Public funding for culture in Sweden

In 1974, Sweden won the Eurovision Song Contest with ABBA’s song Waterloo. ABBA is still one of the best-known names in Swedish pop, alongside others such as Max Martin and Avicii. The same year saw the birth of Swedish cultural policy as a coherent and distinct national policy area, explicitly supporting inhabitants’ access to culture beyond the commercial market. Sweden is still one of the primary music-exporting countries of the world, a position many claim to be the result of extensive public support for democratically-accessible music and cultural welfare society (Swedish Institute, 2017). Government support to culture, or certain kinds of culture, can be and has been questioned. This chapter will take a closer look at the funding of culture in Sweden, in particular public funding, and at arguments for public funding of culture. As Sweden is commonly described as a welfare country, the political concept of welfare in relation to cultural policy will also be discussed. The article finds that both public and private funding of culture has a solid basis in Sweden, but that general welfare structures in place paradoxically make accessing welfare difficult for some groups of professionals in the field of culture.