Introduction: Historical and theoretical perspectives on Scandinavian political systems

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Notes

1. Earlier versions of the articles in the symposium were presented at the workshop ‘The Democratic Audits in the Nordic States’, Workshop on Small States, Centre for Small States Studies (CSSS), Reykjavík, Iceland, 17–18 September 2004 and at the Symposium on Scandinavian Democracy, Centre for Public Sector Research (CEFOS), Göteborg, Sweden, 23–24 February 2005. I wish to thank CSSS and CEFOS for financing these seminars. I would also like to thank two anonymous referees who contributed helpful comments on the entire symposium, and also my fellow authors and the following colleagues who contributed valuable comments on earlier versions of this introduction: Nina Granqvist, Marcia Grimes, Björn Harström, Tomas Jonsson, Susan Marton, Lennart Nilsson and Ulf Olsson. Lastly, it should be mentioned that my own contribution to the realization of this symposium was carried out within the scope of the research project ‘A new institutional landscape. The national system for growth and distribution under transition’, financed by the Swedish Research Council (registration number 2003–1893).

2. The audits' designs and approaches are described in each of the subsequent articles.

3. To the institutional changes, one may also add some major policy changes carried out in Scandinavia over the last two to three decades. First, Keynesian stabilization policies were abandonned in the 1970s and 1980s. Instead, export competitiveness was identified as the source of exposure and prioritized as a prerequisite for economic growth and prosperity. Even though small economies, like the Scandinavian ones, generally continue to be more dependent on external trade, under the new economic policy strategy this has become a difference in degree which no longer seems to inform a significantly different outlook. Second, privatization and deregulation have taken place within previously state-owned infrastructures and in the public sector, while the ambitious public welfare system and strong labour market policies have basically remained. These latter changes have been debated in Scandinavia, and to a domestic observer they seem dramatic but to a foreigner the Scandinavian-specific characteristics are still striking, at least in regard to the extensive public sector (cf. Olsson et al. 2003).

4. On how European social democratic parties formulate a position toward, and take part in, the European integration processes, see, for example, Notermans (2001).

5. For an exposition on the Swedish version of the Scandinavian type of local self-government, including reasoning about the ‘fulfilment of the people's will’, see Strömberg and Westerståhl (1984).

6. Cf. Nilsson (1999), where a four-part distinction on individual ‘roles’ is delineated: voters, taxpayers, citizens and users/clients.

7. Cf. the concept feedback-loop (Easton 1965).

8. For a thorough comparative analysis on how Scandinavian social democratic parties in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries chose to approach parliamentary government and develop civic ideologies, see Jonsson (2005).

9. This criticism has, for example, been formulated either in terms of paternalism: preferential choice of welfare services should be done individually; or in terms of economic crowding-out effects: resources are most efficiently allocated in the private sector of the economy.