ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Behind the Veil of Science Policy: Parliamentarians, the Bomb, and the Definition of Research in Sweden in the 1960s

• In Event: Science, Technology and Politics in the 20th Century

English Abstract

Established in 1959, the Swedish Society of Parliamentarians and Scientists (RIFO) soon came to organize a majority of the members in the Swedish Parliament as well as a sizeable amount of the country’s top scientists and technologists. Initially RIFO’s aims were modest: to inform parliamentarians about recent developments in science and its organization. In the mid-1960s, this supposedly non-political organization decided to enter politics. The parliamentarians in RIFO submitted a couple of cross-party motions in the Parliament which emphasized the need for a “research politics”. The subsequent parliamentary debates offer a rare insight into the political shaping of science policy. While the parliamentarians argued for a broad understanding of research that included military research and atomic energy research, the Government preferred to conflate research with academic research. After a series of heated exchanges, the Government’s position won with a hair’s breadth in the Parliament. This conceptual closure is important for understanding how science policy developed in Sweden. Indeed, the exclusion of military and atomic energy research has caused long-lasting fallacies regarding economic proportions in Swedish science policy discourses. But why was it important for the ruling social democrats to frame science policy as mainly an academic venture? We argue that the narrow definition of research promoted by the Government was a strategy for compartmentalizing military-oriented research, particularly Sweden’s program for developing atomic weapons. The parliamentarians, on the other hand, conveyed a growing concern among scientific and industrial elites regarding the program’s the high costs and potential lock-in effects.

Authors

• Per Lundin, Chalmers University of Technology

• Ingemar Pettersson, Swedish Defence Research Agency