Katja Lindqvist

The chapter describes and discusses the Nordic welfare state approach to governance of the arts using data from Sweden. It enquires into how the Swedish system for public governance of the arts works, in particular with focus on answering the question of whether public governance of the arts does secure artistic freedom, and if so how. In other words, is Swedish public governance of the arts a benefit or a threat to artistic freedom? In order to answer this question, the concepts of governance and policy are defined and described. Furthermore, three dominant public governance modes in use in advanced democracies will be described and used as a theoretical framework for an analysis of strengths and weaknesses of the specific governance arrangements used in Sweden in the field of the arts. The chapter shows that there is reason for concern as regards artistic freedom in Sweden, partly because of the lack of formal arm’s length distance between political and administrative decisionmakers at subnational level, and partly due to ambiguities in government agency information collection related to application procedures.