Jacob Christensen

It used to be the matches of the season, but this year Br�ndby’s 0-1 defeat against FC Copenhagen is almost celebrated as a victory.

Unfortunately, I don’t have access to the more detailed numbers but Swedish media have reported a couple of interesting opinion poll results.

The strange result is from a poll about voters’ confidence in the government and the opposition. Now, as we all know then the Swedish government is in a lot of trouble when it comes to support from the electorate and thus it is not real surprise that confidence in the government has fallen over the summer and is now at 44 per cent.

But when it comes to the Social Democrats, a weird pattern emerges. On the one hand, poll after poll has shown strong support for the Social Democrats – but when asked about confidence in the party, only 34 per cent said that the Social Democrats would do a better job than the present government.

I know that we have to take voters who have changed parties and moved from the sofa to actively supporting a party into account, but this simply doesn’t make any sense to me at all: Why change your vote to a party that you have less confidence in than the party you leave?

Either the pollsters have gone mad or the Swedish electorate is out of its collective mind. Serious academic analysis seems to be in demand here.

The expected result, perversely, has drawn some media comments. A “secret” poll carried out by SKOP for a number of parties and organisations shows that the pattern established since last year’s election is still holding: All parties in the governing coalition are down, the Social Democrats and the Green Party are up. And so are the Sweden Democrats.

Again, the newspapers haven’t reported the numbers in detail but we are told that there is a relatively big gap between the number of men and the number of women supporting the party – 3,6 per cent say that they would vote for the SweDems but only 1,4 per cent of the women against 5,9 per cent of the men.

The short of the long is that the SweDems’ core electorate is the same as the German NPD’s (and all similar parties): Young men with no or short post-secondary education. This is in contrast with the Danish People’s Party which draws its main support from older men with no or short post-sencondary education. The SweDems’ election strategy is also more reminiscent of the NPD and similar German parties’ – build support at the secondary elections (in this case local councils) – than of the DPP’s – build support at national elections.

In any event, the next three years in Swedish politics could be very interesting.

• Dani Rodrik’s weblog: Deconstructing economists’ take on free trade
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• Konsensus kv�ler universitet – Debat
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