Abstract Decisions regarding welfare services take place within a web of legal, political, and organizational structures, shaping the scope of social workers’ legal decision-making authority (DMA). Social workers are often assumed to have full legal authority to decide on welfare services, yet the influence of local political policies on their legal options remains underexplored. This study examines how hard local political policies governing legal DMA affect social workers’ discretion in distributing elder care. By analysing these policies, we reveal the structures that condition social workers’ legal options to provide services. Using elder care in Swedish municipalities as an example, we investigate how different types of hard local political policies create varying premises for social workers’ legal authority to make decisions. Counter-texts are analysed through a comparison of four strategic examples. Our findings show that local politicians use different strategies when delegating authority. As a result, social workers face varying premises regarding what decisions they are legally permitted to make. These results highlight the dependence of social work practice on local politics and underscore the need to study macro-level contexts. Understanding these structures is crucial for interpreting social workers’ working conditions in the provision of welfare services.
Wittberg et al. (Wed,) studied this question.
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