In 1990, the Swedish constitution mandated a unitary parliamentary democracy with a sovereign legislature, the parliament (the Riksdag). The role of courts was to interpret law and the Bank of Sweden was subject to political instructions. This has all changed. This also connects to the issue of openness and transparency, which was fiercely debated prior to the Swedish accession to the EU. The Swedish rules are unique in its openness and invest strong power to the citizen as well as to those that shall investigate the political power and bureaucracy (e.g. media). The fear prior to the accession was that these rights would be threatened by the EUs very different rules when it comes to openness. As far as we know, there are no systematic studies of what has happened concerning these vital democratic issue, something that we also want to redress in this paper.
The core research questions are two: In what way has the relationship between the Riksdag and the government changed during the last 25 years? What does this mean for openness and transparence in representative democracy at the level of the member state?
We will study this by scrutinizing the change in parliamentary and governmental activities in Sweden from the early 1990’ies until today. To judge whether democratic parliaments have in fact suffered a loss of power, we must consider the functions that legislatures ideally or typically serve. The most obvious role of legislatures is to legislate. Yet, as crafters of detailed legislation, parliamentarians have long been eclipsed by the politicians of the executive branch and the bureaucrats who serve them. Parliament has thus delegated much of its law-making function to the executive branch. As a consequence on membership of the European political system, it is reasonable to argue that this process has been accentuated further. A second function of parliament is to oversee policy formulation and implementation in the executive branch. As parliaments have become less directly involved in legislation, their oversight role has arguably become more important. However, over time this activity has also become steadily more difficult as government responsibilities have expanded and the executive branch has grown increasingly large and specialized. The purpose of this paper is to analyze this process and try to understand the implications for the Riksdag on a more principal basis, namely the consequences for representative democracy).
In order to fully answer the question we also need to understand the transformations that take place at the level of the government. Johansson and Tallberg (2010) show that summit decision-making in the European Union, which requires states to confer additional authority, discretion and resources on chief executives, lead to long-term shifts in the domestic institutional balance of power between the executive and the legislature, as well as within the executive branch. Similarly, Larue (2006) shows that the domestic coordination of EU affairs is important in order to understand processes of preference transfer through instructions and the end result in negotiations within the EU.