Entrepreneurial Politicians - A kind of Political Entrepreneurship

Some regions in the northern parts of Sweden today are described as hopeless areas, where unemployment is high, where the reporting sick statistics are increasing, the economy in the municipalities is in general poor and a feeling of despair is spreading among the inhabitants. Bearing this picture in mind what is it that makes some places successful when it comes to increasing population and economic growth, and some are not? The development differs, even though the resources and other surrounding circumstances are mainly equal and the places thereby should be developing in a similar way, they are not. Local and regional development is and has been a highly debated area within researchers, politicians and practitioners. The core question has been what promotes local and regional development? It is a fact that different areas develop differently, some very successful while others are more described as hopeless areas. Focus within the local and regional development research has for a long time been on structural factors such as infrastructure, closeness to industries and so on. Political entrepreneurship is a field of research that is up and coming, it has gained a lot of attention in Sweden lately. A political entrepreneur is widely defined as someone who uses the political field to gain influence. It’s an actor oriented way to look upon local development in opposite to the more structural way to explain development (described above) that has dominated the research earlier. The aim with this article is to give examples of political entrepreneurship at the local level in Sweden. I will show in the article that there is a difference between political entrepreneurs and another kind of actor that I have chosen to call entrepreneurial politicians. It is important that we distinguish between these two kinds of actors in order to better understand what affects local development. The actors differ when it comes to what inspires them to act, profit, how they change boundaries and how they handle institutional imbalance. The article is based upon case studies of four local developmental processes in a village in the northern periphery in Sweden. The processes take place in the years 1975-2007.