Jacob Christensen

Blogging may be a young phenomenon but politics-related blogs come in many shapes.

Some are almost academic (you did hear me slapping my own back here, didn’t you? ), some are oriented towards news and current affairs commentry, some – a lot, I suppose – are basically rants made by the kind of people who used to write endless streams of letters to the editor – any editor – and some try to take a slightly satirical view of politics.

The point of all this is to say that one of my colleagues along with a bunch of his colleagues has kept the blog “Punditokraterne” afloat for a year.

Just one thought for the day: Isn’t it funny that a bunch of individualist libertarians should keep a collective blog?

Just for the fun of it I tried to import the data on TEMO’s opinion poll barometer into a spreadsheet and see if it was possible to get any trends out of them.

You can see my attempt on this diagramme (Opens in a new window).

What I did was to 1) calculate the sum of the poll results for the three parties on the left (Social Democrats, Socialists and Greens) and the four parties (Conservatives, Christian Democrats, Liberals and Centre) and 2) make a sliding avarage of 5 polls.

What I haven’t done was to make some kind of control for missing answers, different research techniques and important stuff like that so my graph does not quite live up to the standards set by S�ren Risbjerg Thomsen in his critical analyses of Danish polls.

You should also note that 1) respondents answering “don’t know” to the question about their favorite party have been excluded from the table I used, 2) I haven’t entered “other parties” as a separate category and 3) I haven’t controlled for the situations where one or more of the present parliamentary parties have fallen below the 4%-threshold.

With those reservations in place, the diagramme still paints an interesting picture: The governing de facto-coalition of Social Democrats, Socialists and Greens commanded a safe majority until the autumn of 2004 when the lead narrowed.

From February-March 2005 up untill now, the centre-right has commanded a relative majority although the gab has diminished from September 2005.

All is not lost for the left: Traditionally the Social Democrats have been able to strike back during election campaigns. My guess is that the biggest problem will be the sorry state of the Green and – especially – Left parties.