In Sweden and Denmark, the development of old-age care has followed markedly divergent paths over the past 20 years. In both countries, the level of old-age care universalism was exceptionally high in the early 1980 s. Since then it has dropped sharply in Sweden, while remaining constantly high in Denmark. These divergent trends are clearly irreconcilable with the common image of a coherent Scandinavian welfare state model, and they seem hard to explain with reference to traditional approaches of comparative social policy. This article attempts to account for the divergent developments by focusing on the balance of old-age care regulation between central and local government. The main finding is that only in Sweden has the central regulation of old-age care been weak and unspecific. As a consequence, Swedish municipalities have enjoyed sufficient autonomous, regulatory competence to exercise certain local retrenchment measures in times of austerity, thereby eventually causing a nationwide weakening of old-age care universalism. By contrast, municipalities in Denmark have been much more tightly bound by central state regulations which have prevented them from imposing similar retrenchment measures in the old-age care sector; consequently, Denmark's level of old-age care universalism has remained comparatively high.

The Scandinavian countries are often assumed to constitute a coherent and unique social service model characterized by a comparatively high level of universalism and a strong capacity to defamilialize care responsibilities. In examining whether we really can identify such a model when comparing current social service systems, social services in the Scandinavian countries are contrasted with their counterparts in three continental European countries. The resulting data indicate that only Denmark complies with the image of the Scandinavian social service model. Both Norway and Sweden deviate significantly. Norwegian childcare services and Swedish elderlycare services do not stand out as particularly universalistic or defamilializing compared with those of other Western European countries. Given these findings, it may be questioned whether it is reasonable to speak of a 'Scandinavian social service model'.

Institutional fragmentation is usually assumed to influence social policy outcomes in countries with constitutional features such as federalism and divided government, but not in unitary and parliamentary states. The example of childcare politics in the Scandinavian countries suggests that institutional fragmentation and veto points also can play a significant role in unitary and parliamentary systems. The rules of childcare implementation in the Scandinavian countries to a varying degree provide municipalities and NGOs with veto opportunities and veto incentives against the realization of the central government's ambition of universal childcare coverage. In Norway but not in Sweden and Denmark municipalities and NGOs have been provided with significant veto opportunities as well as considerable incentives to act. This might help to understand why Norwegian childcare development has lagged behind its Scandinavian neighbours.

The Swedish system of disability support is often praised for its comparably well-developed Personal Assistance (PA) scheme. PA is formally prescribed as a social right for disabled people with comprehensive support needs in the <em>Act Concerning Support and Services to Persons with Certain Functional Impairments</em> (LSS). In the decade following the introduction of LSS in 1994, the PA-scheme expanded steadily to accommodate the support needs of more and more disabled people. It is commonly believed that the expansion of PA has substantially boosted the agency of both disabled people and their relatives. This article critically discusses in what direction the Swedish system of disability support has moved in the past decade. Is the common image of a system moving towards an ever increasing <em>defamilialization</em> of disability support still accurate? Or are there signs of stagnation, or even reversal towards refamilialization? What are the possible consequences of the more recent developments for disabled people and their relatives in terms of agency and equality? These questions will be discussed with the help of an analysis of the regulatory framework of disability support, statistical data and findings from public reports.

This article seeks to identify institutional causes behind policy‐specific retrenchments in the Swedish welfare state. During the austerity period of the 1980s and 1990s, the Swedish welfare state simultaneously experienced retrenchments in some fields and stability or expansion in others. Elderlycare is an example of tremendous retrenchment and childcare one of continuous expansion. A comparison of both fields suggests that the divergent trends might be related to different policy‐specific levels of institutional fragmentation in the implementation process. In elderlycare, implementation was strongly fragmented between the central and local government level, with the central government providing only weak overarching regulation and the local governments enjoying considerable local implementation discretion. As a consequence, in this field, local governments had enough discretion to impose local retrenchment measures in order to adapt to the conditions of austerity. In childcare, a similar development did not take place because in this field the municipal implementation autonomy was severely circumscribed by strong central state regulations. It is probable that the different institutional preconditions in both fields have been shaped intentionally by means of governmental institutional engineering. The decentralized decision‐making structure in elderlycare might have allowed the central government to induce blame‐avoidant retrenchments on the local government level.