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Scandinavian Political Studies, Vol. 29 – No. 1, 2006 ISSN 0080 – 6757 © Nordic Political Science Association

Sweden: The Fall of the Strong State Johannes Lindvall* and Bo Rothstein†

From the 1930s to the 1980s, Swedish politics was based on the assumption that social change could be accomplished through a specific political and administrative process. National politicians decided the aims of policy, government commissions of inquiry engaged experts who compiled available knowledge, Parliament turned the resulting proposal into law, a civil service agency implemented the policy and local authorities put it into effect. This rationalistic model of social steering can be called ‘the strong state’. This article documents the fall of the strong state. It also argues that these changes to the output side of government have troubling implications for the operation of democracy. The reason is that the strong state model provided citizens with a reasonably clear idea of how public policies were – or should be – produced and implemented. As a result of the strong state’s decline, the link from elections to policy is partly obscure, partly broken. The question for the future is whether the strong state will be replaced by some new model that provides the necessary focal points for debates on public policy, or whether stable norms will remain absent due to an inherently obscure division of labour within Sweden’s policy-making and administrative structures.

Introduction What is going on with the Scandinavian democracies? In 2003, a team of Norwegian social scientists announced that many of the links in Norway’s democratic chain of command were broken (Østerud et al. 2003, 89). In the same year, a Danish team described ‘robust’ democratic institutions, concluding that ‘actually, things have gone surprisingly well’ (Togeby et al. 2003, 402). This article deals with Sweden, the largest of the Scandinavian countries. It documents a set of changes within the policy-making and administrative structures of the Swedish state, and argues that these changes to the output side of government have troubling implications for the operation of democracy. Like Denmark and Norway, Sweden has had large-scale government commissions assessing the quality of its democratic system. The first of these, initiated by the Social Democratic government in 1985 and led by four social scientists, concluded that the distinctive institutions and policy programmes * Johannes Lindvall, Department of Political Science, Göteborg University, PO Box 711, 405 30 Göteborg, Sweden. E-mail: [email protected] † Bo Rothstein, Department of Political Science, Göteborg University, PO Box 711, 405 30 Göteborg, Sweden. E-mail: [email protected]

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that had characterised Swedish politics in the postwar period were being dismantled: Sweden was turning into a new kind of democracy, more ‘individualistic’ and more similar to political systems elsewhere (SOU 1990: 44, 21–6). An end had come to ‘strong public expansion, centralized bargaining based on a historical compromise between labor and capital, social engineering and centrally planned standard solutions’ (SOU 1990: 44, 407). Ten years later, another large government commission, led by politicians, also suggested that twentieth-century models of democratic governance were out of date (SOU 2000: 1, 50–9). This time the commission issued clear policy recommendations, calling for the revitalisation of democracy by means of a strengthened civil society and improved opportunities for local governance, individual participation and institutional responsiveness (SOU 2000: 1, 240–52). The discussion in this article starts from an analysis of broad political changes that have occurred in Sweden in the last three decades. On an abstract level, our premise is that while democracy is a method for political decision making, studies of democratic government should not be limited to the input side of the political system (cf. Mettler & Soss 2004). In this respect, our emphasis is somewhat different from the articles on Denmark and Norway also published in this issue of Scandinavian Political Studies. The primary question for the Danish and Norwegian power studies is whether the ‘parliamentary chain of command’ is broken or intact – that is, an input-oriented model: the links in the chain of command are elections, political parties, competition for votes, opinion formation and the internal structures of interest organisations. The changes we identify in the Swedish case concern the output side: institutions for policy making, administration and implementation. How should the broad political changes that Sweden has undergone in the last decades be characterised? On one level, Sweden is still extraordinary in international comparison. Its government taxes citizens more than most other governments do; its welfare state is generous and universal and relies heavily on social insurance and social service provision (Lindbom 2001a). Nevertheless, institutional changes have in many ways been more far-reaching in Sweden than in other small European countries. These changes have been described in terms of the dismantling of socialist policies previously defended by the ruling Social Democrats (Svensson 2002), in terms of decorporatisation, whereby one of the world’s most centralised labour markets disintegrated and labour market organisations lost their pivotal role in policy making (Elvander 1988; Iversen 1999; Rothstein & Bergström 1999; Swenson & Pontusson 2000; Johansson 2000; Lindvall & Sebring 2005), and in terms of idea-change, through which a set of ruling ideas, blueprints for institution-building, fell victim to the ascendancy of neo-liberal economic thought (Blyth 2001, 2002). Our argument is that these trends and events should be understood in the context of a more fundamental set of changes to the character of the Swedish 48

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state. Policy changes, institutional changes and idea changes are all linked to the decline and eventual demise of a certain model of social steering that we call ‘the strong state’. What came to an end around 1990 – when a series of crucial institutional and policy changes took place almost simultaneously – was a particular understanding of how to produce public policy, taken for granted by major political parties and interest organisations. Swedish politics is no longer carried by the vision of the role of the state in society that characterised the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. In those decades, the pace of social reform was very high, there was a sense in which everything was moving forward and nothing was allowed to stand in the way of the continuous, state-led transformation of society (cf. Åberg 1990). The fall of the strong state has had important consequences. From the point of view of democratic government – our main focus here – the most important consequence is that since the strong state provided a relatively clear idea of how the preferences of voters (‘input’) were translated into policy (‘output’), the breakdown in the mechanisms of social steering presents an important challenge for democratic institutions. The idea is simple: given any plausible model of democracy, citizens need a rough idea of how public policy is produced. The question for the future, then, is whether the strong state will be replaced by some new model that provides the necessary focal points for debates on public policy and democratic politics, or whether stable norms will remain absent due to an inherently obscure division of labour within the policy-making and administrative structures of the Swedish state.

The Strong State From the 1930s to the 1980s, Swedish politics was based on the assumption that social change could be accomplished through a political and administrative process that unfolded in the following manner. Leading politicians at the national level decided the overall aims of policy in collaboration with leaders of major interest organisations, and then government commissions of inquiry engaged experts who compiled the available knowledge about the policy’s target area. This resulted in a politically, technically and administratively feasible proposal that could be turned into law by Parliament, whereupon a civil service department was given responsibility for implementation, and municipalities or other local authorities put the policy into effect. Major interest organisations generally supported this view of the political process, and frequently participated both in government commissions of inquiry and in the administrative implementation process. Beyond rationalism and planning, this political culture was based on consensus in the sense that wide political majorities and the support of interest groups were thought to be of great value (Hermansson 1993, 2003). 49

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Within this rationalistic model for politically generated social change, Swedish welfare policy was built on a special combination of two different systems for politically induced social steering. In one system, a number of central civil service departments were given the duty of administering and implementing social reform. These reform bureaucracies included the Board of Education, the Board of Housing, Building and Planning, the Board of Health and Welfare, the Labor Market Board, the Social Insurance Board and the Board of Occupational Safety and Health. Due to the differentiation between ministries and semi-autonomous, central civil service departments in Swedish administrative law, the civil service played a pivotal role in the implementation of public policies. Several large-scale national reform bureaucracies were formed during democratisation and others in the beginning of the social democratic era (the 1930s and 1940s). They became the administrative foundation of the political culture that Tage Erlander (who was prime minister from 1946 to 1969) called ‘the strong society’. Although Tage Erlander spoke of a strong society that would satisfy the expectations of citizens demanding more and more from the government as overall welfare increased, he clearly referred to a strong state, or, more precisely, he did not distinguish between the two (Ruin 1986, 233 – 40; Tilton 1990, 177). In the second administrative system, powerful municipalities and county councils were responsible for much of the practical side of social reform. In the 1960s, large municipal units were created, which – according to the principle of municipal self-government – were responsible for carrying out reform policies. Municipal administrative organisations were thereby professionalised. The two administrative systems attempted to reconcile the classic conflict between local autonomy and demands for nationwide equality. Via their advisory boards, inspections and regulations, the central civil service departments stood for the idea of a nationwide, common standardisation of policy, while the municipalities adapted programmes to local conditions. In the end, however, strong legal constraints made sure that general rules dominated the political and administrative spheres.

New Institutions In the last two or three decades, this rationalist, centralist and national political culture has changed. Centralism, rule by experts and large-scale solutions are criticised. Policy steering has been reshaped, as central planning and common national norms have had to bow to demands for local influence, decentralisation and individual freedom of choice. On an ideological level, the belief that society can be changed – or social problems managed – through a centralised and rational reform and planning process has withered. This is clear from the changing nature of government 50

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commissions of inquiry, which play a far less prominent role than before when it comes to combining expert knowledge and political legitimacy (Gunnarsson & Lemne 1998). However, the most obvious sign of the strong state’s decline is the weakening of central administrative institutions. Some administrative political changes have been spectacular, such as the closing of the National Board of Urban Planning in 1986 and the National Board of Education in 1991. Another change is the decorporatisation of public administration boards. For many decades, representatives of major interest organisations served as board members in these agencies, but this system was abolished in 1991. In 1984, the blue collar Trade Union Confederation (the LO) alone had 1,164 representatives in 664 national boards, committees or sub-committees. Other organisations with similar representation included the Employers’ Confederation, the Confederation of Professional Employees and the Federation of Swedish Farmers (Rothstein 1992). Partly because of intense conflicts between the Employers’ Federation and the blue-collar union movement, employers decided to withdraw from administrative corporatism, which led to the demise of this system. As a result, the legitimacy of national administrative agencies declined (Rothstein & Bergström 1999). Other changes have been more gradual, such as the weakening of the National Board of Health and Welfare, which has lost ground to municipalities and county councils. Having controlled the implementation of welfare policy through advisory boards, inspections and regulations in earlier periods, many civil service departments today resemble central information and staffing units. Their mission is no longer to lead the implementation of national political programmes, but to disseminate information, run contact programmes and, in some cases, to evaluate policies. Their steering functions have changed, moving away from a traditional civil servant ideal towards more network-based and managerial organisational forms (Blomqvist & Rothstein 2000). Since the 1970s, a host of new national boards and agencies have been established within the Swedish state, but many of the administrative bodies that have been created recently do not resemble the boards and agencies of the strong state era. In the 1970s, a majority of new national boards and agencies were still established to implement a new law (or set of laws). In the 1990s, only 27 percent of new administrative bodies had this objective. Instead of implementing new laws and policies adopted by Parliament, most administrative bodies established in the 1990s were set up to coordinate networks of public, semi-public and private initiatives and turn them into de facto policies which were thus established outside (or beside) the direct influence of the Riksdag and the cabinet (Rothstein 2005). These developments seem to be part of a larger international trend in public administration known as ‘from government to governance’, indicating a weakening of the institutional strength of the state (Pierre & Peters 2000). 51

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In addition, there is a new trend that is perhaps particular to the Swedish case. Since the 1980s, a large number of national administrative agencies have been set up with ideology production as their main aim. To use a phrase from the father of French structuralist Marxism, Louis Althusser, these new institutions can be seen as ‘ideological state apparatuses’ (Althusser 1971). They are not designed to implement specific policies based on laws; instead they are engaged in the production of ideological positions. Former politicians (or political aides) head most of them, or a new sort of public official that blends political and bureaucratic skills (which maybe could be labelled ‘policrats’). Thus, the traditional division of labour between the legislative and executive branches of the Swedish government has been altered: under the former division, politicians (together with major interest organisations) produced and disseminated values and ideas that were then translated into policies, while civil servants were expected to manage the execution of public programmes under applicable laws. Now, in many cases, politicians have shifted the responsibility for formulating ideological positions to this new breed in politics (half civil servant, half politician). One example is the mushrooming of the ombudsman institution within the Swedish state. Until the 1970s, this famous (and perhaps only) Swedish addition to international administrative law consisted of one administrative body: the Parliamentary Ombudsmen (‘Justitieombudsmännen’). This institution was established in 1809 as an extraordinary judicial institution to which citizens could take their cases when regular forms of appeal had already been exhausted. Since the 1970s, a number of new such institutions have been established, including the Ombudsmen for Gender Equality, for Children, for Homosexuals, for Ethnic Discrimination, for Disabled Persons and for Consumers. The activities of these new institutions tend to have a weak legal base. For example, few Swedish employers (be they private or public) have been convicted of gender, ethnic or any other type of discrimination, despite evidence that ‘inexplicable inequalities’ are common when it comes to salaries and career opportunities. Instead, the new ombudsmen think of themselves and their organisations as ideologically committed frontrunners for certain causes. As such, they produce journals and similar materials, write debate articles in major Swedish newspapers, organise conferences, fund ideologically committed ‘research’ and produce public exhibitions. In addition to the new ombudsman institutions, many old national boards and agencies have changed their roles to become more ideologically oriented, and new such administrative bodies have been set up: the National Board for Youth Affairs, the National Institute of Public Health and the National Board for Health and Welfare, to mention just a few. To take another example, a parliamentary commission of inquiry recently proposed a new government agency with the purpose of stimulating debate and informing Swedish citizens about the purpose of the European Union 52

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(EU) (Swedes are among the most EU-reluctant of all EU citizens). The government decided to form this commission in 2001. The aim was to ‘stimulate a broad public debate on the European Union . . . and contribute to increasing the public’s knowledge regarding contemporary issues related to the development of the EU’. In the course of its investigations, the commission initiated a series of education campaigns and distributed funds to a number of activities administered by nongovernmental organisations. According to the original plan, the commission was supposed to be dismantled in 2005, but the commission’s main report, published in August 2004 – entitled Stop Ignoring the EU (Sluta strunta i EU; SOU 2004: 82) – proposed that the committee should be turned into a permanent administrative body with eight employees and a SK17 million budget. Another case in point is the National Rural Development Agency, which was established in 1990 and functions more like a combination of interest group and lobby organisation than a government agency. Its main task is ‘to promote good living conditions and development opportunities for people living in rural and sparsely populated areas by influencing various sectors of society. This is achieved by sharing knowledge in the form of statistics, analyses, reports and expert opinions, and through participation in various task forces.’ In 1999, a number of Social Democratic MPs suggested that in addition to this agency, the country needed a National Board for the Big Cities to serve as a ‘promoting lobby organization’. The argument was that urban problems were as important as the needs of sparsely populated areas (Mot. 2000/01:N371). There has been very little political opposition to these developments. Even if the Social Democrats have dominated Swedish politics during the period studied, they are not the only political force behind the establishment of new agencies. The changes to Swedish political culture that we describe have a broader base than the Social Democratic Party.

New Policies The consequences of the administrative changes just described can be observed within several core policy areas. To see how the party in government – the Social Democrats – thought about social reform before the fall of the strong state, consider a report entitled Results and Reforms (Resultat och reformer), which was presented to the Social Democratic Party congress in 1964. The report noted that the ongoing transformation of Swedish society was not yet complete: When democracy had been won in politics, through universal suffrage and equal representation, we started to create democracy in everyday life: education for everyone, universal insurance for security in all turns of life, classless housing, democratic workplaces, a society with access for everyone to the fruits of culture. This was an enormous task. . . . We are therefore far from finishing. (Socialdemokraterna 1964, 109)

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It was taken for granted, in this period, that if there was a social problem, the state could and should solve it. Yet in neither of the core policy areas mentioned in the quote above – education, social policy and housing – is this still the case (cf. Lindvall 2004, 2006). The most expansive phase in the area of education policy was the 1960s, when the national government asserted control over primary and secondary education. In the following two decades, the Swedish school system remained relatively stable. However, things started changing in the second half of the 1980s, and a set of far-reaching reforms were implemented in the early 1990s (Schüllerqvist 1996; Lindensjö & Lundgren 2000). The minister for primary and secondary education in the Social Democratic government, Göran Persson, declared that the existing state bureaucracy that was in charge of national school policy would be dismantled, and its tasks would either be carried out by municipalities or simply abandoned. The education policy changes that occurred in this period have been described as ‘probably the biggest in the history of primary and secondary education’ (Lindensjö & Lundgren 2000, 116, 128). They were responses to demands for local participation, and to decreasing faith in the merits of rational planning. The most expensive part of the social policy area is social insurance, which includes programmes such as unemployment insurance and pensions. Although some important changes to the Swedish social insurance system did occur during the economic crisis in the 1990s, notably in the area of pensions, the system is mostly intact (Palme & Wennemo 1998). However, there is other evidence that the fall of the strong state has had important consequences for social policy more broadly. In the 1950s and 1960s, social policy was an element in a set of policies that arguably reconciled the objectives of economic growth and social protection. This rationalistic idea no longer informs policy making. As Jenny Andersson has demonstrated, established social policy programmes came under attack from the 1970s onwards. First, critics on the left started arguing that social policy should not be subordinated to economic imperatives. Later, critics on the right argued that existing programmes had become inefficient and the social policy domain ungovernable. This later view appears to have become widely accepted by the second half of the 1980s (Westerhäll 2002; Andersson 2003). Housing policy is an area where policy changes have been particularly dramatic (see especially the contributions to Lindbom 2001b). Like education, this area expanded in the 1960s. In the middle of that decade, for instance, the Social Democratic government promised to build one million apartments in the next ten years. The contrast to the present situation is stark. Today, housing policy – in terms of national programmes – is almost entirely dismantled, and as one scholar has noted, the depoliticisation that has occurred in this area represents ‘the end of an era’ (Strömberg 2001, 44). In the early 1990s, the Conservative-led government shut down the housing ministry, and 54

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the Social Democrats (who had actually closed the central housing bureaucracy a few years earlier) did not restore the old institutions when they returned to power in 1994. Another very clear example of the fall of the strong state is alcohol policy. Since Sweden became a member of the EU, the previous system that depended on tight government control of alcohol consumption through a retail monopoly and high taxes is crumbling. Yet as Lundqvist (2005) has shown, a strong tendency to replace central control with marketisation and liberalisation could be seen already by the mid-1980s. Historically, this has been an area with a very tight (some would say harsh) system of government steering. From about 1917 to 1954, an internationally unique system of individual rationing was in place. It was led by a government agency with a telling name: the National Board for Control. Every citizen who wanted to buy alcohol had to register with the local branch of this board, which collected all kinds of information about each individual in order to assess how much alcohol this person could handle. Its files were so detailed that the security police is known to have used it as the best available source of information about individuals (Johansson & Jansson 2000). The system collapsed due to information overload in 1954 and was replaced by a state monopoly for production, import and retail of alcohol, which along with very high taxes kept consumption low (Rothstein 1992). When we consider the policy areas just mentioned – which all belong to the social sector, broadly understood, and were essential areas of public policy making for much of the postwar period – there appears to have been a sudden outburst of reform all over the Swedish welfare model around 1990. The trajectory of reform has the properties we would expect, if we hypothesise a departure from the strong state model: expansion was halted, central bureaucracies were dismantled and policies were no longer conceived of as elements in a concerted government effort to reform society. A possible counterargument might be that the government’s attention has shifted to new areas, new social problems, instead of the old ones we have discussed so far. Yet to the extent that new policy areas have become important in Swedish politics, the government has not responded to new (or newly politicised) social problems in accordance with the strong state model – that is, by setting up government commissions of inquiry, forming central bureaucracies and giving them instructions to implement a set of laws, and integrating individual policies in a coordinated reform effort. Immigrant policy has become more important in recent decades since Sweden has received very large numbers of refugees compared to other European countries and the immigrant population has increased. Immigrant policy first developed as a separate policy area in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the beginning, the aim of immigrant policy was to attend to the specific needs of immigrants, thereby ensuring a standard of living at the 55

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same level as the Swedish-born, and policies were modelled on those pursued in other areas of the welfare sector (Borevi 2002, 89–91, 312). There were incremental changes over the 1970s and 1980s, which accelerated in the mid-1990s, when new goals, under the heading ‘integration’, were adopted. However, it seems that rhetorical changes in the 1980s and, in particular, the 1990s were never meant to lead to new or reformed programmes; they constituted an attempt to resolve apparent contradictions by the introduction of new language (Borevi 2002, 130 –3, 165). In fact, almost all existing programmes were established decades ago in the strong state period (Dahlström 2004). The area of immigrant policy is thus not so new after all, and to the extent that policies have changed, those changes in themselves testify to the fall of the strong state: away from well-defined political priorities and the establishment of bureaucracies that pursue reform in accordance with goals set by policy makers. Another area that has received a lot of attention in the international debate in recent years is family policy. Sweden’s progressive family policies arguably provide for higher birth rates and higher degrees of gender equality than elsewhere in Europe. Yet while there have been some important initiatives recently, the major family policy programmes were in fact established in the 1970s, modelled on existing programmes in other policy areas (Hinnfors 1992; Lindvert 2001). In other words, these policies have not developed and expanded in the way we would expect if the strong state had simply shifted attention from old to new areas. Overall, gender equality is an area where the state appears very ambitious at present (Svensson 2005). Still, many experts express strong dissatisfaction with the results of these policies (Gustafsson et al. 1997; Eduards 2002; Holmberg 2003). Since problems do not seem to be caused by any lack of steering ambitions, they are likely to be caused by some sort of deficiency in state capacity or decreasing trust in government. The state is no longer seen as the obvious ally for those who want to improve conditions for underprivileged groups, such as women and immigrants. Policies for gender equality are not the policies of a strong state. They have the character of general goals, and, as we noted earlier, the tangible policy instruments are often quite toothless. While the government is assertive and scientific knowledge is used to formulate policy, programmes are vague and imprecise. Finally, economic policy was crucial for the strong state (see Lindvall 2004, 2006). It was commonly assumed that the state had the capacity to manage the economy, and success in this area was seen as a prerequisite for the overall operation of the strong state (see, e.g. Socialdemokraterna 1964). The link between economic policy objectives – in particular, growth and full employment – and the idea of the strong state helps explain some peculiar features of Sweden’s economic strategies in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. For a long time, Sweden differed from other countries by virtue of its resilient 56

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pro-employment economic regime. Swedish governments made low inflation the primary objective of economic policy some 10–15 years later than the governments of most other advanced countries and, in the 1980s, Sweden was the only European democracy that used macro-economic policy to prevent job loss (Scharpf & Schmidt 2001, 321). The politics of macro-economic policy is often thought to result from the fact that while there is widespread agreement on the desirability of the main macroeconomic goals (low unemployment, optimal economic growth and low inflation), there is less agreement on their relative importance and on the best instruments for attaining them. However, a decision to change economic policy does not only have consequences for the pursuit of economic objectives in a narrow sense; it also has important implications for the government’s capacity to pursue other policies, such as social programmes, which are often designed for an economy with a certain level of employment. In Sweden, politicians used macro-economic policies to protect the strong state. The legitimacy of governments depended on the notion that they held the means to shield Sweden from the mass unemployment that plagued many other countries. No particular institutional or structural features of the Swedish political economy sheltered Sweden from the international crises in the 1970s: output growth decreased, capital mobility increased, structural crises destroyed entire sectors of the economy and wage cost increases were very high. While a few small European countries gave up fighting for full employment very rapidly when they found themselves in similar situations, Sweden’s response to these developments was to go from austere to expansionary fiscal policies, aiming for the maintenance of full employment. One of the reasons why this choice was the only conceivable option at this time was that politicians on both left and right were anxious to implement welfare policies that had been decided upon in the early 1970s and earlier. Not even the introduction of anti-Keynesian economic ideas in the late 1970s and early 1980s persuaded policy makers to give up the struggle for full employment. Changes were now more substantial than in the 1970s; policy makers gave up fiscal policy as an instrument of macro-economic stabilisation and instead used exchange rate policy to maintain full employment. But policy makers were not prepared to give up on full employment. The reason was, again, that policy choices were made in an environment where all pivotal actors adhered to the strong state ideal. Only in the early 1990s, when – as we have seen – policy makers changed policies in many other areas, did governments implement further macro-economic changes, giving low and stable inflation priority over full employment. The reason why politicians could now make this move was that the strong state was weakening, and the need to protect it was no longer a constraint on their room for manoeuvre. The strong state’s resilience thus explains why Sweden 57

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underwent the transition from full employment to disinflation 10–15 years later than other advanced, industrialised countries. In that sense, an analysis of the strong state and the political norms that it fostered is necessary for an informed explanation of the peculiar trajectory of the Swedish political economy. In conclusion, not only a direct approach (an analysis of administrative and policy-making institutions as such), but also an indirect approach (an analysis of developments in important policy areas) lends support to our claims. For decades, Swedish political culture was defined by faith in a strong state, a particular idea about how to produce public policy. This culture disintegrated over a fairly short period of time in the late twentieth century. Although our purpose here is not to explain the fall of the strong state, but only to identify and describe this change in Swedish political culture, we would like to present a few hypotheses. According to one set of hypotheses, the fall of the strong state was linked to critique from intellectuals and from within the research community. Some of it came from economists, who not only stressed that it was difficult for governments to influence economic targets such as the level of unemployment, but also called for more individual choice and private initiatives in the social sector. Another type of critique had a more leftist orientation, pointing to the welfare state’s tendency to ‘colonise’ the private sphere and to the power of heavy-handed bureaucrats attempting to direct and control the lives of citizens (SOU 1990: 44, 233–40). Furthermore, the last decades have witnessed a widespread, general critique of knowledge and research as a base for social steering, both from within the research community and from outside (Hermansson 2003). Public debates, such as the intense debate on nuclear power from the mid-1970s onwards, have shown that experts and researchers can reach diametrically opposing conclusions about research-based knowledge and its implications for public policy, which has made it difficult to gain legitimacy for the strong state’s expert-based central planning and reform. Finally, empirical research in the public policy field has identified many implementation failures in areas such as housing, poverty reduction and social exclusion: reforms have had not only unexpected, but in many cases also unwanted, results (Rothstein 1986). According to another set of hypotheses, the strong state could only survive as long as it was not challenged politically; it required that major political actors agreed on the benefits and legitimacy of this model of producing public policy. When the objectives and purposes of the strong state were no longer commonly accepted – in the political system, perhaps also among citizens in general – it could no longer serve as the unquestioned starting point for debates on public policy. The explanatory strength of these arguments, however, must await further research. 58

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Implications for Democratic Legitimacy There is no reason to be alarmist – Sweden is still a well-functioning democracy. Still, there is cause for concern. A recent book on Swedish democracy concludes that while other forms of participation have become more common over the last few decades, traditional party democracy seems to be weakening. For example, electoral participation has declined from over 90 percent in the 1970s to 80 percent in the most recent election, party identification has declined and the instability of voter preferences has increased (Holmberg & Oscarsson 2004, 35, Chapter 4, 277–88). Our purpose here is not to establish a causal relationship between the fall of the strong state and the quality of Sweden’s democracy. We will simply assume that given present concerns among social scientists – and given calls for institutional reform from government commissions such as the recent democracy audit (SOU 2000: 1) – Sweden resembles Norway rather than Denmark in the sense that few students of Swedish democracy would summarise their findings with the observation that ‘actually, things have gone surprisingly well’ (Togeby et al. 2003, 402). Other than that, we will limit our discussion to a set of conjectures about the consequences of the fall of the strong state, based on simple assumptions about the effects of administrative and policy-making structures on democratic government. The strong state model provided citizens with a reasonably clear idea of how public policies were – or should be – produced and implemented. As we noted at the outset, national politicians (in collaboration with the major interest organisations) decided the aims of policy, government commissions engaged experts who compiled available knowledge, Parliament turned the resulting proposal into law, a civil service agency implemented it and local authorities put the policy into effect. This is not the only feasible ‘chain of command’ (Østerud et al. 2003, 89; cf. Bergman et al. 2000, 257) in a democracy. There are many stable democracies where institutions interact in other ways, and given the fact that all real democracies fail to live up to some aspects of the democratic ideal, there is no single optimal model of how to organise policy-making and administrative institutions (cf. Dahl 1989, 109). Still, all theoretical models of representative democracy – both mandate models, according to which voters decide on the basis of party platforms, and accountability models, according to which voters decide on the basis of the performance of previous governments (Przeworski et al. 1999) – assume that voters have some notion of how public policies are produced and translated into action. This is why the fall of the strong state has effects on democracy. Taking the accountability model as an example, among the institutional factors that influence the capacity of citizens to assign responsibility to politicians are tendencies towards multi-level democracy 59

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and trends of New Public Management, both of which obfuscate the division of labour between decision-making bodies and administrative agencies (Kumlin 2003). These developments are related to the fall of the strong state. Yet the argument can be taken further, since focusing on specific formal institutions may be too narrow a perspective. In our analysis, institutional changes and policy changes have added up to a change in political culture, which exerts a more subtle influence than separate institutional variables on the images voters have of the political sphere. Decentralisation, Europeanisation and other transfers of political power have produced specific accountability problems, but the fall of the strong state has changed the overall norms that govern political interaction. Political norms can, as Ann Swidler (2001, 212–13) puts it, be defined as ‘the authorized beliefs of a society about itself’. In every polity, Swidler writes, there are ‘constitutive rules’ that are characterised by ‘their capacity to establish a public model of collective life’, being ‘the shared “default option” for collective action in periods of uncertainty’. The strong state supplied one set of such norms, and it has not been replaced by new norms that provide an equally clear idea of how the Swedish state works. The norms that constituted Sweden’s political culture added up to a view of the state as an instrument of social reform. As one student of Swedish politics notes, ‘to produce welfare reforms of a certain kind became what a Swedish ruler was expected to do, his – or their – raison d’être’ (Garme 2001, 137). Cecilia Garme shows that this political culture was not confined to the Social Democrats. On the contrary, her empirical analysis shows that it dominated the centre-right government that took power in 1976 as well. In other words, in Sweden, the legitimacy of democracy has been a derivative of the legitimacy of a continuing social reform effort, linked to the long Social Democratic spell of power but embraced by centre-right parties too, and with deep roots in Sweden’s political history. One clear sign of how far official Sweden has moved away from the strong state can be found in the final report of the recent inquiry about the health of Swedish democracy that we mentioned at the outset (SOU 2000: 1). This commission presented a very different ideal of democracy and the state. Instead of centralised machinery for the production of social reforms and for changing society by political means, the commission advocated a democratic ideal of ‘participatory democracy with deliberative qualities’ (SOU 2000: 1, 23). Ideas about the importance of civil society, of participation in voluntary associations and of citizens engaged in discussions about politics and society, free from hierarchy and power, had taken root. One major problem the commission pointed out was that many citizens felt powerless in their contacts with the public administration (SOU 2000: 1, 133). Thus, in contemporary political rhetoric, the ‘reform machine’ has changed from an asset to 60

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a problem. Yet even if alternative views of the purposes of political authority are conceivable, no such alternative view has yet acquired the dominant status that the strong state held. The perceived link between the legitimacy of democratic decision making and the legitimacy of policy output may explain the differences between, on the one hand, Denmark, where democracy seems to be flourishing, and, on the other hand, Norway and Sweden, where the health of democracy is more in question. As the Norwegian commission on power and democracy makes clear (Østerud et al. 2003), Norway also had a reformist state, and in Norway too, this state is in decline. Denmark has always had very different political traditions, and has not experienced the demise of a strong state model of social steering, as Norway and Sweden have. Developments in the 1990s – when less integrated, small, corporatist countries such as Denmark and the Netherlands had more economic success than integrated states such as Sweden – may even suggest that the time has come for smoother, more flexible models of social steering. In any event, when it comes to models of governance, the Scandinavian countries are far more different than is commonly believed. Returning to the Swedish case, our argument is that the link from input to output, from elections to policy, is partly obscure, partly broken. What is obscure now may become clearer as new ideas about democratic government settle into norms, but some aspects of the political culture that has replaced the strong state seem more troubling. For example, the development of ideological bureaucracies has many implications, of which we would like to point out three. First, the state, as an organisation, has become less coherent. It is no longer an instrument for the political parties that dominate the Riksdag to steer and change society. Instead, the administrative state is turning into another ideological battlefield, where sectoral interests seek power and influence. Second, the role of political parties as the main producers of policy-oriented ideology and ideas is challenged. If their role as producers of political ideas and policies are taken over by ideological state apparatuses it is no surprise that they fail to attract members. Third, this may lead to an even more fundamental change in Swedish democracy. One common, if maybe simple, view of the democratic ideal is that the state should do what the people want it to do. With the development of ideological state apparatuses, Swedish democracy looks more like a society where the state decides what the people ought to think and do. Ideological bureaucracies create ideas that they translate into proposals for policy change. They also take care of securing public support for these policies, which are then taken up by the cabinet and presented to the political parties in the Riksdag. The role of the political parties is confined to selling these ideas and policy proposals to their constituencies. The system still spins, but it spins backwards. 61

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