Procedural tools and pension reform in the long run: the case of Sweden

ABSTRACT

Welfare state reform is understood to be risky, difficult and still ongoing. As such, there is a need for analytic tools that can aid understanding of how governments are able to overcome the various barriers they face in seeking change, and the challenges of managing complex and hybridised welfare arrangements. This article argues that the policy tools literature provides several promising avenues for doing so. Specifically, it suggests that procedural policy tools – increasingly recognised in policy studies – are often critical for mitigating risk of blame, sustaining coalitions and supporting the ongoing adaptation of social policy systems to changing conditions and information. This is especially critical where policy innovations entail new substantive relationships between states, citizens and markets, as initial assumptions about individual and group behaviour are likely to be flawed. Procedural tools can enable learning and recalibration in the pursuit of public legitimacy for changing arrangements. To demonstrate the argument, this article engages closely with a case study of public pension reform in Sweden in the 1990s. The case study finds that, initially, reformers made use of a politically insulated parliamentary working group to design a new system, one which attempted to automate elements of policymaking and transfer risk from the state to the individual. However, this goal has proved more difficult to realise than imagined, and in the longer-term, the government used procedural tools for the purposes of learning and recalibration, and in doing so has gone some way to re-establishing modified forms of state accountability.

KEYWORDS:

• Welfare state reform
• policy instruments
• procedural tools
• pensions
• Sweden
• blame avoidance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

² See Howlett (2000).

¹ Although according the 2017 agreement, some responsibilities for managing the premium pension will be devolved to another new agency (Pensionsgruppen, 2017, p. 5).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Government [Award Number: Australian Postgraduate Award] and The University of Melbourne [Award Number: Arts Fieldwork Grant].

Notes on contributors

Adam Hannah

Adam Hannah is a Lecturer in Public Policy at the University of Western Australia. His research focuses on the role of political ideas in reshaping health care and welfare systems, and he has recently published on this topic in journals such as Policy Sciences, Public Administration, Policy and Politics, and the Journal of European Social Policy.