Abstract
This paper employs Regulation Theory (e.g. Aglietta, 1979; Durand, 2017; Boyer, 2018) and Jessop’s strategic-relational approach (Jessop, 2007) to take initial steps towards making sense of the decomposition of the spatially mediated socio-political alliances formed in support of the globally oriented finance-dominated accumulation regime. The finance-dominated accumulation regime in its various national guises is, since the 2007-9 global financial crisis (GFC), facing its own structural crisis. However, the expression of this crisis takes particular forms on the basis of the regime’s historically specific articulation and institutional configuration in each national setting (Boyer, 2018). One significant dimension, which has only passingly been considered in the literature on the structural crisis of the finance-dominated accumulation regime, is the spatial articulation of this regime. This includes the unevenness of liquidity, deindustrialisation-tertiarisation and urbanisation, but also how this translates into its supportive socio-political alliances. As the accumulation regime entered into structural crisis with the GFC, however, this alliance has been tested as the institutional configuration enabling global competition and stabilising financialisation are being modified with the introduction of austerity and a number of macro-prudential measures. Moreover, “populist” politics, especially on the right, have been articulated by social forces desiring to mobilise the constituencies disadvantaged by the accumulation regime (Worth, 2013). These imaginaries have successfully influenced the usage of state power to implement a range of nationalist measures (Pastor and Veronesi, 2018). They have also attracted electoral supporters from the accumulation regime’s supportive socio-political alliances (cf. Inglehart and Norris, 2016). This paper explores this spatial dimension in the unfolding structural crisis in the arguably most successful of the variations of the financialized accumulation regime, Sweden (Belfrage and Kallifatides, 2018a). Here, a new Swedish model backed by the urban (notionally) home-owning middle classes has emerged. Compared with its more famous predecessor, it now revolves decreasingly around the export sector and increasingly around debt-led consumption and property investment. Ever-increasing levels of private sector, especially household, debt, a major driver of highly leveraged banking revenue, is at the core of this regime. So is rapidly rising real income and wealth inequality. These trends are in significant part due to convergence between global, European and national credit cycles. As a small and open economy, relatively vulnerable to market fluctuations and the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve and the ECB, any Swedish endeavour to deviate from low global interest rates with more restrictive monetary policy would create further financial instability (Belfrage and Kallifatides, 2018b). New policies, for instance those devised to attempt to construct countercyclical macroprudential policy, has led to institutional paralysis. Further administrative crisis, this time in the party-political system, resulted from an intensifying legitimation crisis around the accumulation regime expressed through the growing support for nationalist-populist Sverigedemokraterna with four months of negotiation required to create a grand coalition likely to be shaky during the coming period of government. This paper explores government documents, demographic data and survey data to establish the spatially mediated patterns in these electoral developments underpinning the structural crisis of the new Swedish model.