Abstract
It has become somewhat of a truism in social policy research to argue that the understanding of policy making requires a full grasp of all political life and activity. Few have managed to do it as successfully and informatively as Sven E. Olsson in his internationally much read and quoted Social Policy and Welfare State in Sweden (Lund, Arkiv, 1990). The Swedish welfare state model has since the 1930s remained a lauded ideal continuously watched as to its capacity to survive ongoing financial and political pressures. Olsson’s original book provided a historical and empirical analysis of how ‘the Swedish model’ came to be, and how alongside other welfare systems it went from being a seen as a ‘solver’ to a ‘generator’ of problems. Twenty five years after its first publication, he has now, under the new married surname of Hort, published an extended two-volume update with the concept of ‘civil society’ added to the title. This work is equally informative about the shifting career of the very model of a welfare state, but also more critically challenging in its attempt to combine national contextual detail with broader evidence of international trends in welfare settlements.
The first volume, like the original book, covers the history, significant actors and institutions of the Swedish welfare state from 1884 to 1988. The second volume is new and directs itself to the period 1988–2015 and the ‘lost world of social democracy’. The first volume traces the early developments of social insurance and social services; the broadening definition of welfare into housing, education, labour market and family policies; and its 1930s origins in the liberal humanitarian vision of welfare intellectuals and social movements in collaboration with the Social Democratic Party. The financial crises of the 1970s and 1980s led to a mix of policy changes: administrative decentralisation and a retrenchment in provisions, except in the area of parental and child care support. Yet, with continuing economic growth, universal solidaristic aspects of the system remained despite major economic transformations, growing unemployment and the decline of Social Democratic Party hegemony.
The second volume begins by offering a useful overview of the discipline of comparative social policy, after which Hort outlines in detail the changes to Swedish welfare provision since 1990 across a broad spectrum of policies. The evidence presented shows most programmes and policies still offer protection, supporting Sweden’s ongoing reputation as a ‘good’ welfare provider. The ‘tax state’ is not gone, but has been transformed into a decentralised tax-financed welfare market with higher levels of privatisation, especially in housing, education and healthcare. ‘Employment first’ is no longer the driving policy priority and unemployment, especially among young people, has grown. The changing nature of the electorate in the light of industrial and labour market restructuring, the decline of the traditional working class, more women in politics and employment and an ageing population are also discussed. With a series of coalition governments focussing on low inflation, fiscal prudence and the saving of banks, ongoing popular support for social services has been served at the expense of labour market supportive measures. Hort sees local government as the key to understanding a new configuration of welfare supporting forces such as tenants, pensioners, environmentalists, disability groups, municipal workers: new ‘imagined welfare communities’. In the final sections, he offers an overview of the relationship between the local municipal state, voluntary associations, parishes of the Swedish Church (no longer part of the state) and local companies providing tax-financed services. These form an emergent new ‘civil society’ base for welfare supportive activities spanning class and a variety of increasingly ethnically complex groupings. The final section takes an informative comparative look at the Nordic countries, collectively still continuing to make their mark on a range of international indices of wellbeing.
History, as Hort’s books show, deepens our understanding of the welfare state, its goals, evolving structures and influential actors. History also reveals important truths in seriously recognising ‘exceptionalism’, both for welfare state theorists, eager to predict future inevitabilities, and for politicians opportunistically jumping on poorly thought through bandwagons. But history tends to encourage the search for consistencies and continuities rather than disruptions of inherently fragile institutional structures, disruptions that might call for critical revision of earlier explanations. The transformation of Swedish welfare has been profound in narrowing the egalitarian collective remit in favour of more individual choice, state decentralisation and privatisation. The dismantling of institutional welfare structures is not an easily reversible process, and whatever optimism one might feel about the future of an engaged civil society, it is not always benign or inclusive in its purposes. Hort’s acknowledged failure to access business sources of policy relevance is a weakness here, as is the absence of a critical discussion of the ideological rise of the far right. The notion of ‘tax financed’, either through state institutions or through ‘outsourced’ care, assumes that politicians are trusted to treat tax as a collective good to be fairly taken and distributed, and that the understanding of what constitutes ‘the collective’ is shared. Such trust can no longer be relied on, and nor will the collective national community on which the welfare state ideology was based be easily replaced by new civil alliances, within or between the Scandinavian countries.
Hort’s impressive trawl through a mass of official information – international, national and local, as well as audit and civil society generated – makes these volumes on Sweden an excellent source of reference in welfare state debates more generally for both students and researchers. The organisation of the volumes into a series of reasonably self-standing essays also helps in approaching the density of the material. It is only a shame that no index has been provided to assist scholars in this rich but complex field.