Governing Unnoticed: Depoliticized Cutbacks on Personal Assistance

Abstract: For more than a decade, the Swedish personal assistance act has been subject to extensive cutbacks. More and more people have lost assistance whilst fewer are granted allowances. These cutbacks have transpired without any parliamentary decisions limiting the scope of the legislation. As such, the government claim to have no part in the development, holding the cutbacks to be the result only of administrative court rulings and government agency interpretations. According to the government, discretionary power over the personal assistance act has transferred, from political representatives to independent courts and agencies. The scholarly literature on juridification, the theoretical field describing this type of development, generally share the governments’ assertion regarding the implications of juridification: as political reforms are changed because of court rulings and government agencies’ interpretations, elected political representatives are rendered powerless whereas the discretion of bureaucrats is increased. Accordingly, juridification is described as a zero-sum game where the forfeited power of political institutions is gained by independent agencies. In this thesis, I challenge these assumptions. By analyzing the development of the assistance reform between 2005 through 2017, interpreting government letters of appropriation, investigations, court rulings, and government agency reports, I suggest that the government is not rendered powerless in the governing of the personal assistance act. Rather, by governing the juridification process itself, politicians can govern through juridification. I conclude that the government should not be perceived as disconnected from the austerities of the assistance reform but as a governing actor, utilizing juridification as a political technology. Moreover, given these findings, I challenge the prevailing understanding of juridification as a zero-sum game, transferring power away from democratically elected politicians. Instead I propose that juridification must also be recognized as a tool of governance. Juridification, then, does not infer a zero-sum power transfer but opens up for alternative ways of governing policies in the modern welfare state.