Jacob Christensen

Click.

(Don’t worry: It’s perfectly safe for work. Unless you are a German economist)

So, there is an EU summit coming up? Who’d have thunk – the good thing about these things being held in Brussels is that nobody except the EU correspondents and the Eurocrats have to care. But thanks to Caroline de Cock aka Linotherhino, we too can have a piece of the action.

Yes, it’s the (almost) official European Council Summit Buzzword Bingo – readily available as a PDF for printing. It even has flexicurity!

PS: Just in case you wonder what a buzzword bingo is, here’s Wikipedia to the rescue.

On a slightly more serious note, I would like to point out, that if you want to perform some real comparisons between the US and European countries, you might want to check out the World Values Survey or the work of my former colleague Torbjörn Bergman.

By the way, judging from this figure on the WVS site, it looks as if Northern Ireland followed by Austria (!) are the European countries that are closest to the US.

I’ll admit: Personally, I’m no supporter of the Danish People’s Party but the initial manoeuvring over the UK Conservative Party’s choice of partners in the European Parliament has something ridiculous over it. The Tories have stated that the Danish People’s Party were out of the question because it was too extreme politically.

So, which positions are not too extreme for the Tories?

We urgently need global chemotherapy against Islam to save civilisation. Fair and balanced. (Belgium)

Marching with local SS veterans? A-OK. (Latvia)

Women should not stand for parliament? Sure. The Tories are a modern party. (Netherlands)

Banning gay-rights demonstrations? No problem. (Poland)

I’m sorry, but the only thing to do about British politics is to shake one’s head in disbelief.

1. Eurobarometer has a poll covering voting intentions, voters’ ranking of issues, etc. Looks like we’re in for a fall in turn-out. HT: Charlemagne, the Europhile .
2. There is a Danish poll out (but don’t tell anyone). Surprise result: The Eurosceptic movements look to lose heavily. Let’s see.

Bonus: The Prime Minister’s speech in the Folketing earlier today. Haven’t had the time to read it yet.

Elmine Wijnia gives you some arguments. The presentation takes 8 minutes to play.

HT: Mark Wubben.

I’m trying to collect the electoral platforms for the European Parliament election of the Danish parties (here defined as organisations which present candidates for election, so the People’s Movement and the June Movement count as parties). In some cases the platform was relatively easy to find, in some cases I had so click around a bit to find the original platform, but it seems to me that neither the Liberal Party nor the Danish People’s Party offer a full edition of their platforms – so in these cases I have to do a lot of copying and pasting to make a reference copy. Hrmpf.

Here are the links on my Delicious account – I use the tag ep2009 to organise them.

By the way: I know one of the Danish candidates. But can you figure out who?

Mark Thoma asks:

Why do European central banks respond more aggressively to inflation than the US central bank? Could it be the difference in social safety nets?

My off-the-cuff answer would be that European central banks (in essence the ECB plus satellites) are influenced by the German tradition which has put fighting inflation as the top economic priority even at the cost of economic growth and employment. This again has a link back to the inflation of the early 1920s which nearly broke German economy in general and a lot of private and public savings.

The inflation also had some pretty bad effects for social insurance funds, which had already been badly hit by being forced to buy bad government bonds during WWI, so the link between inflation and social policy has existed for a long time.

On the other hand, we could ask how such a policy would be sustainable politically, and intuitively the argument that an extensive and effective unemployment insurance could be used as an instrument in economic policy along with monetary policy makes a lot of sense. But then again, as I recall, Social Democrats and left-wingers in Sweden and Denmark have raised the ECB’s (and the EMU’s) focus on inflation as an issue.

Anyway, if somebody out there has access to relevant databases and software, it should be possible to test a model including central bank rate decisions, inflation rates, unemployment insurance coverage and unemployment. Or perhaps it has already been done?

So, the ungrateful Paddys Irish voters did it again: Voted to no a European treaty.

With a turn-out of 53,1%, 46,6% voted yes to the Treaty of Lisbon while 53,4% voted no. (Official data here)

The problem now is a) Why did the Irish vote against the treaty and b) What does this mean for Ireland and the EU?

With regard to question a) the immediate answer is likely to be that the voters voted on something else than the issue – political scientists have a term for this: the second-order election problem -, but there is a couple of problems here:

a1) This isn’t the first time the Irish have stopped (at least momentarily) an EU treaty. It happened in 2001 and even if the turn-out was a pathetic 34,8%, the politicians should have learnt their lesson by now.

a2) This isn’t the first time, the present treaty has hit a serious bump in the road: I’ll leave aside the legal niceties and note that the French rejected the treaty in its original form in 2005 (Y: 45,3%, N: 54,7, T-O: 69,3%) as did the Dutch a couple of days later (Y: 38,5%, N: 61,5%, T-O: 63,3%). This treaty systematically fails at referendums.

It will be interesting to see a breakdown of the numbers, but generally there seems to be some clear dimensions in the voting in all three countries: Class and urban-rural divisions play a role here¹ – the urban middle-classes are pro-Europe, the working-class and people from rural areas are more likely to be Euro-sceptic.²

b) is trickier and political scientists in general are bad oracles but I’ll try some observations:

b1) The obvious strategy will be to make this “the Irish problem” in order to contain the damage in the short run. I’m not sure that this is the best road to take in the long run as there are misgivings about the EU out there.

b2) Ireland and to a certain degree Denmark has provisions for mandatory referendums, while there is a strong push for a UK referendum on Europe by anti-EU groups. This could stop formal institutional development and push the cooperation into transnational policy-networks that are more flexible but also more difficult to control.

b3) Denmark has a couple of issues on the agenda – the Maastricht opt-outs and the future of Anders Fogh Rasmussen. I’m sure that it would be possible to hold referendums on the opt-outs under the present Nice Treaty but it may look odd politically. On the other hand, it might theoretically be easier to keep the referendums as referendums on Justice and Home Affairs and Foreign and Defence Policy. My guess is that we will be a bit wiser in early July or August.

Declaration of interest: In case anybody out there wonder, I’ve voted in the Danish referendums in 1986, 1992, 1993 and 1998 as well as the Swedish referendum in 2003. I voted yes all of the times even if I had and have some reservations about the economic conception behind the ECB’s brief.

Update: Professor Richard Sinnott, author of a standard volume on Irish electoral behaviour, has this analysis in the Irish Times. He points to two factors affecting the vote: a) a lack of confidence in people regarding their knowledge of the issues and b) national identity.

How would this

… it is evident that running an integrationist referendum in a political culture in which almost two-thirds of the electorate feel themselves to belong exclusively to a certain national identity (in this case Irish) is never going to be a walkover.

apply in the Danish case?

1. One of my correspondents pointed to the fishing industry as a particular problem [↩]
2. the term is not used in the British sense where Euro-skeptic is a euphemism for anti-European [↩]

Henry Farrell has been busy and provides us with two posts about the Irish referendum on Thursday. The Crooked Timber piece is more or less a summary of the campaign (which in many ways appears to have been pretty unfocused on both sides) while the Monkey Cage post discusses Andrew Moravcik’s understanding of the need (or lack thereof) for legitimising the EU. (HF is sceptical of AM, in case you are curious).

I’ll just steal this from the Monkey Cage post and ask if this would also apply to Denmark (remember that if the Lisbon Treaty passes the Irish referendum, then we are looking at one or more referendums in Denmark in the near future) and Sweden:

Given the difficulties encountered by both the pro-EU argument for legitimation through more democracy, and Moravcsik’s more limited functionalist approach, is there any alternative? My first approximation argument is that there is. As Moravcsik says, there are relatively few salient fundamental cleavages in politics, and European integration isn’t one of them. Thus, the inherent disorganization of the debate in referendums, where you get one side composed of European elites convinced that Europe is a matter of obligation and destiny, the other side a discordant clatter of contrary viewpoints, and voters not quite sure what to do with either set of claims.

The alternative is to recast European policies in the light of traditional cleavages, the most obvious one being the cleavage between left and right. Europe has, to date, been the matter of consensus between center left and center right. But there are very different ways in which politics might be organized on the European level, depending on your attachment to the traditional models of left and right. The left has traditionally favoured a variety of national institutions designed to protect individuals against the vagaries of markets, the right (with some variations) has been more attached in recent decades to free market policies. European policies have clear implications for the feasibility of both, depending on which specific policies are chosen.