Normalization

Long-term social change through normalization reforms targeting people with disabilities and their peers

Between the 1980s and the 2000s, Denmark and Sweden dismantled the institutions that had housed people with severe intellectual and developmental disabilities, and replaced them with public housing in ordinary local communities. It was one of the largest deliberate changes to the social fabric either country has attempted, and it was carried out on the principle — first legislated in Denmark — that people with disabilities should live lives as close as possible to ordinary ones.

This project asks what that did over the long run, and it asks it in both directions. What happened to the people the reforms targeted, and to their families, whose working lives are known to be affected? And what happened to the communities that received them — to the neighbours, classmates and colleagues for whom the reform was never designed but who lived its consequences?

Why the second question is the hard one

The economics of disability policy is usually written as though the effects land only on the people named in the legislation. But a reform that moves someone out of an institution and into a street changes that street. The project's larger ambition is to bring social inclusion into mainstream economic explanations of well-being and inequality — treating who lives alongside whom as an economic variable rather than a social afterthought.

Space is the identifying variation

Deinstitutionalisation did not happen everywhere at once, and it did not place people at random. Housing was built in particular municipalities, in particular neighbourhoods, at particular times. That geography is what makes the question answerable: exposure to the reform depends on where a person lived and when, and comparing places and cohorts that were reached at different points allows the effects to be identified.

It also makes the work heavily spatial. Establishing who was actually exposed to whom means locating individuals and dwellings precisely, defining neighbourhoods at a scale that reflects real social contact rather than administrative convenience, and handling the fact that people move — often in response to the very changes being measured.

The team

The collaboration is assembled around those two difficulties. Joseph Doyle has spent a career identifying the long-run consequences of out-of-home and institutional placement — what actually happens to people when the state moves them into care, or out of it — which is the same causal question this project asks of a different population. Robert Franzese is a spatial econometrician whose work is precisely on interdependence: settings in which outcomes in some units influence outcomes in others, which is the formal statement of the peer and neighbour effects at issue here. Petter Lundborg brings health economics and long experience of the Swedish registers.

BDAD supplies the econometrics and the spatial analysis on the Danish side.

BDAD's contribution

This project is unusual among those on this page in that the data already exist in machine-readable form: Denmark and Sweden's population registers are among the best individual-level administrative data anywhere. There is little to transcribe.

What the unit contributes instead is the second half of its expertise — the econometrics and spatial analysis needed to turn register microdata into causal answers. That is the same capability that makes the unit's transcription work worth doing in the first place, applied here to sources that arrived already digital.