Policy reform and the decline of corporatism in Sweden

Abstract

This article describes the development of corporatism in Sweden from the 1970s onwards. We demonstrate that the Swedish case differs a great deal from other small European countries, such as the Netherlands and Sweden's neighbour Denmark, where corporatism is alive and well and often credited with providing for economic success in recent years. We study corporatism indirectly rather than directly, in the sense that we start from public policy changes in labour market policy, pensions, and immigrant policy, and follow the policy-making chain backwards in order to identify the norms, institutions, and actors that have mattered for policy choices, and how they mattered. Our conclusion is that Sweden has not only experienced decorporatisation in terms of formal institutional changes, but also in terms of a decline in the norms regarding social partnership that previously guided policy making and the interaction of interest organisations.