Jacob Christensen

Once upon a time, Berlingske Tidende was known as “Auntie Berlingske” (yes, just like the BBC). This was because Auntie was supposed to be a nice little old lady who would only talk about the things nice little old ladies would talk about. Obviously, sex was NOT part of the package.

Times change. Somebody at Berlingske got hold of a Reuters story about the sex lives of young English women and decided that … well, let’s look at the facts:

We are dealing with research commissioned by a British pharmacist and the results are only reported in a very truncated form so for a social scientist it is almost impossible to draw some valid conclusions but according to the Reuters article, for a sample of 3000 24 year-old English women the average number of (male?) sex partners was 5,65. This was an increase from 1,67 in “the 1960s” and 3,72 in “the 1970s”. No references are given for the later figures.¹

Let’s see: We do not have any information about when English women have their sexual debut – in Denmark the median age for the first intercourse has remained stubbornly fixed at around 16,5 years so the median Danish 24 year-old would have had some eight years of sexual activity behind her.²

If we return to our English lasses, I suspect that the share of 24 year-olds with 0 partners is minimal while we will have some extreme values on the other side of the average, so the median³ is probably below 5,65 – let’s say 3 or 4.

Would a 24 year-old with 3-4 sex partners strike you as being unusual? I mean: This looks a bit like the number of steady boyfriends a lot of young women will have had at that age. And it would also strongly suggest that most sexual activity involving a partner takes place in medium-to-long term relationships.

Inquiries into sexual activities always face a fundamental problem: Can the answers be trusted? Even if you are filling out a paper questionnaire, answers may be guided by norms. No, you did not vote for the Danish People’s Party last time and no, you did not have sex with five guys every night the last time you went on holiday in Bulgaria. (What? You did? You pervert! Voting for the Danish People’s Party really…) Okay – the suspicion is that women in particular tend to underreport sexual activities in general and the number of partners in particular.

Anyway, the results made the brains of several (female?) journalists on Berlingske Tidende’s newsdesk explode and they had to take to the streets to … well, if they had only stuck to doing that then they would have some of their reputation left, but no: They had to do a vox pop where the Danish people tells their unfiltered version of what goes on between the sheets.

So what goes on? “No no, the number is far too low … I’ve heard about … I know that my younger sister’s friends … ” etc, etc.

May I suggest that Tine Damgård contacts my cousin Henrik Lassen who has studied how tales wander through the ages (You can listen to him here – even if he is not talking about sex) and who would be able to show exactly what is wrong with these answers.

But do we know anything about the number of sex partners young Danish women have? We do, even if the research is four years old, and the results suggest that the median and average number of sex partners may be a bit, but not excessively, higher among Danish women compared with the English. You can get the report here – go to pages 43-45. The numbers are not immediately comparable, but my best guess is that we could be looking at a value in the range between 5-10 partners for 24 year-old Danes – and remember that if a 24 year-old woman has had 10 partners since making her sexual debut at the 16,5 median, that is (only) a little over one new partner per year.⁴

So maybe the truth about the sex lives of young Danes is that despite all talk of one-night stands, hook-ups and whatnot, most have sex with steady partners and that a kind of serial monogamy is the name of the game.

Paradise Hotel⁵ and Sex and the City are fantasies (and people in a relationship have more sex than singles, for some weird reason) and anyway we all know that other people lead more adventurous lives – in and out of bed.

PS: Epidemiology can be fun. For instance it can show that Danes and Swedes are not attracted by each other in real life.

1. Actually, the pharmacy is trying to sell HPV vaccinations to your daughter [↩]
2. What does this mean? It means that if you collect a representative sample of Danish girls aged 16 years and 6 months, half of them will not have had intercourse [↩]
3. Corrected from mean. Ouch! [↩]
4. If she was taking a new guy home every month we would be looking at a figure in the order of 100 partners. How likely is that in real life? [↩]
5. Remember that the cast of PH is … a cast deliberately chosen by the production company. They are not representative of 18-25 year-olds. [↩]

Via Scott McLemee who, bravely, avoided the lure of graduate school, we are lead to Thomas H. Benton (alias William Pannapacker) who takes a dim view of the entire affair:

Graduate school in the humanities is a trap. It is designed that way. It is structurally based on limiting the options of students and socializing them into believing that it is shameful to abandon “the life of the mind.” That’s why most graduate programs resist reducing the numbers of admitted students or providing them with skills and networks that could enable them to do anything but join the ever-growing ranks of impoverished, demoralized, and damaged graduate students and adjuncts for whom most of academe denies any responsibility.

Topic for discussion: Consider similarities and differences between the humanities, social science and science.

PS: You may also want to follow SML’s advice and take a look at comment #75. Is there “a life of the mind” outside of academia. Yes or no?

I hope Fred Bass and “The Editors” will forgive me for lifting his advice about getting rid of books:

My advice is to first clean out duplicates and books with repetitive information — why do you need six dictionaries? Next, remove all books with out-of-date information, like atlases and reference books. Political, economic and topical books should be the next category to sort through; you don’t really need that copy of Richard Simmons’ “Never-Say-Diet Book” (a 1981 best-seller), or a book on the future of the Democratic or Republican parties, written 20 years ago.¹

One should eliminate books that are in poor condition unless they hold sentimental value and remove those you never intend to read again.

Once you have weeded out the duplicates, the out-of-date material and those moldy, unreadable tomes, make sure to note any first editions or autographed books, as they could be valuable if they are in good condition. Put them aside and store them properly — away from direct sunlight and humidity. You might consider investing in some Mylar, as that is the only proven way to keep a valuable book in perfect condition.

I went through the pain last summer (2008, that is) and I’m more or less trying to figure out what to do with the different parts of my library in about a year’s time. Getting rid of old textbooks and books bought for a specific project is the easy bit, weeding out fiction and stuff bought for personal entertainment is much, much trickier. Still, there is something comforting in reading that other people make the same mistakes as I do when it comes to buying books.

1. For “Democratic or Republican parties, insert relevant European party or “the European Union” [↩]

Last week I received the sad message that my former teacher and colleague Gunnar Sjöblom had died at the age of 76.

If you find a copy of the book which was published in honour of Gunnar on his 60th birthday and open it, you will be greeted by a photo of a sardonically looking professor (no tweed-jacket, though), a look which might be a bit unsettling for some. Maybe Gunnar imagined that the photographer was Thomas S. Kuhn or, even better, some 1970s or 1980s marxist student. He had very little love indeed for that bunch. Behind that professorial façade, though, was a man who in smaller groups could be very witty, funny and insightful, also beyond the world of political science.

Gunnar’s claim to fame was his dissertation which was published in English in 1968 as Party Strategies in a Multiparty System. Tellingly, Google Scholar informs us that the book was still quoted into the 2000s, more than 35 years after it was written.

Party Strategies is in many ways a strange book in political science as it is completely theoretical in nature without any open references to empirical data, just as it does not make any use of cases or examples to illustrate its argument. In a way, the book also lacks a thesis to be proved. Rather, the ambition was to apply a systems analysis approach to the study of (well, duh) parties that operate in a multiparty system to discover the various conflicts and dilemmas they face. Even if you are only marginally oriented in the history of the discipline, you will know that Gunnar was playing ball with David Easton (systems theory) and Anthony Downs (party competition).

The book looks at parties acting in the different political arenas and attempts to make a comprehensive overview of the tools and strategies available at each point in the decision-making process. Trying to make a complete empirical analysis of the parties in an existing party system using the scheme of analysis being presented would be a daunting, and in all likelihood impossible, task for any single researcher, but there are many bits and pieces which still merits consideration. And applied on more specific research topics, the book and its scheme could be put to good use.

Gunnar never repeated the feat but spent the 1970s and 1980s producing articles and book-chapters on aspects of party government, usually working in a network of party researchers organised around the late Rudolf Wildenmann. To mention some examples: In 1977, he took on the question of cumulating knowledge in the social sciences in an article in the European Journal of Political Research and in the mid-1980s he contributed to a series of publications about party government with chapters on parties and problem solving in politics and – unusually, for somebody who spent almost his entire career addressing theoretical and methodological questions - the role of parties in the Danish and Swedish political systems.

In Gunnar’s career, one big ambition eluded him: His plan was to write a comprehensive study of party government in Western societies and he made extensive preparations for this work, but it never resulted in a book or a series of papers. He told me, that when he had the opportunity to review the data and literature during a sabbatical, he discovered that much of the material was beginning to be out of date. Other priorities, including national and international organisational duties, had taken up the time needed.

That may be so, but I also suspect that Gunnar lacked the temperament needed to write a synthesis in the style of Giovanni Sartori’s Parties and Party Systems . His approach lent itself better to analysis than synthesis. But then again, who knows what would had happened, if somebody at the right moment had put Gunnar in the office next to Sartori’s?

Still, his contributions to the study of political parties and party strategies stand.

For some examples of early Sjöblom, here are two open-access articles from 1967 and 1968 published in Scandinavian Political Studies. Two reviews of Party Strategies (gated) can be found on JStor here and here.

PS: In case the Google Scholar link fails, this is what you should be looking for – http://scholar.google.dk/scholar?as_q=&num=50&btnG=S%C3%B8g+i+Scholar&as_epq=party+strategies+in+a+multiparty+system&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_occt=title&as_sauthors=sj%C3%B6blom&as_publication=&as_ylo=&as_yhi=&hl=da

091209 – dias

I’ll probably kick myself for doing this (scribd uses a flash-based code) but the slides are reference to a presentation about unemployment policy in Denmark in the 1950s.

In case anybody wondered, all parties survived Tuesday’s “Exam” quite well. I doubt if many votes were moved but it was a fun and well-attended arrangement. When people have the chance to meet a political leader, they will take it.

So, were there any surprises? Well, not really. As we concluded, Vestager is an intelligent politician, she’s very dedicated to her work and definitively generally well-prepared.¹ We should, however, also remember that she was playing on her home ground, i.e. in front of an audience of academics and others with a higher education. Even if they wouldn’t vote for the Social Liberals, the audience would still get what the party’s basic approach to politics is: A highly analytical one.

We might have stressed this aspect further and discussed the strengths and weaknesses of this approach as well as the possible conflict between the party’s very analytical stance on the one hand and its representation of the interests of a certain segment of the society (urban, highly educated, etc).

Okay, this was my first attempt at Being Jeremy Paxman, so a bit of training might do the trick.

1. This is not a royal “we” as I shared the honours with my colleague Lene Rimestad [↩]

No, nothing rhetorical or sarcastic here: It’s the real deal. On Tuesday, 1 December 2009, a distinguished team consisting of Lene Rimestad and yours truly will be cross-examining the political leader of the Social Liberal Party (aka Radikale Venstre) Margrethe Vestager between noon and 2 pm. in front of a no doubt enthusiastic audience of journalism and polsci students at SDU.

There’s even a Facebook page to celebrate the event.

A young and still hopeful reader of the blog mailed me some days ago and asked: What does it take to enter a Ph.D. programme in Political Science?

My immediate reaction was to think that I was the wrong person to ask as I have never been on a committee which assesses applications for Ph.D. programmes. But then again I’ve met a number of Ph.D. students over the years so maybe I have learnt something along the way.

Perhaps I should start by pointing out that in Sweden and Denmark accepting a Ph.D. student is an investment for the department in question. Unlike in Germany, the programme has to be financed in advance, and departments (or rather faculties) receive payments for the number of Ph.D. students who pass their programmes. So, first of all: The department, or the committee, wants to be reasonably sure that you will deliver a dissertation. Of course, things happen: Life has its nasty surprises and students may discover that spending life in academia is not their real goal in life. But if taking your MA took ten years and you have a nasty collection of 2s and 4s on your papers, you may as well forget about it. On the other hand, you do not need a full collection of 12s to get accepted. I know people who never got a 12, or the equivalent, and have made nice careers.¹

My guess is that dependability, rather than talent, is important. Research is also a craft to be learned and applied. And we know that not everyone is an Einstein. In fact, a discipline full of Einsteins may not be a good thing.

When it comes to your application or your project, I would say that having an idea about the current theoretical discussions and the state of the art with regard to empirical or theoretical research topics helps. But this is something you can use your masters thesis for.

Finally, my recommendation is that you pay the chair of the local Ph.D. programme a visit. This could also give you an idea about what type of applications and applicants they are looking for. Oh, and taking your Ph.D. somewhere else than where you took your MA is not necessarily a bad thing.

1. 2s, 4s and 12s? In case you are clueless, look here. [↩]

Ola Nordebo has one or two problems with the political dimensions and their names. I may not be able to help him out of his misery, but I do have my own motives for trying to clarify what we mean by “right” and “bourgeois” (borgerlig/borgarlig) in Denmark and Sweden.

First: Do we need one or more dimensions to describe and analyse the political conflicts?

As it is, political scientists have been discussing this almost endlessly, but the received wisdom seems to be that Danish politics needs two dimensions to make any sense (socio-economic and libertarian-authoritarian are the best bets, AFAIK) while Sweden is quite a unique case in Europe as it generally fits nicely on a left-right socio-economic scale.

While the Green Party, and in later days the Sweden Democrats, have made some attempts to break the Swedish unidimensionality, indications are that they have failed. Which is one reason why SD has found it difficult to make it to the national political scene. One interesting question could be what would happen if the Greens and the Left Party force the Social Democrats to abandon what (at least to me) looks like a de facto alliance with the Conservatives on asylum and immigration politics.

Denmark, on the other hand, is a country where the classical left and right have imploded. It’s not that class does not play a role in Danish politics, but blue-collar voters now choose between the Social Democrats, the Liberals and the Danish People’s Party. Immigration policy is one reason behind this.

Second: What does “right” or “bourgeois” mean on the political arena?

One problem is that both “right” and “bourgeois” tend to be pejorative terms and in Denmark, the … uhm … bourgeois parties go to great lengths to present themselves as something else. “Right” carries connotations of bad guys like Hitler, Franco, Pinochet and Reagan (Try mentioning any of the four to a Social Democrat in either country and watch: The reaction is pretty similar). At best, “right” means upper class. Like in the 19th century. The Swedish Social Democrats are more than happy to call the bourgeois parties “The Right”.

As a reaction, both the Danish and the Swedish conservatives shed the “right” brand. The Danes in 1915, the Swedes in the 1950s. Both parties have always suffered from a certain schizophrenia with regard to their true identity: Should the be true Conservative parties, or should they appeal more broadly to the middle classes? Hence their double names: The Conservative People’s Party and the Moderate Rally.

But things get worse as “the right”, i.e. those parties which are to the right of the Social Democrats, come from very different ideological traditions. A historical irony means that Left (Venstre) is on the right side of Danish politics, but are The Left liberals or agrarians at heart? (Both, actually. As true agrarians they do not care one second about the environment, as liberals they need to establish at least some green credentials). Oh, and the Danish Agrarian Liberals have very little in common with their Swedish counterparts, the Centre Party.

To make a long story short, we have social-liberals, liberals, agrarians, conservatives, Christian conservatives and nationalists joined in a motley mess. In Sweden, the social-liberals (Folkpartiet) lean right, in Denmark they (Radikale Venstre) lean left. So, does “bourgeois” mean staid middle class or progressive?

Acutally, in Denmark “bourgeois” has a nasty smell of Gentofte and Søllerød to it and the Conservatives in particular prefer to speak about the “bourgeois-liberal” parties or, even better, the “non-socialist” parties.¹

Bonus: Why do the centrist Danish Social Liberals call themselves “the Radical Left”? Back in 1905, one of the party’s founders was heavily Francophile and wanted to establish a link with the French “Parti Radical“. The “Left” was taken from the fact that the party was a splinter group from Venstrereformpartiet (the “Left Reform Party”).

1. For Gentofte and Søllerød, insert Täby and Danderyd in Sweden. [↩]

Have you ever wondered about the real difference between law scholars and economists on the one hand and sociologists on the other? Let me put it this way: I cannot possibly imagine a law or an economics professor even asking this question.

Political scientists? Oh, we write text books. Well, some of us do.