Civic Capacity: The Neglected Factor in the Origins of the Nordic Welfare State

Nordic welfare regimes are celebrated for social policies characterized by universalism and state funding. However, contemporary trends of welfare-state retrenchment calls for a renewed examination of who shaped the foundational principles of the Nordic welfare state – and what resources they mobilized to do so. Consequently, this article revisits Denmark’s consequential social reforms of the 1890s. Challenging dominant explanations that attribute Nordic welfare-state origins to class-based power resources (workers or farmers) or to state capacity and bureaucratic expertise, we argue that a historically emergent civic capacity – expertise, organizational templates, and advocacy cultivated within civil society – was a central resource in early welfare-state formation. Methodologically, we identify all key actors in the reform debates (n = 83) and construct a prosopography from biographical and career data. We analyze the resulting dataset with Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) and network visualization to map the field of moral elites and their organizational ties. We find the moral elite consisted of four elite subgroups, including an important group of engaged professionals whose dense embedding in non-partisan civil society supplied the civic capacity that helped document inequality, experiment with mutualist solutions, and frame policy proposals shaping the reforms of the 1890s.