Dear all,
Greetings from Umeå, where the temperature is hovering just above freezing and the dark nights are drawing in. If you ever fancy seeing just how cold it really is here, you can always check the university webcam (http://webcam.educ.umu.se).
Sweden is settling down after the election and the unusually fraught inter-party negotiations that followed. News about articles on the election and its implications will be posted to the group in due course, one of them very soon. Feel free, though, to post anything that I might not be aware of, and which might be interesting to others on our list.
Let's turn once again to the PSA conference in Leicester on April 15th-17th 2003. I've had various expressions of interest from people who are keen to present a paper in a panel run by the Scandinavian Politics Specialist Group. So far, these cover the following topics:
* the decline of progressive politics in Sweden
* Euro-scepticism and the Christian parties
* neo-liberalism and internationalism in the Nordic countries
* the Nordic labour movements and EU enlargement
* Swedish Social Democracy and the trade unions
* presidentialism in Sweden
Remember, our model for a panel is two papers, a discussant and a chair. At the moment, then, it looks as though we've got enough papers for two panels, on, say, (a) Euroscepticism and internationalism and (b) labour movements. So, I'd be grateful if people could do the following.
- If you've already contacted me about a paper idea, please let me know whether you're still interested, and, if you are, send me a title and very brief résumé of what the paper would cover.
- If you haven't yet contacted me, and you'd be interested in presenting a paper, let me know, with title and résumé. (That may leave us with too many papers, of course. But, to borrow a football phrase, that would be a nice problem for the manager to have.)
The deadline for panel proposals is Friday November 15th 2002, so we'll make a decision on our application a week before that (November 8th).
(I'm copying this message to the Comparative European Politics Specialist Group. If it particularly fancies one of our proposed topics, a joint panel may yet be an idea.)
Best,
Nick Aylott.
