Abstract
The chapter explains why Sweden and Australia have been chosen for the extended comparative case study. Over 25 years, from the mid-1980s to around 2010, both the Swedish and Australian welfare states underwent fundamental change. Taxes were cut, deficits abolished, markets deregulated, public enterprises privatized, and welfare services reformed. Somehow the barriers to reform were overcome. Welfare and liberty increased.
By studying cases in which reform would seem particularly difficult, and yet has been achieved in far-reaching, systemic ways, the causal processes by which barriers to reform in modern welfare states can be overcome should be especially clear. Also the two countries are different in a number of ways which may strengthen the results.
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Notes
- 1.
The time periods differ somewhat in the figures below due to lack of data for later years in some of the statistical series used.
- 2.
For Sweden there was no available data from ILO for 1981 and 1988, instead we used the averages of the years before and after.
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Karlson, N. (2018). Two Reform Countries. In: Statecraft and Liberal Reform in Advanced Democracies . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64233-8_3
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