Archive for October 14th, 2007
Asmaa Redux
Following an extra meeting of its executive committee, the Danish Unity List today announced that the party will hold an extra party convention on 17 November 2007 following a new membership vote over the ranking of the party’s candidates for a coming general election.
The vote and the extra conference was triggered by internal and external criticism of the party’s decision to place Asmaa Abdol-Hamid as #6 on the party’s internal candidate list and #2 on its list in the Copenhagen constituency.
Just in case anybody outside of Denmark wonders: The Danish electoral system is based on a number of multi-member constituencies so there are no national party lists but based on experience from former elections parties can rank probabilities for candidates getting elected in different constituencies. In a Danish context, the Unity List is unique in holding a national membership vote and assigning candidates nationally based on the results of the vote. Usually, constituency branches (formally) decide on which candidates to field.
Swedish Opinion Polls
Temo has made my life a little easier by calculating and publishing trends in the deluge of Swedish opinion polls – the summary for September 2007 is here (pdf-file), scroll down to see the graphs if you don’t read Scandinavian. The latest poll was published by Sifo in today’s Svenska Dagbladet.
Not that there is anything new: The governing alliance still gets hammered by the voters and the Social Democrats still enjoy a comfortable lead. If we look back, then things started to go horribly wrong for Fredrik Reinfeldt as early as October 2007 – that is almost as soon as the new government had entered office, presented its programme and lost its first ministers – and haven’t improved since.
The share of insecure voters hover around 15%.
Maple Leaf Blog
Just to follow-up on the election post: If you’re curious about Canadian politics (which seems not to be about Quebec for a change) I’ve found two blogs that may be of interest:
First, Greg Morrow who is a graduate student in Urban Studies at UCLA tracks developments with a focus on electoral trends and electoral systems at DemocraticSPACE. With the prospect of a Canadian general election in November, Morrow promises a dedicated site about this.
Second, Matthew Shugart who is a professor of Political Science at the UCSD writes about electoral systems, horticulture and baseball at Fruits and Votes. Shugart’s Canada posts are here – he basically covers all of the world’s electoral systems.
Finally, an op-ed piece by my colleague Henry Milner about the failed attempt to introduce MMP in Ontario.
links for 2007-10-14
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ecent research suggests that improvements in information and communication technology are affecting the spatial growth of services today in the same way electricity promoted the concentration of manufacturing at the turn of the 20th century.
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Labour-market flexibility, deregulation of the service industry, pension reforms and greater competition in university funding might harm the interest of well-connected, privileged citizens but it would open up opportunities for Europe’s youth and disad
Welcome to the New Address
Yep, it’s almost the same as the old one but it will be a bit of a building site for some days.