This thesis investigates changes in the institutional structures of the Swedish police from the late nineteenth century to the post-war era. State-appointed investigative commissions and parliamentary debates about police reforms are analysed in order to establish the long-term political goals of policing. Until the nationalisation of the entire police system in 1965, the Swedish police consisted of three main institutions: municipal city police, municipal rural police, and regional state police forces. Conceptually, the divide lay mainly between urban and rural policing.

In the cities, poor working conditions brought the idea of a unifying Police Act to the fore, and Parliament decided on national regulations in 1925. In the countryside, the main issue was with policing itself. Local authorities did not have enough resources to adequately maintain order and investigate crimes. This was addressed by a number of reforms attempting to solve the problem by issuing state subsidiaries, diverting resources from nearby cities, and adding new police forces to the countryside.

Policing was defined as a state interest by most politicians from left to right, and from an early-stage nationalisation of the different police forces was established as a long-term political goal. Conceptually, the differences between cities and the countryside decreased over time, making the idea of a single national police institution more and more attractive. 

Conflicting ideas about the short-term solutions to problems in urban and rural districts, however, affected Parliament’s ability to implement reform, making it increasingly difficult to merge the three police institutions and to take the necessary steps towards nationalisation. This can be explained through historical institutionalism and the lock-in effects of path dependence. The institutional structures of the city police, rural police, and regional police made cooperation unfavourable. New police reforms sought ways to facilitate cooperation or consolidation but, in the end, politicians conformed to the existing institutions by further accepting, and even enhancing, the differences between urban and rural policing. This was contradictory to the main political idea behind nationalisation: to create a uniform and more flexible police system. 

Nationalisation could only be achieved after the institutional structures had been torn down. The main steps had been taken in the 1940s as major changes in Sweden’s administrative system took place, altering the trajectory of police reform. At the same time policing had gone through the aforementioned crucial conceptual changes, easing the transition to a single organisation. Thus, the police changed from three separate institutions to a single national police institution. The process was slow and gradual, taking almost a century to achieve.

Swedish state regulation of tobacco use came much later than the regulation of alcohol and drugs. Only in 1993 did the first more comprehensive regulatory act – the Swedish Tobacco Act – come intoforce. By examining the political prehistory of the act in 1957–1993, this article analyses the increasingly complex problem description that made the new legislation possible. The article shows that different parts of the problem description – harms to others, a connection to the public health discourse, and an increasing medicalisation – came to reinforce each other, but also that all essential componentswere in place from the outset and that research confirmed established descriptions rather than drovethe development.

The aim of this article is to examine the framing of excessive consumption as a disease-like condition in the Swedish press during the years 1992-2012. Against a theoretical background discussing medicalisation, we have analysed the characteristics of problematic consumption framed as a disease, as well as the presumed causes of and responses to this problem. Alongside and intertwined with a structural and a rationalisation perspective, we find discussions and explanations of problematic consumption as a disease all through the investigated period. Class and gender are noticeable components of the core problem description, but the reductionist assumption of addiction as a brain disease seems to point to a problem beyond historical and social context. The disease conceptualisation of problematic consumption can be seen as a compensatory perspective in an individualising and consumption affirming society. However, this perspective is ultimately decided by politics and not by research. Despite being a frequently occurring perspective on a conceptual level in Sweden, it is not a legitimate description in legislation or as a cause for public treatment interventions.

AIMS - The aim of this study is to investigate the medicalising of gambling problems by comparing the political discussions on gambling in the Swedish Parliament in the early 1970s and the early 2010s. DESIGN - Against a theoretical background on medicalising processes in general, and medicalisation of gambling problems in particular, we have analysed discussion protocols and parliamentary bills in the Swedish Parliament from the years 1970-1975 and 2012-2013. RESULTS - The problem descriptions of the 1970s and 2010s are, in certain respects, strikingly similar, identifying proactive operators such as the gambling companies and highlighting an inadequate legal framework. But where the MPs of the 1970s put some effort into describing the drab society which fed the need for gambling, the elected representatives of the 2010s shortcut to individual dependence. CONCLUSIONS - EU membership and the development of the Internet have made effective control and regulation impossible in the early 2010s and the political handling of the Swedish gambling problem is therefore a clear example of how market liberalisation can pave the way for individualisation, medicalisation and depoliticisation of social problems.