Norwegian voters have moved to the right ideologically over the past four years, according to a new in-depth study of the 2025 parliamentary election. The finding is not about which party won. It is about what voters told researchers they want — and on tax, immigration and climate policy, the answers have shifted.

What the study found

The research comes from the Institute for Social Research (Institutt for samfunnsforskning, ISF), which runs Norway’s national election survey. The survey has been carried out since 1957, and its value lies less in any single year than in the long series: because the same kinds of questions are asked election after election, researchers can compare positions over decades rather than describe a mood.

Comparing 2021 with 2025, the researchers report that voters as a whole want lower taxes, a stricter immigration policy, and climate measures that intrude less on daily life than they previously accepted. The study also examined views on how the state is run and on regional policy — the long-running Norwegian argument about what should be decided in Oslo and what should be decided closer to home.

Election researcher Johannes Bergh, speaking to public broadcaster NRK, drew a distinction that carries most of the weight of the finding. Voters often move between parties for reasons that signal very little. What the ISF data indicates, in his account, is something different: a shift in the underlying positions themselves, not just a reshuffling of party loyalties.

Why the result looked different

Here is the part that confuses people, and it is worth stating plainly. The September 2025 election returned Labour as the largest party in the Storting, with Jonas Gahr Støre continuing as prime minister. Turnout was high, at just over 80 per cent. If the electorate drifted right, why did the left bloc hold?

Several mechanisms can produce that combination, and political scientists generally point to more than one at a time.

• Ideology is not the only thing on the ballot. Voters weigh competence, leadership, and which party they trust to handle a specific crisis, and those judgements can cut against their policy preferences.
• Blocs, not parties, decide Norwegian governments. A shift towards one party inside a bloc can leave the balance between blocs almost untouched.
• Parties move too. If a centre-left party adopts a tighter line on immigration, a voter with tighter views does not have to change party to be represented.
• Seats are not votes. Norway’s system, with district seats and levelling seats, does not convert a modest national swing into a proportional change in the chamber.

The wider pattern researchers are testing

The ISF project has also been examining a question that reaches beyond Norway: whether voters with immigrant backgrounds are still reliably attached to centre-left parties. That attachment has been strong enough across Western Europe for long enough that researchers have half-jokingly called it an iron rule. Recent elections have produced evidence that it may be loosening.

Where the ISF work is interesting is in what it says the driver is. Analysis using Norwegian panel data suggests the shift is not mainly explained by social conservatism among religiously observant voters — the explanation most often reached for. The stronger association is with everyday economic questions, taxes among them. The researchers present this as a finding to be tested further, not a settled account, and the samples and elections involved are specific to Norway.

How much weight this can carry

An election survey is a powerful instrument and a limited one. It asks people to place themselves on policy questions after the fact, and self-reported positions are shaped by how questions are worded and by what has been in the news. A movement of a few points on a scale is not the same as a change of political identity, and the comparison here is between two elections, not a trend line across ten.

It also does not tell you why. Whether the shift on tax reflects several years of high living costs, whether the shift on climate measures is about the goal or about the instruments — road pricing, fuel duty, building rules — is not answered by measuring the shift. Those are the arguments that will be had, and the survey is the starting point for them rather than the conclusion.

What the study does establish, on its own terms, is that the ground moved between 2021 and 2025, and that it moved in the same direction across several distinct policy areas at once. For parties in both blocs planning for the next Storting election, that is the number worth arguing about.

Sources

• The Local Norway — report on the ISF findings and Johannes Bergh’s comments to NRK
• Institute for Social Research — the Norwegian National Election Study 2025 and 2029