Logo: to the web site of Uppsala University

A cross-class alliance between organized labor and capital was agreed upon in the 1930s. The ultimate break came in 1990 with decentralized wage-bargaining. In the wake of threatening wage inflation and rising unemployment a new regime for collective bargaining emerged through pattern-setting at the end of the 90’s. So far it seems to have survived challenges from declining unionization, the growth of the service sector, shrinking unionized industrial working-class, and an open European labor market. The cross-class alliance seems to have cast its skin and emerged in a new modernized version. Sweden still seems to represent a typical coordinated market economy.

The political context of civil society in Western Europe has changed dramatically in recent decades. These changing circumstances may produce a decline in the integration of civil society into political life especially deliberative activities at the national level. This article discusses how serious these alleged threats are to a hitherto vital civil society that of Sweden. It focuses on fours indicators of organised civil society's contribution to deliberative democracy. First, have efforts to contact politicians, public servants and the media, as well as participation in public debates, decreased? Second, has civil society directed interest away from national arenas and instead concentrated resources in local and/or supranational arenas? Third, is there any evidence of a withdrawal from public activities, such as public debates and media activities in favour of direct contacts with politicians and public servants? Fourth, has civil society become more professionalised in the sense that interest groups are increasingly hiring professional consultants? Two surveys conducted in 1999 and 2005 show that Swedish organised civil society has not faded from national public politics. However, growing public participation is almost exclusively connected to increasing communication via the mass media and direct contact with politicians. Taking part in open public debate has not increased. The national arena has marginally lost some importance. Moreover, there is an increasing tendency to hire professional lobbying consultants. This might improve the quality of civil society's contributions to public deliberation, but a more elitist civil society might also develop, which is uninterested in social dialogue.

Denmark, Norway and Sweden are still among the most corporatist democracies in the world. Although corporatism has declined in Scandinavia over the last decades, it still exists, albeit at a lower level. Based on comparative and longitudinal data, we argue that this is a consequence of the disruption of some of the prerequisites to corporatist exchange. Neither governments nor the relevant interest groups in Scandinavia control what their exchange partner desires to the same extent as they did during the heyday of corporatism. Despite the involvement of different factors in the three countries, the main pattern is the same. Consequently, the character of state–interest group relations in Scandinavia is not as distinctive as it used to be.

Diversity has powerful advantages, but may also generate internal tensions and low interpersonal trust. Despite extensive attention to these questions, the relationship between diversity and trust is often misunderstood and findings methodologically flawed. In this article, we specify two different mechanisms and adherent hypotheses. An individual might base her decision to trust on her perceived social similarity in relation to others in the community, that is, a similarity hypothesis. However, in a homogenous context, she might expect trustworthy behavior irrespective of her own social position due to signals of low degrees of social conflict and dense social networks, that is, a homogeneity hypothesis. Prior research has pinpointed only one of these mechanisms. The homogeneity hypothesis has not been explicated, and when the intention has been to test the similarity hypothesis, the homogeneity hypothesis has unintentionally been tested instead. The results are straightforward. While the homogeneity hypothesis is strongly supported, the findings speak against the similarity hypothesis.

Although power and trust are crucial to human cooperation, and considerable attention has been paid to both these concepts in the social sciences, the relationship between them has been poorly investigated. In this article, based on data about a complete network of labour market actors in Sweden, it is investigated whether power ‘drive out trust’ or if power a requirement of trust. In contrast to previous research, it is concludes that there is a positive relationship between power and trust, although it levels out when power is at a very high level. Also in disagreement with previous findings, it is shown, that symmetry in power relations is not a guarantee of trust: two actors with symmetric low power do not trust each other, at least not in this specific institutional setting. Moreover, the theoretical argument is developed and refined by showing that shared beliefs and group membership also have independent impact on trust, as well as a perception that the other actor is pursuing the common good. Hence, the presumed negative impact of power on trust, is not only neutralised, but also transformed into a positive impact in the social context investigated here. However, more research is needed to show whether this finding is true only within certain institutional settings, and, if so, within which ones.

Corporatism may be seen as variety of capitalism in which specific structural prerequisites such as unionization, centralization, and strong states combined with bargaining and concertation produce certain economic outputs. Corporatism may also be seen as a variety of democracy in which interest groups are integrated in the preparation and/or implementation of public policies. Departing in the last position, we measure the strength of Scandinavian corporatism by the involvement of interest groups in public committees, councils, and commissions. Corporatism in relation to the preparation of policy has gone down in all three Scandinavian countries whereas corporatism in implementation processes are more varied among the three countries.

This study tests three hypotheses on data from a survey on employment relations conducted in Sweden in 2006. The first hypothesis implies that the extent to which an employee perceives formal institutions as fair and duly enforced increases the probability that he/she will behave cooperatively. The second hypothesis states that an employee's trust in the opposite party should have equivalent effects. The last hypothesis holds that an employee's perception of formal institutions as fair and duly enforced increases his/her trust in the opposite party. All three hypotheses are supported by the data. The interpretation is that there is indeed an effect on cooperative behavior and willingness to enter into flexible contracts from perceptions of fair and enforced institutions, but it is indirect and mediated by attitudes of trust.