In Cops We Trust

Ah, polls. You can always count on polls to neatly condense complex issues into simple, snappy numbers. And they also happen to make great copy - easy to write, easy to read. Nothing perks up an otherwise slow news day like a nice poll.

Two recent polls grabbed my attention. The first, as most of you know, is that comedian Jón Gnarr's joke party Besti flokkurinn ( lit. "The Best Party") is now polling high enough to win six of Reykjavík city council's 15 seats.

This news was followed by some strong reactions from the party's opponents - that there's nothing funny about playing with the future of our children, that the joke has gone too far, and so forth.

It's unfortunate that reacting in this manner to The Best Party makes you look like a humorless square. After all, The Best Party is packed with actors, comedians, musicians and artists on the list. They are decidedly cooler than parties who actually have platforms.

A lot of people are saying that The Best Party has proved that people are unsatisfied with "The Four Parties", as they are known - the conservatives, the Progressives, the Social Democrats and the Leftist-Greens. This is wrong. What the groundswell of support for the Best Party largely means is that being an entertainer with no platform trumps being a politician who has one. There are actually eight parties running for city council right now, none of them polling nearly as well as The Best Party, and all of them have platforms.

On the other hand, I have to admit, the Four Parties have done an excellent job on their own in utterly ruining the trust of this town's residents. These past few years have seen the majority coalition swing from right to left to right again, and the in-fighting within some parties has been facepalm-inducing. I personally prefer parties who have platforms. It means you can hold them accountable. The Best Party is hedging their bets - by offering nothing, you can't say they never followed through if you're disappointed with their performance.

But I can understand why people would want to see Jón Gnarr as our next mayor. It's an admittedly tempting thought - I think he's a brilliant and genuinely all-around nice guy. Let's just hope he can actually deliver if it happens.

Speaking of trust, a new poll from Market and Media Research shows that, apparently, we trust cops a whole lot more than we trust the government, the media, and the ruling parties. 78.9% said they trust the police a great deal, with only 7.4% distrusting them. At the same time, 19.3% trust the ruling coalition a great deal while 58.9% don't trust it much; 15.4% trust the media a lot while 46.9% trust it very little, and only 10.5% trust parliament as a whole, with 56.4% saying they do not trust it much at all.

Here's my amateur, absolutely-no-schooling-in-psychology explanation of these numbers:

Just as the instability within city hall has helped contribute to support for The Best Party, politicians on the national level have changed hands due to early elections brought on by public protests. Today, the economy is still weak, but getting better - which is why the ruling coalition polls slightly better than the house of parliament in general - but people still associate parliament with insecurity and, with the release of the SIC report, even more so with corruption. Policemen, on the other hand, are always policemen. That you can count on.

Yep, polls are fun. Always great copy.