The article analyzes the commissioning and production of expert reports about Swedish health care management and governance. We show that these reports are rarely solitary stand-alone products, but tend to form clusters in an evolving discourse centered around specific policy solutions. We also show that the most important producers of such reports tend to come from a small circle of informally recruited academics and policy experts representing a narrow segment of academic disciplines. We point to some of the risks involved in this structure of knowledge production and argue that reports: (a) may form their own environment rather than address real problems; (b) may reproduce certain taken-for-granted assumptions and critical lacunae; (c) may have their impact decided by their network connections rather than by their intellectual content; and (d) represent a structure that provides opportunities for special interests to enter the process.

This article analyzes the emergence of the Swedish “national system for knowledge-driven management.” We argue that the system is best understood as a meta-instrument that is underpinned by an “instrument constituency,” a coalition held together by a joint interest in a particular policy solution. Based on interviews and documentary analyses, we show the conflicting interests that are included in the constituency and how the functional effectiveness of the meta-instrument is exposed to a number of risks that follow from its specific implementation and from the heterogeneity among its constituency. In particular, we point to the threats against professional learning, responsibility, and integrity.

Related Articles: Selling, Niels, and Stefan Svallfors. 2019. “The Lure of Power: Career Paths and Considerations among Policy Professionals in Sweden.” Politics & Policy 47(5): 984–1012. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12325. Shen, Yongdong, Meng U. Ieong, and Zihang Zhu. 2022. “The Function of Expert Involvement in China's Local Policy Making.” Politics & Policy 50(1): 59–76. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12450. Svallfors, Stefan, Erica Falkenström, Corrie Hammar, and Anna T. Höglund. 2022. “Networked Reports: Commissioning and Production of Expert Reports on Swedish Health Care Governance.” Politics & Policy 50(3): 580–97. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12462. 

In this article, we analyse the striking resilience of for-profit care and service provisionin what has often been seen as the archetypical social democratic welfare state:Sweden. We focus on the strategic discursive activities of private companies andtheir business organizations as they try to influence perceptions, organize actorsand facilitate communication to defend profit-making in the welfare sector in theface of increasing conflict and opposition. We argue that taking such organized actioninto account changes dominant perceptions about the characteristics of theSwedish political economy, and carries important lessons for analyses of changesin the organization of the welfare state in general.

This article focuses on “partisan policy professionals” (PPPs), i.e. people who are employed to affectpolitics and policy, and analyzes their particular motivations and skills. This article focuses on the occupationalpractices of PPPs: what are their main motivations and driving forces, and what are thekey skills they deploy in their work? The main motivation for PPPs is a desire to wield power and influencethe course of affairs, while their working-life satisfaction comes from getting their messageinto the media without becoming personally exposed. The key resource of PPPs is contextdependentpolitically useful knowledge, in three main forms: “Problem formulation” involves highlightingand framing social problems and their possible solutions. “Process expertise” consists of understandingthe “where, how, and why” of the political and policy-making processes. “Informationaccess” is the skill to be very fast in finding reliable and relevant information. These motivations andskills underpin a particular professionalism based in an “entrepreneurial ethos”, which differs fromboth the ethos of elected politicians, and that of civil servants, and which has some potentially problematicimplications for democratic governance.

The article analyses the orientations of political employees in Sweden. It finds that their roles are diffuse: there is no agreement among political employees about whether they are politicians or not, and their mandate is fleeting and unclear. They hold the average politician’s intellectual abilities in low regard, and sometimes take on clearly paternalistic views toward elected representatives. They see little attraction in pursuing a career as elected politicians, because of intrusive media scrutiny and since they hold a view of elected politics as slow, boring, and shallow. The professional route to politics is seen as more fast and fun.