A Twilight of the Welfare State? Pre-Crisis, Crisis and Post-Crisis Development Trajectories of the Welfare State in Sweden

In the long term the issue of the welfare state is one of the most debated political topics and it concerns almost all members of society. In the last few decades the advanced welfare state has been more frequently perceived as an obstacle for competitiveness in the globalized economy and issues of its economic sustainability and societal impact are widely debated. Sweden is generally considered to be a country with the most advanced model of welfare state, but it is also a country which suffered from a deep economic crisis in the early 1990s. Development of the Swedish model of welfare state in the context of the crisis presents a critical case for assessment of welfare state vitality. In this thesis, welfare state is defined as a multidimensional phenomenon that includes both social expenditures and institutions of social policy and power structures and legitimacy. For analyzing of transformations of the Swedish welfare state in all four dimensions is applied a theoretical perspective based on the power resources theory, the institutional approach, the transnational perspective, the dependency and the world-systems theory which whose complementarity is theoretically substantiated. The thesis with this approach should contribute to better understanding of the development of the welfare state in..