“Scandinavian politics is much less partisan and more coalition-prone than in the US, with proportional representation effectively denying any one party an absolute parliamentary majority. But we should not mistake a contingent twentieth-century historical conjuncture of relative political civility for a supra-historical essence of Nordic political culture.”
“The social-democratic welfare state has faced strong historical challenges — both from the Left, by strong communist and new left movements, and from the Right, by organized business, such as the powerful Swedish employer organization SAF, and by Tea Party-like anti-taxation movements, which appeared in the 1970s in Norway and Denmark. Simply put, the “Nordic Consensus” has never been as comprehensive as Williamson would have us believe.”