7. How Have Narratives, Beliefs and Practices Shaped Pension Reform in Sweden?

This chapter investigates how institutional narratives, beliefs and practices have shaped pension reform processes in Sweden. The chapter adopts a bottom-up perspective, analysing the development of pension policy in two major reform episodes, the 1959 ATP reform and the 1994/98 reform of that system. The chapter shows how important pension reform struggles in the past shaped policy-makers’ beliefs and shared institutional narratives concerning the appropriate design and role of the pension system. The failure of collective bargaining to produce supplementary pension coverage for blue-collar workers in the two decades prior to the 1959 ATP reform generated grass-roots pressure for union leaders and eventually, the Social Democratic Party, to pursue a legislative solution. The emergence of widespread belief in the virtues of expertise-based socio-economic planning intersected with growing Social Democratic influence in politics to create a centre-left world view that saw major pension reform as desirable, achievable and just. In the 1990s, the intense political conflict associated with the 1959 ATP pension reform helped to generate a shared narrative in which political conflict was to be avoided at all cost in negotiating the parameters of a reformed pension system in the 1990s.