Jacob Christensen

Just a follow-up to the previous post: My colleague David Nicolas Hopmann had this electoral poster (in Danish) for Simon Faber which is now hanging in our corridor at SDU.

Maybe I ought to write something about the latest twists in Danish immigration policy – the only problem is that Danish politics these day more often than not makes me want to jump out of the window. It is probably a good thing that I live on the ground floor.

So… in other news:

On Sunday, voters in the city of Flensburg (or Flensborg, as it is called in Danish) elected a new mayor, and none other than Simon Faber of the SSW. This, as far as I can tell, is the first time a representative from the party of the Danish and Frisian minorities holds a political position this prominent.¹

The election has some interesting aspects:

1. The Cities in Schleswig-Holstein elect their mayor (Oberbürgermeister) directly – but the turn-out was dismal. In the run-off election, only 23,3 percent of the electorate bothered to vote. In the first round turn-out was just as bad with 27 percent voting.

2. The question is if abstentions were equally distributed among “Danes” and “Germans”. Maybe the minority was more motivated to vote in the second round?

3. The two candidates in the run-off were supported by coalitions – Simon Faber by SSW and SPD while Elfi Heesch was supported by CDU and Die Grünen. Jörg Klose, the candidate supported by the largest group in the city council, WiF, only managed to attract 9 percent of the vote in the first round.

4. Actually, Faber narrowly edged out SPD’s candidate Thede Boysen in the first round.

5. Electorally, there have been some major upheavals in local politics in Flensburg recently: Both SPD and CDU have suffered major defeats in the last local elections – SPD twice: From 35 to 25 percent of the vote in 2003 and then again to 16 percent in 2008, while CDU went down like a lead balloon in 2008 from 37 to 20 percent of the vote.

All in all, it is probably not too surprising that somebody not attached to either SPD or CDU won the election this time even if I know too little about local politics in Flensburg to get the entire picture.

PS: SSW has a parallel north of the border in the form of Slesvigsk Parti but to be honest, I have no idea if SP has managed to hold the position as mayor in any of the local councils since 1970.

1. Wikipedia tells us that Helmut Christensen – no relation – was acting OB in 1982-1983 [↩]

This is an act of shameless self-promotion: Along with Flemming Juul Christiansen I contributed with a chapter on the elections in Denmark. Given the price tag, you will probably find it in specialist libraries.

Juliet Lodge (ed): The 2009 Elections to the European Parliament. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. (Amazon.co.uk)

After almost five years of eponymous blogging, I’m happy to introduce nothing less than the first guest blogger on this site: Jessika Wide, a former colleague from Umeå who is now a Post Doc at Uppsala University. Jessika’s main line of work concerns the political representation of women and here she writes about the decrease in the share of women MPs at the recent Swedish election and the possible causes.

The results from the dramatic parliamentary election in Sweden are just settled. So far the entry of the Sweden Democrats into the parliament and their position as the holder of the balance of power has attracted most attention. However another striking result is a decrease in female representation, from 47 % to 45 %. The decrease might be seen as marginal, but it is a break in the development. Since Swedish women became eligible in 1921, female representation has constantly increased, election after election. The only exception is the fateful election in 1991.

In 1991 the female representation in parliament decreased from 38 % to 33 %. One reason was the entry of male-dominated populist New Democracy into parliament. Another that the right-wing parties won seats from the left, and the right-wing parties had a lower female representation than the left-wing parties. The decreased female representation was seen as very serious and as a consequence a number of feminists created a network called “the Support Stockings”. The aim of the network was to pressure the political parties to increase the female representation in the election in 1994. Otherwise the network should create a women’s party, which was supported by a majority of the population and seen as a threat by the other parties. The result was that the established parties did increase the share of female candidates, for example the Social Democrats introduced zipped lists.¹ In the election 1994 the female representation increased to 40 %, a new world record at that time.

So, what happened in the election this year? Hitherto the decrease in female representation is said to depend solely on the entry of the Sweden Democrats, with 3 female and 17 male MPs. However this is only half the truth. The female representation has also decreased significantly in some other parties. For example if only the Centre Party and the Liberal Party had sustained their share of female MPs from 2006, the female representation in parliament would not have decreased at all this election, despite the entry of the male-dominated Sweden Democrats.

This is the female representation in the political parties after the election (with female representation 2006 in parenthesis) and the number of MPs in total:

The Left Party: 58 % (64 %), 19 MPs

The Social Democrats: 48 % (48 %), 112 MPs

The Green Party: 56 % (42 %), 25 MPs

The Centre: 30 % (41 %), 23 MPs

The Liberal Party: 42 % (54 %), 24 MPs

The Christian Democrats: 37 % (38 %), 19 MPs

The Moderate Party: 48 % (43 %), 107 MPs

The Sweden Democrats: 15 % (–), 20 MPs

Why do we see this decrease in some parties which normally are considered to be positive towards gender equality and with a previous history of a high female representation? It is even more confusing that the Moderates have a gender-balanced representation, despite the fact that issues concerning gender equality and gender quotas are not very prioritized in the party.

The answer is the electoral system. Sweden has a proportional system which is seen as positive towards female representation, but the country is divided into 20 constituencies. The Social Democrats and the Moderates both received about 30 % of the votes and in most constituencies they won several seats each. Meanwhile the smaller parties have won maximally one seat each in the constituencies. This is nothing new, but it is clear that in this election the right-wing parties have gone to the polls with most lists topped by a male candidate. Since only one candidate from each party is elected it makes no difference that the rest of list is zipped. Also the Green Party and the Left Party won maximally one seat each in the constituencies, but in those parties the candidate selection is coordinated on a national basis to achieve a gender-balance also among the top candidates.

What will be the consequence of the decreased female representation? Most likely we will not see a repeat of the reactions in 1991. Most people will probably consider 45 % to be just as good as 47 %. Still it is the second best in the world (after Rwanda). Moreover we already have a feminist party in Sweden today, Feminist Initiative, which only received a modest 0.40 % of the votes in the election. More likely there will be a discussion within the smaller right-wing parties with a decreased female representation, especially in the Centre Party, which had 50 % female MPs in 2002. There might also be a discussion about the gender distribution of the parties’ top candidates on the ballots in the elections. This affects not only the female representation in parliament but also the gender distribution of positions of power at the national as well as the municipal level. For example, men still dominate in the municipal executive boards and among municipal commissioners.

1. Zipped lists – or “varannan damernas” – means that male and female candidates alternate on the party lists /JC [↩]

Round-up and reflections by my colleague Nick Aylott (apologies for the self-referential link at the end).

Henrik Oscarsson notes that a quirk in the Swedish election system may lead the Alliance to lose the majority it would have won if the system had been more proportional.

Whoops: Forgot these

Gissur Erlingsson argues that the success of the Sweden Democrats was caused not by a change in public opinion (demand) but a change in organisational strategies and capabilities (supply). If you have some kind of institutional access, you might also want to check these (gated) papers by Jens Rydgren: “Radical Right Populism in Sweden: Still a Failure, But for How Long?” (from 2002) and “Is extreme right-wing populism contagious? Explaining the emergence of a new party family” (from 2005).

This was an entertaining evening if you were a political scientist or a Sweden Democrat.

From the beginning, it was clear the SwedDem would pass the 4% threshold and the question was if the government would retain its majority. In the end, we had the rather weird situation that the government in fact increased its share of the vote compared with 2006 and lost its majority in the process.¹ Even stranger is the fact, that immigration (SweDem’s major issue), despite the hopes of Danish right-wing commentators, appears to have been a marginal issue for the overwhelming part of the voters. The dynamics behind the increased support for the Sweden Democrats are not completely impossible to explain (a mix of nationalist and industrial society nostalgia in a limited segment of the electorate), but they add a new level of complexity to a party system which has been dominated by the socio-economic left-right dimension since the 1920s. If you read Scandinavian, you might want to take a look at this post by Anders Johansson Heinö about the development of the Sweden Democrats.

Despite the focus on the Sweden Democrats, I will maintain that they are a sideshow to some more profound developments in the Swedish party system and society as a whole. Since the 1930s, the Swedish party system has been a dominant-party system with the Social Democrats in command of the median voter and the median MP (until 1970, the SocDems had an additional advantage due to the composition of the upper chamber). Exactly when the Age of Social Democracy ended may be a topic for discussion: The party faced electoral problems during the 1970s and since 1988 it has only once managed to win more than 40 percent of the vote. Yesterday, the Social Democrats only managed to win marginally more votes than the Moderates – just as in Denmark, the party’s share of the vote is the lowest for a century.

Bad leadership has played a role but as my colleague Ulf Bjereld points out, the party faces some more fundamental challenges. Sweden 2010 is not Sweden 1985.

One characteristic of the present party system is an increased volatility. As Fredrik Reinfeldt was careful to point out, the difference in the share of the vote between the Social Democrats and the Moderates in 2002 was 25 percentage points. In 2010 it was down to less than one percentage point. Much of this volatility is intra-bloc volatility but the fight for the median voter has definitively increased.

Another characteristic is that Sweden now has to major parties commanding around 30 percent of the vote and six smaller parties each holding around 5-7 percent of the vote. The real difference between Sweden and Denmark is that Denmark has two 25% parties (V, SD), two 15% parties (DF, SF) and four parties hovering between 3 and 10 percent of the vote (KF, RV, LA, EL). Finland and Norway each have three major parties and a number of medium-sized and smaller parties.

There are many aspects of the 2010 to discuss but the most acute problem concerns the parliamentary basis of the government. First, we should note that there is one, and only one, way Fredrik Reinfeldt and his four-party government can be brought down: If the Sweden Democrats join the Red-Green opposition in a vote of no confidence.² Needless to say, the Red-Greens could present a motion of no confidence but they will need the SweDems to vote actively against the government and such a move would trigger a massive round of recriminations.

Commentators and political scientists have pointed out that the government has the advantage of being able to choose between relying on the Sweden Democrats (Fredrik Reinfeldt emphatically ruled out this alternative on the election night) or seeking more or less formal agreements with the Social Democrats (as did Carl Bildt during the 1991-1994 parliamentary term) or the Green Party (Reinfeldt made such an invitation, only to be rejected by the leaders of the Greens). We should remember that these are early days and all three alternatives bring advantages and risks to all parties even if the interest on election night concentrated on some kind of agreement between the alliance and the Green Party.

Besides the symbolic aspect, the problem with the Sweden Democrats is that their economic policy builds on the assumption that curbing immigration will finance the expansion of a lot of transfers and services. The problem with the Greens is that the environmental and energy policies of the Alliance differ fundamentally from those of the Green Party (nuclear energy, for starters!) and if we look at the Social Democrats, taxes and social insurance appear as the major stumbling blocs.

That’s it for tonight, but stay tuned for more in the coming weeks.

1. Look here for the election night result [↩]
2. From the 2014 election, things will be a bit different as the term of the prime minister will expire at the end of the parliamentary term. But Sweden will still apply negative parliamentarism [↩]

Unless my internet connection goes down and Twitter gets hit by the infamous Fail Whale, I’ll be tweeting as jacobchr. If you want more, the more-or-less-official hashtag seems to be #val2010. Henrik Oscarsson has promised to be there as well.

And at this point, I may as well admit: It looks clear already now that I s**k at predicting. This was my guess back in April and it is obvious that I got the developments in the public opinion completely wrong. The election looks set to be much tighter than expected and turn-out to be higher than I predicted.

Why? Well, back in 2007 I noted that the opinion had turned against the government and wondered why: 1, 2, 3, 4. But just as the Alliance looked set for the burial came a comeback worthy of Lazarus.

Maybe the Social Democrats picked the wrong leader, or forgot to reconsider their policies and strategies in the process? Or maybe they forgot that Sweden these days isn’t the country it used to be? Or perhaps the prospect of Lars Ohly entering government spooked middle-class voters with the collapse of support for the Social Democrats as the result?

Among the Danish commentariat the Sweden Democrats have been the cause célèbre during this campaign – “why can’t a Swede be like us”, the refrain goes. Well, maybe the Swedes are more like us than many would like to believe, but on the other hand the priorities among voters and the political elite may be different in Sweden compared to Denmark.

If you want a cheap guide to the 2006 election, look no further than here. Statsvetenskaplig Tidsskrift’s special edition on the state of the parties is also available for free. And I have written an overview of the state of the (centre-)right.

Even if the Sweden Democrats are a sideshow to the main event, you might want to check out Niklas Orrenius “Jag är inte rabiat, jag äter pizza” (“I’m not an extremist, I eat pizzas”) about SweDem activists and the media’s problems with coming to terms with the party and Markus Uvell’s discussion of the sentiments and dynamics behind the support for sd in “Folkhemspopulismen” are both worth a read.

Enjoy your election night.

Peter Santesson asked in a tweet if Henrik Oscarsson wasn’t being too cautious in his conclusions about the state of the election campaign (and consequently, that my reference to HO was also over-cautious).

As I’m not an electoral researcher or statistician, I’ll leave the technical details to Oscarsson and just summarise how I interpret the numbers:

1. There are variations between individual polls and we should be extremely careful when reporting or interpreting on the basis of single polls. Especially when a poll shows a major development compared with other polls and earlier polls from the same pollster.
2. I put Mona Sahlin’s chances of becoming prime minister after the election to = 0%. The collapse of support for the Social Democrats is something which will merit the attention of an army of pollsters and political scientists.
3. It is not likely that the Centre Party or the Christian Democrats will fall below the 4%-threshold. (See comrade Four Percent).
4. Support for the Sweden Democrats appear to the on the increase. Even if there are statistical uncertainties, I now think it is more likely than not that SD makes it past the threshold
5. The big question to me is: Will the alliance win a majority of its own, despite SD entering the Riksdag, or will Sweden have a hung parliament. Here, it looks to me that everybody have something to play for.

Monday’s round-up:

• My colleague Nicholas Aylott summarises the state of the game so far.
• Henrik Oscarsson has checked the numbers and is not prepared to call the election yet.
• Robert Östling at Ekomonistas considers the dynamics behind “Comrade Four Percent”.

Apologies for the lack of updates. The thing is that the Swedish election campaign seems to be moving ahead at the expected pace with the economy, jobs and social services as the main issues. Immigration and integration below the radar.

The talking points I would make for an improvised discussion would go along the lines:

1. The major story to me is the collapse of support for the Social Democrats. Soc Dem getting around 30 percent and being the second largest party in some polls is like recording pigs flying all over the place and flying saucers landing in Times Square. and yet, Swedish media appear curiously unsurprised.

2. How is the relatively strong performance of the Sweden Democrats linked with the weak performance of the Social Democrats?

3. If SweDem pass the 4 percent threshold and there is no overall control in the Riksdag, I would expect Fredrik Reinfeldt to form a minority Alliance government but just like Poul Nyrup Rasmussen in the 1990s to go for agreements with either the Green Party or the Social Democrats.