Navigating the Representative-Politics–Liberal-Rights Dilemma: Social Policy Designs for Nonremoved Migrants

Abstract

Although nonremoved rejected asylum seekers (NRASes) are declared unwanted, the liberal state is obliged to provide them with basic social protections. We argue that various social policy designs can mediate the representative-politics–liberal-rights dilemma and allow for (limited) access to differentiated, conditioned benefits. Drawing on migration control and welfare-state literature, the findings stem from expert interviews with stakeholders and document analysis in Austria, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Welfare-enabling approaches are context specific, varying from path dependencies in Sweden to change-resistant forms of policymaking in Austria. In the Netherlands, exclusionary measures are explained by early general welfare retrenchments.     

Same law–same rights? Analyzing why Sweden's disability legislation failed to create equal rights in mental health

This article analyzed the apparent paradox of disability rights in Sweden. Despite strong welfare state traditions and stated Government ambitions to create generous statutory entitlements for all disabled people using a single, comprehensive Disability Act, psychiatric disabilities were principally excluded from the Disability Act's rights and provisions. The study focused on Sweden's Mental Health Reform and Disability Reform using governance perspectives that traced and analyzed the policy-processes of both reforms. Theoretically guided analytical frameworks were developed to help understand the divergent reform outcomes. The first focused on legislative arguments of regulatory specificity and legal enforcement mechanisms to consider whether the Disability Act was formulated in a manner that was easier to apply to certain disabilities. The second analyzed ideological arguments and the influence of Government political beliefs that signaled specific reform ‘visions’ to implementers and thereby influenced policy implementation. The main findings are that both perspectives matter as the dual influences of legislative and ideological differences tended to exclude mental health service users from the Act's generous disability rights. The overall conclusion was that while legislation was an important regulatory mechanism, the Government's underlying ideological reform vision was also an essential governance instrument that signaled Government intentions to implementing agencies and thus influenced the creation of enduring disability rights.     

Crucial Factors in Implementing Radical Policy Change: A Comparative Longitudinal Study of Nordic Central Agency Relocation Programs

Abstract

Why do public policies succeed or fail? The aim of this article is to contribute to answering this enduring research question in policy research through a comparative study of the variable efforts by Nordic governments to relocate their central agencies from the capital regions over a period of several decades. This was a radical redistributive policy program premised on a policy instrument – coercion – which was very alien to political systems characterized as consensual democracies. Hence, it is no surprise that only two out of seven relocation programs of any substance were successful. The really intriguing research question here is how any relocation program was achievable at all in a policy context where this was very unlikely. A broadly based multi-theoretical analytical framework linking interest groups, institutions, human agency in the form of policy entrepreneurship/design and situational factors is employed to solve this research puzzle. Findings from this study offer important contributions to the following research fields: comparative public policy, radical policy change and most specifically the so-called third generation of public policy implementation research.     

A losing gamble. How mainstream parties facilitate anti-immigrant party success

The emergence of anti-immigrant parties in Western Europe has provoked very different responses from mainstream parties. Some have tried to counter the anti-immigrant parties while others have tried to recapture lost voters by taking a tougher stance on immigration. Country comparative studies have tried to determine the effectiveness of different strategies, but systematic testing has been impaired by small-n problems. This paper therefore exploits sub-national variation in 290 Swedish municipalities to investigate the effect of mainstream party strategy on anti-immigrant electoral success. The paper finds that a tougher stance on immigration on the part of mainstream parties is correlated with more anti-immigrant party support, even when controlling for a large number of socio-economic, historical and regional factors. This result indicates that mainstream parties legitimize anti-immigrant parties by taking a tougher position on immigration. However, the results presented in the paper show that it is not sufficient for one mainstream party to take a tougher position; it is only when the entire political mainstream is tougher on immigration that the anti-immigrant party benefits. What is more, the toughness of the parties on the left seems to be more legitimizing than the toughness of the parties on the right.     

瑞典积极的劳动力市场政策有效性分析

瑞典是世界上最早开始实施积极的劳动力市场政策的国家，同时也是目前世界上实施积极的劳动力市场政策力度最大的国家之一。积极的劳动力市场政策在瑞典的劳动就业中占有重要地位，是瑞典劳动就业政策的一个基本特征。瑞典积极的劳动力市场政策充分开发并利用了“边际化”劳动力资源，提高了劳动参与率，促进了不同部门之间劳动力的合理配置，但其高昂的支出也加重了财政负担，减少了正规就业。     

Technocracy,Politicization, and Noninvolvement: Politics of Expertise in the European Regulation of Chemicals

This article addresses the relationship between scientific expertise and policy in European chemicals regulation. We argue that the role of scientific expertise in the European regulation of chemicals varies across decision‐making levels, countries, and stages of the policy process. Our case study of the role of scientific expertise in the regulation of brominated flame retardants illustrates considerably different manifestations of this interconnected process across regulatory arenas, even though this case concerns a single group of substances. On the European Union level, we find a mix of technocracy and politicization; in Sweden, a clear‐cut politicization; and in Poland, noninvolvement. Such differences can be explained by a combination of factors, in particular frame dominance, and mobilization of advocacy coalitions.     

White Women. White Nation. White Cosmopolitanism: Swedish Migration between the National and the Global

Emerging from the concepts of white cosmopolitanism and white cosmopolitan femininity, this article analyses “cosmopolitan narratives” of Swedish migrant women who lived abroad for an extended period and eventually returned to Sweden. Based on eight months’ ethnographic work, including 46 in-depth interviews with migrants who had returned in Sweden, the article explores how national boundaries are both maintained and traversed in the construction of a “world citizen”. It is argued that the women’s self-identification with a cosmopolitan ethos is structured by whiteness, nationality, and class that grants uninterrupted mobility and “worldliness”. As symbolic bearers of the Swedish nation, national ideals act on the white women’s bodies internationally, in ways that both uphold and re-inscribe the nation into the global. Thus, apart from obscuring global inequalities, white cosmopolitan femininity is imbricated in both national and global politics as a place where global structures reconnect with the white nation, thereby enabling Swedish migrants to re-install themselves into contemporary global settings as self-defined cosmopolitan subjects     

Race place shape: a case study of contested racialized boundaries of belonging,embodiment, and gender in Swedish alternative media

When the alternative and separatist media site Rummet (The Room) was launched in 2014, it had immediate echo in Swedish mainstream media. The platform’s founders declared that it was for and by ‘racialized feminists and anti-racists’, and that only non-whites were welcome to participate. Criticism from the elite media focused on the separatist stance and accused the founders of being racists themselves. My discussion in this case study concerns the racialized intersections of body, space, and identity. The data consist of texts posted on Rummet’s website during January 2014, and articles in the Swedish mainstream media published during the first three months of 2014. The founders of Rummet made use of the media space to reverse the white gaze, reframe themselves and their bodies, and re-imagine place-making mediascapes and identities. The polemical debate framed the site’s separatism as a threat to social cohesion and evaded the question of white privilege.     

Sweden’s Burka Ban: Policy Proposals,Problematisations, and the Production of Swedishness

ABSTRACT

Between February 2002 and November 2018, Swedish politicians from the Centre, Christian Democrat, Moderate, Liberal and Sweden Democrat parties proposed policies to ban clothing variously referred to as the “burka,” “full-covering veil,” “face veil” and “niqab” (Arabic for face veil) at least 38 times, six at the national level and thirty-two at the municipal. Research suggests that circa 100 women in Sweden wear a “burka”; clearly these policy proposals have little to do with the burka’s prevalence. What, then, do these policy proposals attempt to govern? In this text we adopt feminist political scientist Carol Bacchi’s “what is the problem represented to be?” approach to analyse Swedish bills to regulate the burka. These policy proposals, we contend, have more to do with conceptualizing Swedishness than addressing an existing “problem” of women who wear burka.     

Åkesson at Almedalen: Intersectional Tensions and Normalization of Populist Radical Right Discourse in Sweden

This study analyses the populist radical right discourse of the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna, SD), examining how Jimmie Åkesson, the SD chairperson, conceptualized gendered social positions in the folkhem ([Swedish] people’s home) in his annual speeches in Almedalen, since the SD entered the Swedish Parliament in 2010 to date. Attention is being paid to whose voices are allowed to come forth and in which manner this is done, and to how inequalities intersecting gender and ethnicity are explained and reproduced, as means to normalize populist radical right discourse in Sweden. Theoretically, the study rests on the conceptualization of the populist radical right as a thin-centred ideology, which is contingently adapted to national politics, to which it ads “intersectionality from above” as a specific analytical perspective. The discourse-historical approach (DHA) provides the methodological tools for the analysis and facilitates its contextual positioning. The article contributes analytically to the field, shedding light on how, in the context of populist radical right discourse, welfare chauvinist appeals are employed formally to acknowledge the importance of gender equality in Sweden, and are used as a device to contour two antithetic entities: the supposedly gender-equal Swedish ethnic majority as the opposite of the allegedly deeply patriarchal migrant Other. The article also contributes empirically to the study of the populist radical right in Sweden. It provides a more nuanced picture of the party’s ideological transformations in what is envisaged to be their ideological normalization—from fringe nationalism (antidemocratic national socialism) and outright racism to welfare chauvinism and cultural racism (Islamophobic exclusionary nationalism) in conservative clothing.