Rights and duties in the Norwegian welfare state

How do we think about the balance of duties and rights in the welfare state: and specifically in the Norwegian welfare state?

For T.H. Marshall, writing many decades ago, in relation to the British welfare state, the central concept at play was what he called social citizenship. This concept asserts that states are responsible for taking care of their citizens, providing education, an acceptable standard of living and well-being. Everyone has an equal right to social benefits and one should not be stigmatized for accepting these. Marshall’s vision of social citizenship also included a recognition of the corresponding duties of citizens, such as the obligation to work and contribute to the community, indicating a balance between rights and duties in the welfare state. Different welfare states have at different times interpreted the balance between rights and duties and who holds them in different ways.

While Marshall wrote in the context of postwar Britain, in the Scandinavian context, a similar notion of social citizenship has been influential as an underlying concept informing the Scandinavian or ‘Social Democratic’ welfare states, including the Norwegian welfare state. Scandinavian scholars Gösta Esping-Andersen and Walter Korpi, for instance, describe the Social Democratic (or ‘institutional’) model of the welfare state as prescribing that “the welfare of the individual is the responsibility of the social collective… that all citizens should be equally entitled to a decent standard of living, and that full social citizenship rights and status should be guaranteed unconditionally”. The Social Democratic welfare states, including the Norwegian welfare state, have been known for the emphasis they place on the responsibility of governments to provide welfare for citizens (whereas other models emphasize the responsibility of families and the market to a greater extent). While the balance between rights, duties and who holds them have been negotiated and shifting since the beginning of the Norwegian welfare state project, the disruption of this balance can be seen particularly with neoliberal market reforms in recent decades.

Neoliberalism is understood as a political rationality and mode of governance that fundamentally reorganizes state, society, and individual conduct around economic principles. Neoliberalism began to gain influence in Norway from the 1970s, with Norwegian economists advocating for market-based solutions, privatization, and deregulation. This was due to the economic crises of the 1970s and worries about the sustainability of the welfare state model. In the 1990s and 2000s, neoliberal reforms gained acceptance in Norway with New Public Management-style reforms and market rationality-based reforms being implemented in the public sector.

For example, in the education sector, an initial wave of reforms focused on decentralisation and delegation of tasks, and introduced Management by Objectives (MBO) as a governing system in education (formally enacted through the 1992 Local Government Act that restructured municipal administration, based on the proposals in White Paper No. 37, 1990–1991). The Norwegian kindergarten sector has also undergone increasing corporatization and marketization. As of 2022, 53% of kindergartens were private. This has remained relatively stable for the last few decades, but during this time large for-profit corporate providers have increasingly replaced traditional parental cooperatives and standalone local early childhood education and care centres.

Similarly, in the health sector, the 2001 Helseforetaksreformen, or Health Service Reform, reorganized public hospitals into state-owned enterprises, with the goal of making the public health sector more efficient. This reform created five government-owned regional health corporations that owned the hospitals, rearranging power and responsibility. These kinds of reforms are often presented as technocratic, and they are justified by politicians on the basis of economics and management expertise rather ideology. But this obscures the important implications for Norwegian citizens and society of the greater emphasis thereby given to a market logic in the public sector.  Neoliberal reform and the application of market logic to the public sector alters the relationship between citizens and states and the balance between duties and rights in the Norwegian welfare state. The effect of neoliberal reform is to remove citizens from the rights and duties balance inherent in social citizenship as explained by Marshall. In applying market logics to the welfare state, key welfare services are reconceptualized as products to sell, and citizens are reconceptualized as consumers.

Supporters of market reforms have argued that sectors that have undergone such reforms are more responsive to consumer needs and consumer satisfaction. But this also leads the “consumers” of those services to expect different levels of service dependent on the package purchased. The extension of this logic to the public sphere can therefore be argued to undermine universalism and the underlying social citizenship logic of the balance of rights and duties and the equality of citizens in relation to that. Additionally, a market changes how states and politicians conceptualize their own duties to citizens, and, as described by Aberbach and Christensen, sidesteps key political questions about who exactly the government should serve (by assuming that all citizens have the same level of influence, when, increasingly, they do not).

When the public sector is conceptualized and structured in this way, the duty of the government and the welfare state changes from providing welfare to citizens to ensuring responsiveness to customer needs and satisfaction, and these cannot be assumed to be the same thing. Additionally, duties can change hands from the government to private corporations or state-owned enterprises, obscuring and complicating where duty lies.

When the citizen is cast as the consumer, their rights and duties are also changed, and they are subject to the discourse of consumer choice and personal responsibility. This further shifts the idea of social citizenship away from a conceptualization of citizens who are entitled to social rights arising from their commitment (via duties) to a community towards a consumer-citizen who is viewed primarily as a rational economic actor, making decisions based on a cost-benefit analysis, without consideration of differing levels of access to resources or structural barriers and constraints or of their own role (and responsibilities) in reproducing such structures. With this formulation of the public sector as a market, or operating according to market logic, citizens are denied rights at the same time as new duties are applied outside of the welfare model and its give and take of rights and duties.

Therefore, neoliberal reforms have reconfigured the relationship between citizens and the Norwegian welfare state and altered how we think about the balance between rights and duties in the welfare state context. As previously explained, Marshall's social citizenship has been influential in informing how we understand the placement of rights and duties in the Social Democratic welfare state, traditionally placing emphasis on the duties of the government to fulfil citizen's social rights, with citizens performing corresponding duties that arise out of claiming social rights and belonging to the community.

The market-consumer conceptualization upends this understanding and traditional expectations of the welfare state, transforming both citizen and state rights and duties. While such reforms are often presented simply as technocratic changes in governance and management, in fact they hold more significance. As neoliberal principles continue to shape public sector reforms, the fundamental relationship between citizens and the state evolves in ways that challenge the foundational principles of social citizenship. Therefore, more attention should be paid to the effect of neoliberal reforms on the relationship between citizens and the state, the shifting expectations placed upon both parties, and the entitlements that citizens can reasonably claim within an increasingly market-oriented welfare system. 

• Audrey Geissinger is a Doctoral Researcher at PRIO and the University of Oslo and a member of the RCN-funded Co-Duties project at PRIO.