Study On The Swedish Welfare State Reform

The Swedish welfare state was often seen as the most highly developed welfare state and an ideal model for social democratic welfare state. The Swedish social policy is characterized by universalism and high level of de-commodification which promote an equality of the highest standards instead of tolerating a dualism between state and market, between working class and middle class. In Swedish welfare state, all strata are incorporated under one universal insurance system and guarantee the social solidarity.In the early 1990s, however, the Swedish economy was in big trouble, the state budget had enormous deficits which the government had to cover by loans in the finance market; the right wing party alliance take power from the Swedish Social Democratic Party; high level of unemployment rate. Meantime, Neo-liberalism has posed a serious challenge to the Swedish welfare state arguing that the high taxes that generous welfare programs require distort the function of markets by creating a tax-wedge that stops numerous transactions and therefore reduces economic growth.Under the pressure, the Swedish welfare state undertook a serial welfare reform, including pension, sick insurance, unemployment insurance and public service. By analysing these reform, it was easy to find neo-liberalism idea from cutbacks and reconfigurations in welfare programmes, especially opening up to competing private actors. The Swedish welfare state faced the danger of being dismantled and losing its social democratic character after welfare retrenchment reform.In this paper, I use de-commodification and stratification which widely knows and accepted tools developed by Esping-Andersen to identify the change of social democratic, liberal and conservative ingredient in the Swedish welfare state after retrenchment reform. I argue that although the Swedish welfare state was reformed in many ways in the 1990s and some cutbacks were made, the welfare state has not been dismantled; the Swedish welfare state has still kept very strong social democratic identity and retreated the attack of neo-liberalism.The Swedish welfare state's resilience lies in its universal social welfare policy which including all the social actors into the universal welfare system, especially absorbed the white-collar class successfully and constructed a solid political league to support Swedish welfare state. In addition, the policy-feedback also did contribution to the Swedish welfare state's resilience and made it was a difficult deal to dismantle the welfare state.To conclude, the changes of the Swedish welfare state during the 1990s were incremental, rather than fundamental. Cuts have been made, but they do not sum up to a radical restructuring of the Swedish welfare state. The reason for the survival of Swedish welfare state is its organization promoting distinct attitudes of distributional and procedural justice that strengthens the inclination of citizens to support the welfare state.