Regional development policies and the constructions of gender equality: The Swedish case

Abstract.  This article uses a discursive approach to analyze how gender equality has and is being constructed and given meaning in the context of Swedish regional policy. Drawing on Carole Bacchi's 'What's the Problem? Approach', we explore how arguments concerning the new forms of regional policy are assigning different categories of people different subject positions and, in particular, we focus on the kind of subject positions that are being given to women as a group in this context. The discourse being shaped in national policy is, however, interpreted in specific contexts. Accordingly, we compare the way this new discourse is being (re)interpreted and (re)constructed and the subject positions being ascribed to women in the regional development partnerships and growth strategies in two Swedish regions: Västerbotten and Jönköping. Finally, we draw attention to how both the form and the content of Swedish regional development policies create great difficulties for politicizing gender as a power dimension in society. We suggest that regional politics has become de-politicized and argue for the need for it to be re-politicized with gender included as a conflict dimension.     

The Green Breakthrough in Sweden

Based on survey data from the Swedish Election Studies Program, the green breakthrough in Sweden is assessed. In the parliamentary election of 1988, for the first time in 70 years, a new party, the Greens, succeeded in getting representation in the Swedish Riksdag . The future situation of the Greens is very precarious, however. The analysis shows that the party's voters tend to belong to highly volatile groups in the Swedish electorate (young, big city, white collar). Furthermore, the Greens have to confront many different issue publics on environmental issues since a coherent green dimension structuring ordinary people's opinions on environmental issues has not yet developed in Sweden. The alternative green dimension is still to a very large extent an elite phenomenon in Swedish politics.     

Internationalization and Parliamentary Decision-making: The Case of Sweden 1970–1985

In this essay we discuss effects of growing interdependence and internationalization upon national political institutions. More exactly we address the question of how these processes are reflected in matters handled by the Standing Committees of the Swedish Parliament. Generally speaking, the proportion of international issues has increased continuously during the 1970s and the early 1980s. The internationalization of parliamentary work has mainly taken place outside the area of 'traditional' foreign policy. Even though internationalization is a general phenomenon in the Swedish parliament, the enhancement of international issues is particularly evident in subject areas linked to economic life in general, but issues concerning environmental policy, communications and energy policy also bear the stamp of internationalization. In spite of this internationalization of domestic politics the pattern of relations with actors on the international scene seems to be rather stable. The picture is dominated by international organizations in the Scandinavian region and Western Europe. Traditionally, the principle of consensus has governed Swedish security and defence policy. Our data support this notion. However, international issues outside the area of 'traditional' foreign policy do not bear the hallmark of consensus. The level of conflict is considerably higher and has risen, especially during the 1980s. Generally speaking, patterns of conflict in international issues do not deviate from those in 'pure' domestic policy. Thus, internationalization has also involved domestication regarding the level of conflict.     

Party Politics and the Common Good in Swedish Local Government

Local government in Sweden is usually classified as the northwest European type of local government, together with the local government systems of the other Nordic countries and Britain. In the 1990s and the early years of the new millennium, Swedish local government has been especially susceptible to the ideas of 'new public management' (NPM). At the same time there has been a long-ongoing trend of increasing party-politicisation of local councils. In this paper a selection of five local authorities are examined in order to see how party politics and party-politicisation are confronted by the new organisational doctrines. It is concluded that in this respect the doctrines guiding local government organisation can be characterised by three common traits: the legitimacy of particular interests is denied in favour of the common good of the locality; it is denied that conflict and competition between political parties perform any democratic function; finally, when it comes to the relation between politics and administration there is a common confession of the management-by-objectives doctrine. Somewhat surprisingly, these three principles guide organisation and politics not only in those authorities most enthusiastically adopting NPM but also in the authorities implementing organisational reforms based on more communitarian principles and even organisationally conservative municipalities not even considering any organisational change. One interpretation of this contradictory observation may be that NPM concepts and ideas have also found their way into local doctrines that are based on quite different principles. Another interpretation is that there is a consensus tradition in Swedish political culture that can also account for similar results in municipalities not explicitly introducing an apolitical organisation doctrine.     

National protest agenda and the dimensionality of party politics: Evidence from four East-Central European democracies

Contemporary democracies show considerable differences in the issue composition of their protest politics, which tends to remain relatively stable over time. In countries like Germany or the Czech Republic, the vast majority of protests have been mobilised around sociocultural issues, such as human rights, peace, nuclear power or the environment, and only a tiny portion of protest has focused on economic issues. At the opposite extreme, protest in France or Poland usually has a strongly economic character and voices demands relating to material redistribution and social policy. What lies behind the cross-country differences in national protest agendas? In this article, the national protest agenda depends on what issues mainstream political parties are contesting: the content and strength of the master-issue dimension. In reference to the literature on the multidimensional political space and niche political parties, one should expect that there is a substitutive effect; where the stronger a specific master-issue dimension is in party politics, the less salient that issue dimension is in protest politics. This substitutive effect results from the tendency of electoral politics to reduce political conflict to a single-dimension equilibrium, which decreases the importance of other issues and relegates the contest over secondary, niche issues to the realm of policy-seeking strategies, with protest being a common type of this political strategy. In party systems where single-dimension equilibrium does not exist and the master-issue dimension is weaker, the same dynamics result in a more convergent relationship between party and protest politics and a greater similarity between the protest- and party-system agendas. To investigate this theory, the national protest agendas in four countries are examined. The Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia show four combinations of two crucial factors that are not available in the old Western democracies: the content and the strength of the master-issue dimension. The study draws on an original dataset of protest events organised in the four countries between 1993 and 2010, and on qualitative and quantitative data on issue dimensions of party politics obtained from studies on party politics and expert surveys. The results show that in the Czech Republic, where the master-issue dimension has remained strongly economic, protest has been predominantly sociocultural. In Poland between 1993 and 2001 and Hungary between 1993 and 2006, the master-issue dimensions are strongly sociocultural, while protest is predominantly economic. There is no single-dimension equilibrium in party politics in Slovakia or in post-2001 Poland and mainstream parties compete on both economic and sociocultural issues. Consequently, the substitutive dynamics between party and protest politics is weaker and the issue agendas in party and protest arenas are here more alike.     

The Impact of the Radical Right: Lessons from the Local Level in Sweden, 2002–2006

The aim of this article is to further develop the argument that the interaction between radical right‐wing challengers and mainstream parties is bound to shape not only the trajectory of the latter, but also the future prospects of the former. Drawing on recent developments in Sweden, following the Sweden Democrats' (SD) appearance in local politics in 2002 and 2006, the article demonstrates that the SD has had an impact on the coalition practices of Swedish mainstream parties, responsible for the emergence of minority governments rather than grand coalitions. This trend suggests that the mere presence of a radical right party, although small and isolated, polarises the party system. The article supports the notion that the interaction between unequal competitors matters to the trajectory of the party system, and further concludes that the current responses of Swedish mainstream parties appear to improve, rather than to curb, the fortunes of the SD in subsequent elections. Finally, the article presents evidence indicating that the presence of the SD in local councils causes increased levels of political conflict. The results imply that the impact of the radical right is more immediate than suggested by previous research. The fact that the typically stable Swedish party system has been put under strain as a result of a seemingly minor challenge suggests that the radical right is a political force with which to be reckoned.     

Four worlds of morality politics: the impact of institutional venues and party cleavages

The most prominent theory accounting for variation of morality politics across Western Europe is the so-called Two Worlds framework. According to this approach, the presence or absence of a secular?religious cleavage in national party systems strongly affects the degree of conflict intensity and the framing of morality policy issues. This article shows that the explanatory power of the Two Worlds model could be enhanced significantly by introducing a second analytical dimension that captures the institutional venue (party politics vs. parliamentary politics), in which moral conflicts take place. This is useful because there are instances in which a religious cleavage is lacking, but moral conflicts are nonetheless highly intense and party-based (the traditionalist world), and there are cases in which the religious cleavage formally exists, but moral conflicts are nonetheless resolved in the parliamentary arena (the unsecular world).     

Is populism the third dimension? The quest for political alliances in post-crisis Spain

In this article, we defend the ideational approach to populism by arguing that populist discourses have consequences for government formation and the coalition choices of political parties. Using two attempts of government formation in Spain during 2016 as an example, we show that incorporating a populist dimension of competition alongside the two traditional relevant cleavages in Spain (left-right and center-periphery) can successfully explain agreements where approaches restricted to the two traditional dimensions fail. Essentially, populism forms a third, ideational dimension with its own content, one that can be considered alongside thick ideological dimensions in formal spatial analysis, shaping alliances among political parties.     

Does housing create votes? Explaining the electoral success of the AKP in Turkey

In this paper we examine the rise and consolidation of the Justice and Development Party (Adelet ve Kalinma Partisi, AKP) by analyzing its success in local elections. Our examination of the durability of the AKP takes into account existing explanations of Turkish electoral politics such as economic voting, center-periphery relations, and traditional party cleavages, as well as the clientelistic tendencies of Turkish parties. We argue that the intensification of neo-liberal economic policies encouraged the AKP to seek alternative sources for distributive politics, which it found in Turkey's Mass Housing Administration (TOKİ). Using political, economic, and socio-demographic data for 900 municipal districts in Turkey, we empirically analyze the relationship between TOKİ financed housing projects and the AKP's success in the three mayoral elections between 2004 and 2014. Our results show that while traditional explanations of Turkish party voting account for some of the AKP's success, distributive politics in the form of TOKİ housing projects is a stronger predictor of the party's durability.     

Reputation and Interstate Conflict

In international politics, states learn from the behavior of other nations, including the reputations states form through their actions in the international system. This article presents a model of how states process this information and examines how this learning affects international conflict. The model builds off of cognitive balance theory and foreign policy learning models and breaks new ground in its ability to provide a contextual assessment of reputation in world politics. The article then investigates whether a dyad is more likely to experience conflict if at least one state has a reputation for hostility. This hypothesis is tested empirically across all dyads in the international system from 1817 to 2000. The results indicate that states do engage in this learning behavior and that the information generated by extra-dyadic interaction of states has a significant bearing upon the likelihood of dyadic conflict .     

Democracy the Swedish Way? The Exclusion of ‘Immigrants’ in Swedish Politics

Official declarations state that Sweden is today a multicultural society. At the same time, ethnic hierarchies have become increasingly conspicuous in contemporary Sweden. Recently, a governmental inquiry on structural discrimination in Swedish society presented a report analysing the relationship between the multi-ethnic composition of the Swedish population and participation in Swedish politics. This article discusses some of the main findings of the report. On the basis of a number of case studies, it illustrates how inequalities in terms of participation and influence in Swedish politics are (re)produced. One of the main conclusions drawn in the article is that all citizens that participate in Swedish politics are faced with a series of routines, conventions and idea(l)s categorising citizens according to their perceived closeness to a Swedish 'normality'. Thus, democracy not only constitutes a formalised system of impartial procedures and conventions, routines and norms that regulate the political process in a way that guarantees freedom and equality to all participants. Rather, political participation also reflects exclusionary practices long well-documented in, for example, the housing and labour markets. In order to understand these practices, it is necessary to examine the historical interconnections between nationalism and democracy . By means of the recurrent characterisation of Swedish democracy as specifically Swedish, it becomes the job of Swedes to 'enlighten' the 'immigrants' to become 'Swedish democrats'. This specific conceptualisation of democracy is founded on the ideal of an archaic national community, which in contemporary multi-ethnic Sweden is not capable of including the whole population on equal terms.     

French Center-Periphery Relations and Science Park Development: Local Policy Initiatives and Intergovernmental Policymaking

This article focuses on new patterns of territorial governance in the aftermath of the 1982 decentralization reforms in France. The traditional "cross regulation" model developed by the Crozier school is wrong to assume culturally grounded stalemate and to suggest that local political power is nothing more than the informal access of local elites to national policymaking. Analyzing the policy of technopoles or science park development, both nationally and by way of detailed local case studies of Montpellier and Rennes, we demonstrate that, on the contray, French local and regional authorities have risen progressively to independent loci of governmental power and policymaking. Local policy initiatives are, however, embedded in a multi-level institutional fabric ranging from the local to the European level. These developments in center-periphery relations need to be placed into the context of the general decline of the traditional French public policy model, which has been stiffly challenged by the norms of market, Europe and subsidiarity. In conclusion, a comparative and interorganizational perspective suggests that France is moving toward a territorial system increasingly characterized by the dynamics of intergovernmental conflict and cooperation and best described as "quasi-federalism in unitary disguise."     

Political Parties and ‘the Immigration Issue’: Issue Ownership in Swedish Parliamentary Elections 1991–2010

Why is ‘the immigration issue’ rarely polemical for the Swedish mainstream when it divides parties across Europe? Several factors suggest fertile ground for conflict, yet parties hesitate to capitalise on anti-immigration cues. Based on interviews with Swedish MPs, the article discusses two interlinked issues. First, immigration crystallises conflicting ideological streams: market liberalism vs. value conservatism (for the centre-right) and international solidarity vs. welfare state/labour market protectionism (for the centre-left), and stressing the ‘wrong’ stream detracts attention from parties' core competencies. Second, since competition, when present, revolves around issue ownership, parties that are less trusted on immigration will divert attention to areas of higher competence. Whether immigration becomes politicised is not necessarily dependent on electoral grievances or a radical right presence but on parties' ability to handle and negotiate these conflicting streams and issue priorities. An appreciation of the party politics of immigration is thus central to understanding when, and why, immigration becomes an ‘issue’.     

A Case of Strange Bedfellows in the EU: An Institutional Perspective on the French–Swedish Cooperation on Alcohol Control

Some relationships in modern politics may intuitively be more difficult to understand than others. This article deals with what might be referred to as a case of strange bedfellows, i.e. the French–Swedish cooperation on alcohol control in the European Union (EU). The French government has actively supported the Swedish government on several occasions in discussions and disputes over alcohol control policy issues at the EU level, and this article presents and discusses three different interpretations of this support. It is concluded that, rather than reflecting current economic calculations or matching policies, the French support should be viewed in relation to an institutional perspective emphasising the importance of historical paths and inefficient histories.     

Cosmopolitanism and Global Politics

This article discusses whether global politics are the best means for achieving cosmopolitan ends. It distinguishes the cosmopolitan goal of global obligations from the cosmopolitan politics of global governance. Evidence for cosmopolitanism in society and culture is not strong. In global politics states pursue their own material interests rather than cosmopolitan goals. Copenhagen and the financial crisis did not lead to global cosmopolitan politics as might have been hoped. The article argues that it is dangerous to continue to believe in cosmopolitan politics in such a context. Cosmopolitanism is better pursued through a politics that recognises material interests, conflict, is bottom‐up and based in what is happening, rather than top‐down and optimistic about cosmopolitan attitudes.     

Transgendering Mother's Day: blogging as citizens' media,reproductive rights and intimate citizenship

Citizenship is fast emerging as a central concern for transgender politics. This article approaches the topic of transgender citizenship by investigating empirically how the practice of blogging has served as a way of claiming, or practicing, intimate citizenship for transgendered people. Theorization of intimate citizenship helps us to further our understanding of the ways in which our most private decisions and practices are inextricably linked with public institutions, law and state policies. Significantly, this development is also tied up with other characteristically late modern technological advancements, ranging from new reproductive technologies to new Information and Communication Technologies. In the case of transgender politics, such interlacings become particularly perspicacious, not only due to modern discourses concerning diagnosis and treatment, but also because the presence of social media resources affords new possibilities for the sharing of personal and political narratives about ‘being transgendered’. In this article, I investigate an event in the Swedish blogosphere, namely the way in which the national celebration of Swedish Mother's Day became a site for the contestation of the current limitations of the reproductive legal rights for transgendered people, providing an opening for a more general debate on transgender reproductive rights.     

Radical Right Populism in Sweden: Still a Failure,But for How Long?

Although radical right populist (RRP) parties were successful elsewhere in Western Europe during the 1990s, Denmark and Norway included, the Swedish RRP parties have been more or less failures. Besides the short-lived party New Democracy, which disappeared in 1994, no Swedish RRP party has managed to escape electoral marginalization. The main purpose of this article is to explain this failure. Such an explanation is approached by using explanatory factors identified from earlier research on RRP parties elsewhere. We find some factors that have worked against the emergence of a strong Swedish RRP party, namely: enduring class loyalties, especially for working-class voters; an enduring high salience of the economic cleavage dimension (and a corresponding low salience of the sociocultural cleavage dimension); a relatively low salience of the immigration issue; and finally, a low degree of convergence between the established parties in political space. However, we also find some important indicators that there may be an available niche for the emergence of a Swedish RRP party in the near future, namely: widespread popular xenophobia; a high level of discontent with political parties and other political institutions; and a potential available niche for an anti-EU party of the right. Hence, this article concludes that if a sufficiently attractive party emerges in Sweden, with a certain degree of strategic sophistication and without too visible an anti-democratic heresy, it might be able to attract enough voters to secure representation in the Swedish parliament.     

The Decline of the Swedish Model

The international literature on the Swedish model has failed to realize the severity of its economic crisis. The Swedish malaise is entirely home-made and started much earlier than international commentators realized. The sharp downturn in the performance of the public and private sectors in Sweden is a result of the overemphasis on the public sector, upsetting the earlier established balance between markets and politics. Since 1975 Sweden has been ruled by a distributional coalition that has not yet provided reforms that can take the country out of its economic difficulties.     

European Parliament Elections and Political Representation: Policy Congruence between Voters and Parties

It is often said that European Parliament elections fail as an instrument to express the will of the European people. However, while the elections are not contested at the European level and are often dominated by national issues, this does not necessarily imply that they fail to connect policy views of voters and representatives. This article examines policy congruence between voters and candidates, utilising the candidate and voter surveys of the European Election Study 2009. First, it demonstrates that policy preferences of candidates and voters are constrained by three separate policy dimensions. Second, it shows that the quality of representation is high in terms of left/right, the main dimension of conflict in European politics, but lower on the cultural and European integration dimensions. Finally, it establishes that in some cases the aggregation of national parties in political groups in the European Parliament poses problems for effective political representation.