Two Sides of the Same Coin or Complete Opposites? The Establishment and Continuous Development of Labour Market Integration Policies in the Scandinavian Countries from 1970 to 2014

It has been roughly 40 years since ‘new immigration’ waves gained a hold in the Scandinavian countries. A question which has been the subject of much interest is how these comprehensive welfare states have responded to increasing ethnic diversity. In is commonly held that the Scandinavian countries differ on a number of counts when it comes to immigration as well as integration policies. However, much more thought has been devoted to drawing overall conclusions than to thoughts about how to conceptualise this research field. To classify the relative development of public policies across countries as convergent or divergent has been an academic endeavour within the field of comparative public policy for several decades. The importance of setting up rigorous conceptual and methodological requirements and being precise about the time period and the policy sectors compared are some of the main lessons from this research field. The ambition of this paper is not to draw conclusions on the field of immigration or integration policy as a whole but instead to recasting the debate on Scandinavian integration policies by examining whether the three countries converged or become more different in the period from 1980 to 2014 in the field of labour market integration policies – an area which from the political level has been seen as crucial and has been the object of widespread attention. A large proportion of immigrants have proven difficult to integrate into the Scandinavian labour markets and many public policies have been introduced in order to deal with this challenge. The empirical analysis of this paper demonstrates how the three countries have grown more alike in the area of labour market integration policies and how we see an overall shift towards convergence, although there are also notable exceptions to the rule.