How decisions are made
In Sweden everything is political – which means it is very important that the political is not politicised.
This is the fourth part of a series detailing the 5 paradoxes that explain Sweden. In the introductory post I described this one so:
4) policy decisions are certainly made with a huge degree of consensus and everyone should be on board the train but...once the train is loaded with as many people as can be, CHOO CHOO, there’s no stopping it and it will absolutely run you over if you dare stand in its path. This is why Sweden can seem to be both very democratic and very authoritarian at the same time.
Let me take a concrete example. We don’t have juries on Swedish courts. Instead each district court has two lay magistrates who work with one professional judge to produce a decision based on both the law and on society’s input. The lay judges (nämndemän) are chosen by the local political parties, but are supposed to be guided by the law. In other words, they are party-political appointees, there in order to channel public opinion, but also expected to behave in a legally correct and impartial way. When news breaks that a lay judge has interpreted the law based on what their political party thinks (!), there is a chorus of condemnation.
This is an example of how Swedish decision making is based on getting everyone on board, and hearing all sides, and then producing something so ‘neutral’ that no one can oppose it. And, in fact, no one can oppose it – almost literally – there’s little possibility for opposition because all the groups with power are already on board because of the consultation and negotiation stage.
“If we make sure almost everyone is onboard with this, then it doesn’t matter who protests”
If you know anything about me, you’ll already have guessed I’m going to explain this with reference to the historical context! And the history this grow out of is itself a paradoxical one.
Dive into the past
For hundreds of years Sweden was a relatively rigidly-controlled society, with an early system of bureaucracy and conscription, so that the king’s armies could be manned despite the small population size, plus the world’s first central bank so the imperial enterprise could be funded, despite a lack of rich merchants willing to lend. This all meant a lot of keeping track of people and controlling them. Knowing what kinds of human resources the country held (a task usually done by the priest of the local parish or socken). This also meant state-sponsored factories to produce all the weapons and also all the uniforms and the other equipment needed for the Swedish empire. This all meant that when the empire came crashing down Sweden was left with a strong and effective machinery for war, which wasn’t doing anything much, and the current system has traces of this still, combined with the next step...
This involved the coming of industrialisation. The factory owners soon faced the same problem the kings had: a lack of humans in this thinly-populated country. This meant not only that the labour unions had a great amount of leverage early-on, but that the employers had to offer perks of the job, like child-care, to make sure they did not lose workers to their rivals, and to take advantage of as much women workers’ labour power as possible. Combined with this is the old Swedish political representation of the farmers. The new rich were in many cases the same people as the old rich, but there was still a large number of richer owner-peasants and free farmers, who had been heard in the Swedish political system for centuries. This helped the dividing line between the upper class and the growing working class not be as clear-cut as in absolutist France, and so the system could bend rather than breaking.
Bend it did, and over the early years of the 20th century the labour movement, plus the liberal reformers, the farmers’ party and feminist and temperance movements shaped the development of the modern Swedish state. This leads me to joke that ‘Sweden is a country where the trade unions won.’ By which I mean that it is a country where these social movements are actually in the driving seat. Rather than an authoritarian or aristocratic state repressing and only half-heartedly accepting the new movements (as in Germany) or refusing to change at all and being overthrown (as in Russia or France) the Swedish system was able to adapt to changing facts such as the growth of cities, of an educated population and an organised working class.
But! And here’s the paradox! This process happened at the same time as the older ruling class was at the negotiating table. The parties of Church, King and Country were also present at the making of modern Sweden. So rather than simply being a country shaped by (for example) the Social Democrats, Sweden is rather a country shaped by cordial strife between the Social Democrats and their rivals and enemies. The resulting paradox makes me want to call it ‘Prussia with a human face.’
Back to the present-day
To go back to the start, this is why I think so much of Swedish decision-making needs to be based on both a strong form of consensus and is also often seen as ‘un-political’. In order for major welfare state reforms to be brought in during the 1930s, for example, they were framed as simply based on the rational ‘best practise’ of other modern countries, including the USA. If they had been seen as the class victory for the labour movement there would have been far more resistance. So the success of the Social Democrats involved, necessarily, making themselves invisible. Maybe one reason why relatively few Swedes now think they should bother keep voting for them?
This is how we get to a situation where party-political appointees can be expected to act in an unpolitical way. Coincidentally I was reading the other day some research for my teacher training that makes a similar point:
’Swedish political culture in the second half of the twentieth century was characterised by the belief in the rational, more or less non-ideological steering of economic, social and educational policy.'
This is from an analysis by Florian Waldow (2009) about how Swedish school policy was presented internally as being based on local issues while it was really influenced by international trends more than it admitted. Swedish ‘borrowing’ from international policy on things like school was hidden because of the need to present policy as coming purely from Swedish domestic sources and being non-ideological and the product of simple rational problem solving.
Onboard the Polar Express
So where does the choo-choo train from the start come into all this? Well, remember the Swedish imperial bureaucracy? Remember the Central Bank and all the other forms of central power? They are still alive in many regards, except the new modern state has been re-fitted as a welfare vehicle. And so when all the stakeholders on board this vehicle have come to their rational consensus – based simply on problem solving of course – the Imperial Express is ready to steam ahead again. And surely no one would oppose the process of rational problem-solving, would they? (No one who matters, anyway…)
This is why Swedish decision-making in policy can both be unusually humane – because it has indeed been formed from a number of perspectives and has indeed taken into account a lot of different people’s well-being – but also be quite hair-raisingly brutal when it is done with its deliberating.
One historical example of this that my co-author Ylva Nilsson has pointed out is the ending of the Swedish ship-building industry. There was a debate over its profitability, and the decision was taken eventually to simply shut it all down by the mid-1970s. While on the one hand this was done with the cooperation of the labour unions, and so there was no sudden mass unemployment, the fact that those groups who might usually oppose such a move were involved in making the decisions meant that if anyone from the local communities did want to stop the closing of the shipyards they had no powerful allies to turn to.
I could go on all day and keep adding historical examples of this!
Yours chronologically
Loukas Christodoulou
Reference: Waldow, Florian. Undeclared imports: silent borrowing in educational policy-making and research in Sweden, Comparative Education. 45:4, (2009), pp 477-494