Jacob Christensen

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

• SOM-institutets bocker – Det nya Sverige

  Nu gäller det ekonomisk tillväxt, social välfärd och mänskligt välbefinnande. De flesta kurvor pekar uppåt och optimismen inför framtiden är stor.

  (tags: sweden sociology politicalscience research)

• DN “Tre av fyra högskolor fråntas sin examensrätt”

  17 av de 23 högskolor som ansökte om examensrätt uppfyllde inte de sakkunnigas minimikrav. Det är en tydlig signal att det finns betydande kvalitetsproblem i ekonomiutbildningen.

  (tags: erikåsbrink sweden academic education university UmU economics)

• HSV – Hårda krav på högskolor 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 några veckor under det senaste året bott i studentkorridor i Umeå, levt studentliv och tagit del av undervisning, fest och vardag.

  (tags: UmU umeå 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 Göran 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 Torbjörn Bergman and Camilla Sandström 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 Göran 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.

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.

Last.fm Mainstream-O-Meter, originally uploaded by jacobchristensen.

I’m 30,5 % mainstream. Whatever that means.

Mainstream-O-Meter (for last.fm-users)