earticle

영어

Focusing on the 2000s, this paper explores political strategies of conservative opposition parties under the hegemony of social democracy in Sweden. Conservative parties gave up anti-welfare and anti-labor ideology and adopted pro-welfare and pro-labor ideology as a new party ideology in the 2000s. After they formed a ruling coalition government, they did not try to destroy welfare system but to reorganize it in a limited scale. It is called “liberalization without retrenchment”. Why did it happen in Sweden? This paper argues that it was an outcome of three factors in Swedish politics; the consensus politics, narrowing difference among political parties, and party strategies based on changing voters’ voting behavior.