Legitimacy, Institutional Change, and the Politics of Public Administration in Sweden

ABSTRACT. Public administration in Sweden has been the chief vehicle for the rapid postwar development toward an extensive welfare state. However, during the 1980s, as a result of increasing criticism about inertia and bureaucratization, several major reforms were initiated to "renew " the public sector. These reforms included a wide range of different measures, including deregulation, privatization, and "liberalization " experiments at the local level. This paper argues that these reforms, along with increased overall efficiency of the public sector, fulfilled a number of political and admin-istrative functions. They were aimed at enhancing the overall legitimacy of the public administration and also at displacing conflicts triggered by fiscal problems to the local political level. As a result, the 1980s witnessed local governments becoming increasingly important suppliers of public services. At the same time, state public administration agencies adopted a more subtle and observant role than they had previously played