The professionalization has been claimed to be the result of two parallel processes: a political professionalization process (the politician no longer lives only for politics, but also from politics), and an intellectual professionalization process (increased need for people with the greatest possible degree of knowledge background). Such tendencies are interesting both along a historical dimension, and along a traditional right-left dimension (bourgeois vs. socialist). Questions asked: What are the connections between the recruitment of people with a specific political experience background and the recruitment of people with a specific educational background? How does this vary between political institutions (between ministries, between governments, and between government and Storting), between parties, and over time?
We have only given examples of a few general analysis possibilities here. A more detailed description of various analysis possibilities can be found in NSD's learning package on 'Analyses of political elites' (Eliassen and Ryssevik, 1986) and in the chapter on recruitment in volume II of Storting og Regjering 1945 - 1985 (Eliassen, 1985).
The first major collection of this archive was undertaken by Professor Trond Nordby in 1985 and resulted in a biographical work the same year at Kunnskapsforlaget. The biography work formed the basis for the old NSD biographical archive for the period after 1945. As Nordby was to cover 40 years, previously written biographies were used for the collection in 1985, primarily Olaf Chr. Torp's permanent overviews of the newly elected Storting.
In 2001, the archive was primarily updated using questionnaires, but i.a. membership in committee boards and councils was taken from NSD's Committee Archive. All registration of information about the representative from external sources was carried out before sending out the questionnaire so that the representatives had the opportunity to check whether the information was correct.