How Do Social Democrats Legitimize Cutbacks? Welfare Retrenchment to Save the Welfare State

Abstract Social democratic parties have contributed to the development of welfare state retrenchment in many European countries. While numerous studies have attempted to explain this, few have focused on how parties legitimize cuts, given that they are often unpopular with social democratic voters. Examining Sweden, we argue that the Swedish Social Democratic Party has developed a legitimation model that presents welfare cuts as a way of safeguarding the welfare state. This model has been persistently used since the early 1990s and is now central to the party's rhetoric. This has implications for how we should understand the ideological development of Swedish social democracy and suggests that it may be fruitful to study how welfare cuts are justified in other empirical contexts.