In 2003 the Swedish parliament decided to incorporate maintenance
support for the elderly within the framework of the state social insurance
system. Maintenance support for the elderly entails that individuals who,
due to too short a period of residence in Sweden, do not qualify themselves
for a full guarantee pension and thus have the right to receive
benefits after completion of an income test. A large proportion of these
people previously received individually incometested social benefits.
Maintenance support for the elderly and how it is perceived by the elderly
is the focus of the study. The overall aim of the study is to gain
knowledge about what it means for immigrants who moved in later life
to be the subject of a transfer from a selective benefit system to one
where more general principles apply. More specifically the aim concerns
what it means for their possibilities for gaining access to social rights and
what it means for their relationship with the Swedish welfare state. The
study’s empirical material consists of two parts. The first part contains
register data from the social services register of the National Board of
Health and Social Welfare and the social insurance register of the Swedish
Social Insurance Board. The second consists of interviews with
eleven foreign-born elderly persons who previously received social
benefits and now receive maintenance support for the elderly. The
analysis of the register data indicates that one-fifth of the target group
actually includes people born in Sweden while the rest are immigrants
arriving in Sweden in later life. For most of those in this latter group the
maintenance support is their only source of financial support while it is a
supplement for the Swedish-born elderly recipients. The results show
that of those, who previously received social benefits and where the
maintenance support is their only source of financial support, about onefifth
received a smaller amount of benefit after the reform. The interview
study indicates the existence of a gap between what the respondents
express as needs of more individual considerations both in terms of the
contact with the administrating authority and the maintenance support’s
monetary content and how the elderly perceive that these needs are provided
for. In order to try to understand this gap the result was analysed
by using a number of major theoretical concepts such as universalism,
stigma and shame, and social citizenship, public identity and recognition.
The conclusions of the study is that a comprehension of the gap can be
found in the standardised design and administration of the maintenance
support and in the socio-economic context that immigrants coming to
Sweden in later life find themselves in.