Recently, party politics in Scandinavia saw patterns of change as bourgeois governments could be formed in Denmark (2001-2011) and Sweden (2006-2014) that commanded pure centre-right majorities in Scandinavian welfare states. Moreover, observers of Scandinavian politics have claimed that the largest bourgeois parties in Denmark and Sweden formed new alignments with social groups that had previously been Social Democracy’s backbone such as skilled workers. However, what seldom has been studied is how these bourgeois governments pursue public policies under an important structural constraint, the universal welfare state. The universal welfare state exhibits an effective constraint on the centre-right’s desire to perform its traditional market-liberal policies since too many voters are covered by welfare schemes and these voters need to be won and kept if the centre-right wants to remain in power.
This is related to another constraint on the centre-right’s decision-making capability, the problem how to cater to the three voter-groups that brought centre-right governments in power: the traditional bourgeois business constituency, a new liberal middle class, and skilled workers that turned their back on social democracy around the turn of the millennium. Given the heterogeneous policy preferences of these three voters groups and the internal pressure from the parties’ rank and file, the centre-right cannot perform pure policy-seeking, but is always bound to balance its political decisions according to these two constraints.
I argue that this is done by a skilful mixture of selected expansion, status quo maintenance in case of well-entrenched welfare schemes, and cuts targeted at outsider groups that lay outside the centre-right’s constituency and are too heterogeneous to provide an electoral threat. To develop and test the theoretical arguments on the dual constraint, the paper first analyses the public policy performed under the liberal-conservative government in Denmark (2001-2011) and second puts this evidence in comparative perspective.
