Financialized accumulation, neoliberal hegemony, and the transformation of the Swedish Welfare Model, 1980-2020

Bibliographic Data

ID4906077
AuthorsViktor Skyrman (0000-0003-0365-0124, Stockholm School of Economics, corresponding author), Majsa Allelin (0000-0003-2500-8976, Södertörn University), Markus Kallifatides (0000-0002-2039-0339, Stockholm School of Economics), Stefan Sjöberg (0000-0002-4962-1540, University of Gävle)
Year2023
Volume47
Issue4
Pages565-591
Publication date2023-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueCapital & Class (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0309-8168 • E-ISSN: 2041-0980
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/03098168221128101
OpenAlexW4298143968
LanguageEN
Citations received22
References cited62

Drawing on a Gramscian Regulation Approach and Harvey's accumulation by dispossession thesis, this article discusses the structural and hegemonic mechanisms of the neoliberal transformation of Sweden's welfare sectors. Providing new longitudinal data on welfare retrenchment, corporate governance, wealth shares, and private economic power, the article further analyzes how the transformation of the Swedish post-war universal welfare model is related to class struggle and accumulation regime change in the Swedish economy. Following a decade-long countermobilization of Swedish capital and a severe economic crisis in the early 1990s, neoliberal economic common sense was cemented among social democratic policy elites that manifested itself in an institutionalized austerity polity, leading to a slow but steady dismantling of the Swedish welfare project. Roughly a fifth of employees in the three largest welfare sectors work in private welfare companies that generate tax-financed profits on politically created welfare markets. Welfare profits are in turn defended by a welfare-industrial complex and undergirded by a hegemonic bloc consisting of capital elites and sympathetic policymakers. In the virtual absence of vocal antihegemonic forces, many social democratic leaders have limited criticism against welfare profits throughout the last decades. On the contrary, austerity measures practiced by Swedish social democrats have thereto led to deteriorating social cohesion and spawned distrust among core social democratic voters

Austerity · Economic system · Economics · Hegemony · Market economy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Polity · Retrenchment · Welfare · Welfare capitalism · Welfare state · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Law · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Public Administration · Social Policy and Reform Studies

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Open DOIOpen Access