Jacob Christensen

I’ve created a page listing the review series, I have posted at irregular intervals since this blog started in October 2005. It should make it a bit easier to go back and read the posts.

The page is here (or use the tab in the header to navigate)

I’ve allowed myself to “steal” a review by my colleague Nick Aylott about the 2006 campaign in Sweden – but given proper author credits, I’m sure Nick doesn’t mind too much

…and what a match, indeed what a tournament that was. Denmark gate-crashed the European Football Championships after Yugoslavia had been excluded at the next-to-last moment.

Everybody – and I mean: everybody – expected the national team to disappear without trace after the opening round. Or to quote striker Flemming Poulsen (from memory):

Are we fit for 90 minutes? Sure: 30 minutes in the first match, 30 in the second and 30 in the third one. 90 minutes, no problems.

It has to be said that England and France were huge disappointments, the win over the Netherlands in the semi-final was a little lucky, and that the German side played with their heads under their arms in the final.

The Germans were rattled by John Jensen’s early goal and forced their attacks for the rest of the match.

I happened to be on Rådhuspladsen the day after the final. It was hot (30 degrees or something), it was humid (105% at the very least) and the place was completely and utterly packed.

But which tournament really stand out as Denmark’s best: The 1984 European Championships, the 1986 World Championships, the 1992 European Championships or the 1998 World Championships?

At the risk of being branded a heretic, I would suggest that 1998 is a strong contender with the Laudrup Brothers at their peak. The initial round was less than promising, but Denmark vs. Brazil…

• Key Blair legacy: better state schools | csmonitor.com

  Britain’s departing prime minister gets generally high marks for reforms and better testing results.

  (tags: education uk policy)

• Shankar Garnesh – Blogging: 11 things to do before you hit the Publish button

  Sometimes, you forget the most important – and then go back and edit. So, here’s a checklist to help you out:

  (tags: blogging web2.0 blog blogpost)

• Weblog Tools Collection: 11 Things Before You Publish

  Shankar Ganesh lists 11 things that you should do as a blogger before you hit the publish button. I have a few more that I would like to add.

  (tags: blog blogging blogpost web2.0)

I just noted that the Swedish Board of Higher Education has published a report about “Diploma Mills and Faked Exams” (pdf-format, Swedish).

Given that Labour Market Minister Sven Otto Littorin’s somewhat questionable MBA from “Fairfax University” was the talk of the political town last week and Littorin was evetually forced to remove the reference to the exam on his official website, that could be mandatory reading for aspiring politicians.

One question, though: Why did it take the blogosphere nearly a year to figure that out?

PS: Littorin isn’t the only politician who have presented problematic academic merits. Some years ago it was discovered that a Danish government minister never had finished the MA on her resume. Oops…

Henry Farrell has made the same observation as I have: There are lots of good academic economists in the blogosphere (or is that term too 2006?) – see my Google Reader feed for proof – but political scientists are few and far between, both in Scandinavia and the U.S.

Daniel Drezner’s blog is the only one which springs to mind while Andrew Gelman and co’s Statistical Modelling at least in theory is more oriented toward social science statistics but still occationally relevant for political scientists – even for someone who like me generally has worked with qualitative analyses.

My unofficial and incomplete list of Swedish and Danish academics includes Ulf Bjereld (a card-carrying christian social democrat as well as a political scientist) and Punditokraterne (a group (!) of libertarians and again more economics and law than political science).

Oh, and one of my former students blog about Austrian politics even if his perspective is more that of an active politician than of a detached analyst.

Anyway, Farrell has presented an ambitious plan:

I’ve set up a blog to link to new political science papers that are likely to be of interest to a general audience (where ‘general audience’ denotes the kinds of people who read Ezra, CT, Dan Drezner’s blog etc). At the moment, it consists of nothing more than abstracts of interesting papers and links to them. I hope over time to do a bit more than that (but not for a couple of months; I also have a book to finish over the summer).

The blog is here – Political Science Papers blog. We shall see if and how this works out.

By the way: There is a site called politicalsciencepapers.com – and to me that looks very much like an essay mill.

Something strange is going on in Swedish politics. It used to be so that the Social Democrats were in power and the voters were satisfied. Actually, Swedish governments were among the most stable in (Western) Europe and research showed that the level of public trust in politicians was among the, if not the, highest in Europe.

Not anymore: Since 1991, Swedish voters have regularly elected a new government, only to turn their back on it at the next election. It happened in 1991, when the centre-right took over the mess the Social Democrats left behind after nine years of “third way”-policies. The governing coalition got whacked by, first, international economic forces and then in 1994 by a disgruntled Swedish electorate hoping for the resurrection of the good old welfare state.

The Social Democrats soon discovered that the economic upheavals of the mid-1990s left no room for 1970s-style welfare policies and were forced to implement even sterner austerity policies than those presented by the centre-right.

The result was a hemorrage at the 1998 elections both in terms of support for the Social Democrats and general public trust in politicians, but fortunately for the Social Democrats the angry women of the public sector left for the Left Party, thus blocking the centre-right’s chances for returning to government.

The 2002 elections now stand out as something of an exception: Support for the Conservative Party collapsed – again helping the Social Democrats and a Liberal Party which for some years had looked more like an political zombie than a vibrant party – but the slide in turn-out and public trust had almost been halted.

However, the familiar collapse in support for the government set in again during 2003 and reached impressive dimensions following the bungled handling of the tsunami disaster on Boxing Day 2004.

During 2005 and 2006, the government looked more like a tragic clown show than a professional political executive while the opposition gained new confidence and support. A change of government looked like an open-and-shut deal and, indeed, in September 2006, Sweden had a new centre-right government led by the young Fredrik Reinfeldt.

From then on, everything went wrong. Two ministers had to leave office almost as soon as the government had been installed and the electorate suddenly found a new love for the Social Democrats so that the left wing would lead the governing alliance with 10 to 15 percentage points in opinion polls.

What is going on here? Why is the Swedish electorate behaving in a way, you would expect to see in Poland, Hungary or Slovakia (my apologies to individual Poles, Hungarians and Slovaks), but not in a consolidated democratic welfare state?

To review the developments of the last year, I will consider three hypotheses in a series of posts during the coming days.

The hypotheses are:

1. The centre-right parties didn’t win the election in 2006: The Social Democrats lost.

2. The centre-right parties did win the election in their own right, but they did so on false promises.

3. The centre-right parties did win the election in their own right, they have honoured their electoral promises but they have failed in communication and delivery.

PS: I haven’t forgotten about the upheavals of the Danish political scene. A review of those will follow in later installments.