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‘Distributing Decline’: Swedish Social Democrats and the Crisis of the Welfare State

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Peter Walters
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Extract

IN SWEDEN, AS ELSEWHERE, ECONOMIC TRAUMA HAS BROUGHT the future of the welfare state onto the political agenda. The conjuncture at the end of the 1970s of a faltering economic performance together with an acute fiscal crisis has called into question the viability of welfare commitments. A widespread body of opinion sees the welfare state as a volume of expenditure which needs to be trimmed to accord with more limited economic means. Some argue more fundamentally that the welfare state, both as a fiscal burden and a set of values, contributed to the malaise of the economy and is an obstacle to its recovery. A feature of Swedish politics in the early 1980s has been the growth of electoral support for the Conservative Party which has introduced into public debate the ideas and idiom of neo-liberal political economy. The Conservatives have exploited a vein of unease extending across the political spectrum which has become concerned not only about the economic inefficiency of the welfare state, and the tax burden needed to maintain it, but also about the possibility that its institutions have limited rather than enhanced individual choices and freedoms.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 20 , Issue 3 , 01 July 1985 , pp. 356 - 369
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1985

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References

1 The Conservative, the Liberal and the Centre Parties are collectively termed by all Swedes the ‘bourgeois’ or ‘non‐socialist’ parties. Between 1976 and 1982 they formed a succession of coalition governments. For the bourgeois governments’ economic policy see Walters, Peter, ‘Sweden’s Public Sector Crisis’, Government and Opposition, Vol 18, No. 1, 1983 Google Scholar.

2 See the statement of economic policy in The Swedish Budget 1983/4, Ministry of Finance, Stockholm, 1984 (English language version).

3 See ‐The Swedish Budget 1983/4, pp. 16–17.

4 The best analysis of the role of unions in recent Swedish economic policy is Andrew Martin’s chapter on Sweden in Gourevitch, Peter et al., Unions and Economic Crisis: Britain, West Germany and Sweden, London, Allen & Unwin, 1984 Google Scholar.

5 The Swedish Budget 1983/4.

6 Figures taken from Indikator, the newsletter of SIFO (the Swedish Institute of Opinion Research), ‘The Swedish General Election’, September 1982.

7 The Swedish Budget 1983/4, p. 45.

8 The Swedish Budget 1984/5, p. 33.

9 Malm, Stig interviewed in Sweden Now, No. 3, 1984, p. 21 Google Scholar.