Jacob Christensen

According to a poll, three in five Danes think they have too little sex while one in five Danes is decidedly unhappy about his or her sex-life.

This is all very well and perhaps not too surprising. The myth about the sex-mad Scandinavians is just that: A myth.

What I don’t understand is that the poll was commissioned by one of the private employment funds which administer the Danish unemployment benefit system.

On the other hand I will readily admit that there is nothing even remotely sexy about unemployment benefits.

Is it just me or has February seen an unprecedented surge in the quantities of spam – both as spam-mail and spam comments?

Hooray for Thunderbird and Aksimet.

Via Statistical Modelling: A resume of a paper by John Huber and Piero Stanig about income and right-wing vote. I’m stealing Andrew Gelman’s quote of the conclusion here:

The poor have a greater propensity to support right-wing parties in countries that are ethnically heterogeneous, rich, low in urbanization, low in party-system polarization, and that have no parties that are at once left wing on redistribution and right wing on issues related to individual liberty. . . . Income-based voting polarization increases when countries are ethnically homogenous and urbanized, when voters can choose to vote for a left-wing redistributive party that is conservative on individual liberty issues, and when there is no religious tax.

Sweden and Norway are included in the sample of data used for the analysis but unfortunately Denmark (where many blue-collar voters vote for the Liberals and the Danish People’s Party) isn’t. My immediate guess is that Denmark and Norway have a lower degree of party-system polarization than Sweden which could help explain the success of right-wing parties in attracting working-class voters. Go test.

Berlingske Tidende published a test including 20 out of the pool of 200 questions to be used in the new test for foreigners applying for Danish citizenship.

I hit 20 out of 20.

Earlier, I managed to be an 80% lagom Swede and I have as a matter of fact also passed a mock German citizenship test.

Should I apply for triple citizenship or just declare myself a cosmopolitan?

A regional government reform could be on its way in Sweden after the Committee on Public Sector Responsibilities delivered its final whitepaper today. According to the press release, the committee proposes the introduction of 6-9 regions which will replace the existing 21 county councils.

Unlike the recent reforms of Danish and Norwegian local governments which saw the effective abolition of the regional level of government (Denmark) and the transfer of responsibility for health care from the regional to the national level (Norway), the Committee wants to keep and possibly strenghten the role of the regional level by giving the new regional councils strong powers in industrial and infrastructure policy.

Just as interesting is the fact that the committee doesn’t propose a change in the structure of local councils.

The committee suggests that the proposed reform should be introduced in two steps to coincide with the 2010 and 2014 elections.

Reports in DN, SR (Swedish media are dominated by stories about a major traffic accident involving two buses near Uppsala)

Once upon a time you could always tell a Social Democrat apart because he or she would have a faultless grip on procedure. German and Scandinavian Social Democrats have always known how to run a meeting or conduct an internal election.

Things have changed.

Last year Franz Müntefering resigned as chairman of the SPD after a botched attempt to elect an official in the party’s central office. Yesterday the Hamburg branch of the SPD cancelled the election of a lead candidate for the next Bürgerschaft shortly after the deadline for delivery of votes. The reason according to the local chairman – who was also one of the candidates for the candidacy – was that a substantial number of votes had gone awol.

The election in itself is interesting. The Hamburg branch appears to be engaged in a bloody internal conflict between chairman Mattias Petersen, a maverick with populist leanings, and groups supporting Dorothee Stapelfeld, a more traditional Social Democrat who is not troubled by unnecessary charisma.

I wouldn’t be surprised if some in the Hamburg SPD dream of putting Helmut Schmidt in a time-machine in order to have a younger edition of the eloquent and agressive Schmidt face Ole von Beust of the CDU. Alternatively, the Germans could look to Denmark to see how an internal election can be carried out.

I’m not really an expert on labour market policy but the round of collective bagaining in the Danish industrial area which ended today includes some interesting results.

First, we can note that the negotiations ended in a deal and that a major industrial conflict seems to have been a highly theoretical option. The discussion about managers’ salaries and other incomes did not have the expected – or feared – effect.

Second, the agreement continues a line from the last round of negotiations in 2005 which saw the creation of a parental leave fund. The idea behind the fund was that the risk of hiring younger women should be distributed more equally between employers. This time the negotiated parental leave – which is a supplement to the parental leave regulated by the state – is expanded and parts of the negotiated leave will be reserved to the mother and father respectively.

Finally, the agreement also includes the establishing of a fund for education and training for workers and increased contributions to collective pension schemes.

The agreement, which will have to be accepted by employers and union members, only covers around 240.000 workers but agreements in the industrial area are generally considered as a guide for negotiations and agreements in other areas in the Danish labour market.

Sources: Dansk Industri, Dagbladet Børsen, Politiken.

I should note that last week brought two anniversaries in Danish politics:

Hit the road, Hans

Ten years ago the then leader of the Conservative Party, Hans Engell, decided to drive home after a dinner for the party’s parliamentary group. It was a very bad idea: Engell was drunk and hit a road block north of Lyngby. Blaming the contractors of the roadworks afterwards didn’t exactly help Engell’s public standing, and he was eventually forced to retire from his post as chairman of the Conservative Party.

Engell stayed on in politics for three more years where his main contribution was to undermine the two consecutive leaders with a disastrous result for the party at the 1998 elections as the most important outcome. In this way, Engell paved the road for Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s unchallenged rise to the position of, first, leader of the opposition and, second, Prime Minister.

In 2000, Engell made an unusual career move as he became editor of the tabloid Ekstra Bladet. Given that Ekstra Bladet was part of Politikens Hus which had traditional links to the Social-Liberal Party and – to some degree – the Social Democrats, hiring a very outspoken conservative politician was not exactly what you would have expected.

Engell’s presentation page at Ekstra Bladet has an edge to it, by the way: It shows a frontpage lambasting the present Conservative Justice Minister Lene Espersen in a case concerning an undercover police agent. Engell was Justice Minister between 1989 and 1993 and it has been claimed that he was involved in the case and as editor tried to block some reports about his role in the affair.

The Lady from the Social Office

Pia Kjærsgaard is 60? Just like Marianne Jelved, Kjærsgaard has a strange timeless appearance even though she has been a prominent politician almost since the day she entered parliament in 1984 as a substitute for Mogens Glistrup who was serving a jail term for tax fraud.

The Danish People’s Party is essentially a working class party and the party has made good use of the fact that Kjærsgaard worked as a home care assistant when she reentered the labour market in the late 1970s after a ten-year hiatus. The Danish People’s Party has made good use of that move in presenting Kjærsgaard as the home case assistant of all Danes.

More than anything Kjærsgaard is a child of the upheavals of the 1960s: She has a middle-class, not a working-class, background and was originally attracted to the Social-Liberal Party under Hilmar Baunsgaard’s catch-all leadership but it was Glistrup who made her go into politics as a member and later a candidate for the Progress Party.

In the mid-1980s Kjærsgaard quickly emerged as the Progress Party’s biggest political talent. She showed an unusual flair not only for electoral agitation but also for parliamentary negotiations. She didn’t have Glistrup’s extraordinary analytical intelligence but unlike Glistrup who basically lives in a parallel universe, she had a sense for people’s aspirations and for how to run an organisation.

She also possessed the brutality any successful politician needs: When Glistrup’s eccentricities threatened to sideline the Progress Party in the early 1990s, she had prepared her strategy along with a select few allies, left the PP and formed the Danish People’s Party, demolishing the Progress Party and leaving her old idol looking as a spent joke as part of the process. Since then, she has faced and defeated a number internal critics and she has survived being vilefied by political opponents.

At 60, Kjærsgaard is a success story. In an age where journalists tell us that personalities are everything and organisations nothing in politics, she chose not to rely on her immediate charisma and electoral appeal but instead built a tightly controlled party organisation that would guarantee the survival of populist politics in Denmark.

Even if – or rather: Especially when – you do not agree with her politics, Kjærsgaards political competences and strategies merit attention.

Jim Gibbon has organised what must surely be the first Academic Haiku Competition. The polls are open until Monday evening EST.

My favourites: Humanities #4, Physical sciences #10, Social sciences #24, Tech/Computers/Internet #7.

My general criterion has been the perceived poetic beauty of the poems. Feel free to disagree.

Hat tip to Crooked Timber.

Denmark doesn’t have an arctic climate but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t take Danish snow storms seriously. I know: I was in the middle of the one which hit Denmark and parts of Sweden on Wednesday. Fighting my way back from the bus-stop (no commuter trains) to my mother’s house through the snow drift was hard work.

The curious thing is that I was in Odense during the day and there was no sign of snow there. But if you know Denmark, it’s not altogether surprising.