Jacob Christensen

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.

Transport economy really isn’t my specialist field but Paul Krugman raises in important issue in his blog today: The collapse of rail freight in Europe.

An excerpt from the paper, Krugman quotes in his post:

A little more than a 20 percent of the gap cannot be explained by these inherent differences and is presumably due to public policies including priority of passenger service, lack of interoperability at borders, and incentives of the rail operators. We estimate that if that policy gap were closed railroads’ share of freight in Europe would almost double, increasing to 15 percent.

This time via John Quiggin:

This afternoon, I looked at the NY Times to see a story about stagnant real wages in Europe, which began with a lengthy voxpop about a couple who had bought a breadmaker because baguettes were too dear, and continued in much the same vein. Deep within the article was the information that eurozone prices have risen by 22.5 per cent since 1999. But despite various claims about the declining purchasing power of wages, there is not a single piece of statistical evidence on wages anywhere in the story. Instead, we got a lengthy and inevitably inconclusive discussion of what constitutes the “middle class.

A quick visit to Eurostat reveals that Eurozone wages have risen about 30 per cent since 2000. German wages have increased by about 20 per cent, so the article’s claims of stagnation appear to be about right for Germany, but not for the EU as a whole. Of course, to do things properly you’d want to consider the impact of food prices on low-income households. But given the focus on the middle class, it seems reasonable to suppose that the price index measures the standard of living for the average middle class household reasonably well.

All I can say is: Remember rule #1 in journalism – never let the facts interfere with your story. Sigh.

At the third and final reading, the Danish parliament ratifies the Lisbon Treaty with 90 votes to 25. The Danish People’s Party and the Red-Green Alliance voted against the treaty, the Socialist Party split 11-3 while all other parties supported the treaty.

Politiken notes the media silence.

Floyd Norris shows that the share of U.S. men without work is higher than many imagine (hint: “unemployment rates” are not the same as “the rates of people without a job”). Paul Krugman agrees and adds France to the equation.

Krugman also points us to a paper from 2006 by John Schmitt and Dean Baker taking issue with the “Eurosclerosis” argument.

Just one thought: How do the incarceration rates in the U.S. influence the figures?

Of cause the impending downturn complicates matters a bit.

And yet more procrastination: NATO invites you to identify the member countries, the partnership countries and the Mediterranean Dialogue countries.

Believe me: Those Central Asian Ex-Soviet republics are a bit of a match.

Hat tip Foreign Policy.