Protests against Welfare Retrenchment: Healthcare Restructuring inSweden

Abstract

The ‘new politics’ perspective in welfare state research holds that class‐based parties and unions have lost some of their influence and that they have been replaced by client organizations that are capable of resisting retrenchment pressures. However, scholars within the ‘power resource tradition’ contend that class is still fundamental and that client interests are weak in corporatist countries with a strong labour movement. It is argued in this article that scholars within the power resource approach have focused too much on social insurance programmes and traditional forms of political participation, and that this has made them blind to client protests. An empirical study of political efforts to close down nighttime emergency surgery in Swedish hospitals is presented. The Swedish counties planned to close down emergency surgery in 17 hospitals in the period 2003–04. The political proposals to close down emergency departments were met with strong protests from client groups, and politicians often withdrew their proposals of closures. In this case study, politicians claim that it was client protests that made them withdraw a decision to close the emergency surgery. This result suggests that client protests are politically important and diverges from the expectations deduced from the power‐resource approach but lends credibility to the theory of the new politics of the welfare state.

Are Political Parties More Responsive to Advocacy Groups Mobilising Core Voters or Swing Voters? Political Responsiveness to Citizens' Protest Movements in Swedish Local Governments

“…Uba ), most of the protests against school closures were mobilised by parental and neighbourhood networks, and the results indicate that these activities may be politically important. Thus, Swedish local welfare services appear to conform to a different logic of political decision making than do national social insurance programmes (Taghizadeh & Lindbom ).…”

A sociology of public responses to hospital change and closure

“…, Moon and Brown , Oborn ). Where qualitative data are used to explicate a public perspective on change processes, it consists of interviews with elected politicians (Fulop, Walters, Perri6, & Spurgeon, ) or small numbers of highly engaged individuals either campaigning against (Bryant, ; Taghizadeh & Lindbom, ) or engaging with (Abelson , Droog et al ., 2017; Farmer et al . , Foley et al .…”

“…Despite a shared focus on the public dimensions of major change, they lacked qualitative data collection focused on public perspectives: one highly-cited cluster of studies relies upon analysis of newspaper coverage or official documents of a handful of high-profile change proposals including Kidderminster Hospital and St Bartholomew's Hospital (Joseph and Kearns 1996, Joseph et al 2009, Moon and Brown 2001, Oborn 2008. Where qualitative data are used to explicate a public perspective on change processes, it consists of interviews with elected politicians (Fulop, Walters, Perri6, & Spurgeon, 2012) or small numbers of highly engaged individuals either campaigning against (Bryant, 2003;Taghizadeh & Lindbom, 2014) or engaging with (Abelson 2001, Droog et al, 2017Farmer et al 2007, Foley et al 2017, Martin et al 2017) change processes. The most in-depth study of wider public perspectives on major change comes from the English NHS (Barratt et al 2015).…”

(De)politicising pregnancy-related risk: gender and power in media reporting of a maternity ward closure

“…In the 1990s, however, Sweden's approach to maternity care changed when the healthcare system was restructured. An NPMinspired model replaced the welfare model (Larsson Taghizadeh & Lindbom, 2013) widely recognised as Sweden's political hallmark, and cost efficiency and purchaser-provider models came increasingly to the fore (Giritli Nygren & Nyhlén, 2015). This has led to increased centralisation, and units outside urban centres have been relocated to larger towns or have been forced to close (Brommels & Vintmyr, 2015).…”