Abstract
Sweden’s contemporary institutional arrangements are the product of a century and a half of evolutionary political and constitutional change. Whereas the constitution of 1809 provided for a division of power between the king and parliament, the Riksdag gradually acquired increased competence in the course of the nineteenth century as various categories of law became subject to joint rather than royal jurisdiction. In parallel fashion, members of the king’s advisory council (the cabinet) gradually displaced the monarch as the effective center of executive authority. The prime minister and members of the cabinet subsequently became politically accountable to the Riksdag in the course of Sweden’s democratization between 1907 and 1921. Sweden’s contemporary status as a parliamentary democracy was formally ratified with the adoption of a series of constitutional amendments in 1968-69 and a wholly new constitution in 1973–74.
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Notes
Four documents constitute the composite Swedish constitution. They include the aforementioned Instrument of Government and the Riksdag Act, as well as the Act of Succession and the Freedom of the Press Act. They are compiled in English translation in the Swedish Riksdag, Constitutional Documents of Sweden (Stockholm: Norstedts Tryckeri, 1975).
Under the St. Lague method of proportional representation, which was adopted in 1952, the total of the votes for each party in a given electoral district is divided by a succession of uneven numbers (1.4, 3, 5, etc.), and seats are awarded to the highest quotients obtained among the various parties. For a detailed discussion of Swedish electoral law, see Dankwart A. Rustow, The Politics of Compromise (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), 123–28.
Statistiska centralbyrån, Statistisk årsbok för Sverige 1995 (Stockholm, 1995), 407.
Statistiska centralbyrån, Statistisk årsbok1995 (Stockholm, 1995), 407. Swedish scholars reported that during a single legislative session (1980–81), the cabinet initiated fully 26,220 executive actions. They included 203 government bills, 4,434 budgetary and other decrees, 8,690 appeals, and 7,560 miscellaneous measures (including administrative appointments). See Bengt Owe Birgersson and Jörgen Westerstahl, Den svenska folkstryreisen (Stockholm: Liber Förlag, 1982), 171.
Ibid.
Thomas J. Anton, Administered Politics: Elite Political Culture in Sweden (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980), 5.
Statistiska centralbyrån, Statistisk årsbok 1995 (Stockholm, 1995), 226, 234.
Contrary to the practice of the British Labour Party and the French Socialists, Sweden’s Social Democrats have nationalized very little industry. Instead, the SAP has relied much more on a combination of fiscal, monetary, and active labor-market policies to achieve its economic objectives of continued growth and full employment. In ironic contrast, the nonsocialist parties nationalized the shipbuilding industry while they were in office from 1976 to 1982 in an attempt to salvage the branch in the face of increased international competition. See chapter 24.
Statistisk årsbok för Sverige 1995, 340–41.
Ibid., 342.
Stein Rokkan, “Norway: Numerical Democracy and Corporate Pluralism,” in Political Oppositions in Western Democracies, ed. Robert Dahl (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 107.
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© 1998 Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Hancock, M.D., Conradt, D.P., Peters, B.G., Safran, W., Zariski, R. (1998). Where Is the Power?. In: Politics in Western Europe. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14555-3_22
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14555-3_22
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