This work analyses the contents and transformations of the Swedish welfare state through the lens of elderly-care and childcare policies from 1930 to 2005. The aim has been, first, to analyse and explain the institutional characteristics and ideological content of the Swedish welfare state, especially in the field of care policies, which are central to the Swedish welfare model and largely contribute to its specificity. We have considered the Swedish welfare state as a specific social contract between the state and its citizens and we have analysed how the " boundaries " of the welfare state have been defined, that is to say how the fields of intervention considered as legitimate and the means of state intervention considered as appropriate have progressively been defined. The second aim of this work has been to analyse the transformations of the Swedish welfare state not - or not only - from a political economy perspective, which has largely dominated the literature on welfare state reforms, but rather from a more sociological perspective which considers the changing nature of the relations between the state and society that these reforms and transformations entail. We have thus analysed the processes of reform and restructuring in the fields of elderly-care and childcare policies, the logics that have underpinned these reforms, and the determining factors (especially the ideological, economical, and political factors) behind these reforms. We have also sought to evaluate the impact of the reforms. It is through this combined analysis of the reforms, their rational and their impact that we have been able to test the hypothesis of a possible redefinition of the specific social contract between state and society. Our analysis of the reforms has shown diverging trends in the two fields under study: there has been a targeting and focusing of resources on the people most in need in the case of elderly-care, but a dilution of resources in order to cover a greater number of children in the field of childcare. Although these strategies have raised certain issues for the legitimacy of these policies, our results nonetheless show a great stability in both the principles and the institutions of the Swedish welfare state. We show that the specific institutional characteristics of the Swedish welfare state have created a strong amount of support but also high expectations from the population, both of which have contributed to the normative resilience but also to the capacity of adaptation of the Swedish model.
