Many natural resources have degraded and collapsed despite being managed under rigorous institutional frameworks set up to ensure rational exploitation. Path dependency of dysfunction institutions has been suggested as an explanation for such undesired outcomes. We explore the role of path dependency in natural resource management by studying a 100-year evolution of Swedish fisheries. We rely on three main types of original longitudinal data collected for the period 1914–2016: (A) policy documents, (B) government spending on management and subsidies, and (C) catch and fleet data. Our analysis contrasts the periods before and after the Swedish entrance into the European Union (1995) because this marks the year when fisheries policy became beyond the direct influence of the Swedish government. We uncover four pieces of evidence suggesting the existence of a path dependent dynamic in the pre-EU period: (1) despite increasing insights on the vulnerability of fish stocks to overexploitation, national policy goals in relation to fisheries continuously promoted incompatible goals of social and economic growth but without any reference to the sustainability of the biological resources; (2) the same policy instruments were used over long periods; (3) actor constellations within the fisheries policy subsystem were stable over time; (4) neither political regime nor macroeconomic variables and fisheries performance (industry production, oil price, landing values) could explain observed temporal variation in subsidies. We conclude that key policy actors in the pre-EU period formed an "iron triangle" and thereby prevented necessary policy changes. These national reinforcing feedbacks have been weakened since EU entrance, and the indicators for path dependency show broader involvement of stakeholders, a shift in spending, and policy goals that now explicitly address ecological sustainability.
The aim of the present study is to describe and analyze the attitude of local government officials to traffic safety and to their roles in the decisions being made with regard to traffic safety measures. The purpose is also to give an overall picture of the decision-making processes in connection with specific traffic safety measures in two municipal authorities. The study has been divided into two parts. The first part was an interview study in which twenty local government officials in eleven municipal authorities were subject to in-depth interviews. The second part consists of case studies of the planning and decision-making processes with regard to traffic safety matters in two municipal authorities, where the source material in each case consists of written documentation.
The relationship between politicians and civil servants is ambiguous and potentially problematic in democratic terms. The aim of the thesis is to examine this relationship in the Swedish core executive, Regeringskansliet. More specifically, the analysis emphasises the respective role expectations of the two groups when interacting with each other. The thesis is based on two extensive qualitative interview studies with politicians and senior civil servants, one carried out in the early 1980's and one undertaken more recently. Hence it also offers an opportunity to analyse whether these expectations have changed or remained stable during the last decades. The findings reveal that the role expectations of politicians and civil servants to a high extent correspond, and have remained relatively stable over time. The relationship between politicians and civil servants is based on norms such as (conditional) trust, delegation and yet relatively close interaction. If so, politicians are unloaded by the civil service in order to handle their external responsibilities. Although relatively informal, a passive hierarchy of roles ensures the superiority of politicians and more specifically of the minister. Civil servants adapt to roles taken by politicians, although providing guidance to the politicians on how to behave in office. The division of labour is not based on the different tasks performed in the policy-making process. Instead, politicians assume responsibility for all actions and decisions – also those undertaken by the civil servants – within the ministries, while civil servants offer politicians protection and security. Taken together these results indicate that the institutionalised norms that surround the relationship between politicians and civil servants are highly powerful. Nevertheless, the thesis also reveals tendencies towards a departure from these norms, suggesting that this relationship is to some extent fragile and exposed to various attempts at reform.
The relationship between the state and municipalities has for the recent decades become increasingly complex, strained and infected. The education policy has for several decades been surrounded by different governing logics and conflicts where the conflict between the state's pursuit of national equality and the local self-determination is prominent. This study examines how this conflict affects the municipal official's approaches to the state's control of the municipal compulsory school through aimed government grants. The study consists of a qualitative interview study of six municipalities with 23 respondents. In each municipality, I have conducted interviews with municipal officials, principals and municipal politicians. The findings show that the aimed government grants should be seen in the field of tension between state and municipality and between politics and professions. Conflicts arise between the municipalities' different conditions as well as their local needs and the state's pursuit of national equality between schools. The municipal officials are assigned significant power regarding how the state and municipal governance is to be put into practice and are therefore given a coordinating central position where they must balance between state requirements, local requirements and school's requirements. The findings indicate that they seem to prioritize the state's target of national equality in favor of the local target of self-determination. The relationship between the state and the municipalities gets exposed through the role conflicts of the municipal officials, which both compete and cooperate. The conclusion is that the municipal officials should be regarded as the state's extended arm, or as "state municipal officials". They possess a double loyalty to the state and local government and must, with this double loyalty, be the guardians of the local and national democracy at the same time. There is a risk that the municipal officials' double democracy loyalty demonstrates that the local democracy ...
Already from the title of this dissertation can two important points be made. The first is that the dissertation is about the relationship between central and local government, more specifically in Sweden today. The second point is that this relationship is seen from a balance of power perspective, where the relative power of the actors is an empirical question rather than derived from a given hierarchical structure. Such a perspective is based on analysing the actors as interdependent. The central government can thus be dependent on the local government, as well as the other way around, and this interdependence can vary over time and between policy areas. This perspective differs from that of most studies, which often see the relationship either in terms of steering (that local governments are executing centrally determined policies) or local self-government (that the Swedish local governments has a constitutionally protected right to handle their own affairs within certain legal limits). I argue that both these perspectives take a hierarchical point of departure and are, to a large degree, static in their approaches, which means that they risk not discovering, or have problem explaining, changes in the relation between central and local government. To view the relationship between central and local government as interdependence leads to a focus on the resources that the actors possess. For public organisations the most relevant resources are: authority-related resources, financial resources, political resources, informational resources, and organisational resources. The central government has a power advantage concerning authority and financial and political resources while local governments generally have an advantage in terms of informational and organisational resources. The policy area chosen is Swedish refugee policy. The basic paradox within this area is that the central government grants the refugees asylum but cannot give them a place to live without the permission of the local government. This permission is accomplished through voluntary agreements signed between the National Integration Office and the local governments. It is then the local governments that integrate the refugees to Swedish society by providing housing, education, healthcare and so on while the central government is giving the local government a grant to cover the expenses. The central government has lacked political, informational and authority-related resources. The resource used to compensate for this has been the financial resource. By economic incentives the central government has encouraged local governments to increase their refugee reception. This has been the central government's universal weapon and has been used to reduce its vulnerability as well as its sensitivity. For local governments, authority-related and financial resources have been lacking. The resource that the local governments have had, all the way through the time period studied here, is the organisational resource. This is something that the central government simply cannot provide and this is why there is a relationship of interdependence – just as only the central government has authority in its power base, the local level is the only one with organisational resources.
This book, with the title Coalition rule - bloc rule - multiple rule, deals with the development of the forms of government that have been put into practice in Swedish municipalities during the period 1952-2002. Forms of government refer to how the power, in the form of chairmanship of local administrations, has been distributed between the majority and minority in the different municipal councils. Two levels are involved in this study. First a national investigation, which for the main part of the period is done in the form of a total survey. Second, more detailed case studies applicable to the development in the county of Kronoberg, Småland. As the title indicates the development of the forms of government in Swedish municipalities can be classified into three main phases. The first phase, coalition rule, means that the majority and the minority shared chairmanships of local administrations. This was valid at the time of the starting-point of the study and continued until the beginning of the 1970s. The second phase, bloc rule, was seriously modelled during the first half of the 1970s and implied that one of the traditional political blocs had all the chairmanships in a municipality. The third and last phase, multiple rule, can be said to have started in the mid 1990s. This phase was characterised by softened bloc politics, among other things as a consequence of the fact that the Green Party and various local parties had the position as the balance of power in considerably more municipalities. The theoretical framework of the study is composed by the concepts of conflict and consensus, political culture, practice, hegemony and coalition formation. These five elements seem to be interrelated, and they should serve as suitable instruments of analysis. This should make the empirical results more possible to generalise. Conflict and consensus can be connected to the political culture by the fact that the political culture in a municipality can be characterised by either conflict or consensus. The political culture can then lead to a certain practice. For example, under a long succession of terms of office, a system is applied with as far-reaching majority marks as the law allows, where one of the traditional political blocs always is in power in the municipality. There is also an ambition to develop the theoretical insights better, in particular in two cases. First, there is an effort to formulate ideal models of municipal politics on the basis of the conception of hegemony. Second, there is an attempt to integrate the human factor in the theories of coalition formation.
In this report, we draw several background pictures and discuss a number of scenarios around the challenges of the local government sector in Sweden. The ambition is to raise questions, but also to question certain accepted notions of the local government mission in Sweden. There are no easy answers on the challenges and consequences needed and there is a great need of more research in the field that both can stimulate with new angles and work as a relevant basis for decision-making. The report begins with a description of the demographic development that affects the sector from several important aspects such as investment needs, skills supply and revenue and cost development. Then there is a discussion on how the spread in conditions between local government organizations may affect equality and how these conditions can build a sustainable future local government structure.The sector has its own opportunities to meet future challenges through efficiencies. A lot of work is needed concerning management, governance and organization. The last chapter compiles several issues that requires further research.
Den här avhandlingen undersöker utvecklingen av en elektronisk förvaltning ur ett legitimitetsperspektiv. Det övergripande syftet är att analysera den reella och potentiella förändring som e-förvaltning innebär för den offentliga förvaltningens legitimitetsgrunder, både i form av hur e-förvaltning har formulerats som idé, och hur det konkret har gått till när e-förvaltning har implementerats i praktiken. Avhandlingen består av fem artiklar som undersöker olika aspekter av syftet, från idéerna bakom e-förvaltning på internationell nivå, till implementeringsprocessen på lokal nivå. Den övergripande analysen använder sig av så kallad pragmatisk institutionalism, samt perspektiv på hur legitimitet skapas och upprättshålls i förvaltningen. En fallstudie av en svensk kommun utgör det huvudsakliga empiriska materialet. Detta material kompletteras med en mindre studie av ytterligare en svensk kommun, samt dokumentstudier av den Europeiska Unionens policy för e-förvaltning. Avhandlingen lyfter fram fyra huvudsakliga slutsatser: (1) e-förvaltningsreformer bidrar till skapandet av en ny praxis, där den praktiska utvecklingen och tillämpningen av IT blir ett allt viktigare inslag i den studerade kommunens organisering och serviceutövning, (2) detta bidrar till en omorganisering av aktörsroller- och förhållanden. Ledande tjänstemän i kommunen övertar den strategiska styrningen av utvecklingsprocessen från lokala politiker, medan kommunens närbyråkrater kringgås genom att medborgaren förväntas ta ett större eget ansvar för interaktionen med förvaltningen, (3) legitimitetsgrunder såsom brukarinflytande och kundanpassning placeras därmed i förgrunden medan den politiska styrningen och bedömningen hamnar i bakgrunden, (4) dessa förändringar tyder på allt starkare inslag av en gör-detsjälv-logik, där legitimitet i genomförandeprocesser främst grundar sig i individens möjlighet till självbetjäning och självförvaltning via elektroniska kanaler. ; This thesis explores the development of an electronic government from a legitimacy perspective. The overarching aim is to analyse the actual and potential processes of change and impacts of e-government on bases of legitimacy within public administration – both with regards to how the ideas behind e-government have been formulated as well as how e-government in practise has been realised. The thesis consists of five articles that examine different aspects of the overarching aim; from the ideas behind e-government on an international level, to the practical implementation process in local government. The overarching analysis uses an institutional perspective and perspectives on the creation and maintenance of legitimacy in public administration. An in-depth case study of a Swedish municipality provides the main empirical material for the analysis. In turn, the material is supplemented with a smaller case study of another Swedish municipality, as well as document studies of the e-government policy of the European Union. The analysis arrives at four overarching conclusions: (1) egovernment reforms contribute to new practises, in which the development and application of IT is becoming increasingly central for the local organisation and the provision of public services, (2) this contributes to a reorganisation of actor roles and relationships. Leading public officials shoulder the strategic steering usually confined to local politicians, whilst street-level bureaucrats are circumvented by citizens since citizens are expected to shoulder greater individual responsibility in their interaction with administrations, (3) in turn, certain bases for legitimacy are placed in the foreground, in particular user influence and customer adaptation, whilst political steering and evaluation are downplayed, (4) these developments point at the emergence of a do-it-yourself-logic, in which legitimacy is mainly based on creating sufficient preconditions for individual selfservices and self-government through the electronic channels of administrations.
The concept of civil society has lately become fashionable in political as well as scientificcontexts. This article critically discusses the 'politics of truth' in A Persistent Democracy!, thefinal report of the Swedish Commission on Democracy. The argument in the article is that thereport over-stresses the importance of civil society and the role of individual responsibilitiesand initiatives against public arrangements and interventions, referred to in the report as statepaternalism. The report is making specific 'technologies of government' visible, as it is creatingcitizens as primarily 'moral human beings'. The problem with strategies to 'roll back theState' for the benefit of a civil society of this kind, is that they necessarily open up for inequalitiesand conflicts in-built in civil society. To deepen democracy presupposes a continuouslong-term struggle for changing predominant power structures and unequal distributionsof vital resources, material and non-material. In this perspective, the report of the Swedish Commission on Democracy does not offer an adequate answer to challenging questions forthe future of a vitalized Swedish democracy. ; Reprint ur Statsvetenskaplig Tidskrift 2000 (http://www.statsvetenskapligtidskrift.se/section.asp?id=552)
The primary aim of this study is to provide a deeper and more complete understanding of why the great municipal amalgamation (storkommunreformen) during the 1940s became the political solution to the problem that the Government believed many of Sweden's municipalities had in satisfactorily providing for a local welfare society. The study also describes the results of this large-scale reorganization process. The events examined include the political decision-making process at the national level that took place during 1939-1949, as well as the regional/local realization of these decisions during 1946-1952. The parliamentary treatment of the municipal division issue should be viewed as a good example of what researchers have termed a Swedish decision-making model. One clear manifestation of this was the fact that the national commission that investigated the question primarily formulated the principles for the reform. The committee's proposal received strong endorsements in the reports from the reviewers of the proposal. The government authorities and many of the municipalities felt that a new division of municipalities was justified. Opposition that did occur came mostly from rural municipalities with small populations. Many of these municipalities believed that the present municipal divisions functioned well as they were. Of those municipalities that were affected by amalgamation, 39 percent of them did not agree with the decision. The majority of these could agree to merge with other municipalities, but not with the municipalities stipulated by the authorities. Considering the fact that the then current divisions were based on a long tradition, demands for retaining independence could have been greater. At the same time, it should be borne in mind that 66 percent of all larger municipalities were formed using some level of force. This still indicated a relatively widely distributed opposition to the amalgamation decisions, however.
This dissertation analyses how the Government runs governmental agencies. Which management methods can and may the Government apply for the purpose of implementing political decisions through administratively independent agencies? Can political actions be conducted with rational methods? In accordance with Swedish administrative practice, Government and Parliament are to set up comprehensive objectives and establish the principal direction of activities, while the agencies are responsible for the implementation of the political decisions. The subject of the dissertation is primarily results-based reports, and results are analysed and assessed relative to the objects. The purpose of this study is to compare how management should work according to political programs and intensions, and how it actually works in Parliament, the Government and Government Office, and agencies. It is based primarily on a close scrutiny of management in eight agencies and in the Government Office, Government and Parliament. Special attention is devoted to the implementation of results-based management in Swedish administration, and also to relations between politicians and civil servants at various stages of the management process. Considerable differences between objectives and reality are found, and also considerable differences between different agencies and fields of activity. Certain parts of the results-based management model have been over-applied, due to the fact that the Government has set too many and too detailed objectives. Other parts are under-applied, and there are too few examples of systematic follow-ups and assessment of activities. Results-based management contains valuable features, primarily that results awareness is emphasized in agencies, but the Government has taken its management ambitions too far. The consequence is that necessary developments and changes in the activities of the agencies have not been implemented.
After years of various forms of cooperation between the government and various opposition parties, the Swedish parliamentary elections in 2002 resulted in a contact between the Social-democratic minority government, the Left Party, Vänsterpartiet, and the Green Party, Miljöpartiet de Gröna. The political issues included were specified in a 121 points programme, and the cooperation parties established two cooperation offices within the Swedish government administration. The cooperation offices consist of eight full time appointments as political advisors each. There are several reasons to put attention to this developed form of contact parliamentarism. The cooperation offices constitute a new form of coordination between a government and its cooperation parties, which contrasts the norm. In addition, the cooperation offices change the organization of the government administration whereby important aspects of the highly institutionalized culture in the ministries can supposedly have been affected. Thirdly, it is of importance to the representative democracy if parties that are not in a government position, and therefore cannot be held responsible, turns out to have a great deal of influence and many possibilities to affect, or even set, the political agenda. This paper describes how the cooperation offices are organised, and, secondly, discusses the consequences of the establishment of these offices for the government administration as such, but also for the parliamentary chain of governance as a whole. The conclusion is that this form of developed contract parliamentarism can break the parliamentary chain in several ways. The contract has resulted in an increase of resources in terms of economy, information and informal contacts for the two cooperation parties. The cooperation offices have also given the Left Party and the Green Party increased knowledge and experience of the government administration. The contract has, in this sense, given the cooperation parties larger influence than perhaps can be justified by their representation in parliament. ; Regeringskansliet och samhällets organisering
Regional politics is changing; it is transforming from being mainly a responsibility of the central state to a concern that is more for the regional or local governments. At the same time, there are signs of a transformation of the political system in general. The development indicates a decreasing hierarchy as the power of the state is challenged and the political agents are increasing in number. This indicates that the political agents are changing but there are also indications that the political forms are transforming. The politics is increasingly characterised by project and process politics, networks, cooperation and partnerships. This transformation is generally described as the transformation "from government to governance". New governance is one of the most frequently discussed issues in contemporary political science literature, and this has led to a wide variety of conceptualizations. Considering the changing regional politics and general changes as the political forms and agents, this thesis studies who governs the regional politics and how regional politics is governed.The purpose of this thesis is to provide empirical contributions in order to increase the understanding of changes in regional politics at the local level. This is done by dividing governance modes into typologies. Four political processes at the local level in the municipality of Åre between the years 1973-2007 are analyzed. The thesis is based on qualitative semi-structured elite interviews. The informants have been selected by snowball sampling. The interviews have also been complemented by documentary studies. The documents that have been studied are the protocols from the municipal assembly from 1973, when the municipality was created, to2007. The documents also consist of the parish archives (sockenkrönikor) governmental reports and official documents of the local and state-level government. The material has been analyzed by using process tracing.The main results of the study are that there have been changes in the regional politics at the local level in relation to the political agents and the forms of politics. The 1970s were characterized by strong state power and hierarchy. The political processes have increasingly been characterized by the typology of the new governance. The study has shown that in practice the regional politics in Åre is characterized by both traditional governance and new governance at the same time there has not been a paradigmatic shift. The elements of new governance are increasing but there are still significant signs of the traditional bureaucratic system such as hierarchy and ordered rule. As the signs of new governance increase, the political entrepreneurs play a bigger role in the processes being analyzed. The study also shows that the critique of traditional forms of governance relating to participation and influence has not become irrelevant as the signs of new governance increases.
The Reparliamentarization of Sweden? The Use and Relevance of Parliamentary Resolutions to the Government In contrast to the theory of deparliamentarization amongst parliamentary democracies, this article points to the Riksdag's use of so-called resolutions (tillkännagivanden) to the Government as a sign of growing reparliamentarization. Resolutions in the Swedish context are constitutionally non-binding but politically coercing. From this first study of a hitherto uncharted parliamentary instrument some preliminary conclusions materialise: Resolutions are more complex nowadays than 15–20 years ago requiring more effort from the Government. Parliament's use of resolutions has, broadly pictured, evolved from unanimous or bipartisan demands on often technical issues to an increasingly politicized tool of reiningin minority governments. In some exceptional cases even issuing a few so-called negative resolutions which essentially seek to infringe the Government's executive powers. Resolutions may offer a complementary measurement of a government's parliamentary strength and provide additional insights into the workings of Swedish (and potentially other countries) parliamentarism given additional research.
The aim of this thesis is to understand the decision-making processes concerning ice-breaking along the coast of Norrland, with the specific aim to analyse the activities of regional interest groups in the Norrland region and government agents at different administrative levels at the key stages of the decision-making processes: initiation, drafting and decision-making. The thesis also explores how institutional factors at different administrative levels affected the agents that were involved at those stages of the decision-making processes. As navigation along the northern Swedish coast must negotiate winter conditions which causes ports to freeze over, the government ice-breaking service functions as an instrument to compensate the export firms in Norrland for these constrains. Year-round navigation in the north Swedish coastal waters was achieved through a series of decision-making processes that took place during the period from 1940 to 1975. These decision-making processes are important to study since ice-breaking was an integrated component of the expanding heavy basic industries in Norrland and thereby for the rapidly growing exports during the 1950s and 1960s. This period is the decisive point in the economic history of the Norrland region regarding how the natural resources should be exploited and how exports should be advanced. This study concludes that the decision-making processes were initiated by government agents at different administrative levels. Official investigatory commissions were set up at several occasions to deal with issues related to the government ice-breaker service by the ministries responsible for ice-breaker policy. It is also demonstrated that the decision-making processes concerning ice-breaker investments were initiated by the government boards that were responsible for the operation of the ice-breaker service. In this respect, the study concludes that the government activities during the initiation stages should not be confused as a sign of regional interest group passivity on these issues. The activities of the interest groups during the initiation stages were primarily intended to draw attention to the problems caused by winter to regional shipping, in order to put the issue on the political agenda. As the decision-making processes proceeded into the drafting stages, the participation from regional interest groups was much more significant as the government offered interest groups forums and procedures for structural consulting through various organisational arrangements. The regional interest groups that participated in those arrangements were industrial firms in the heavy basic industries sector. In those cases other regional interest groups participated, they would promote the interests of those firms. As a result, the final drafts from committees and government bodies included arguments that favoured an expansion of ice-breaking to promote the growth of the heavy basic industries in the Norrland region. The analysis of the decision-making stages suggests that a combination of institutional factors at different administrative levels contributed to the outcome of the decision-making processes. One result is that the general aims of macro policy such as trade policy, growth policy and regional development policy were favourable towards an expansion of the government ice-breaker service, which would benefit the export industries in the Norrland region. Another result is that the sectoral organization within the government maritime bodies contributed significantly to the outcome of the decision-making processes. Large-scale planning and operational experimentation was allowed to take place within the ice-breaker service, which convinced the government that ice-breaking and winter navigation was a feasible transport alternative.
