The social democratic state1995
the Swedish model and the bureaucratic problem of social reforms
by Bo Rothstein
If one wants to know if politics, and most especially if reformist politics, matters - if, that is, political mobilization can change democratic capitalist societies - then Sweden under the Social Democrats is clearly one of the best empirical cases to study.
Bo Rothstein uses the Swedish experience to analyze the limits a social democratic government labors under and the possibilities it enjoys in using the state to implement large-scale social change. He examines closely two SAP programs, one a success and the other a failure, that attempted to change social processes deeply embedded in capitalist society.
He ties the outcomes of these programs to the structure of the state and hypothesizes that the outcome depends, to a considerable extent, on how administrative apparatuses...