Nordic Prostitution Policy Reform

The conservative Swedish daily, Svenska Dagbladet, reports today that while the 1999 law banning the purchase of sexual services in Sweden has resulted in 600 convictions, one of the key effects of the law has been a norm shift.

In a survey conducted by the University of Gothenburg last year, roughly seven of ten respondents were in favor of maintaining the ban.  In comparison, a survey from 1996 (the year after the official report proposing criminalization of both the buyer and seller of sexual services was released) shows that only 30% of respondents thought that the purchase of sexual services should be criminalized.

For those who have an interest in how policymaking can potentially contribute to the re-shaping of societal norms, those figures provide fodder for some interesting discussion.  Yet, the 1996 survey is of particular importance for the NPPR project and our work on Sweden. The relatively low level of support among the Swedish public in 1996 for the policy that became law just three years later suggests that policy entrepreneurs in favor of the ban were not able to draw upon public opinion in making the case for reform to policymakers.

Indeed, it will be interesting to see in our Swedish elite interviews (to be conducted in 2010) if the discrepancy between the attitudes held by the Swedish public and the desired reform being propagated by advocates was addressed during lobbying efforts, if at all.  Given the lack of favorable public opinion climate, it appears to be the case that policy entrepreneurs required an alternate means for making their case in a compelling manner.

As such, this simple piece of survey data draws our attention once again to the need to properly specify the causal mechanism that resulted in the 1999 ban.  What ideas were of greatest relevance as reform entrepreneurs sought to achieve support from targeted policymakers?  How did they manage to graft those ideas to the proposed ban?  And of equal interest, did reform proponents need to discredit those who proposed alternate policy reform visions, or were they of little consequence in the elite ideational environment of Sweden in the mid and late 1990s?

Related posts:

1. Evaluating the Swedish Ban on the Purchase of Sexual Services: The Anna Skarhed Report
2. Norway bans the purchase of sexual services
3. Finnish legislation on the purchase of sexual services: potential revisions?
4. The sale of sexual services in Norway: legal, but still illegal?
5. Swedish Liberal MP Supports Ending Sex Purchase Ban, Backing Brothels