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Delete Cancel Save. Close Save. This statement is a combination of truism and self-contradiction: it goes without saying that the policies of a Liberal government would lie closer to the party-line of the Liberals than those of a coalition government of Liberals and Moderates; and the argument that it is position, not numbers that is the basis of policy is actually an excellent definition of pivotal government. The pivot has continued to dominate the political scenery during the last 25 years: Social Democratic governments balancing between the non-socialists and the Left Party-Communists during the seventies, eighties and again today,.
Reality differed from theory. It was hard to form large, united and accountable governments. Political scientists began to reconsider the doctrine of parliamentarism.
When one of Staaff s most devoted pupils got the chair in political science at Uppsala with the ambition to implement Staaff s research program, he therefore suggested that parliamentary theory be reformulated to account for the experience of minority parliamentarism. Unlike its British counterpart, the Swedish parliamentary system lacked an active expression of will on the part of Parliament with respect to government.
It was therefore better to say that parliamentarism was a form of government in which the government "was tolerated" by the majority in Parliament. The pivot fitted well into this picture: it was the most easily tolerated government. To capture this idea, he coined the concept of "negative parliamentarism" Brusewitz , The pivot produces the policy that the people prefer to all available alternatives, this had been the message from a Liberal party leader. Is that just political rhetoric or is there some substance to such a claim?
When we talk of preferring various alternatives to each other or tolerating one government more easily than another, we assume that citizens feel differently about the various parties. Some are liked very much, some are accepted, some are unsympathetic, some are abominable. But since Borda we know that this problem can be overcome for a modern approach, see Riker One way of doing this is by giving the voters several votes so that they can grade their likes and dislikes.
In actual elections this hardly ever occurs. But this situation can be simulated in research. In Swedish electoral surveys in , those interviewed were asked to rank their party preferences, data that we have transformed into a Borda analysis of the election of that year Figure 2. The main difference between this outcome and the official election result according to the majority rule is that the two large parties - the Social Democrats and the Moderates - are weakened and the other parties become larger.
In other words, the Borda analysis tends to even out the size of the parties. Even if it is not apparent from the table, the underlying data informs us that the voters place Social Democrats and Moderates as their first and last preferences, whereas the middle parties are to a much greater extent secondorder preferences.
The middle parties, and especially the Liberals, arouse greater sympathy among the electorate than the simple majority rule can express. The parties in the middle are most easily tolerated as governors: a prime minister from this camp represents the minimum common politics. Bargaining is a technique for the pivot to form voting majorities with the help from left or right.
But this method is also used by other archetypical roleholders in the political game, perhaps most significantly by the coalition builder. The coalition builder tries to widen the parliamentary basis for the government by bargaining with another party to get an agreement that stands for a longer period of time. Let us imagine the following preferences:. This captures the situation in a parliamentary committee before one of the most important coalitions in modern Swedish history, namely that between the Social Democrats L and the Agrarian Party M , was formed in , a step that led Sweden out of the minority parliamentarism of the twenties to the majority coalition in the thirties.
In the model R depicts the non-socialist opposition. Of the issues, b symbolizes the agricultural policy of the Agrarian party, c represents the unemployment policy of the Social Democrats, and a stands for the defeat of these proposals. In the committee, the two policies became inseparably interconnected.
None of the alternatives received a majority of first preferences. The adjusted preferences after this had occurred were as follows the preferences that have changed place are underlined :. The value of broad solutions and consensus was the main theme taken up by the leader of the Social Democratic Party, prime minister Per Albin Hansson, when he defended the log-rolling before Parliament. He took exception to a simplified procedure of the kind that only satisfies the firstorder preferences of the parties.
A rule like that favored the no-votes; it was a simple matter to defeat M's b with votes from L and R, and there was no difficulty in defeating L's c with votes from R and M.
But when the country was in the grips of the Great Depression, the stalemate facing the minority government in Parliament could be accepted no longer. The prime minister had therefore entered negotiations with all the parties and an agreement had also been reached.
With arguments remarkably similar to those later to be put forward by political scientists Buchanan and Tullock, Hansson made an earnest plea for log-rolling and consensus. The intensity of the interest people took in different questions varied.
Contrary to its reputation, log-rolling was a morally acceptable method by which most people could have their preferences satisfied depending on how intensely they felt about them. This was a method for "the politics of a good society" Lewin ; cf. The ultimate step in broadening the parliamentary basis of the government is to form a grand coalition.
What was one to say about the fact that in , one of the parties, R, was left out of the agreement? This had actually worried the prime minister greatly, and he emphasized time and time again in his address to Parliament how desirable it would have been to extend the bargain "in traditional Swedish fashion" so that R could also get some satisfaction.
There was room for everyone in "the good society". Six years later, under the extraordinary circumstances of the Second World War, Hansson assembled such a coalition. In the bargain struck between the parties, partisan differences were put aside and agreement was reached on that which in the seriousness of the moment was essential: foreign and defense policy.
However, what is more interesting from our perspective is the fact that at the end of the war Hansson reasserted his conviction that a grand coalition would be valuable in the future, in peacetime. This did not seem to hold now, declared the self-confident Social Democrat who could. Resignation of Swedish Majoritarian Coalition Governments. The nonsocialist parties seemed doomed to perpetual opposition. This was not healthy for the country's political life.
In "the good society" everyone should have an influence. A permanent grand coalition was one way of approximating the preferences of all Proceedings of the Swedish Social Democratic Party Congress , Developments did not turn out as Hansson wished but the idea of a permanent grand coalition has since then remained an alternative in Swedish politics, one that the parties return to from time to time Ruin Forming a majority by coalition building seldom results in a government that is sufficiently "united," though, to meet the standards of parliamentary theory.
As already mentioned, most majoritarian coalition governments have split up before the election. There have been five of them Figure 3. Not even the large reform government of , which introduced parliamentary democracy, lived up to Staaff's ideal; after carrying out the reform, the Liberals and the Social Democrats split on economic issues - "socialism" - and the government resigned. Interesting from the point of view of majoritarian or consensus democracy are the words that the out-going prime minister, Staaff's successor as the leader of the Liberal Party, wrote after the dissolution of the government.
So much should be clear, that one cannot and should not attempt to transfer the English Cabinet's position of power to our country without modification A Swedish parliamentary government cooperates with Parliament and its party to a far greater extent that its English counterpart, and as long as there is mutual trust, the leadership of the government need not be the least impaired by it Eden , The red-green coalition of was a successful one - only the outbreak of the Second World War made it necessary to replace it with a grand coalition.
From the point of view of evaluation there is reason to regard it as a "united" government and consequently acceptable to the doctrine of parliamentarism like the already mentioned one-party Social Democratic majority government of The subsequent coalition formed between the Agrarians and the Social Democrats in split on the supplementary pension issue. The coalition of the three non-socialist parties - Agrarians now.
Center Party , Moderates and Liberals - could not reach agreement on nuclear energy policy. In a second attempt of the three non-socialist parties to govern together ended in disunity over taxes when the two middle parties took the remarkable step of bargaining with the Social Democrats instead of trying to reconcile their differences with the Moderates.
And the largest government of all according to Figure 1, the grand coalition during the war not included in Figure 3 , was fundamentally disunited, especially on economic issues or "socialism" like the reform government in , and resigned as soon as the war was over - in spite of what the prime minister had wished. By definition, a consensus government including all parties with no division of roles between a majority in government and a minority in opposition is contrary to the original meaning of parliamentarism.
In majoritarian democracy the opposition is excluded from power not because it is unimportant. Staaff underlined the importance of an opposition that could criticize the government, aiming at forming the government itself after the next election.
For the adherents of the British parliamentary doctrine, making the government accountable to the voters was the way in which the opposition fulfilled the vital function of strengthening the legitimacy of democracy. In the Swedish political tradition that we have tried to describe in this article, "accountability" is seldom mentioned as a value. Instead, legitimacy is promoted by another strategy. By sharing power with the parties in opposition and including them in the rule of the country, the government is supposed to be regarded as representative for the people as a whole and consequently one that all can feel loyal to.
To "reach consensus," to "find a common policy," to "capture the will of the people" have been the declared motives of Swedish politicians. Representativeness is the central norm in Swedish political culture.
The government should represent the people's opinion. Or to quote a leading authority:. To create "representativeness of opinion'1 has been interpreted as the central as well as the operationalizable goal that the proportional electoral method is intended to provide for.
The analysis of Swedish parliamentarism then leads us to a well-known. Stating this, we immediately must add that Lijphart's democracy is characterized by large government, even grand coalitions, whereas the most common Swedish government is a minority government. How can this be reconciled? The answer is that there often is, as we have seen, "a hidden majority" behind the Swedish minority governments. Their aim has been - to use a typical Swedish expression - to "anchor" its politics with the majority.
Even small governments have had the ambition to pursue policies that are liked by a plurality. That was what prime minister Hansson referred to when he spoke of the "traditional Swedish fashion". It should be emphasized that majoritarian and consensus democracy are just two models and models seldom correspond to reality one hundred percent.
As a matter of fact Swedish politics has also majoritarian characteristics. During the first two decades of this century, before parliamentarism was accepted, and again during the seventies and eighties, we witnessed a two bloc system with shifting governments, even if during the latter period there were also many agreements across this bloc cleavage; during the nineties cooperation and consensus between parties is again the dominant trend.
The best description is perhaps therefore to say that Sweden has been somewhere between the two models, "between the grand coalition and a two-party system," to quote the title of a well-known study Ruin However, there is no doubt about the fact that of the two models Sweden is closer to consensus democracy - with the qualifications just made.
In order to understand this tradition of consensus, it is useful to go back to pre-democratic times where we started. There can be found a governmental ideal that comes close to Lijphart's power-sharing democracy. In the predemocratic form of government, against which Staaff and the left-wing parties revolted, the opposition was included. The King wished all opinions to be represented - no one was to be left out and everyone should have a place.
Policies were to be formed so that they could be accepted by all. Swedish governments based their policy instead "on a compromise, consisting in the fact that two opposed parties and interests, each for its own part, yield somewhat and in this manner carry out the intended reform or measure" - thus functioned "the true compass" of Swedish politics, which "levels out differences and thereby brings about a decision that is for the benefit of the country as a whole and not simply for one party" Fahlbeck , 45, To adopt parliamentarism in Sweden would entail "extremely grave difficulties" in a country that was accustomed to "assessing issues.
Sweden's consensus tradition is often portrayed as the result of the Social Democrats' famous and successful log-rolling with the Agrarians in In this article we have searched for deeper roots. We wish to draw attention to the similarity between the ideal that was embraced by Swedish Conservatives at the turn of the century and Lijphart's power-sharing model.
Perhaps it is too much to expect that the victors of the Left would admit that in the long run it is the ideal of the losers, the Conservatives, that has come to shape the development of parliamentary government in Sweden.
That is nevertheless what has happened. Adopting a historicistic argument Staaff maintained that parliamentary government was the ultimate outcome of a long process of constitutional development.
To oppose this end was to defy a historical law. To be critical of parliamentary government, as the King was, was tantamount to acting unconstitutionally. In thus anticipating a practice that was established only later, the Left succeeded in further provoking the Right. See my article Lewin A net sample of 3, people was selected. Most of these were interviewed at home; a smaller number by telephone. Non-response was Borda points are calculated in such a way as to allow respondents to have "weak" preference orders, i.
Borda points for each party are calculated and the sum of these yields the grand total of all Borda points. This makes it possible to calculate the number of seats in Parliament each party would obtain: a party's share of the total number of seats is equal to its share of the grand total of Borda points. For example, if a party wins 6. Should it instead win Points of criticism to this approached are that the voters are "forced" to take all parties into consideration and that the distances between all "ranks" are equally large.
I agree with Damgaard that the problem is not what we might mean by "termination" of a government but rather how we should define "government". Here the following definition is used: a new government is considered to have been formed if one of the following occurs. The research has been sponsored by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Fund. Andersson, G. Arrow, K.
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