When the Swedish Social Democrats lost their position in government in September 2006 the event reverberated around Europe (Toynbee, Reference Toynbee2006). The election defeat attracted a high degree of international media attention – unusual, some might say, for a comparatively small Scandinavian country. This can be interpreted as an indication of the special status Sweden has obtained in the consciousness of social commentators and academics alike. Sweden is the reference welfare state, the ideal type of the already ideal-typical social democratic welfare state regime (Esping-Anderson, Reference Esping-Andersen1990). And as the Social Democrats are seen as part and parcel (and the name-giver) of this Swedish welfare model – having held power for all but nine years since 1932 – the world is curious to see how things will change under the new government.

In the light of these recent political events, Eero Carroll and Lena Eriksson's edited volume on welfare politics from a Swedish perspective is timely. But apart from being topical, the book is also a high quality contribution to the theoretical, empirical and conceptual study of the welfare state in general. The book's unique selling point is its eclecticist outlook, emphasised in the book's title as well as by the editors in their introduction. The editors’ aim has been to produce a book that is broad not only in terms of policy areas, time periods, and national contexts covered, but also in terms of the analytical, theoretical, methodological and disciplinary perspectives of the contributors to the book.

Across the ten different contributions, the policy areas and welfare issues covered include family policy, poverty, social security, social care, employment, unemployment, education, social mobility, crime and social trust. Interestingly, these themes are often examined in combination, investigating the interconnection between different policy areas. For example, Tommy Ferrarini makes a convincing and important case for a positive link between family policy and poverty, based on a comparative analysis of parental leave schemes and poverty amongst families with very young children in 15 welfare states. Similarly, Kenneth Nelson, in his impressive comparative analysis of 18 welfare states, throws some novel light on the interrelationship between the generosity of means-tested social assistance and the design of other existing social security programmes such as insurance. And Sara Ström uses the Swedish context to explore the effects of unemployment on family life. Amongst her results she concludes that unemployment of parents increases the risk of accidents amongst the household's children, a finding which is particularly interesting considering the comparatively generous levels of unemployment compensation in Sweden.

In line with the interdisciplinary objective of the book, the contributors have been drawn from the disciplines of social science and historical studies. Hence the time periods focused on in individual chapters vary greatly, spanning in total more than a century, as indicated in the book's title (1880s–2000s). Birgitta Plymoth goes back to the 1880s to investigate how poor relief and philanthropy dealt with the dilemma of working mothers at a time when the male breadwinner was the norm. Through this exciting multi-level analysis she shows how different levels of society may well be bearers of the same norms, but the way in which these are put into practice are dependent also on local conditions and more pragmatic interests – in this case the need for female labour. Similarly, Peter Johansson uses the historical context of sickness insurance policy in Sweden between 1880–1930 to test his theoretical inquiry into the preconditions for policy continuity and change. His finding that the political administration apparatus operates in its own right on its own institutional level adds yet another dimension to the theoretical emphasis on institutional constraints on policy change. The widest historical spectrum is covered by Johan Edman and Lena Eriksson, who give contemporary active labour market policy an historical edge by analysing the more than century-long institutionalization of norms within Swedish social care services regarding the centrality of work to the individual and to society.

Other issues are studied in the context of more recent periods or draw on longitudinal data sets, as does Susanne Alm in her conceptually sound analysis of the impact of social and cultural capital on upward social mobility. A thought-provoking finding in this study is that parents’ attitudes towards education (Alm's measure of cultural capital) is more significant for upward mobility than parents’ involvement in the child's education (Alm's measure of social capital).

All of the chapters in Carroll and Eriksson's book constitute good quality contributions to welfare state research, empirically, conceptually and theoretically. It is also exciting to note that the book's contributors belong to a new generation of welfare state analysts: researchers who had only recently finished their Ph.Ds at the time when the book project was initiated. As such, the publication of the book has a further reason to be applauded. There is perhaps less theoretical and methodological variation throughout the book as a whole than the editors suggest in their introducing chapter. Quantitative analysis and institutionalist theory does seem to dominate. One exception to this rule is Urban Lundberg's chapter, which in itself is a critique of institutionalism's tendency to emphasise continuity over change and structure over agency. Lundberg has chosen Swedish pension reforms between 1978 and 1998 as the empirical context within which to pry open the ‘black box’ of party politics and focus on those individual actors (social democratic politicians) who were instrumental to the final outcome of the reforms.

In the light of recent events in Sweden referred to earlier, Lundberg's conclusion to his analysis seems almost prophetic. Lundberg suggests that ‘only time will tell if the Social Democrat's decision to abandon the ATP [income related occupational pension system] will mean that they have actively contributed to substantially changing the ground for their own continued success’ (p. 133). Time has told and history would seem to have proved Lundberg right. Time will also undoubtedly tell us what will happen to the Swedish welfare state under the New Moderates. What we need in order to understand any possible changes ahead is for high quality social policy research, like that presented in this book, to continue.