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How Social Democrats legitimize cutbacks

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Niklas Altermark and Åsa Plesner, “How Do Social Democrats Legitimize Cutbacks? Welfare Retrenchment to Save the Welfare State,” Government and Opposition 60, no. 3 (2025): 664–681, doi:10.1017/gov.2025.1; local copy.

The article examines how the Swedish Social Democratic Party justified welfare retrenchment. It identifies a legitimation strategy that presents cutbacks as necessary to preserve the welfare state from debt, market pressure, or a loss of national economic autonomy, and traces its persistent use from the early 1990s onward.

The study explains the framing of retrenchment rather than proving why the cuts occurred. It nevertheless shows why Swedish welfare-state change cannot be represented as a simple handover from a protective left to a dismantling right. Social Democratic actors could alter policy while claiming continuity with the welfare state’s purpose.

For Boomers and democracy, this makes party adaptation around changing constituencies plausible, but it also strengthens an ideological and crisis-based alternative to cohort capture.

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