Administrative courts and allocative choices: limiting local governments’ decision-making power

Administrative courts in Sweden have an important role in assessing individuals’ right to social care services. These courts not only have the power to overturn decisions made by public agencies, including municipalities’ social welfare committees, they can also replace the original decisions with new ones. For example, courts can establish that an individual is entitled to home care service or residential care despite being denied such care by the committee. Thus, what allocative choices the administrative courts make have implications for the discretion of local welfare committees. However, systematic empirical knowledge of the courts’ choices is lacking. The aim of this paper is therefore to shed light on how courts resolve allocative questions. Empirically, the study investigates the judgments of Swedish administrative courts in eldercare cases in 2019 and 2020 to determine whether the courts circumscribe local government committees’ decision-making power and control of resource allocation. The findings show that while administrative courts change the decisions made by social welfare committees to a fairly low extent, the decisions they do change are likely to limit the committees’ discretion and result in an increase in costs for local governments.