Anton Sylvest Lilleør from SAXO Institute at University of Copehagen is a visiting doctoral student at LUCK 16 – 27 September. The stay is financed by the National Graduate School of Historical Studies and their scholarship program for PhD students. The scholarships make it possible for doctoral students to stay for two weeks at one of the five universities within the National Graduate School (Lund University, Gothenburg University, Linnaeus University, Malmö University and Södertörn University).

We invited Anton to briefly present his project:

My PhD project is an attempt to write a history of the electorate in Danish politics. A key idea structuring this attempt is that the electorate is not only a political subject constituted by suffrage, but also an object of various kinds of knowledge production. I examine the introduction of election statistics and especially behavioural voter research and opinion polling in Danish politics with an emphasis on the post-war period. I am interested in this body of knowledge as a new statistical form of representation in politics which represented the electorate in ways that were different from traditional electoral-partisan representation. More generally my project deals with the relation between statistics and representative government, that is between a form of knowledge and a form of government.