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Central versus Local Service Regulation: Accounting for Diverging Old‐age Care Developments in Sweden and Denmark, 1980–2000
Author(s) -
Rauch Dietmar
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
social policy and administration
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.972
H-Index - 63
eISSN - 1467-9515
pISSN - 0144-5596
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9515.2007.00596.x
Subject(s) - retrenchment , welfare state , universalism , austerity , central government , demographic economics , neglect , political science , economics , development economics , local government , public administration , medicine , nursing , politics , law
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 1980s. 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.