The ‘new politics’ perspective in welfare state research holds that class‐based parties and unions have lost some of their influence and that they have been replaced by client organizations that are capable of resisting retrenchment pressures. However, scholars within the ‘power resource tradition’ contend that class is still fundamental and that client interests are weak in corporatist countries with a strong labour movement. It is argued in this article that scholars within the power resource approach have focused too much on social insurance programmes and traditional forms of political participation, and that this has made them blind to client protests. An empirical study of political efforts to close down nighttime emergency surgery in Swedish hospitals is presented. The Swedish counties planned to close down emergency surgery in 17 hospitals in the period 2003–04. The political proposals to close down emergency departments were met with strong protests from client groups, and politicians often withdrew their proposals of closures. In this case study, politicians claim that it was client protests that made them withdraw a decision to close the emergency surgery. This result suggests that client protests are politically important and diverges from the expectations deduced from the power‐resource approach but lends credibility to the theory of the new politics of the welfare state.

Information that relates to the consequences of political decisions is often regarded as the main currency for interest group influence. However, this argument has mainly been applied and empirically tested in the case of highly professional and permanent groups. It is therefore unclear to what extent the provision of information plays a role in the political impact of informal and loosely organized groups, such as social movements. This article demonstrates how social movements use information to influence elected officials on the local level in Sweden. A quantitative study of 339 proposed school closures during the 2002-2010 period is presented. School issues have been one of the most important drivers of contentious politics in Sweden. The results reveal that technical information provided by movements, such as information on unintended economic consequences and alternative proposals that could save costs, decreases the probability that proposals will result in school closures. Protest actions with a large number of participants, however, have no statistically significant effects on closures. The study suggests that less organizational resources may be required to influence elected officials through technical expertise than would be expected in light of previous research.Providing policymakers with information that relates to the consequences of their decisions is often asserted to be one of the most important means by which interest groups influence the decision-making process. Existing empirical studies on lobbying suggest that interest groups that provide this type of information are more likely to have access to elected officials (Bouwen, 2004) and influence the decision-making process (Burstein and Hirsh, 2007). However, it is currently unclear to what extent this argument is generalizable to informal groups, such as social movements. Most existing empirical studies focus on highly professional and permanent groups on the

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In ethnically diverse societies, are citizens treated equally by their political representatives? Several field experiments find that politicians discriminate in their daily communication with voters. However, these studies only focus on the USA and South Africa and may overestimate the degree of discrimination by ignoring sex and socio-economic status. We address these shortcomings by investigating ethnic discrimination in Sweden. In an email experiment, all 812 municipal commissioners were randomly contacted by voters with Arabic- or Swedish-sounding names. Our results do not show any clear signs of discrimination; thus, previous results might not be generalisable to Sweden or similar democracies.