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This study explores the strategies employed by the Swedish Railway Council to influence national railway policy from 1902 to 1967. The Council was a corporatist arrangement and functioned as a broker between industrial and regional interests and the public railways. The results show that though the Council's policy influence in many cases was marginal, there were occasions when the members could use the Council as a tool to influence railway policy, most notably the division of the network into profitable and unprofitable lines, with different forms of government subsidies. The Council's influence increased through a shift in arguments, from a position that tariffs should be high enough to deliver a return on the invested capital, to an emphasis on having tariffs that could support national and regional economic development, even if it created commercial losses. When Swedish transport policy shifted in the 1960s, the Railway Council gradually lost its importance and eventually dissolved.

This paper investigates the introduction of and consequences of the “Vision Zero” (Nollvisionen) that was part of a law passed in 1997 and called for a radical reduction of deaths caused by road traffic. We try to answer the question why the Vision Zero has failed to reach its goals for the last ten years. The introduction of the Vision Zero can be explained with a combination of changes in traffic policy and welfare policy, together with a reorganization of the transport sector that created new opportunities for old interest groups. Our main conclusion is that the strong idealistic and visionary political goals in the Vision Zero are in line with a Swedish tradition of over-arching visionary national goals for the transport sector in general. Idealistic goals suppressed critical objections, but at the same time there were insufficient resources for investments and lack of approval for the policy from actors within the sector, which can create lock-in effects and actually prevent effective policies from being implemented. This might explain the relative ineffectiveness of the policy, and the slim chances of the Vision Zero to ever being achieved.

Hur påverkas enskilda orter av att en stor och tekniskt avancerad anläggning etableras? Ökar eller minskar befolkningen? Vad blir det socioekonomiska utfallet avinvesteringarna? Vilka effekter kan det bli av ett slutförvar i Oskarshamns eller Östhammars kommun? Fredrik Andersson drar sina slutsatser utifrån det socio-ekonomiska utfallet av genomförda investeringar i kärnkraft, vattenkraft och gruvor.

Rollspel som hobby är en vid det här laget drygt 30 år gammal företeelse. Inom den högre utbildningen är rollspel som metod både av betydligt yngre och äldre slag. Vad man med en vid definition skulle kunna kalla rollspel förekom i utbildningssammanhang redan i slutet av 1800-talet. I en mer modern tappning fick rollspel som undervisningsform en renässans under 1900-talets sista decennier. Fortfarande är dock rollspel som hobby och pedagogik i princip skilda världar. Denna artikel argumenterar för användbarheten av rollspel i pedagogiskt syfte och pläderar för en utvecklad diskussion om varför, hur och på vilka sätt rollspelen skall användas i undervisningen. Områden som lyfts fram i artikeln är var rollspel som metod traditionellt används inom högskolepedagogiken, för- och nackdelar med rollspel som undervisningsmetod samt förslag på hur rollspel kan användas, med utgångspunkt i historieundervisningen. Dessutom pläderar artikeln för att det finns beröringspunkter och utbytesmöjligheter mellan rollspel som hobby och som pedagogik.

This article analyses the decision-making processes and the mobilisation of actors surrounding the investments in private railways in Sweden by means of a case study of the East Coast Line between Gävle and Härnösand around the year 1900. An effective regional interest group was formed with the aim to construct a coastal railway in Norrland. It consisted of a small, but well-connected and well positioned, group of industrialists, politicians and railway promoters, who would all benefit from the construction of the railway.

The limited size and homogenous character of the regional political and economic elite made it easier to form a cohesive interest group. It also enabled the use of personal networks to influence the policy process. Furthermore, the impact of the interest group also depended on institutional factors. Before the electoral reforms beginning in 1906, the Swedish political system gave regional elites considerable political influence, which enabled the merging of political and financial power. In municipalities controlled by industrial interests, municipal resources were channelled into a railway investment that catered mainly for industrial interests. The landsting were another source of public funds for railway projects, and different regional elites fought to have access to their funds. The regional elite also had channels into policy-making on the national level, since their firm grip of local and regional politics allowed them to obtain parliamentary seats. This increased the impact of the interest group, and also helped to shift some of the investment burden from companies and financial investors to the taxpayers.

Hence, the process of building a private railway was not only about engineering and economy. It was also about the mobilisation of the regional elite behind the project, in order to be able to perform the political manoeuvres and power brokering necessary for the railway to become a reality.

In this dissertation the construction of two coastal railways, the East Coast Line and the Bothnia Line, in the Norrland region of northern Sweden is used as a case study of how regionally based interest groups are formed, and how they gain access to decision-making processes on a national level. In periods when a number of preconditions were in place, a window of opportunity opened for the coastal railway that the regional elites could exploit. Among these was the ability to form a coherent regional interest group, through institutions that created platforms and power-bases that enable regional elites to co-operate and act on regional and national levels.The existence of an institutional framework that was adapitve towards regional railway promotion was also important. The study shows that the coastal railway had a very flexible role on the agenda, as it provided a fixed solution against which actors could pin a multitude of different problems. An important factor for explaining the development of the coastal railway question in Norrland was the ideological notion of the region itself. Being a vast, resource-rich and sparsely populated region, Norrland had almost always received special consideration in both public opinion and national policy making. It also created a remarkable stubbornness among the regional actors in working for the coastal railway. Regional interest groups had also learnt that linking their claims to Norrland's peripheral position had high legitimacy on the national arena, by claiming the need for regional fairness and/or the national importance of the regional export-intensive industries. This was instrumental in justifying the repeated exemptions from the national railway policy regimes that ultimately were decissive in making the regional elites successful.