The development of Swedish employment protection legislation

This article explores how and why employment protection legislation developed in Sweden in the ways that it did from its early beginnings to the present period. It hopes to offer answers to questions about the initial impetus for statutory regulation, the number and quality of significant employment protection measures adopted and the positions of stakeholders with interests in the reform decision making process. It does this by drawing on a variety of both primary and secondary source materials such as employment protection databases, translated parliamentary records and research publications. At the same time, it assesses the explanatory merit of proposed hypotheses in the literature by testing them against the available empirical evidence. Several interesting findings emerged from this study.