The Welfare State Upholders: Protests against Cuts in Sickness Benefits in Sweden 2006-2019 : A Case Study of Political Action against Welfare Retrenchment

Sammanfattning: The debate between the Power Resource Approach and the New Politics thesis has been ongoing for decades. The PRA claims that the labor movement continues to be the most prominent defender of the welfare state. The NP-thesis, on the other hand, claim that the welfare state in itself has created new interest groups, clients of specific welfare state programs, that have largely taken over as the most prominent welfare state upholder. In an attempt to empirically evaluate the usefulness of these two theories, quantitative data on protests against cuts in the sickness benefit program in Sweden during the years of 2006-2019 have been collected through investigating newspaper ma- terial. The results show that the protest engagement among client groups is greater than the engagement among the labor movement when looking at protests directed specifi- cally against cuts in the sickness benefit program. This result lends credibility to the NP- thesis while it questions the PRA. When including protest events directed against cuts in the sickness benefit program among other welfare retrenchment related grievances, the results show that the labor movement continues to be a prominent defender of the welfare state. Additionally, the PRA/NP literature is criticized for failing to acknowledge the possibility of protest coalitions between client groups and the labor movement or- ganizations. The results show that coalitions of protest exist, but more research is needed to conclude how coalition building relates to the theoretical debate regarding the welfare state upholders.