8 The Class Politics of Swedish Welfare Policies

Abstract

The second Scandinavian chapter picks up on the emphasis on the welfare state. The main interest here is in class divisions in attitudes to welfare redistribution. It finds that the changes that appear to have occurred in the region do not appear to have led to other cleavages becoming more important than that of class. Again, politics is emphasized as the key to understanding the social bases of partisanship rather than vice versa. In contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, the debate about class politics takes on a very different form to that in the West: it concerns not whether class divisions have declined with the transition from industrialism to post‐industrialism, but whether they have increased as the former communist countries—with their former ideology of classlessness—undergo the uneasy transition from command economy to free market democracy.