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Scholarly discussions on the political power of care and care ethics have considered democratic notions such as how care recipients can make their voices heard, but the problem has recently been expanded to include how care needs can be met in a manner consistent with democratic commitments to justice, equality and freedom for all, which addresses equal access to care. Assessing the possibilities to meet this requirement shows different trade-offs in civil society, the market and publicly funded solutions. It seems that the ideals of care ethics, such as democratic access to care, sit more comfortably with publicly funded care.

While a growing body of research argues for increased attention to ethics within public administration, scholars diverge on how to conceptualize the character of public ethics. Likewise, empirical evidence regarding the role that ethics plays in the quality of service delivery is rare. The author argues that the concept of a public ethics of care is useful for public administration in welfare states. She examines the idea empirically through a large‐N analysis of frontline bureaucrats within the Swedish Social Insurance Administration. The analysis develops two general measures of a public ethics of care as well as a public ethics of justice. The author proceeds to show a clear presence of an ethics of care in the Swedish public sector. Further, analysis shows that these two ethics measures are supplementary, not contradictory, and that age is the main individual determinant behind ethics of care, strongly correlating with number of years in office. The conclusion underscores how public ethics of care results from acquired experience in fulfilling care‐oriented tasks.

AbstractThere is a long‐standing argument that citizensapos; trust in the state needs to be recurrently reproduced for policies to endure and that this also includes trust in its separate policy agencies. Such trust is likely to be more important for costlier policies, as, for example, social insurance schemes. The article explores whether short‐term changes in welfare programme generosity affect peopleapos;s trust in the agency implementing the programme. Using the example of early retirement in the encompassing welfare state of Sweden, we study a decade of significant reform (1999–2010), during which the inflow to early retirement diminished greatly, as did citizensapos; trust in the implementing Swedish Social Insurance Agency (SSIA). We conclude that citizensapos; trust is higher when implementation is more generous. Indeed, a third of the drop in citizensapos; trust in the SSIA over the period can be explained by declining levels of generosity in early retirement, with people politically to the left responding with lower trust. Theoretically, we suggest, first, that trust in implementing institutions can function as feedback to policy and, second, that there is a basic relationship between more generous policy outcome and higher trust in encompassing welfare states such as Sweden.

In frontline bureaucracy research, the dominant view holds that frontline workers resist managerial pressure to "blame the poor" by bending the rules based on moral considerations, a practice labeled "citizen agency." We suggest that frontline responses to managerial pressure are filtered through welfare state regime type. Based on in-depth study of caseworker reasoning in Sweden and Denmark, we find a "structural problem explanation" that sees reasons for clients seeking support as rooted in the structures of society—not in the individual client. We find and present two narratives hitherto not problematized in frontline bureaucracy research: the "statesperson" and the "professional."

The issue of whether political interests are gendered, and if so, how, has been a recurrent theme in research. While there have been several attempts recently to address gendered political interests theoretically, the central concept of feminism has not been explored in any depth in this context. This article uses unique data pertaining to self-identification as a "feminist" MP, and explores how it relates to gender, party and certain policy issues previously connected to women in Sweden and Denmark. The two neighboring countries both have a high representation of women, but while the Swedish government called itself "feminist," this was unthinkable in the Danish case. Our main finding is that in both countries male feminist MPs deviate from their female counterparts by not supporting "acting for women" which indicates a separate and gendered understanding of what being a male feminist implies. However, no strong association addressing intrinsic feminist male concerns such as parental leave, was found. Another possibility could be that male feminists refrain from taking agency from females, which the "acting for" option could imply. We conclude that the concept of "acting for women" needs to be abducted from its central stance in feminism as a category of representation to mirror the multifaceted contemporary landscape.