Enter the e-mail address associated with your account.
Click "send" to have your password e-mailed to you.

Email:
Institute of Public Finance

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License
Archive
print

Explaining the Survival of the Swedish Welfare State: Maintaining Political Support Through Incremental Change


Andreas Bergh, Ratio and Lund University, Sweden


Abstract
Despite challenges and doomsday predictions, the Nordic welfare states with high taxes and public expenditure are still with us. This paper describes strategic choices for policy makers of the welfare state and uses the case of Sweden to argue that the high tax welfare state has survived several challenges through a process of incremental change, where the welfare state is modified in order to maintain political support from voters who would otherwise favor cutbacks. This gradual adaptation leads to heterogeneous universality characterized by flexibility, freedom of choice, and financial solutions that involve both public and private funding. While such policies may increase inequality, they play a crucial role in maintaining political support for high taxes and expenditures. Compared to likely counterfactual scenarios, this gradual adaptation may be the political strategy that minimizes inequality in the long run.

Keywords:  Welfare state, Nordic model, institutional change, taxation

Year:  2008   |   Volume:  32   |   Issue:  3   |   Pages:  233 - 254

Full text (PDF)   |   E-mail this article   |   Download to citation manager
 March, 2008
III / 2008
DOAJ
Hrčak
RePEc
CrossRef
CrossCheck
EBSCO Publishing
ISSN 1846-887X
e-ISSN 1845-9757
In order to give you a better user experience, cookies have been stored on your computer.
By accessing the website www.fintp.hr the user has given consent to using cookies. More information