Swedish Family Policy – Continuity and Change in the Nordic Welfare State Model

The main question addressed in this regional issue is whether or not the Nordic welfare states can still be considered a distinct welfare regime cluster given recent changes, such as the introduction of more private elements into the welfare state. The Nordic welfare states are often described as emphasizing full employment, economic and gender equality, and universal access to cradle‐to‐grave welfare state benefits and services. In the case of Sweden, often pointed to as the model of a social democratic welfare state, such elements remain intact in most aspects of the welfare state, even given the challenges presented by the global neo‐liberal economic paradigm since the 1970s. One way to determine whether or not the Nordic welfare states remain a distinct cluster is to provide an in‐depth examination of various welfare state policies in each Nordic country. To contribute to this analysis, an investigation of family policy in the Swedish context will be provided. Even given recent challenges, such as the introduction of private for‐profit childcare providers and a home care allowance, I argue that Swedish family policy has remained largely social democratic in its underlying goals, and thus acts to support the case for a distinct Nordic welfare regime cluster.     

Social Policy in Harsh Times. Social Security Development in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden during the 1980s and 1990s

For the past two decades, Nordic social policy has been subject to a range of serious challenges, among which economic problems and critiques by neo-classical economists have been most prominent. This article raises the question whether Nordic social policy has significantly changed during this period of challenges. Based on an empirical analysis of social expenditure data and three central social security programs, this article provides evidence that changes in Nordic social policy over this period have, in fact, been relatively minor. Indeed, the four welfare states of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden have shown remarkable resilience considering the harsh challenges that they have been exposed to since the early 1980s.     

Income mobility among the elderly in Sweden during the 1990s

Using a large panel dataset, this article investigates the degree of, and explanatory factors for, income mobility amongst the elderly in Sweden during the 1990s. It contributes to literature on welfare indicators for the older population as it supplements the welfare picture of the income adequacy with insights into income certainty during old age. Our methodological approach is to work with the administrative register data for Sweden, and this allows us to use a reliable record of incomes for a large sample of the elderly. Results for Sweden-born and foreign-born elderly persons are analysed separately and compared with corresponding groups of people of working age. Not surprisingly, nearly all of our results indicate that the income of the older population is more stable than that of the working age population, and upward income mobility is not as usual among the elderly as among other groups. The multivariate regression analyses identify several explanatory factors affecting those elderly who experienced income mobility. Most importantly, the death of a spouse increases the probability of downward income mobility, particularly amongst women. These and other findings of this research point to triggers of income poverty in old age that should be taken into account in policies concerned with the level and indexation of retirement income of future pensioners.     

Policy Changes in Community Mental Health: Interventions and Strategies Used in Sweden over 20 Years

The deinstitutionalization of mental health care has changed the responsibilities of involved authorities and has led to a continuous need for new treatment forms and interventions. This article describes this development in Europe, and in particular how these new conditions have been handled in Sweden over the past 20 years at the level of governmental policy‐making. Three major policy documents from 1994, 2009 and 2012 were included in this study. To increase our understanding of the policies' contents, we have used theoretical concepts concerning governance, implementation and political risk management. Although our main interest was to find out how the government handles interventions for users of the mental health care system, we found that the policy work is progressing stepwise. The first document, from the deinstitutionalization era, did not discuss interventions clearly. Instead, it was mainly concerned with both practical and economical areas of responsibility. The second document, from the post‐deinstitutionalization era, was more focused on what services should be delivered to the users, while the most recently published document to a greater extent addressed the question of how the support is supposed to be designed. The trend in European community mental health policy has been to advocate services in open forms that are integrated into the society's other care systems. This is also the case in Sweden, and continuous work is being done by the government to find strategies to support the development, and to meet the needs at both political and local levels.     

Equal Parenting when Families Break Apart: Alternating Residence and the Best Interests of the Child in Sweden

Shared, or alternating, residence for children when their parents separate is increasingly common. Sweden adopted a new policy in 1998 (modified in 2006) which gave courts the mandate to order 50/50 alternating residence against the will of one parent. Since then, the 50/50 alternating residence has become the legal norm in Sweden in cases of disputed custody. In this article, we ask how Swedish policymakers reasoned in relation to the potentially conflicting values of equal parenting post‐separation and the interests of children. More specifically, we investigate how they addressed some of the most common objections to court‐ordered alternating residence. We found that all three issues were discussed extensively during the policy‐making process, but that, in the end, none of them was seen as contradictory to the goal of promoting more equal parenting roles post‐separation through the introduction of court‐ordered alternating residence. This policy outcome, we argue, should be seen in light of Sweden's long‐standing commitment to strengthening the role of fathers in the care of children.     

Family Commitments under Negotiation: Dual Carers in Finland and Italy

This paper makes a comparison between Finnish and Italian working dual carers. Dual carers have responsibilities simultaneously at two different fronts. The selected Finnish and Italian samples of carers are doing similar care work in different settings. They negotiate care with a variety of actors and under differing circumstances. A care life story has been constructed for each participant. Then these care life stories have been compared with each other, especially at points where the need for negotiation has been evident, at life's various turning points. There are many individual similarities in negotiations performed in Finland and in Italy. However, their divergent contexts create considerable variation.     

The Choice Revolution: Privatization of Swedish Welfare Services in the 1990s

During the 1990s, the Swedish welfare state was declared by some to be in a “crisis”, due to both financial strain and loss of political support. Others have argued that the spending cuts and reforms undertaken during this period did slow down the previous increase in social spending, but left the system basically intact. The main argument put forward in this article is that the Swedish welfare state has been and is still undergoing a transforming process whereby it risks losing one of its main characteristics, namely the belief in and institutional support for social egalitarianism. During the 1990s, the public welfare service sector opened up to competing private actors. As a result, the share of private provision grew, both within the health‐care and primary education systems as well as within social service provision. This resulted in a socially segregating dynamic, prompted by the introduction of “consumer choice”. As will be shown in the article, the gradual privatization and market‐orientation of the welfare services undermine previous Swedish notions of a “people's home”, where uniform, high‐quality services are provided by the state to all citizens, regardless of income, social background or cultural orientation.     

The Local and the National in Community Care: Exploring Policy and Politics in Finland and Britain

International literature on community care tends to focus on the national level of welfare institutions and policies. However, community care is largely a locally tailored service and this paper makes a case for local comparisons of community care policies. Using local case studies from Finland and Britain, the paper argues that focusing on the local level contributes to the comparative study of community care in two ways. First, local comparisons highlight the often distinctively local nature of community care policies and thereby add to our understanding of community care. Second, local comparisons extend existing cross‐country explanations of community care by showing that community care is largely shaped by local politics, together with indirect structuring by national contexts. As such, the local case studies highlight the importance of the relationship between policy and politics, which has often been neglected in comparative research.     

Welfare and the unemployment crisis: Sweden in the 1990s

In the 1990s Sweden went through a deep economic recession accompanied by a massive increase in unemployment and a rapidly growing budget deficit. The crisis had large repercussions for the welfare of many citizens and it generated cutbacks in virtually all social policy programmes. This halted a welfare-state expansion that had been going on for decades. It also caused great concern about the state of welfare of the nation. In 1999 the Swedish Government appointed a 'Welfare Commission', a team of academic researchers who were assigned the task of drawing up a balance sheet for the development of welfare in the 1990s. The Commission delivered its final report in October 2001. This article is a condensed account of one of the more central issues for the Commission; namely, how the unemployment crisis affected already socially and economically vulnerable groups. Looking at the development over the entire decade, three groups stand out as particularly disadvantaged in terms of individual welfare resources: young adults, immigrants and single mothers. The downturn for these groups was especially accentuated in terms of employment and income. Young people and immigrants trying to get into the labour market during the crisis years faced the problems of newcomers to the systems of social protection. The poor economic development for single mothers could essentially be attributed to the shortage of work in general and of full-time work in particular that followed from the unemployment crisis. As a consequence, the importance of selective benefits increased and the relative size of all public transfers – despite rationing measures – stayed fairly unchanged. The results highlight the great influence of macroeconomic conditions and policy making for the welfare of vulnerable groups in society.     

Unemployment Protection and Family Policy at the Turn of the 21st Century: A Dynamic Approach to Welfare Regime Theory

This article contributes to the welfare state regime literature from a substantive and methodological perspective. At a very abstract level we confirm the relevance of the welfare state regime theory and stability for the period from 1971 to the end of the 1990s. However, by analyzing family policy and unemployment protection, we observe a dual transformation of the welfare state, consisting of a trend towards a ‘socialization’ of family policies and a retrenchment in unemployment insurance benefits. Our Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) of the two policy domains captures the multi‐dimensionality of the decommodification and defamilialization concepts and visualizes welfare state developments over time in a Cartesian space. This dynamic analysis provides us with a nuanced understanding of welfare state regime stability and change.     

Immigrants in Sweden's labour market during the 1980s

Using a new database, we studied the earnings of people born outside Sweden and those born in Sweden who were living in Sweden from 1978 to 1990. The results show that relative earnings of people born outside Sweden deteriorated. This is not only caused by an increasing proportion of immigrants from countries outside Europe but also by a deteriorating situation on the labour market for immigrants born in the Nordic countries or in other European countries.     

The Revenge of History – The Institutional Roots of Post‐Communist Family Policy in the Czech Republic,Hungary and Poland

The authors combine historical and sociological institutional analysis to show that despite the political and socio‐economic transformation in 1990s, the institutional development during and before the communist era provides the best explanation for current childcare policies in Central Europe. While most authors have concentrated on policy changes that have taken place in the region since 1989, this article concentrates on the historical roots of these policies and shows that today's policies are highly influenced by a certain dynamics that had already emerged under communist rule. It shows that a historical institutional approach, which analyses the ‘gendered logic of appropriateness’ and policy legacies at various critical junctures, can explain why family policies in Central Europe had already begun to differ during the communist era, why these main differences continue and why even the changes that have taken place follow logically from historical‐institutional developments.     

Social and Family Policies in Italy: Not Totally Frozen but Far from Structural Reforms

This article analyses the main shifts in the political and public discourse about families, children, elderly people, care needs and women‐friendly policies in Italy over the last two decades. It shows that while family and gender relationships have become an ideologically highly charged public issue, policies at the practical level have remained largely stagnant, marginal and fragmentary. At the same time, important institutional changes (such as the constitutional reform of 2001, which introduced a form of federalism) have created new problems of governance. The authors argue that in the face of inadequate policies, the recourse of individuals and families to old (family solidarity) and new (migrant labour) solutions may cause new tensions and inequalities.     

共财与家法——宋代饶阳李氏家族探析

宋代饶阳李氏家族以共财和家法而为时人称道,在北宋前期即被视为能够保守门阀的代表性宰相家族。本文从这两个方面对李氏家族进行了一些剖析。在宋代社会条件下,官僚家族的共财被认为是世所难及的事情。共财之难在于管理,李氏家族在财产管理方面颇有自己的特点。数代同居的李氏家族,设有专门的仓库。财产入库之后,各种消费则有详细的规矩,并形成成文的财产管理法规。在李氏家法和家风的作用下,李氏家族在较好地处理内部关系的同时,也十分重视时外部关系的处理。两方面社会关系的处理,对李氏家族的门阀维持和家族发展,均起着重要的作用。宋代官僚家族大都重视同族之间的共财,并借助其财产关系进行家法和家风的建设。这种努力的成功与否,直接影响着官僚家族门阀的维持。     

Social assistance in China and Sweden: how policy intentions are translated into local practices

This article compares social assistance policies in China and Sweden, with a special focus on the means of translating policy intentions into local practices. Unlike China, Sweden has laws regulating social assistance, which is intended to ensure a ‘reasonable standard of living’. Though considered a legal right, assistance is Sweden is means-tested. While social assistance claims are dealt with by the welfare bureaucracy in Sweden, in China the process of application involves the input of cadres, administrative officials from different levels of government, and neighbours. The challenges facing Sweden are to find ways to cope with long-term social assistance and to help recipients find work. The challenges facing China are to establish a social assistance law and standardized management procedures, and to incorporate the resources of social work.     

Combining Work and Family in Two Welfare State Contexts: A Discourse Analytical Perspective

This paper describes and compares the way in which British and Finnish mothers of dual‐career families construct discourses on the work and family interplay. Through this comparison, the paper also considers the presence or visibility of larger welfare state frameworks at the level of the discourse of mothers. The paper argues that, despite the many structural and ideological differences between the British and the Finnish welfare states, mothers living in them often construct their daily lives by using similar discursive frameworks. These discourses are, however, contextualized and interpreted differently. This level of contextualization and interpretation of the discourses is argued to be the stage where the structures and gender constructs of welfare states step in.     

Swimming against the tide: why Sweden supports increased labour mobility within and from outside the EU

While the free movement of labour in the EU is generally depicted as a positive feature of the single market, it was also controversial in the debate on EU enlargement. Actors opposing enlargement argued that large waves of migrants from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) would ‘swamp’ Western labour markets, leading to so-called social tourism and increasing xenophobia. Contrary to the developments in other countries, Sweden was one of the only three Member States to immediately open its doors to citizens from the EU accession countries of 2004 and 2007. Sweden has also been one of the few EU countries to actively promote greater liberalisation of labour migration policy for third-country nationals (TCNs) within the EU, and the new Swedish Immigration Law of 2008 dramatically liberalised the TCN labour migration policy and made it more employer-driven. We argue that in order to understand why Sweden has supported increased labour mobility within and from outside of the EU, we need to complement existing explanations by analysing the preferences of the political parties. A two-dimensional analysis focusing on economy and culture provides an understanding of why so-called unholy coalitions of parties in support of liberal labour policies have emerged in Sweden during the 2000s. The article ends with a discussion of lessons learned from the Swedish case and wider implications for rights-based mobility in the EU.     

Change and Resilience in Welfare State Policy. The Politics of Sickness Insurance in Norway and Sweden

This article compares the processes of reforming sickness insurance in Norway and Sweden. Despite the many similarities between the Norwegian and Swedish welfare states, they have taken different paths when it comes to reforming their sickness insurance systems. In the period between 1990 and 2010 Sweden changed its wage replacement levels and levels of employer financing several times, while in Norway they remain basically unchanged since 1978, notwithstanding many reform initiatives by political authorities. Why have the two cases evolved so differently? We address this question by using Peter Starke's review of the retrenchment literature which outlines four major strands of theorizing the politics of welfare reform: neo‐functionalism, conflict theories, institutionalist theories and discourse theory. Rather than treating these as providing competing explanations, the article suggests that elements from all perspectives bring insights to the case. The need for policy reform must always be communicated in a way that can be understood and approved in order to materialize as actual policy change. But discursive change and apparently seductive frames will not always be enough. This comparative analysis illustrates that the chance of success for new frames or discourses depends on the institutional, political and functional context into which they are inserted. Similar attempts at framing the need for reform and cutbacks have had different effects in the two countries depending on the character of the counter forces and extant frames reformers are up against. On the other hand, over time discourses and frames also shape institutions and political relations.     

Through the gender lens: a comparison of family policy in Sweden and China

In this study, Sweden and China's family policies, with a specific focus on their effect on gender equality, are compared. We describe the different goals and objectives of parental/maternity leave and childcare policies. The effect of family policies on gender equality, indicated by equal employment opportunities for women and the gender division of labour in the family in the two countries, is also discussed. A systematic comparison revealed that both countries included the promotion of gender equality in their policy agendas, but they varied in design and implementation. Swedish family policies assume childcare is a public concern, and women's participation in the labour market and men's involvement in childcare are considered to be crucial to achieving gender equality. In contrast, China's family policies emphasize women's participation in the labour market, but overlook the gender division of household work and childcare at home.