TRYDEGARD, Gun-Britt <br/><br/>
One uniform welfare state or a multitude of welfare municipalities? The evolution of local variation in swedish elder care 

 - Oxford :  Wiley-Blackwell,  August 2010 
<br/><br/> The Nordic welfare states, including Sweden, have an inbuilt dilemma between two main principles: universalism and local autonomy. The concept of ‘welfare municipalities’ has been used to characterize the social policy construction of independent local authorities implementing national welfare policies. The aim of the article is to study the evolution of the balance between universal, centralized versus local, decentralized principles in Swedish welfare services, using elder care as a case. The article follows up previous studies on the extensive diversity and the local path dependency in the distribution of elder-care services in Sweden. A predominant impression from the present exploration is that the pattern has changed in many aspects during the first decade of the new millennium, and in a complex way. The coverage of home help and residential care has become less generous, a sign of weaker universalism. On the other hand, the decentralization tendencies have decreased, the earlier reported geographical disparity appears to have been reduced and the municipalities are increasingly adjusting to the national average. Also, the earlier strong local path dependency has faded out and therefore the concepts ‘welfare municipality’ and ‘local social policy’ appear to be less accurate than heretofore when describing the Swedish model of elder care