Tracing local well-being through time and space

From an operationalization to a research agenda

Abstract

This paper develops and applies a multidimensional indicator of objective well-being grounded in the capabilities approach to analyze spatial and temporal patterns across Swedish municipalities from 2002 to 2020. Operationalizing well-being as a place-based capability environment across six dimensions – economic, health, education, safety, civic, and inclusion – the study moves beyond income-centered accounts of regional inequality and examines how different dimensions of well-being are jointly shaped by local institutional and socioeconomic contexts. The analysis reveals that well-being is persistently structured by municipality type and industrial composition, yet in ways that defy a simple urban advantage: large municipalities lead on economic and educational dimensions but score systematically lower on safety and inclusion, while rural and small municipalities display more balanced capability profiles. Over the study period, well-being improved broadly but unevenly, with rural and peripheral municipalities converging toward the national median while former industrial towns experienced broad-based capability decline across multiple dimensions. The geography of well-being has increasingly aligned with the geography of political discontent, with electoral support for the Sweden Democrats growing strongest in capability-disadvantaged municipalities. Together, these findings advance a spatially grounded, multidimensional understanding of territorial inequality and offer a framework for identifying where structural disadvantage and capability deprivation intersect most acutely.