Riksdagens kontroll av regeringen : Demokratiskt ansvarsutkrävande eller partipolitiskt spel?

Sammanfattning

A defining feature of parliamentary democracy is that the cabinet must be tolerated by a majority of the members of parliament. Several Swedish cabinets during the last decades have depended for their survival on support agreements with one or more parties outside the cabinet. The purpose of this study is to describe the impact of this ‘contractual parliamentarism’ on parliamentary accountability. The Swedish constitution stipulates several mechanisms through which parliament can hold the cabinet accountable. The most important of these are examination by the Committee on the Constitution and the declaration of no confidence. The study analyses the usage of the two mechanisms, proceeding from the theoretical assumption that support agreements between political parties should reduce the need of formal constitutional control mechanisms. The results show that support parties indeed exercise less control over the cabinet compared with the opposition parties. The study also shows that the actual usage of the control mechanisms has diverged from the original intentions of the drafters of the constitution. The results put into question the functioning of parliamentary accountability, which has implications for Swedish democracy at large.