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Research on winner-loser effects has demonstrated the consequences voting for a winning or losing party have on evaluations of democracy: Voting for the winners makes voters more positive toward democracy and the electoral process while voting for the losers makes them more negative. However, in the literature, less attention has been devoted to a possible winner-loser effect on confidence in the institutions responsible for the conduct of elections. In the following study, we bridge this gap by exploring how confidence in Sweden’s Election Authority changed among voters of winning and losing parties. The analyses indicated that, despite the high institutional trust and system support in Sweden, voters lost confidence in the Election Authority if their party lost and gained confidence if their party won. This effect was strongest among voters of the Sweden Democrats. Overall, Sweden Democratic voters gained the most confidence after the 2022 election, probably attributable to the Sweden Democrats shedding their pariah status and invited to real government influence in 2022. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of whether long lines at polling stations may impact voter turnout are scarce, and hitherto none has analyzed a high-turnout proportional electoral system. We investigate whether problematic election-day lines at polling places during the 2022 Swedish general election contributed to the considerable decline in turnout. Our analyses combine data on polling stations’ closing times in the 20 largest municipalities with survey data on poll workers in three municipalities. The results suggest that precincts with line problems on election day saw lower turnout than comparable precincts. Interestingly, this effect appears to have been partly offset by some voters instead casting their ballots in an advance voting polling station on election day. Although the line problems were not widespread enough to explain more than a fraction of the overall decline in turnout, congestion risks are important to consider in future elections to avoid a higher and more unequal cost of voting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Market reforms within the Swedish welfare sector have paved the way for models based on buying and selling welfare services. Public procurement constitutes a hub for commissioning and providing social services. The aim of this article is to explore how social work is shaped within a procurement context. Attention is directed to how social workers providing procured services describe their work. The empirical material consists of interviews with 16 providers of social services within different areas of a procured social work. The results show how procurement shapes the provision of social work, in terms of specifications of time and quantity, a quantification of the work performed with clients and how the framework of procurement shapes the client as a commission and a case. It is further shown how providers compensate for and deal with the framework of procured social work to meet the clients' needs. The results raise questions about the possibilities for procured social work regarding the services' demarcation, specialisation, and time frame. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how older people make sense of their situation in calls to a helpline a few months into the Covid-19 pandemic. By drawing on the sociology of everyday life to analyse callers' various understandings of the crisis, the article nuances current knowledge about older people's situation. The thematic analysis shows that the callers make sense of the crisis linked to social relations on a personal, anonymous, and abstract level. The callers' responses to challenges to their everyday routines - adjustment or critical evaluation - are connected to different approaches to trust: basic trust in a shared social reality with someone or regulating trust in a set of norms independent from that other. Whereas the calls demonstrate very few positive adjustments in personal relations, they show that anonymous and abstract relations serve as important resources for both maintaining and re-evaluating everyday life during a crisis. Although older people's lack of secure personal relations during the pandemic points to vulnerability, their resourcefulness is apparent in their active engagement in important anonymous and abstract relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During most of the 20th century shelters for the homeless has been criticized as being of too low standard and an unworthy way of living in a welfare society. During the 1960s and 1970s most shelters in Sweden were shut down and replaced with other forms of housing for the homeless. Since the late 1980s and early 1990s the issue of homelessness has returned to the political agenda as an existing social problem in Sweden. In this period we have also experienced a return of the shelters. These newly opened shelters are in many ways based on the same ideas like the old shelters described in stories of poverty and deprivation from the 19th century. In our article we raise the question how a system that has been rejected and condemned from both ethical and ideological standpoints as an unworthy way of living can be "remodernized" and considered again as a (temporary) solution to homelessness. We examine how shelters are justified in the 21st century and what functions they fill. We also discuss the fact that the shelters are almost exclusively run by (religious) voluntary organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information related to the 2006 annual meeting of the Association of Sociologists, which was titled as "The City and Eastern Europe." Mats Franzén, retiring speaker of the Association, started with a presentation on "the renaissance of the city," taking account of the new-old character of the city and the new possibilities and problems that exist in an ever more modernized and post-industrial society.