I’m currently following the Swedish parliamentary election. At the moment, it seems to be much tighter than the opinion polls had predicted. We seem to be seeing a lot of very close elections these days (Denmark 1998, USA 2000, Germany 2002, Italy 2006 and many more).
I’m wondering what’s going on… Are people changing their minds after reading the opinion polls? (That is, “Oh, so Moderaterna are winning? I’ll vote for somebody else then!”) Or are all the spin-doctors in all parties just so good at influencing the public that it becomes a stale-mate?
I tend to favour the former explanation, since the latter should mean that all parties in a multi-party system should be of equal size, which is clearly not true. It’s probably caused also by the media’s tendency to report all elections as if they were presidential ones with two clear alternatives, and a group of voters then try to pick the losing party.
I might be very wrong about the causes, but something is definitely going on!
