During the transformation from nation states to member states, it might be the case that the role of political parties, as organizing societal interests, is replaced by other modes of civil organizations. A vast number of interest groups are active in the policy process in Brussels. We know this for a fact, but we know very little about how these organizations strategically act in order to maximize influence. Thus, the overarching aim of the paper is to ask the following research question: How does the outsourcing of political authority from the national level to the EU, to the bureaucracy and to the sub-state level, effect political parties’ functioning and role in the Swedish democracy?
Thus, in this paper we analyze how political parties have developed during the last 25 years. As in a number of studies, the analysis of the political parties in the Nordic countries by Aylott et al. (2013) show that modern democracy has created a number of challenges for how political parties work. The EU-membership, and its multi-level decision system is one of these aspects that create a pressure on how political parties makes certain arrangements. It is important to try to more specifically understand these changes and the consequences for representative democracy. The most important thing is perhaps the lack of the politicization of EU-politics and in that respect, the political parties are crucial agents. This means that we also want to know how parties themselves view the future of Europe and their role in it. As a matter of fact, if political parties should manage to effectively organize the direct link to the EU-level, this would contravene the overall theory of the member state.
Contemporary models of party organisation, such as the famous ‘cartel party’ (Katz and Mair 1995, 2002, 2009), suggests that the balance of intra-party power has shifted to the benefit of the ‘party in public office’ (i.e. party affiliates in parliament and government). It asserts further that this has been accompanied by the softening of inter-party competition in favour of inter-party collusion. Instead of being a citizens’ representatives, parties constitutes an arena for elite cooperation, increasingly isolated from the popular will.. If these propositions are true, then a model that envisages a party’s leaders as agents of its rank and file might seem somewhat divorced from reality. Indeed, one recent discussion of party organisation from a principal-agent perspective takes the opposite starting point to ours, with regional units conceived as the agents of the party leadership (Houten 2009). We will empirically investigate these hypotheses through an in-depth study of the transformation of the Swedish party system.
