Legal experts warn: Sweden’s social insurance system fails to deliver social security

In the new SNS report Ensuring Social Security? An Examination of the Swedish Social Insurance Code legal scholars Ruth Mannelqvist and Sara Stendahl examine three core benefits within Sweden’s social insurance system: sickness benefit, disability benefit, and housing allowance. The researchers identify significant shortcomings in both legal quality and goal fulfillment.

The social insurance system consists of around thirty different benefits designed to provide social protection in various life situations. In Ensuring Social Security? An Examination of the Swedish Social Insurance Code, the authors review three central components of the system—sickness benefit, disability benefit, and housing allowance—focusing on whether the legal framework provides the security promised by law.

The researchers find that these benefits have gradually been eroded. In the sickness and disability insurance schemes this is particularly evident through deviations from the income replacement principle - the idea that compensation should be proportional to lost income. According to the authors, this development has taken place without any prior political debate on the constitutionally enshrined value of social security.

- The benefits we examine neither provide adequate protection against income loss nor function as a stable safety net for particularly vulnerable groups, says Ruth Mannelqvist.

The report also analyses the housing allowance, which over time has become available to fewer households. Its design has led many recipients into debt to the state through repayment demands.

- The housing allowance is characterised by complex rules and a high risk of repayment claims. At the same time, the level of ambition has declined, and the allowance has, for many, become part of the last-resort safety net. This was never the intended purpose, and it is inconsistent with the overarching goal of the system to ensure social security, says Sara Stendahl.

Since 2011, all benefits in Sweden’s social insurance system have been consolidated under a single legal framework—the Social Insurance Code. Despite its stated aim of simplifying and clarifying the rules, the report concludes that the system remains highly complex and difficult to navigate for both insured individuals and administrators.

Key conclusions:

• Although no political party advocates dismantling the social insurance system, gradual changes since the 1990s have eroded it’s character as a rights-based legislation.
• The Social Insurance Code does not function as the civic rights legislation it was intended to be.
• A renewed political debate is needed on the purpose and goals of social insurance, to ensure both social security and legal certainty.
• The deficiencies in the Social Insurance Code are so significant that a comprehensive legal review of the legislation is necessary.

About the report

Ensuring Social Security? An Examination of the Swedish Social Insurance Code is part of the SNS research project Economic Security, which takes a comprehensive view of Sweden’s social protection systems for parenthood, illness, unemployment, old age, and economic assistance. The aim is to contribute new knowledge and a foundation for informed public discussion.

About the authors

Ruth Mannelqvist is Professor of Law at the Department of Law, Umeå University.

Contact: ruth.mannelqvist@umu.se / +46 (0)90 786 74 17

Sara Stendahl is Professor of Public Law at the Department of Law, University of Gothenburg.

Contact: sara.stendahl@law.gu.se / +46 (0)31 786 15 25