Archive for January 24th, 2008
Governors, Senators and Presidents
With the help of Barry Burden, John Sides of the Monkey Cage has a few words to say about presidential candidates and why governors seem to be more successful than senators in running for the presidency.
Very brief summary: It’s not just about what the electorate wants, it’s also about incentives and resources of potential candidates.
Maybe It’s about Time to Do Some Research into This Problem
Contemporary social science, as we all know, relies heavily on statistical information and telephone surveys or questionnaires have been an important instrument in gathering information from and about the public. At this point I may as well admit that I in recent years more often than not have assigned mailed questionnaires to my dustbin (perhaps it was the prospect of using an hour on filling out a questionnaire about drug and alcohol use that did it – I don’t use drugs, in fact I have never even not inhaled, and as Nick Aylott can testify, my alcohol consumption is minimal. Alcohol and migraines, even of the milder sort, are not a happy couple).
Anyway, some years ago Danish authorities made some changes about the rules for contacting individuals for research purposes which meant that it was relatively easy to keep researchers from contacting you and in a recent paper, the Danish Statistical Bureau tells us that now fever than 690.000 people (about 12% of the total population) have signed up for “protection against researchers”, as the system is called. The consequences are of cause of some importance – there is a huge loss of potential respondents which again will have long-term effects on the preparation and evaluation of public policies.
The Statistical Bureau is in fact able to calculate some patterns here: People on Sjælland and in the Metropolitan area are more likely to opt out as are younger people and those with a high school diploma. Unemployed and students are also overrepresented (yes, I admit that it sounds a bit odd that you can do research on people who have opted out of the system, but as long as you can get the information without contacting them, everything is fine).
The Bureau has no good explanations for why people choose to opt out. The head of the Bureau points out that the formulation “forskerbeskyttelse” (which I have translated into “protection against researchers”) on the formula you have to send to your local council when you move may be the culprit. The opt out is also listed along with the opportunity to get protection against local address registers and being contacted by marketing bureaus – two major annoyances to most people. Or maybe we are simply dealing with the phenomenon of questionnaire fatigue.
Sickness Benefits
The strangely-named AERådet (when I was young, it was known as Arbejderbevægelsens Erhvervsråd, or the Labour Movement Industrial Council, one of the first “think tanks” in Denmark), today published some figures about sickness benefits payments in Denmark.
From a Danish perspective there is nothing particularly surprising about the figures: As the economy has boomed and unemployment fallen steadily, so have sickness benefits payments increased just as steadily. The conventional interpretation is that 1) as unemployment falls, people with less than good health get work and 2) production demands take a heavy toll on the workforce.
There are of cause some problems with this interpretation: Women are traditionally more sick than men (women also live longer, as in all modern societies) and public sector employees are more sick than private sector employees. This means that other factors must play a role in sickness patterns – for one thing, we shouldn’t underestimate the role played by managements for keeping or undermining employees’ health.
But the really strange thing is that Sweden right now is seeing a different pattern. Where sickness-related absence from work or the labour market is pro-cyclical in Denmark, it tends to be counter-cyclical in Sweden. Basically, the weaker the labour market, the more sickness. (The women and public sector component also apply on this side of Øresund)
Swedish observers have long suggested some kind of substitution effect between unemployment benefits and sickness benefits were at work but in many ways the Danish and Swedish systems are similar. Following the labour market reforms of the 1990s, we might expect a stronger trend towards substitution of unemployment and sickness benefits in Denmark but this hasn’t happened.
Bispingen, Bitterfeld or Kuala Lumpur. Whatever
This could be a warning to skyscraper-obsessed local councils everywhere.
I wouldn’t be the least surprised if all of the photos in the series were from Stockholm, though.
Yes, That Is One Way of Putting It
The explanation behind this rather surprising news item turned out to be that news from the BBC’s Arabic service for some reason appeared in the ordinary news rss-stream in Google Reader.