At the end of March 2020, international media present Swedish management of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic as soft and irresponsible. Thus, Sweden, which is usually regarded as exceptionally risk averse and cautious, has chosen an unexpected risk management approach. The aim of this article is to reflect on how the Swedish government has managed the Covid-19 pandemic until early April 2020 from two theoretical perspectives, the risk society thesis and governmentality theory. We make a brief review of how previous pandemics have been managed compared to Covid-19 and try to understand the consequences of the Swedish handling of present pandemic with a particular focus on the governance of the pandemic and the exercise of power rather than definite risk management strategies during the pandemic.

The aim of the study was to empirically test whether grouping people according to their general beliefs, combined with positional factors, can explain environmental concern, and whether there are country differences in this respect. The study is based on the United States, Canadian, Norwegian, and Swedish parts of The International Social Survey Program (ISSP) survey 2000 on environmental concern. The four countries were paired resulting in a comparison between North America and Scandinavia. The results showed that general beliefs, together with education and political affiliation, were the most stable predictors of environmental concern, and that adding general beliefs to the analysis improves the explanatory power in a significant way.

In this article, we examine the conceptual importance of integrating risk and intersectionality theory for the study of how risk and various forms of inequality intersect and are mutually constitutive. We argue that an intersectional perspective can advance risk research by incorporating more effectively the role of such social categories as gender and race into the analysis of ‘risk’ as an empirical phenomenon. In doing so, the intersectional perspective articulates more clearly the connection between the social construction of risk and, on the one hand, the reproduction of new and complex social inequalities and, on the other, intersections of social class, gender, ethnicity and other social categorisations. We trace the intellectual division between risk and feminist-inspired intersectionality research, showing how these approaches can be aligned to study, for example, risk-based welfare and social policy. We use a discussion of general directions within welfare policy to illustrate how an intersectional perspective can be used to show the ways in which new governance strategies create new divisions and reproduce existing forms of social inequality. We conclude the article with a call for a new research agenda to integrate intersectional frameworks with risk theory in order to provide a more nuanced analysis of the relationship between social inequality and risk.Anna Olofsson, Jens O. Zinn, Gabriele Griffin, Katarina Giritli Nygren, Andreas Cebulla and Kelly Hannah-Moffa

Compared to many other countries, Sweden has managed the COVID-19 pandemic with no lockdowns, less regulation and more voluntary action expected of citizens and organizations. In this article, the authors explore media representations of national preventative strategies and how they were anchored in broader discourses. The article aims to analyse the development of crisis narratives and struggles over legitimacy during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in Sweden. Employing a critical discourse analysis, the authors investigate the editorials and opinion articles in Sweden’s largest morning newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, during the spring of 2020. The authors combine descriptive analyses of the development of the crisis narratives with discursive analyses of conflicting ideologies in the debate. The study indicates that three crisis narratives dominated the debates: health, the economy and democracy. Within and between these narratives, struggles over legitimacy in the handling of COVID-19 were captured in several conflicting perspectives or paradoxes: Swedish exceptionalism versus the world, centralization versus decentralization and herd immunity versus herd humanism.

The aim of this study is to empirically test Roudometof's suggested one-dimensional operationalization of transnationalism, from cosmopolitanism to localism, and compare it with an alternative two-dimensional operationalization. The study uses Swedish survey data from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), for 1995 and 2003. The results indicate that a two-dimensional, rather than a one-dimensional, solution fits the data better. Transnationalism can therefore be seen as one dimension ranging from local to global and one ranging from protectionism to openness. The same result was obtained for both 1995 and 2003. The results also show that people with different attitudes differ socioeconomically and that there is a trend over time towards more protectionist, rather than open, attitudes among the Swedish public.