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Abstract During the 1990s, the Swedish welfare state was declared by some to be in a "crisis", due to both financial strain and loss of political support. Others have argued that the spending cuts and reforms undertaken during this period did slow down the previous increase in social spending, but left the system basically intact. The main argument put forward in this article is that the Swedish welfare state has been and is still undergoing a transforming process whereby it risks losing one of its main characteristics, namely the belief in and institutional support for social egalitarianism. During the 1990s, the public welfare service sector opened up to competing private actors. As a result, the share of private provision grew, both within the health‐care and primary education systems as well as within social service provision. This resulted in a socially segregating dynamic, prompted by the introduction of "consumer choice". As will be shown in the article, the gradual privatization and market‐orientation of the welfare services undermine previous Swedish notions of a "people's home", where uniform, high‐quality services are provided by the state to all citizens, regardless of income, social background or cultural orientation.

Summary

A challenge for governments contracting out public services is holding accountable contractors who fail to meet agreed-upon standards. In social services, contract monitoring is complicated by the fact that contracts tend to be incomplete and performance hard to assess. In this study, we examine how local governments in Sweden hold private contractors accountable in nursing home care. The main finding is that a mixture of accountability mechanisms was used, but that social accountability was seen as most effective. Marketaccountability measures like contract termination and financial sanctions could not be applied as local governments lacked the capacity to enforce them

Despite its broad usage, universalism as a concept is not always clearly defined. In this article, a multidimensional definition of universalism in social policy is developed, based on four policy characteristics: inclusion, financing, provision, and the adequacy of benefits. In the empirical part of the article, the feasibility of this definition is tested by an analysis of recent changes in the Swedish welfare state, which is typically described as universal but has undergone substantive reforms since 1990. Four social policy areas are examined: pensions, social insurance, health care, and family policy. The results indicate that Swedish welfare policies retain their universalistic character in some dimensions but have become less universalistic in others. This demonstrates that a multidimensional approach is best suited to capture in full the nature and implications of welfare state reform.

Elder care is one of the sectors where nonprofit organizations are most active. One exception is the Scandinavian countries, where the nonprofit sector plays a marginal role in this area. In the article, we ask why this is the case. The findings show that in Sweden, nonprofit organizations have found it hard to compete with for-profits and that this inability to compete, in turn, reflects their relative organizational weakness. A main argument in the article is that this weakness must be understood in the context of the historical development of the modern elder care system in Sweden, where social democratic reformers in the 1940s chose to create a universal public system for providing services to the elderly, thereby making the nonprofit sector redundant. Universalism in this interpretation was seen as incompatible with service delivery by private organizations, a view that has come to change in recent years.

AbstractShared, or alternating, residence for children when their parents separate is increasingly common. Sweden adopted a new policy in 1998 (modified in 2006) which gave courts the mandate to order 50/50 alternating residence against the will of one parent. Since then, the 50/50 alternating residence has become the legal norm in Sweden in cases of disputed custody. In this article, we ask how Swedish policymakers reasoned in relation to the potentially conflicting values of equal parenting post‐separation and the interests of children. More specifically, we investigate how they addressed some of the most common objections to court‐ordered alternating residence. We found that all three issues were discussed extensively during the policy‐making process, but that, in the end, none of them was seen as contradictory to the goal of promoting more equal parenting roles post‐separation through the introduction of court‐ordered alternating residence. This policy outcome, we argue, should be seen in light of Sweden's long‐standing commitment to strengthening the role of fathers in the care of children.