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The article discusses the reasons behind the Finnish and Swedish decision to seek North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) membership following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Topics include the deep-rooted perception of Russia as a threat; the personal memories of historical conflicts and the national interests of Finland and Sweden; and the challenges of polarized public discourse and academic freedom in the context of Russia's actions.

A commonly assumed reason for the delegation of authority from a legislature (politicians) to bureaucracies is that the bureaucrats have an information advantage over the politicians, including knowledge of cost–benefit analysis (CBA). But it is reasonable to assume that the bureaucrats use their information advantage by taking all relevant aspects of policy into account? We model the use of CBA using a delegation model and then test the theoretical predictions with empirical data collected from five Swedish government agencies. The empirical results lend support both for the hypothesis that risk aversion concerning the environmental outcome, the bureaucrats' environmental attitudes, and the cost of taking CBA information into account have a considerable impact on the probability of using information from a CBA. Hence risk averse and bureaucrats with strong environmental preferences are less likely and bureaucrats with low cost of doing a CBA more likely than other bureaucrats to use CBA information. Finally, a binding governmental budget constraint may positively influence a bureaucrat's choice of using CBA information. A tentative conclusion is therefore that it may be possible to increase the use of CBA by making the budgetary consequences of policies much clearer and demanding due consideration of costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How responsive are democratic governments to business demands for tax cuts? We research this question in comparative case studies of cuts in corporate taxes and inheritance taxes in Austria and Sweden. We find that governments, regardless of partisan composition, are responsive to business demands, but that fiscal and electoral goals attenuate responsiveness. In both countries, the limited revenues generated by inheritance taxation and greater alignment of business demands with middle‐class voter interests resulted in governments heading business demands for an abolition of this tax. Goal conflict were larger for corporate tax cuts. In both countries, governments tried to minimize these goal conflict by adopting compensatory policy measures, specifically measures to broaden the tax base and simultaneous tax cuts for low‐income groups. The findings suggest that the policy output of business‐friendly tax cuts reflect a balancing of conflicting goals, rather than outright business dominance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the extent of and characteristics of localised voting in a Swedish context. Localised voting is defined as an independent act of choice in relation to local elections. Contrary to most previous research, this article suggests that localised voting should also include those who are well informed about each election but vote for the same party in the different elections and not only those that split their tickets. A citizen survey conducted in the four northernmost counties indicates that two-thirds of the voters are local; 38 percent are informed same-party voters and 28 percent split their tickets. To a large extent, the two types of localised voting are explained by different factors. The informed same-party voters tend be older and are critical of the state of democracy in their municipality whereas the split-ticket voters have weak party allegiance and generally support a small party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subject and purpose of work: This article analyzes the factors depicted in the literature as essential for the emergence of far-right parties and assesses the importance of unemployment, immigration and political establishments in the failures of the far-right wing parties in Sweden and Finland in early 2000s. Materials and methods: Multi-methods approach is used in this study including case studies and a novel technique based on Boolean algebra. Results: The findings of this paper lead to the conclusion that the correlation between unemployment rates and the electoral strength of far-right parties is weak and does not support simplistic thesis such as high unemployment leads to extremism. Moreover, despite objectively favorable conditions in terms of high immigration rates, the presence of non-European immigrants in a country does not in itself explain the emergence of far-right parties. Conclusions: The study points to the importance of political factors such as the differences between the mainstream parties and tackling the immigration issue by the Liberal Party in Sweden and the wide ideological span of the coalition government and the role of Finland's special relationship with the USSR that militated against the emergence of far-right parties in these countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Alternative perspective on "propaganda" in the public relations historiography. • Propaganda was a term that was still in use during the late 1960s. • One of Sweden's largest communication achievement during the 20th century. This article presents an alternative perspective regarding the concept of "propaganda" in the historiography of public relations. Recent scholars of public relations have rightly criticized early attempts to write the field's history as a linear progression, from propaganda to excellence. At the same time, however, the same recent scholars have come to accept a linear conceptual change, and that "propaganda" became an impossible term in liberal democratic countries in the 1960s. By using the empirical case of the massive communication efforts initiated by the Swedish Commission on Right-Hand Traffic, which was assigned to implement right-hand traffic in 1967, this article shows that the concept of "propaganda" both occurred frequently and was used in a neutral sense. To deepen the understanding of this alternative perspective, the article both presents how the historical actors conceptualized their work, and describes how the communication work of the Commission was performed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The significant increase in the number of refugees entering the European Union and the low employment rates among them remain pressing issues across Europe. While previous research has mainly focused on refugee integration prospects from the policymakers' point of view, we shift the analytical focus to how refugees perceive the introduction programme experience, examining the case of Syrian refugees to Sweden. Drawing upon semi‐structured interviews with Syrian refugees, our results suggest that the quality of language training, the complexity of the validation process for educational qualifications and the lengthy administrative procedures are perceived as important barriers hindering the access of refugees to the Swedish labour market. These barriers are differently perceived, especially by those with differing levels of education. This highlights the utility of an intersectional approach, and the continued need to explore the diversity of migrant experiences when assessing integration policies and programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand why support for anti-immigrant policies is on the increase in Sweden, we need to think about Muslim demands for parity within the country. In this context, the adhan (Muslim call to prayer) is best understood as a practice, not merely as an expression, and as all practices it forms a part of a certain way of life. The real question is whether or not other, non-Swedish, forms of life should be allowed in Swedish society. To this question all Swedish politicians, not only the Sweden Democrats, currently give a negative answer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tax evasion is a problem everywhere, but it is a much bigger policy problem in some countries than it is in others. The Italian government estimates that it loses more than 27 percent of total tax revenue to evasion, whereas the Swedish government estimates their "tax gap" to be less than 9 percent. What explains this variation? We test for the importance of culturally based attitudes and institutionally structured rules for taxes and benefits through a unique set of cross-national experiments and attitudinal surveys done in multiple locations across Italy, the UK, the United States, and Sweden. Participants in each location were presented with identical conditions based on institutional variations (tax rates, redistribution regimes, benefits) and asked to complete a survey afterward concerning their attitudes toward a number of social and political issues. A mixed-model analysis of the 2,537 subjects in our study reveals consistent influence of institutional scenarios and three attitude scales measuring pro-redistributive ideology, fiscal responsibility, and perceived government competence. Country effects, however, are more mixed and inconsistent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the September 9, 2018 election for the Swedish Riksdag, particularly focusing on turnout and the performance of the various Swedish political parties including the red-green bloc of the Social Democrats, Greens, and Left Party and the Alliance bloc comprised of the Moderates, Centre, Christian Democrats, and Liberals.

Is Sweden a failed state in the making or a paradise on earth? Neither. Sweden is a functioning democracy but it faces serious challenges. This article attempts to make sense of them. It considers issues of law and order and the emergence of parallel structures of power. It shows that Sweden, following an unprecedented wave of immigration, is experiencing an ongoing struggle to define the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Sweden, the term labor movement still designates the political collective that was formed many years ago out of the cooperative relationship between the Social Democratic party (Socialdemokratiska Arbetarpartiet, SAP) and the manual workers' trade union movement organized in the Swedish Trade Union federation (Landsorganisationen, LO). The term embraces the institutional links between the SAP and LO, as well as the ideological unity that is supposed to exist between them. There is no correspondence to this linkage with a political party in other parts of the trade union community in Sweden, for the national unions and peak organizations (or federations) of salaried employees and professional workers take a "neutral" position vis-à-vis political parties. In fact, these organizations are not regarded as parts of the labor movement, and they are usually not called trade unions but simply associations or federations. The connection between trade unions and the Social Democratic party in Sweden has a long tradition, going back to the foundation of the first modern unions in the 1880s.

The article examines the political condition in Sweden as of September 2018, with topics including the parliamentary election held on September 8, 2018, the history of social democracy in the country, and the socio-economic Counter Reformation in the early 1980s.

Democratic theories expect citizens to be able to accurately evaluate fulfilment of parties’ election pledges. We use specifically designed survey items from the Swedish National Election Study to compare citizens’ perceptions of the fulfilment of specific party pledges with actual fulfilment and assess circumstances that lead to correct evaluations. We find that political knowledge triumphs partisan attachments to incumbent parties when it comes to explaining why voters are correct. The results are interesting in light of common knowledge about the importance of partisan attachment in evaluations of general government performance: We argue that when specific election pledges are being evaluated, personal heuristics, such as attachments to incumbent parties, play a lesser role for judgements. Instead, the specificity embedded in the evaluation encourages citizens to engage in a more knowledge-based evaluation of whether pledges are fulfilled or not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine preferences for redistribution inherent in Swedish tax policy during 1971-2012 using the inverse optimal tax approach. The income distribution is carefully characterized with the help of administrative register data, and we employ behavioral elasticities reflecting the perceived distortionary effects of taxation. The revealed social welfare weights are high for non-workers, small for low-income earners, and hump-shaped around the median. At the top, they are always negative, especially so during the high-tax years of the 1970s and '80s. The weights on non-workers increased sharply in the 1970s, fell drastically in the late '80s and early '90s, and have since then increased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To paint a fuller picture of economic voters, we combine personal income records with a representative election survey. We examine three central topics in the economic voting literature: pocketbook versus sociotropic voting, the effects of partisanship on economic evaluations, and voter myopia. First, we show that voters who appear in survey data to be voting based on the national economy are, in fact, voting equally on the basis of their personal financial conditions. Second, there is strong evidence of both partisan bias and economic information in economic evaluations, but personal economic data is required to separate the two. Third, although in experiments and aggregate historical data recent economic conditions appear to drive vote choice, we find no evidence of myopia when we examine actual personal economic data. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The main purpose of this study is to examine political competition on the local level in Sweden and to empirically test two theories of political competition, namely whether the size of the unit affects the variation in political competition and whether socioeconomic standards affect the variation in political competition. The findings support the suggested causal mechanism between socioeconomic standards and competition. Accordingly, units with higher socioeconomic standards have a higher level of political competition. Some empirical findings also support the suggested causal mechanism between the size of the units and the political competition. The findings show that population size is a robust determinant of competition and that a larger population size affects competition positively. The findings show also that area size is a relatively robust determinant of competition and that area size has a negative effect on competition. However the negative effect is contrary to the expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the historical homeland of the first freedom of information law, Sweden is universally well-known for its centuries-long traditions of government transparency and respect for individual freedoms and liberties that have been deeply rooted in public mentality of people since medieval times. Today, this nation is also emerging as a global leader in advancing open data phenomena, launching an extremely wide range of public platforms in the sphere. In this respect, this article is mostly presented as a policy review of the open data movement in this Nordic state through the prism of its traditional inclination toward philosophy of open government, open economy, open source software, open science, and even pirate politics. In an attempt to understand a highly context dependable and truly multidimensional nature of the phenomena, the research analyzes various political and socioeconomic backgrounds of the open data movement, tracing interesting patterns and promising networking trends that could be observed today in the communication between its key stakeholders and demonstrating in an intrinsically empirical and illustrative manner how its fundamental pillars such as civic engagement, direct participation and public-private partnerships are exactly promoted within one given society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article I argue that the project, a governmental technology that is now widespread and accepted throughout the public sector, is not a neutral tool for implementing policy and conducting politics. Rather, my argument is that this form is intrinsically political in so far as it produces disruptions and sets boundaries for how any given task is to be performed. By mobilizing a set of optical metaphors from feminist theory of difference, I examine organizations that work for gender equality in Swedish regional development and illustrate how the governmental technology ofthe projectreflects, refracts, and diffracts the practices associated with this work. Thus, I argue that if one wishes to understand contemporary gender-equality work, it is reasonable to consider the specific effects that are produced as it passes through the project form. The short empirical illustrations given here indicate, among other things, how the project form functions in some respects as a mirror, andreflectsaspects of gender-equality work that are commonly experienced regardless of form or setting, such as encountering resistance. In other respects, the project formrefractsgender-equality work, bending it into new directions so that, for instance, securing funds and coming up with new innovative project plans takes precedence over the actual work that respondents feel they should be doing. Finally, the intersection of gender-equality work and the project form also producesdiffractioneffects, such as the emergence of hybrid consultants. These multi-faceted figures function as evaluators, controllers, activists, and disseminators of knowledge, which makes them simultaneously important to and disdained by the respondents in this study. Thus, it is concluded that the disruptive effects of the project form should be recognized as political and studied more extensively in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Central to policies relating to risk governance at the regional and local levels is the interaction between the public and private sectors also referred to as networked governance. At the same time, the role of political actors in general and policy entrepreneurs in particular, in terms of policy change, has gained considerable traction in recent policy scholarship. The purpose of this study was to investigate the change in governance arrangements resulting in the formation of a coordination network in regional flood risk management-the first of its kind in Sweden. Our research is guided by the following questions: first, would the policy change (the establishment of the networks)have taken place if a policy entrepreneur were not part of the policy transfer process? Second, what is the role of policy entrepreneurship in the implementation of the policy after its nationwide adoption? Third, what other factors played a role in the variation of the results in the implemented policy that is, the enforced networks? We find the role of a policy entrepreneur key in the policy transfer from the regional to the national level. In order to investigate the resultant networks, we draw from B. Guy Peters (1998) and his conceptualization of factors which affect the politics of coordination. In addition to the presence of a policy entrepreneur, we compare: (i) pluriformity of network members;(ii) member interdependence; (iii) redundancy of structures, and (iv) degree of formality (in terms of meetings). Our findings suggest that entrepreneurs contribute to the variation in the functionality of the enforced river groups, though other factors play a significant role as well.Most importantly, perhaps, we did not identify entrepreneurs in any of the river groups which were not functional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates a part of the party leaders' webb-tv debate staged by the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet on the 1st of September as a part of the election campaign before the elections to the Riksdag, county councils and municipal assemblies that took place on the 14 September 2014. The debate investigated in this paper deals with gender equality questions. The overall aim of this study is to examine what topics the politicians choose to discuss during the debate and what line of argumentation they use. The method used was ideological discourse analysis coupled with classical rhetoric and eristic. The results of the argumentation analysis are set in a broader framework of gender studies and the Swedish political landscape [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, Sweden is used as an example of how organised politics has changed quite dramatically in the last couple of decades. The paper argues that there are a number of points that has recently changed Swedish organised politics in rather fundamental ways. These changes entail a new actor constellation in Swedish politics and policy-making, decreased visibility of political processes and the emergence of a strong feedback loop between inequality, participation and public policies. What this amounts to is a very different form of elite-driven policy-making than the old corporatist structures. An amorphous and quite invisible but still highly elite-driven process has emerged, in which inequality has increased dramatically, and the impact of money on politics has become stronger even in Sweden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this analysis of how electoral rules and outcomes shape the internal organization of political parties, we make an analogy to primary elections to argue that parties use preference-vote tallies to identify popular politicians and promote them to positions of power. We document this behavior among parties in Sweden's semi-open-list system and in Brazil's open-list system. To identify a causal impact of preference votes, we exploit a regression discontinuity design around the threshold of winning the most preference votes on a party list. In our main case, Sweden, these narrow “primary winners” are at least 50% more likely to become local party leaders than their runners-up. Across individual politicians, the primary effect is present only for politicians who hold the first few positions on the list and when the preference-vote winner and runner-up have similar competence levels. Across party groups, the primary effect is the strongest in unthreatened governing parties. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent decades, the history of childhood and history of education have gained status as political concerns through the establishment of numerous truth commissions and inquiries into historical institutional child abuse. This article discusses the methodological and ethical dilemmas that arise when writing the history of abused children with the objective of both recognising and redressing the victims as well as offering an account of ‘what really happened’. Comparing how inquiry commissions in Ireland, Sweden and Denmark evaluate and approach victims’ oral testimonies and written records from child welfare agencies, the article explores the acts of balancing between different epistemological approaches to the concept of ‘truth’. The results suggest that while inquiries have to address and convince several audiences simultaneously, empiricist positivist methods of inquiry have dominated the approaches to ‘truth’. However, this approach has not been without ambivalence, and there are examples of constructivist approaches as well. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Though more than 100 countries have adopted gender quotas, the effects of these reforms on women's political leadership are largely unknown. We exploit a natural experiment—a 50–50 quota imposed by the national board of the Swedish Social Democratic Party on 290 municipal branches—to examine quotas’ influence on women's selection to, and survival in, top political posts. We find that those municipalities where the quota had a larger impact became more likely to select (but not reappoint) female leaders. Extending this analysis, we show that the quota increased the number of women perceived as qualified for these positions. Our findings support the notion that quotas can have an acceleration effect on women's representation in leadership positions, particularly when they augment the pool of female candidates for these posts. These results help dispel the myth that quotas trade short-term gains in women's descriptive representation for long-term exclusion from political power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Organizational reform has become a recurring solution to problems of social exclusion and unemployment. In Europe, and other parts of the world, there is a trend towards policies of 'activation' in employment and social policy. The idea of flexible, individualized and tailor-made services is coupled with managerial and market-based reforms as well as collaborative governance. In these complex structures of service provision, coordination and inter-agency co-operation have become key concerns. Based on a study of a recent reform of programmes for newly arrived refugees in Sweden (Etableringsreformen), this article seeks to contribute to the literature on governance of 'activation' by examining the consequences of mixed modes of governance (market and collaborative) on local inter-agency co-operation. Drawing on data from in-depth case studies in two municipalities, it is demonstrated how the coupling of managerial practices and quasi-markets with existing collaborative arrangements has created barriers for inter-agency co-operation. The results indicate that institutional tensions between governance forms represent an important factor for explaining governance failure in this policy area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine the implications of Sweden's reformed national pension system and how this policy reconfigures the state-citizen relationship. By applying the methodological approach of 'studying through,' the study depicts a shift in responsibility from a state level to an individual level. More specifically, I here shed light on how politicians, technocrats, and bureaucrats work to educate and foster the general public into responsible, hard working and financially literate citizens. The article further reveals that such attempts are not readily accepted or adopted by the citizens at the receiving end of the pension policy and so, instead of providing stability and security, this social security policy invokes a sense of insecurity in Swedish citizens. [Pension System Reform, Anthropology of Policy, Sweden, Studying Through] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the Swedish parliamentary elections of September 2014, focusing on how pluralism in the party system works to polarize the political climate. The former strength of the Social Democrat party is discussed, as is the role of the Alliance formed by the centre-right parties, the Moderates, Liberals, Centre Party and Christian Democrats. The Social Democrats' coalition with the Greens and the Left Party is mentioned and the implications of the election are discussed.

This article analyzes the recurrent “erosion thesis” in the governance literature, arguing that bureaucratic or procedural public-sector institutions have come to play a less significant role in public-policy formation. Evidence from the Swedish policy-making institutions referred to as “governmental commissions” and adoption of the perspective of interest organizations support the claim. Using various theories of institutional change, I show that increased government control has reduced the influence of governmental commissions on policy, but not eliminated the belief held by interest organizations that the commissions are legitimate institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article looks at Russian military activity in Sweden and in the Baltic states (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia). Particular focus is given to military readiness in these nations and to the effects of the Georgian war of 2008 and the 2014 separatist conflict in Ukraine on their foreign and military policies. Details on the Baltic states' participation in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and on NATO's military presence in the region are presented. Other topics include Finland's defense policies and the defense of the Swedish island of Gotland.

The demise of the solidaristic wage policy, followed by the introduction of individual wage setting, is one of many similar changes in the Swedish welfare regime in recent decades. These changes were often demanded by employers and then eventually accepted and implemented by parts of the labour movement, i.e. Social Democracy and its related trade unions. Ever since its introduction in 1993, however, individual wage setting has created much controversy within Kommunal (the Swedish Municipal Workers' Union), the largest trade union in Sweden. In this light, it is interesting to examine the arguments that convinced a majority of the delegates at the decision-making congresses. Two main arguments in favour of individual wage setting have been put forward by union leaders, namely that the new wage system is appreciated by members and that increased wage dispersion increases productivity, which in turn leads to higher wages. This article reviews these arguments. It is found that member surveys suffer from flaws in methodology and that the productivity argument is ill-founded. The reason for the insistence on individual wage setting must be sought elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]