A number of researchers at some of Sweden’s most prestigious seats of learning made a move in Dagens Nyheter’s debate pages. They claimed that new research results at the universities of Uppsala, Lund, Umeå, Stockholm and Göteborg should be heeded by politicians. The following day, some of Sweden’s best-known writers on cultural matters rallied to their support in a debate article in the cultural pages of Aftonbladet. It described how some internationally renowned intellectual authorities advanced arguments pointing in exactly the same direction as the previous day’s debate article.

This is how opinions are formed. And this is how opinions have been formed throughout the modern era – with one difference. In this particular case, it turns out that not all the players were quite as free as the reading public might have thought. Instead they are linked to a network, whose work is financed by some of the largest trade unions, which are pumping money into the network because they want to steer opinion in a certain direction.

It is important for us to be informed about these pressure groups, which often portray themselves as sidelined and forgotten in the media, in order to understand and evaluate today’s Swedish media reality.

Forging new opinions has become an occupation that has moved from non-profit organizations, parties and popular movements to professional organizations, which specialize in the development of ideas and opinion-forming.

A closer inspection of two of Sweden’s most talked-about think tanks – the left-wing Arena Group and industry’s Timbro – shows that they are very efficient at creating extensive contact networks with influential politicians, officials, researchers and journalists.

Included in the Arena Group are: the newspaper Arena, the internet portal Dagens Arena, the Arena University (seminar activity), the think tank Agora, and the two publishers Atlas and Premiss. (The latter has specialized in commissioned publishing.)

Since the Arena Group was established, it has managed to associate itself with a large number of researchers representing all the prestigious seats of learning in Sweden, from Lars Pålsson Syll at Malmö University to Malin Rönnblom at the Centre for Women’s Studies in Umeå. Moreover, the contact network of the Arena Group includes several very influential politicians, as well as journalists on many of Sweden’s largest dailies, radio and TV channels, and a number of minor cultural and social journals.

The advantage of a think tank is that it offers a legitimizing link between researchers, opinion-formers and politicians. Those social scientists who cannot imagine collaborating directly with a trade union or an interest group can instead become associated with a project through the Arena Group. Conversations with representatives of, for example, the unions HTF and SKTF as well as LO (The Swedish Trades Union Confederation) reveal that this kind of adjustment has been an important reason for their choosing to support the Arena Group.

Several of Sweden’s most famous social scientists have in one way or another collaborated with the Arena Group: Bo Rothstein, Erik Amnå, Bo Stråth, Lars Nord, Rune Premfors and Joakim Palme. They appear either as participants in seminars or as authors of some of the Arena Group’s publications. Moreover, a smaller group appears on the think tank’s scientific board. Seats are held by famous researchers such as Drude Dahlerup, Paula Blomqvist, Sverker Gustavsson and Katarina Mattsson.

For several of the researchers linked to Arena, their participation is partly dependent on the networks that the Arena Group can help with. There are, furthermore, often ideological motives in their choosing to associate with a certain think tank.

Paula Blomqvist is a doctor of philosophy and lectures in political science at the University of Uppsala. Despite the fact that she sits on the scientific board of the Arena Group, she feels that she does not want to represent them as a player. Blomqvist believes that, with the think tanks, there is a partially new market for researchers to disseminate their results, which has to do with a partial medialization of society. But she is sceptical about how the think tanks sometimes slant and exaggerate drafting, and she is also dubious about whether, as a researcher, one should be connected with the work of a think tank:

”There is a risk in media debates that, if you end up in a certain pigeonhole as a researcher, you can seem less serious. I wouldn’t publish anything at Timbro,” she says.

In large part, the Arena Group has striven for credibility by associating with researchers to the same extent it does with opinion-formers. However, the Arena Group’s managing director, Håkan A Bengtsson, emphasizes that they are not doing any lobbying, but instead want to reach out in public discussions through seminars and books. Nonetheless, he does not want to endorse the use of science as a weapon in the political debate.

For think tanks to succeed, it is crucial to enlist writers who can make a great impact. The Arena Group’s publishing company, Atlas, has the historian and Left Party member Åsa Linderborg, famous for her book Mig äger ingen (‘No One Owns Me’). Timbro has the Liberal Johan Norberg, who also used to be employed there. His perhaps most controversial book – Till världskapitalismens försvar (‘In Defence of Global Capitalism) – also made him famous with foreign think tanks, and led, among other things, to the American Cato Institute making him a fellow.

Norberg’s description of the opposition to Timbro is characteristic of how the think tanks often view their surroundings: ”The Liberal dominance is a figment of Wirtén’s imagination”, he says when he hears the Arena Group’s Per Wirtén claim that right-wing political views appear more often in the editorials and debate pages of important Swedish newspapers. According to Norberg, the general view is that Timbro often fights an uphill battle on many issues, and that resistance comes from a number of institutions: the authorities, journalists and left-wing political educational organizations like ABF.

The same kind of underdog perspective becomes clear when representatives of the Arena Group describe the world around them. Arena’s founder, Per Wirtén, does not think that there are any credible, nationally established left-wing political platforms in Sweden which can operate as think tanks, and that the right, therefore, has too much scope to define the current political agenda. This view may seem rather surprising when one considers the political influence of the Arena Group’s financiers over the past hundred years, and that a number of studies have shown a clear left-wing majority among the press corps.

What most people seem to agree about is that money plays a decisive role in the work. For Timbro, financing comes from Stiftelsen Fritt Näringsliv – The Swedish Free Enterprise Foundation (not to be confused with the organization Svenskt Näringsliv – The Confederation of Swedish Enterprise). The Arena Group is in part dependent on so-called subscribers – organizations and individual members who pay for different publications and seminars.

Subscriber membership is divided into different levels, with the most important organizations called gold subscribers. The unions HTF and SKTF each contribute SEK 500,000, and LO twice that. The arrangement underlines the precarious relationship of the Arena Group with its financiers, whose interest in providing members with Arena’s publications is a condition for the business not running at a loss.

It is not always an entirely optimal solution, notes Wirtén, who admits that it might lead to an unhealthy dependency: ”Yes, dependency is always a problem. But it isn’t an acute problem for us, for two reasons. On the one hand, because it’s not a major part of our income, on the other because there are so many organizations that, if one drops out, the financial setback would not be that great. We’ve spread the risk, you might say.”

Arena’s reliance on financiers was made clear, however, when the book publishers Media i Fokus, who had financed their publications with orders from several trade unions, were forced to cease publication because of a withdrawal of support from the unions. Even though the unions purchase magazines to provide financial support (to the tune of SEK 80,000 a year) and subscriber membership provides a guarantee for continued business, the notion of remaining independent plays a very important role for the self-image of the trade union-financed Arena Group.

A kind of mystery surrounds the foundation and finances of the Arena Group which is difficult to get to grips with in talking with those involved. In Axess’ interview with him, Per Wirtén indicates vis-à-vis the Group’s foundation that initially ”there was nothing … there was no money”.

Håkan A Bengtsson paints a similar picture in a telephone interview in which he claims that it was he and Wirtén ”who founded Arena”. Such historiography seems important in order to underline what the very cornerstone is in the image of its work Arena wishes to present to the outside world: that they are – as it says in the manifesto on their homepage – ”a pure ideas group with no owner, no profit interest or organizational ownership. We are independent from organizations and parties. Behind the Arena Group stands the non-profit organization Arena.” Even the association’s original statutes state that ”Arena’s work shall be pursued independently of political parties and interest groups”.

A manifesto of this kind undoubtedly deserves to be taken seriously and scrutinized.

We can begin with the question of how the association was founded, with Wirtén’s and Bengtsson’s picture of two independent debaters who created an independent forum, on their own initiative and without any money, coming to nought after listening to people from LO. According to Mats Eriksson, political secretary at LO, Arena was founded on the initiative primarily of Olle Sahlström and Helén Pettersson at LO – with funds from LO – to create a counterweight to Timbro, which is supported by business. The then chair of the union SKTF, Inger Efraimsson, is said to have got in touch with the union HTF and the insurance company Folksam.

But also as regards ownership, the picture is not quite as unproblematic as Wirtén and Bengtsson claim it to be. The Arena Group has a complex structure of juridical persons: companies, limited partnership companies, non-profit and former economic associations.

In the final analysis, the business is constructed with a non-profit, tax-exempt organization at the top and a limited partnership company at the bottom, which implies almost total protection from any insight and minimum public exposure of its financial activities. However, we can state this much based on public documents – their total turnover is SEK 22 million with expected profit in 2007 of just SEK 200,000. Of the Group’s income (from educational and seminar work, study visits, customized training, newspaper sales etc), the publishing house Atlas accounts for the bulk.

As much as 68% of the group’s turnover comes from Atlas, which is run as a limited partnership company, in which two joint-owners, Per Wirtén’s private company, Sjumilaskogen, and Håkan A Bengtsson, have invested SEK 1 each. In its turn, above Atlas is the company Politikens och idéernas arena i Stockholm AB, which acts as a general partner, i.e. a juridical person in a limited partnership who is totally responsible for the partnership’s debts.

The owners of a limited partnership company (in this case, Wirtén and Bengtsson) should, according to custom, not take out any salary from the company but be taxed on the profit the company generates. By means of written articles of partnership, the owners agree how the profit should be divided. This agreement is not public, nor does it need to be registered, something that does not exactly contribute to the transparency which, generally speaking, has been a lodestar of the labour movement. (For example, LO chair Wanja Lundby-Wedin said in a press release in 2004 about the foundation Stiftelsen för Anna Johansson-Visborgs Minne that it is ”important to have complete openness and insight”.)

But the question is not whether Wirtén and Bengtsson (given that they are members of the association) own even greater shares of the business than the publishing house Atlas. The non-profit organization Arena, which comprises the parent company for the group, is not registered either as non-profit making or active in Affärsdata.se, where instead the detail ”business closed down” can be found.

If members of a non-profit association receive financial support through the association using companies in which the members themselves are owners or employees, the association ceases to be non-profit-making and instead becomes commercial, according to the Swedish National Tax Board. Axess has, on enquiry, been refused the right to see Arena’s membership register, which is why it has not been possible to check this state of affairs. But in an interview that Axess conducted on 21 May, 2007, Håkan A Bengtsson said that the members of the non-profit association Arena were ”people who work for or have worked for the Arena Group”.

One condition for an association being held to be non-profit making and exempt from taxes is that the association does not benefit the financial interests of individual members, which – as is apparent from the above – Arena does not seem to comply with.

If we return to the Arena Group’s own description of themselves – as an ”ideas group with no owner, no profit interest or organizational ownership. We are independent from organizations and parties. Behind the Arena Group stands the non-profit organization Arena” – then it appears to be dubious in almost every aspect.

Ownership interests do exist in the organization, but a great deal indicates that it is not merely a question of owners in the form of the variety of juridical persons and companies which the group officially consists of today (in which Wirtén and Bengtsson undoubtedly have personal ownership and profit interests), but that the real owners actually consist of the members of the association. It is, therefore, a question of personal, private ownership (possibly unconsciously so because of ignorance).

But nor is the group independent of organizations. Sitting on Arena’s different boards are weighty union representatives such as Mats Erikson, the political secretary of LO, Heli Kärkkäinnen from LO ideas debate, Stina Andersson from the union SSR (the Swedish Association of Graduates in Social Science, Personnel & Public Administration, Economics & Social Work) and Bengt Olsson from the union HTF.

The subscriber structure, as we have said, similarly results in an undoubted state of dependence vis-à-vis the major financiers in the trade union movement, who presumably control more than SEK 100 billion, invested in industry, which they depict – paradoxically – as their opponents.

And in this way, the final question of independence from political parties also results in a sensitive situation. Bearing in mind LO’s close collaboration with the Social Democratic party, one might wonder what would happen to the subscribers’ open-handedness, if in the Arena Group’s production of ideas they concluded that there were good reasons in an election campaign to encourage support, for example, for a coalition of the Centre Party, the Left Party and the Green Party.

Timbro is considerably more liberal than the new Moderates. Unlike Arena, Timbro finds itself in a tense relationship with the political party that may be regarded as its ideological home. Timbro is nevertheless correctly located in the non-socialist sphere in Sweden. Timbro’s greater independence stems from the fact that they are sitting on foundation capital donated in perpetuity, whilst Arena is dependent on the trade unions regularly injecting capital.

The liberal Timbro functions today as a brand for opinion-forming. The think tank is financed by Stiftelsen Fritt Näringsliv (The Swedish Free Enterprise Foundation), and has SEK 320 million in capital. They can make use of the entire capital, but have planned their work in the long term and therefore seldom allow Timbro’s annual budget to exceed SEK 20 million. Maria Rankka is managing director of Stiftelsen Fritt Näringsliv (SFN) and also head of Timbro. Her background is with the Moderates, and she was previously a partner in the consulting firm Prime PR.

The work of the think tank Timbro is divided into traditional organizational branches: a publishing branch, an idea and conference branch and the nursery Stureakademin, which specializes in training future talent. They publish ten books and between twenty and thirty reports every year. Most of what is published is based on manuscript proposals initiated from within the organization. About a year ago, Timbro also revived Näringslivets Medieinstitut (‘The Trade and Industry Media Institute’), a brand devoted to critical analysis of the media.

Despite the fact that they have always considered themselves to be facing an uphill struggle, Timbro has exercised great influence during its thirty years. Its market-liberal, individualist attitude was controversial but influential during the 1980s, when collectivist and corporatist values were being abandoned. Even if the organization today no longer arouses the same feelings – proof that its once radical ideas and proposals have in part become public property – it still plays an important role in shaping the political agenda. The network, now as then, consists primarily of politicians from the non-socialist parties and colleagues at some of Stockholm’s most famous consulting firms. Within the press corps, it is primarily editors from Moderate and Liberal editorial pages who dominate.

At Timbro, they are aware that political labels can sabotage the legitimacy of the source. The ”Timbro” brand naturally causes many people on the left to lash out, which is why they, like Arena, are clear in wanting to come across as an independent think tank. They see the fact that there are often personal links to influential politicians in the non-socialist parties simply as an asset for networking around seminars or publications. On the other hand, this collaboration must not be too close. ”Somewhere there is a limit”, says Timbro’s director of programmes, Erik Zsiga. He previously worked on the editorial page of the daily Svenska Dagbladet and belongs to a very important group of writers at Timbro – those with the ability to achieve maximum penetration in the media. It is no coincidence that he often writes about issues involving music and culture.

”The cultural sphere is an area where we’re limited. The right’s self-confidence has been far too weak, and it hasn’t always taken part in the cultural debate with enough interest. Many of the people I meet in the cultural sphere don’t vote non-socialist, but in our view of culture we can sometimes agree on certain issues. And that produces a win-win situation where we can collaborate. Unfortunately, people who don’t come from the cultural sphere are often criticized when they take part in the cultural debate. The most recent example of this is Johan Staël von Holstein.”

Within the cultural sphere, it is precisely Timbro’s links to politics and business rather than to writers, musicians and artists that has been an impediment, making it difficult to gain legitimacy for their opinions. Many people in this sphere are disturbed by what they believe to be a tendency among Timbro people to ideologize art and literature (exemplified in the ”monomaniac interest” in Ayn Rand). They find that Timbro’s views of a de-politicized cultural life have a hollow ring and are based more on ideology than on a genuine commitment to culture in its different forms.

If the Arena Group has worked actively to imitate SNS and its research network, Timbro’s contacts with the world of research are more sparing. The more academically inclined work within the Timbro sphere used to end up with the City University, which today has morphed into the Ratio Institute. But there is no collaboration with the think tank today. Ratio has its own operation, which consists exclusively of writing for academic publications.

Johan Norberg is dubious about whether the lack of academic support for Timbro has to be something negative: ”It’s difficult to say whether it’s an advantage or disadvantage. But on many occasions, I’ve felt that it’s difficult to get researchers in Sweden to become more public. A high profile on socio-political questions is often regarded as something negative in the university world. Mauricio Rojas is one example of a researcher who tried to make a break with the traditional division, but finally he too left the world of research. As for influences from interest groups, I think it’s a shame that there hasn’t been a greater exchange between the university world and the ongoing social debate. It’s like Gunnar Myrdal wrote: ‘There is no neutral research’. More researchers should have the courage to describe their normative assumptions. On the left, there’s Åsa Linderborg, and she‘s a good example. She’s clear about where she’s coming from, so then it’s also possible for me to understand whether she feels she’s part of what she’s describing.”

Anna Thoursie at the Arena Group is critical of Timbro’s position and thinks that they are engaged in ”poster politics”. Erik Zsiga does not agree: ”Even if we don’t have the same research profile as SNS, we do have different expert panels for each product we support. Content-wise, I’ve never felt that it’s a problem coming from Timbro, but sometimes there’s an unfair picture of me when I get involved in a debate.”

Zsiga is backed up by many of his Timbro colleagues, who instead describe their own work as research and analysis. In recent years, there have been great differences of opinion among those in the Timbro sphere. The referendum on the euro is one example, the attitude to feminism another.

The fact that the debate can become heated at Timbro too became clear in 2001, when Birgitta Kurtén-Lindberg’s book Tokfeminismen (‘Crazy Feminism’) was published. The book uses biological reasoning to criticize today’s feminists, which aroused strong feelings among some co-workers.

To balance the internal criticism, two years later they published the book Frihet och feminism (‘Freedom and Feminism’) by Carolin Dahlman and Johanna Möllerström. This too was criticized severely for being based on unscientific assumptions and poorly supported theses. Johan Norberg thinks that there are reasons to criticize both books: ”Kurtén-Lindberg’s book on feminism was bad. It was a fighting book. And the book about liberal feminism was also a fighting book, although from the other direction. I think this is a very interesting debate, but so amazingly sensitive that many people with an academic perspective don’t want to address the question. So instead it ends up with writers who perhaps don’t always take established academic premises as their starting point, which means that the debate is not always taken forward.”

The critique that he delivers against the books on feminism shows that Timbro has failed to instil in people’s minds any deeper analysis of some topical issues, which indicates difficulties in establishing contacts with subject specialists. Writers who are recruited internally have been able to leave their mark on publication to much too great an extent.

Many people find the hope of providing a broad platform to those who want to disseminate opinion-forming materials advocating a market-liberal, open society paradoxical. How can you recommend breadth and openness in opinion-forming when at the same time you fix the operation so as to take a basically positive attitude to today’s capitalist society? And are there any views that Timbro distances itself from? What writers would not be allowed to write?

Johan Norberg believes that Timbro has acquired a clear liberal profile, and for this reason it is simple to see who does not belong in the think tank: ”So keeping the right wingers out really hasn’t been much of a problem. Non-socialists today are almost aggressive against dictatorships worldwide, and in the liberal Swedish public debate there’s also great resistance to Guantánamo. On the other hand, I think that there’s such a remarkable trivialization of dictatorships on the Swedish left. Take Hugo Chávez, for example. If he had been an American ally, all the cultural pages would have hung him out to dry.”

Of course, Timbro and Arena want to be regarded as independent players and in certain contexts can certainly act independently. But they have their original task from the founders, in Swedish business and the trade union movement respectively, to pursue certain issues above others. Both think tanks are directed by interests that prefer to farm out political activity at the consultant level rather than plead their own case.

Research: Lisa Irenius and Felix Heuman

Translated by Phil Holmes