We found a match
Your institution may have rights to this item. Sign in to continue.
- Title
The Perils of Vanguardism: Explaining radical cuts to unemployment insurance in Sweden.
- Authors
Gordon, Joshua C
- Abstract
Over the past 25 years, Sweden has gone from having one of the most generous unemployment benefit systems among the rich democracies to one of the least. This article advances a multi-causal explanation for this unexpected outcome. It shows how the benefit system became a target of successive right-wing governments due to its role in fostering social democratic hegemony. Employer groups, radicalized by the turbulent 1970s more profoundly than elsewhere, sought to undermine the system, and their abandonment of corporatism in the early 1990s limited unions' capacity to restrain right-wing governments in retrenchment initiatives. Two further developments help to explain the surprising political resilience of the cuts: the emergence of a private (supplementary) insurance regime and a realignment of working-class voters from the Social Democrats to parties of the right, especially the nativist Sweden Democrats, in the context of a liberal refugee/asylum policy.
- Subjects
SWEDEN; UNEMPLOYMENT insurance; HAZARDS; SOCIAL democracy; DEMOCRATS (United States); LABOR unions
- Publication
Socio-Economic Review, 2019, Vol 17, Issue 4, p947
- ISSN
1475-1461
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/ser/mwx046