Institutional Legacies and the Role of Citizens in the Scandinavian Welfare State

In this article, I attempt to explain the different roles of Swedish and Danish citizens when they encounter the welfare state. The case chosen is primary education, the area with the greatest variation. My thesis is that the differences arc primarily explained by the different institutional legacies in the two countries, rather than the often-suggested alternatives, i.e., the different strength of the labor movements and the importance of Grundtvigian ideas in Denmark. I argue that in the first decades of the 20th century, Sweden and Denmark established two very different systems of school administration. Once established, these have shown a high, though by no means total, stability and the development has been path dependent. Due to the different institutional legacies, the same political ideas have often resulted in different decisions and measures in the two countries.