Major Mapping of the Swedish Power Elite

What does the Swedish power elite look like today? The last time we received a scientific description was in 1990, when the Swedish Maktutredningen (Power Inquiry) conducted an extensive study of Swedish elites. At that time, two main centers of power were identified: on the one hand, large corporations and their interest organizations, and on the other, the labor movement with the Social Democrats and the trade unions.

Much has changed in Sweden since 1990, and there are reasons to believe that today’s answer to this question looks different. Soon we will find out, thanks to a research grant from the Swedish Research Council awarded to the project Splittring eller enighet? Nätverk och organisationer i den svenska makteliten (Fragmentation or Unity? Networks and Organizations in the Swedish Power Elite).

Anna Tyllström, a business economics researcher, will lead the project.

– Elites are groups of people who exercise a disproportionately large amount of power over how our society looks; this can involve both formal and more invisible informal power. This is not unusual in democracies, but precisely because they have this power, it is important to understand who they are, how they influence our society, how open they are, and what they do to retain their position of power, she says.

Over the past thirty years, income inequality in capital incomes in Sweden has increased sharply, immigration has shifted in character, and gender equality in leadership has increased both in government and in business. A significant portion of publicly funded welfare services has also been outsourced, giving rise to new companies and career paths, and an influence industry has emerged between politics and business, where representatives often are influential without having formal mandates.

The project will investigate who belongs to the Swedish elite today in both business and politics, and how they are connected to each other. This will be done by studying individuals, their networks and the organizations in which they are active. The work will employ methods such as social network analysis and AI-based mappings of individuals’ biographies. For example, this means using various registers to identify people with some form of formal power and then gathering information about how their networks are structured.

The research team consists of scholars from the fields of network sociology, political science, organization theory and strategic communication — all with prior experience studying elites in Scandinavia. Other team members include Christoph Houman Ellersgaard from Copenhagen Business School and Anton Grau Larsen from Roskilde University, who together have previously conducted an extensive mapping of the Danish power elite, as well as Sofiya Voytiv at FOI and political scientist Nils Gustafsson from Lund University.

The project is set to begin in 2026 and will run for four years. – “The goal is to shed light on how power is concentrated and reproduced in Sweden’s upper echelons, and thereby contribute to a more transparent and just society,” says Anna Tyllström.