Integration of the military elite in the national elite structure of Norway

Integration of the military elite in the national elite structure of Norway While the political, economic and cultural elites have received extensive attention within elite research, fewer elite scholars have taken an interest in the military elite – the top officers in the military defense. An exception is of course C. Wright Mills’ analysis of the military elite as one of the three dominant elite groups in USA after World War 2. Within the research field termed ‘military sociology’, however, a large number of scholars have devoted much energy to study the attitudes and actions of higher military officers. Following in the wake of the pioneers Samuel Huntington and Morris Janowitz many scholars have for instance studied empirically the relationship between the military, its culture, and civil society in USA and Europe. The studies in USA have for instance documented that officers vote disproportionally Republican, are more often recruited from rural areas, and many of them are critical towards what they see as a moral dissolution in civil society. In this paper I will focus upon the relationship between the military elite and other significant elite groups in the Norwegian society. In earlier research, many of the scholars have started from a cultural sociological perspective. In this paper, I will anchor the analyses in an elite theoretical perspective. I will discuss to what extent members of the Norwegian military elite are integrated in the national elite structure. Theoretically elite integration is about the extent of which different elite groups or segments within a specific elite group are united, divided and opposed or fragmented and not related to each other. For analytic purposes it is necessary to distinguish between manifestations of elite integration and structural circumstances fostering integration. In the paper, I will discuss both manifestations of and structural conditions for elite integration. I will on the one hand examine manifestations of elite integration through charting the attitudes of the Norwegian military elite to various central issues in the political debate in Norway compared to other elite groups. I will include their views upon (i) the private-state issue, (ii) their opinions about immigration, (iii) their positions on the collaborative industrial relations in Norway, (iv) the officers’ party-political preferences, and (v) trust in the political institutions. On the other hand, in order to examine structural conditions for integration, I will compare the class background of the military elite with that of other elites. In addition, I will investigate the extent of which they are in contact with other significant elite groups. I will discuss the elite integration of the military elite in a contextual perspective. During the latest decades, substantial changes have taken place in defense policy in Norway. I expect that these changes have affected the political attitudes of the military elite and their relations to other elite groups. I will follow up this expectation using data from two national elite surveys in Norway, conducted in 2000 and 2015 respectively.