From a research perspective, Lars Trägårdh’s scholarly production has spanned several different areas, whose common denominator can be described as the moral and political logics of the Swedish social contract. Based on his doctoral dissertation, his first major theme was Swedish political culture in a comparative historical perspective. In his 1993 dissertation at University of California, Berkeley — The Concept of the People and the Construction of Popular Political Culture in Sweden and Germany, 1800–1933 — the focus was on the concept of “the people” in Swedish and German political language. Central to the analysis was the question of the nation and nationalism, including similarities and differences between the Swedish Social Democrats’ vision of the Folkhem (the “People’s Home”) and the German Nazis’ vision of the Volksgemeinschaft.

Later, he turned to two other aspects of the Swedish social contract: the character of Swedish civil society and its role in Swedish political culture, and the position of the individual in the modern welfare state. He came to view Swedish political culture as a triangular drama with the state, the individual, and the family/civil society in the leading roles. This approach has resulted in a number of works analyzing the Swedish or Nordic model, Nordic civil society, and the position of the individual in modern Sweden. Among these is the book Är svensken människa?, written with Henrik Berggren, first published in Swedish in 2006, in an expanded edition in 2016, in German translation in 2015, in English in 2022, and in Greek in 2023.

In recent years, building on his analyses of the relationships between the state, the individual, the family, and civil society, Trägårdh has also engaged in several related research projects: one concerning the conditions and historical roots of social trust in Sweden (with Susanne Wallman Lundåsen, Dag Wollebaek, and Lars Svedberg, Den svala svenska tilliten: Förutsättningar och utmaningar. Stockholm: SNS Förlag, 2013), and others focusing on the Swedish social contract and Swedish national identity in a time of increased migration and diversity. In this context, Trägårdh has pointed to growing tensions between ideals of solidarity and rights-based logics grounded in citizenship and the nation-state, on the one hand, and in human rights and a post-national, borderless form of solidarity, on the other. See, for example, “Scaling up Solidarity from the National to the Global: Sweden as Welfare State and Moral Superpower” in Sustainable Modernity: The Nordic Model and Beyond, edited by Nina Witoszek and Atle Midttun (London: Routledge, 2018), and “Religious Civil Society and the National Welfare State: Secular Reciprocity versus Christian Charity” in Contested Hospitalities in a Time of Migration: Religious and Secular Counterspaces in the Nordic Region, edited by Synnøve K. N. Bendixsen and Trygve Wyller (New York: Routledge, 2019).