This article presents survey results on Swedish and Finnish parliamentarians' perceptions concerning their influence over domestic decision making in European Union (EU) matters. In the literature the parliaments in Sweden and Finland are classified as powerful ones that can exert considerable influence over domestic EU policy making. Moreover, Finland and Sweden joined the EU at the same time. Therefore the overall expectation is that the parliaments should be equally powerful. However, the results from this survey indicate a significant difference in perceived influence between the two parliaments. It is obvious that Swedish parliamentarians perceive themselves as more marginalised in relation to the government than Finnish parliamentarians. After trying different explanations, it is concluded that the differences can be ascribed to the parliaments' different organisational set-ups for government oversight.
In this article, we examine the occurrence of pre-electoral coalitions (PECs). Recent research points to when and why they are likely to occur, but these explanations are pitched at aggregate level, and they are less satisfying when applied to our particular cases. Rather than institutional or party-system features, we concentrate on the parties themselves – a level of analysis that raises theoretical and methodological challenges, which we discuss. Empirically, we investigate two cases of PEC in 2005–2006. One involved three Norwegian left-of-centre parties, the other involved four Swedish right-of-centre parties; both marked major departures from established behavioural patterns. We suggest certain conditions that may be necessary for a PEC to be formed. In particular, we argue that ‘decisive’ parties must prioritize office at the moment of decision, and that this preference order may be induced by some sort of environmental or intra-party stimulus.
This article examines the institutional arrangements between Social Democratic parties and trade unions in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. First, the authors show how these relations have weakened at a varying pace. Party–union ties are now quite distant in Denmark, but remain relatively close in Norway and, especially, Sweden. Second, the authors explore this variation using a simple model of political exchange. The finding is that the intensity of the relationship is correlated with the resources that each side can derive from the other, which in turn reflects national differences. Yet it is also clear that the degree of change is related to the formative phase of the institutional arrangement itself: the weaker the ties were from the beginning, the more easily they unravel in response to environmental changes.
Since the 1990s, the Swedish school system has become increasingly more diversified. Decentralization, the introduction of private schools, the challenge of globalization & increased ethnic diversity among pupils have contributed to an increasing heterogeneity. This project analyses the prospects for civic education in different institutional settings & contexts, in both public & private schools. Using unique survey data 1999 & 2009 we ask which effects different institutional settings have on "citizen competences," i.e., civic engagement, political efficacy, knowledge about democracy & political issues, & democratic values & tolerance. The project breaks down into three distinct but interrelated parts. The first deals with changes over time in young Swedes' civic competences. The second subproject focuses on the way & consequences when controversial issues are taught in different schools & institutional settings. The third sub-project adds a comparative perspective by analyzing similarities & differences among young people & schools in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland & England. Adapted from the source document.
Despite a general acknowledgement that knowledge about identities is essential for understanding international relations, surprisingly little has been written about what actually activates one of a state’s many identities and not another. More generally, the article suggests that situational relevance and commitment are of importance. More specifically, it is suggested that a policy area’s legitimisation is a factor that may affect the commitment to a collective identity. The argument is illustrated by the case of ‘Norden’, as the inhabitants of Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Sweden call their territory. The end of the Cold War and Sweden and Finland joining Denmark in the European Union (EU) put Nordic identity under severe stress in the beginning of the 1990s. As shown, this collective identity was intensely active in the case of the Nordic Passport Union, but less so in the case of environmental negotiations.
It is a contested issue to what extent international conventions on human rights actually constrain states. While earlier shown that courts may invoke international conventions, this article investigates to what extent legislators, when it comes to migration, are similarly restrained. In a context where the trend is that states limit immigration and curb asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants' social rights, the answer would seem to be that states are obviously unhampered. However, in Sweden there have been changes to the Swedish Aliens Act and to the entitlement to health care which have rather safeguarded asylum seeking and undocumented children's situation. This article discusses the role that the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) has played in this development and considers whether this has restrained Sweden's ability to act.
The most direct way to regulate immigration is to decrease the possibilities to reach a state’s territory through visa demands, carrier sanctions, and limiting the chances of granting a residence permit even when a person succeeds in reaching a state’s territory. However, during the last decade several scholars noted that in an attempt to decrease the number of asylum seekers, states have also started to curb asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants’ right to work and social benefits. Intriguingly, even though Sweden has followed this international pattern of using direct ways to curb the number of asylum seekers, this paper shows that to a large extent Sweden has abstained from using the more recent indirect methods. Although there are examples of reductions in social benefits, the trend has generally been the reverse in Sweden. Unexpectedly, we suggest that an economic crisis, such as the one that occurred in Sweden in the early 1990s, may lead to an increase of certain rights. We also discuss a number of possible explanations for the Swedish case, including whether a proportional electoral system creates possibilities for small parties to influence policies pertaining to social rights. Furthermore, since we demonstrate that in recent years children have been the primary beneficiaries of an increase in social rights, we suggest that groups perceived to be vulnerable are more likely to experience an increase in social rights.
In this essay, we examine the introduction of three points for a win in senior football, a reform that eventually became universally adopted. We have two objectives. First, we seek to answer the question of whether the effect of the new system has justified its proliferation. The second objective is to present a methodological discussion about how to measure this effect, which involves judgments that many would say are entirely subjective and which, at best, are hard to operationalize - a problem that is not unusual in social science. We measure the ’excitingness’ of football through constructing an index of two distinct features of any match. We then apply the index to our data by combining quantitative analysis with strategic case-selection. Our preliminary findings are that three points for a win does seem to boost football’s excitingness, but that the improvement takes four to five years to take full effect.
The puzzle to be explained in this article is how and why parties experience variation in the degree of moderation in nationalism. The article submits that an important indicator for such variation can be found in the extent to which a party is transnationally embedded, but the central claim of this article is that while external influences may well temper party nationalism they are filtered through predominantly internal factors, notably the cleavage structure and the political culture. The explanatory power of this argument is tested through a comparative case study of relative moderation in nationalism of two Baltic post-communist national conservative parties, Pro Patria Union in Estonia and For Fatherland and Freedom/LNNK in Latvia, with particular attention to party preferences and positions on national questions, as well as of engagement in transnational party cooperation. Both started out as national conservative parties, but whereas the former party has turned into a more mainstream conservative party of European stance and a moderate nationalist party the latter has remained radical nationalist and basically held on to (ethno-) nationalism. The article examines the sources of this variation.
Surveillance is an important governance technique of modern societies and is linked to particular governmental rationalities. This article examines the Swedish policy on camera surveillance, using the analytical framework of governmentality, the art of government, in advanced liberal societies as its theoretical framework. The focus is on three features that characterise current developments in the Swedish policy. These are labelled situational prevention, generalisation of distrust and the significance of the informed citizen. The study shows how prevention, i.e. situational prevention, was successfully introduced as a main rationale for monitoring only after the technology had been in place for some years. Monitoring as a form of general situational prevention, the congruent generalised distrust that affects the public and the Swedish requirement to inform citizens about cameras are viewed as elements of a governmental rationality based on the notion of the autonomous, free and self-responsible subject. Accordingly, the popular idea that camera surveillance is an indicator of an expanding security state must be modified.
This article challenges the assumption that there is an essential difference between a West European 'civic' and an East European 'ethnic' conceptualisation of the nation. If there were such a distinction, one should be able to trace a distinctive 'ethnic' concept of the nation among the populations of East European countries. The article analyses public opinion in three East European countries - Latvia, Poland and Lithuania - using a survey of more than 1,100 respondents in each country. This data suggests, first, that we must question the model of a general East European definition of the nation as an ethnic unit. Second, it is evident that the respondents of each country define the nation differently. For example, Latvian respondents presented a specific concept of the nation - one with clear ethnic undertones. A certain number of the Latvian respondents defined members of the nation according to a single criterion: having Latvian as one's mother tongue. The article also shows how we can deconstruct the concepts of the ethnic versus the civic nation, and thus analyse their separate components. This makes the distinction less rigid, and encourages the discovery of different combinations of ethnic and civic arguments. The result should be more nuanced studies of concepts of the nation and of national belonging.