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ABSTRACT
Since the 1990s, Sweden has embarked on a series of market reforms in public services, aiming for greater efficiency and better service quality. Nevertheless, the political debates do not seem to fade away and local politicians still have to decide on privatisation issues. We argue that attitude studies of local politicians are of importance and present a 2014 survey in this regard, using Swedish elderly care as one example. Our findings show that altitudinal difference between left- and right-wing politicians on private for-profit providers remains distinctive. Moreover, political orientations of individuals, political majority in the municipality, as well as privatisation level already achieved locally are identified as important factors in explaining local politicians’ willingness to privatise further. This case study serves as a good example to examine the market development of public welfare in advanced welfare states and also contributes to the contentious discussion of political roles in welfare reform.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. The reason for the relatively small share of elderly care provided by the non-profit sector is elusive. One explanation could be that Sweden has a strong public sector and activities from non-profit organisations have been performed and organised in ways such as through volunteering (Konkurrensverket Citation2013).
2. 82–85% of the total cost is covered by local tax, 10% by national tax and 5–6% by the elderly themselves. This was a more general description of funding for elderly care in Sweden. To our knowledge, more detailed data on municipality level is not available yet.
3. This was true on the national level. During our survey period, the previous election had been held in 2010 and the centre-right bloc was in charge of the national government.
4. Sweden’s Democrats got 13% of the votes in the 2014 national parliamentary elections. However, SD is normally positioned outside of these two blocs and neither left- or right-wing parties are willing to cooperate with them in the parliament.
5. Ormerod (Citation2006) once pointed out that pragmatism is a theory about meaning, characterised by weak values and uncertain cognitive frameworks. By contrast, ideology is marked by strong values and firm cognitive systems. Regarding political pragmatism, there are no abstract principles such as individual liberty, freedom, equality or beliefs about the market economy for the development of society. Ideological politics, on the contrary, is embedded with belief systems full of principles, normative ideals and other cognitive frameworks.
6. The usage of austerity is connected with slow economic growth, rising deficits, high levels of unemployment and so on. There is no obvious fiscal austerity in Sweden now. Nevertheless, we use austerity here in a similar sense as opposed to welfare expansion, c.f. Pierson (Citation2001) and Lindbom (Citation2016).
7. There are, however, studies showing that support for public welfare measures may vary among different age groups depending on the type of welfare area, see for instance Svallfors (Citation1999).
8. We conducted a pilot study first, which served as a basis for redesigning and revising the questionnaire. From the beginning of March 2014, we sent a request to all Swedish municipalities, based on the information provided by the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (Sveriges Kommuner och Landsting, SKL) asking for their cooperation and consent to participate in the survey.
9. Our survey did not include questions about personal education, background or income level. We wanted to avoid any intrusion of privacy and concomitant low response rate. Admittedly, these personal data would have been helpful in further explaining the variances in politicians’ attitudes.
10. Those choosing not to express their opinion regarding preferences for private or public providers (circa 2%) have been removed from the analysis.
11. No multicollinearity of independent variables was detected in the regression analysis.
12. Regarding our second dependent variable, namely, the optimal distribution of private/public providers, we have to admit that such a perfect point might not actually exist in the economic models because of externalities, multiple principals and information asymmetries (Hindriks and Myles Citation2006; Barr Citation2012). For analysis purposes, we used the Huber–White method, which avoids the need for assumptions of normal distribution and homoscedasticity to fit data.
13. We had one probing question in our survey (not shown in this article) and the result shows that politicians, irrespective of political orientations, share the same view that the level of transparency and political overseeing of the system should be increased.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Ming Guo
Ming Guo is a PhD candidate at Linköping University in Sweden and EHESS (École des hautes études en sciences sociales) in France, working under the framework of Erasmus Mundus Joint PhD Program-Phoenix. His research interests include elderly care marketisation, health inequalities and welfare state.
Sam Willner
Sam Willner is associate professor at the Department for Studies of Social Change and Culture at Linköping University, Sweden. His research interests are Swedish public health policies and practices from a historical perspective. He has published several articles and book chapters on these topics.