Jacob Christensen

“Elvis has left the building” was my first association when I stumbled on this page.

• SOM-institutets bocker – Det nya Sverige

  Nu g�ller det ekonomisk tillv�xt, social v�lf�rd och m�nskligt v�lbefinnande. De flesta kurvor pekar upp�t och optimismen inf�r framtiden �r stor.

  (tags: sweden sociology politicalscience research)

• DN “Tre av fyra h�gskolor fr�ntas sin examensr�tt”

  17 av de 23 h�gskolor som ans�kte om examensr�tt uppfyllde inte de sakkunnigas minimikrav. Det �r en tydlig signal att det finns betydande kvalitetsproblem i ekonomiutbildningen.

  (tags: erik�sbrink sweden academic education university UmU economics)

• HSV – H�rda krav p� h�gskolor som vill ge civilekonomexamen och masterexamen

  (tags: sweden education economics university UmU)

• BildMuseet – pressinfo I Can See the World from Here

  Fotografen Jens Assur har n�gra veckor under det senaste �ret bott i studentkorridor i Ume�, levt studentliv och tagit del av undervisning, fest och vardag.

  (tags: UmU ume� photography exhibition art)

Given that Swedish media has been full of praise for the electoral strategy of the Alliance under Fredrik Reinfeldt, it may seem provocative to argue that the change in government was caused as much by the Social Democrats’ failure to win the election as by the political innovations of the four centre-right parties.

What we should remember is, that the centre-right’s win was a narrow one – if only a few tens of thousands of votes extra had gone to the Social Democrats, the Left Party and the Green Party, the Social Democrats could have stayed in power.

Gudrun Schyman’s Feminist Initiative and the anti-immigration populist Sweden Democrats didn’t make it into the Riksdag but it is a fair guess that they pulled most of their voters from the left – FI from radical women, SWD from working-class men fearing social changes.

FI has pulled out of the electoral arena, but SWD are still around and could make life difficult for the Social Democrats in the 2010 electoral campaign. On the other hand, the fact that the Social Democrats have gained in popularity in opinion polls since the September election while SWD have stayed on 2,5-3 % support should be a relief for Social Democratic strategists.

The Pers(s)on Effect

Among journalists, political scientists and ordinary Swedes alike it has long been a received wisdom that G�ran Persson was a liability to the Social Democrats.

True, Persson never managed to come across as a likeable figure to the public – he was more like that arrogant teacher who always made fun of you in front of your classmates in school (*) – but we should remember a couple of things before condemning Persson as the root of all evil hitting the Social Democrats.

First, Persson took over as finance minister in 1994 and prime minister in 1996 in the middle of the worst economic crisis to hit Sweden in, well, time immemorial. Voters who had hoped that the return to office of the Social Democrats in 1994 would also mean the return of the cosy welfare state of the 1970s and 1980s quickly saw their hopes dashed and Persson was the evil evangelist of the austerity policies and de-regulations.

The Persson of the mid-1990s is a familiar figure in private enterprise: He is the leader who is brought in in order to save a crisis-stricken business by rationalising processes, cutting slack and selling off or closing unprofitable branches.

Depending on your point of view, he is a saviour, a rationalisation expert or a butcher. And he has a problem when the tide turns: He is either the safe pair of hands with economic expertise but without strategic visions for developing new enterprises or he has to handle a severe case of bad karma among the staff. I would argue that even if Persson at heart should have been a reformer of the classic Swedish Social Democratic stock, his time in office was overshadowed by memories of Persson the crisis manager.

Second, by mid-2004 it was obvious that Persson was a spent force politically. He had almost dropped out of the EMU referendum campaign in 2003 and it is a likely guess that he would have left office in time before the 2006 campaign if Anna Lindh hadn’t been assassinated in September 2003.

Persson’s true passion at this time was the farm he had bought with his new wife Anitra Steen, the CEO of state-owned Systembolaget – a farm which was often presented as a manor house in media, fuelling suspicions of bourgeois aspirations on Persson’s behalf and making him the object of petty envy in a conformist society.

Finally, our friends in Gothenburg have pointed out that Persson wasn’t unique in being less popular than his party. According to the 2006 SOM report, only Fredrik Reinfeldt of the Conservative Party managed to be more popular than his party among voters. But as prime minister and leader of the largest party, Persson was of cause the most profiled politician in Sweden in the 2006 campaign.

The Position Effect

Journalists like to tell us that politics these days is all about personalities and spin because the differences in political ideologies and the strategic positions of political parties have practically disappeared.

Well, maybe not. My colleagues Torbj�rn Bergman and Camilla Sandstr�m have analysed the election platforms of the Swedish parties as part of the Party Manifesto Research Programme and they found that not only was the 2006 election characterised by an unusually (in a Swedish context) high degree of polarisation, the Social Democrats also performed a sharp left turn between 2002 and 2006 in an attempt to re-create its image as a radical reform party

In my opinion the change in position was an electoral liability for two reasons: First, the Social Democrats chose to address the party faithful rather than the marginal voters at the centre of the electoral spectrum. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that centrist voters under such circumstances would be more likely to contemplate the centre-right alternative.

Second, making sudden and drastic changes in a party’s positions raises the question of credibility. The change might have worked under a new party leader, but G�ran Persson cast a long shadow (see above).

On the other hand, we should remember that the Social Democrats had lost votes to the Left Party in earlier elections and were anxious to win the women employed in the public sector (and privatised parts of the health care and social welfare sectors) back. Even if support for Feminist Initiative collapsed as the election drew closer, loosing the feminist vote was still a concern for the party strategists – and rightly so, in my opinion.

The Policy Effect

Finally, the Social Democrats made one big mistake when the party leadership decided on the themes to emphasise in the election campaign. The party assumed that voters wanted improved health care and social services to make up for the cuts from the mid-1990s and a stronger focus on the heavily criticised education system while unemployment was no longer a major issue after several years of solid economic growth.

The decision to emphasise health care and education wasn’t all wrong: Exit-polls showed that the voters who eventually supported the Social Democrats had health care and education as their first priorities. But voters who supported the Conservatives and the Centre Party mentioned employment at the most important issue guiding their choice of party.

For some reason, the Social Democrats had managed to miss the unease about unemployment and the labour market in general and the centre-right suddenly “owned” an issue that had always been controlled by the Social Democrats.

The Tsunami Effect

The 2004 tsunami was a freak event in a faraway country but it did hurt the Social Democrats’ image as competent administrators severely.

Political and administrative response to the disaster which killed almost 550 Swedes (that would equal 18.000 U.S. or 3.700 U.K. casualties, just to give you an impression of the magnitude of the disaster) was fumbling if not incompetent and the exact whereabouts of Lars Danielsson, Prime Minister Persson’s right hand in foreign policy, remains a mystery to this day. (It seems that he spent some of the time surfing the internet looking for a hotel for a holiday in Malaysia).

Foreign Minister Laila Freivalds was eventually forced to resign in early 2006 while Danielsson finally threw in the towel shortly before the election. In both cases it was far too late to wipe out the impression of an indifferent, even arrogant political leadership and support for the Social Democrats reached an absolute low-point during 2005.

And the sum of all of this is: In the 2006 election campaign, the Social Democrats were handicapped because of a discredited leadership, a wrong choice of policy positions and a wrong set of issue priorities.

(*) For the record: I can’t recall any of my teachers at Buddinge Skole or Gladsaxe Gymnasium behaving like that. But I wouldn’t be surprised if some of you have met such a creature.