Reykjavík Grapevine - 08.10.2010, Blaðsíða 10

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The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 16 — 2010 So is a comedian really scaring Iceland's politicians away from breaking up
Parliament? That's kind of funny. Hah.
We were trolling Facebook the other
day and stumbled upon the phrase
“the Gnarr effect.” We were intrigued.
What is this so-called ‘Gnarr effect’?
WHAT DOES IT MEAN? So we tracked
down Ólafur Þ. Harðarson—the po-
litical scientist responsible for coining
the phrase. We sat down with Ólafur
(who is incidentally also Dean of the
School of Social Sciences at the Uni-
versity of Iceland), and got him to ex-
plain this catch phrase, the success of
the Best Party and what it means for
Iceland’s four established parties.

In his facebook diary Reykjavík
Mayor Jón Gnarr recently wrote
that he visited the university of
Iceland and learned that he had
become a concept in political sci-
ence—“the Gnarr effect.” do you
know what he was referring to?
Well I actually met Jón that day and
we were discussing the Best Party and
sort of what kind of party it was, ideol-
ogy and so on and so forth, and I told
him that I get a lot of foreign journal-
ists asking me for interviews to explain
the Best Party and the Gnarr phenom-
enon, if you like. And in discussing this
with foreign journalists I think prob-
ably I have coined the phrase, “the
Gnarr effect.” So it’s not really a theo-
retical political science term [laughs].
For a new party that is antiestab-
lishment, satirical, made of comedians
if you like, obtaining 1/3 of the vote is
highly unusual. And as I have been us-
ing it, “the Gnarr effect” simply refers
to the impact this extreme success of
the Best Party has had on the other
parties.

Why was the Best Party so unusu-
ally successful?
The basic reason for this great suc-
cess was two-fold. First, there was the
extremely low trust that Icelandic vot-
ers now have for the four established
parties. But, secondly, the profile of
the Best Party was very different from,
for instance, many of the protest par-
ties in Europe that had been getting
up to 10–15% in some cases. Many of
those protest parties have basically
been extreme right wing, focusing
on xenophobia, hatred of foreigners,
things like that. There has been some
electoral market for that, but they are
not getting anything like a third of the
vote.
The difference here is basically
that the Best Party presented them-
selves as a party with little emphasis
on ideology. Then it seems to me that
they had relatively nice, presentable
candidates. So my explanation of their
success is that many voters thought
that they could, by voting for the Best
Party, show their dislike of the estab-
lished parties—at low risk.

Low risk? Jón Gnarr’s platform was
about bringing a polar bear to the
zoo and things like that.
Ah, yes but people didn’t take that very
seriously. He was basically saying, ‘we
are nice guys, we have no extreme ide-
ology and we are fed up with politics
as it has been.’ When he got detailed
questions on policy, he said we have
excellent public administration that
will take care of the technicalities. A
lot of people were prepared to take
a chance on voting for such a party.
They probably thought, even if they get
some members elected, there would
be no disaster.

Back to “the Gnarr effect,” specifi-
cally what kind of impact is it hav-
ing on the established parties?
It’s basically twofold. First, the success
of the Best Party is a powerful deter-
rent against calling for new elections,
which some of the old parties would
otherwise like to do in light of the
present difficulties in government and
disagreements in parliament.
The second impact of “the Gnarr
effect,” which I don’t think has really
manifested itself to a great extent, is
that the established parties will do
some soul searching—asking, ‘what
did we do wrong? What do we have to
do to gain back the trust of the people
and avoid something like this from
happening again?’
Was the crash itself not enough to
get the parties soul searching?
To some extent. We’ve had the SIC
[Special Investigative Committee] Re-
port that is extremely critical of the po-
litical system, the political parties, the
political culture, basically how Iceland
has been practicing politics for the last
decades. And then we have this report
from the Parliamentary commission.
They basically concluded that the po-
litical culture in Iceland has serious
defects, and there are a lot of things,
both in legislation and political prac-
tices that should be reformed.
The important thing is, firstly, a
committee with representatives from
all of the parties came to the same
critical conclusion and secondly, all 63
members of parliament voted for this
resolution. That of course means that
MPs from the parties responsible for
those old practices and political be-
haviour are at least verbally saying,
‘okay this is right, we have to do some-
thing.’
A completely different question
is, ‘are they going to do something?’
So far, I have not seen many signs
that they have really been taking this
seriously enough. At least the unani-
mous passing of this parliamentary
resolution is perhaps the first sign that
all MPs are accepting that there is a
problem.

At this point though, do you think
it matters if the established parties
attempt to reform, or aren’t people
just too fed up with them?
That’s impossible to say. If you look
at history, the most likely outcome is
always that things will stay roughly
the same in terms of parties and party
support. It’s rare that major parties die
when you have great discontentment
among voters (the exception being
Italy in the early ‘90s). The old parties
almost always adapt when a new situ-
ation arises.
However, a refocus of political
agenda is far easier than changing a
heavily ingrained political culture. The
worst-case scenario for the estab-
lished parties is that the people get so
fed up that they conclude that those
rascals in conventional politics are so
bad that we can’t get anything worse.
So they can vote for anything. That
could be the Best Party. That could
be a xenophobic party. That could be
a new centre party. It’s impossible to
predict. So if the old parties do not
adapt and refresh themselves, there is
increasing probability of “the Gnarr ef-
fect.”

do you think the Best Party has
a shot in the next parliamentary
elections then?
Well, my guess is that most voters
would not be prepared to take the
risk of voting for a party like the Best
Party, with almost no ideology and lit-
tle experience, because there is more
at stake when governing the country
than governing the city.
People might think it’s okay to have
Jón Gnarr, a nice mayor in Reykjavík,
but whether they would like him to be
a Prime Minister is another question.
Voters might ask questions like, is it
likely that Jón Gnarr and those lov-
able, respectable artists would really
be good at reorganising the economy
and facing the difficult tasks of run-
ning a country with no experience in
politics.? So, when it comes to this, I
think it would be more difficult for a
party like the Best Party to succeed.

But were you not surprised when
the Best Party did so well in the
city elections?
Yes, I was surprised. As a political sci-
entist, I am trained in observing poli-
tics as they usually are, what is com-
mon, and then you get something that
is absolutely out of the ordinary, you
are really not expecting it.
One of the fascinating aspects of
Jón Gnarr and the Best Party is that
the whole operation is so ambiguous—
you never know exactly when they are
serious, when they are not. Are they
just making a parody of the political
system and giving warning to the con-
ventional politicians or is there some-
thing else to it.
We are in completely unknown
territory so we’ll just have to see how
things unfold. And I have to admit, for
a political scientist, things like this,
even though people don’t always ad-
mit it, it is of course scientifically very
interesting, just like economists, they
find economic disasters very interest-
ing, and geologists find eruptions very
interesting.
Politics | Interview
The Gnarr Effect
ANNA ANdERSE N
HöRðuR SVEINSSON
Established parties, beware!
“That is one of the fascinating
aspects of Jón Gnarr and the
Best Party, the whole operation
is so ambiguous—you never
know exactly when he is
serious, when he is not. Is he
just making a parody of the
political system and giving a
warning to the conventional
parties or is there something
else to it.”
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