Ann-Cathrine Jungar

A Case of a Surplus Majority Government: The Finnish Rainbow Coalition

Surplus majority government is the most frequent type of cabinet in postwar Finland. The case study investigates the explicative power of two groups of theories of surplus majority government on th ...

Adaption or Diffusion of the Swedish Gender Model

In the late 1980s, Helga Maria Hernes (1987) formulated the thesis that the Scandinavian welfare states have gone further than other welfare states in achieving equality between the sexes. Since then, Sweden has joined the European Union (EU), and questions have been raised about the extent to which EU membership may change the Swedish gender model and/or influence thinking on gender issues in other member states and at EU level. Hernes (1987, p. 135) was not claiming that equality had been fully achieved, only that the Nordic welfare states were potentially women-friendly. An important aspect of women-friendly policies is that they give women the opportunity to participate in public life and to reconcile motherhood with paid work. Compared to most EU member states, Sweden has a long history of policies encouraging women’s participation in the labour market and enabling parents to combine family life and employment.

Agrarian populism in Finland : continuity and change

Agrarian-based populism has an almost uninterrupted presence in Finnish politics. Its various manifestations are analysed in this chapter. The main focus is on party-based agrarian populism: the Fi ...

7 The Sweden Democrats

This chapter analyzes the organizational development of the Sweden Democrats (SD). During the last ten years they have built a highly bureaucratic and centralized party organization capable of accomplishing crucial party goals such as winning votes, office, and parliamentary influence as well as party cohesion (Sjoblom 1968; Muller and Strom 1999).