Selecting party leaders: who chooses and who shapes the choice?

Political parties across Europe have a wide variety of procedures for selecting their leaders. While some hold formal leadership contests with all members casting a vote for their preferred choice, other parties can end up with a single candidate being presented to the party following negotiations behind closed doors. Nicholas Aylott and Niklas Bolin outline a model for understanding how these decisions are made by focusing on the role of so called ‘steering agents’ who help to determine which candidates are able to successfully navigate the selection process

How the rise of the Swedish radical right changed the most stable party system in Europe

The Swedish party system has long been regarded as one of the most stable in Western Europe. However, as Nicholas Aylott and Niklas Bolin write, the growth in support for the radical right Sweden Democrats ahead of the Swedish general election on 9 September represents a major challenge to the country's two traditional political blocs. While the SD may not end up in government any time soon, it will be increasingly difficult in the long-term for the mainstream parties to maintain their ‘cordon sanitaire’ around the party

Shifting perceptions of intra-party democracy: Leader selection in the Swedish Liberal Party

The Swedish Liberal Party chose a new leader in 2019. It was, in some ways, typical of leader selection in Sweden. It featured an elaborate, institutionalised and yet only semi-public form of “precursory delegation,” in which aspiring leaders are filtered by a “steering agent” on behalf of the party's main power centres. In other ways, though, the process was unusually conflictual and produced an unexpected result, which had considerable consequences for the party and for Swedish politics. Moreover, the selection involved the breakdown of a long-established procedure for leader selection in the party. We seek to explain this deviant case. We emphasise an unexpected cascade of decisions by regional party branches to hold membership ballots on the leadership candidates. This event, we argue, was critical for the outcome. We also suggest a causal mechanism, a shifting perception of procedural legitimacy, that facilitated the outcome—a mechanism that could be useful in understanding leader selection and moments of party change more generally

Party rules, party resources, and the politics of parliamentary democracies: how parties organize in the 21st Century

This article introduces the first findings of the Political Party Database (PPDB) project, a major survey of party organizations in parliamentary and semi-presidential democracies. The project’s first round of data covers 122 parties in 19 countries. In this paper we describe the scope of the database, then investigate what it tells us about contemporary party organization in these countries, focussing on parties’ resources, structures and internal decision-making. We examine organizational patterns by country and party family, and where possible we make temporal comparisons with older datasets. Our analyses suggest a remarkable coexistence of uniformity and diversity. In terms of the major organizational resources on which parties can draw, such as members, staff and finance, the new evidence largely confirms the continuation of trends identified in previous research: i.e., declining membership, but enhanced financial resources and more paid staff. We also find remarkable uniformity regarding the core architecture of party organizations. At the same time, however, we find substantial variation between countries and party families in terms of their internal processes, with particular regard to how internally democratic they are, and in the forms that this democratization takes

"Political Parties, delegation and Europeanisation: A Conceptual Framework"

[From the introduction]. A great deal of research, both normative and empirical and too voluminous to be listed here, has been devoted to this democratic deficit. But the vast majority of it focuses on the institutions of the Union. Only a small, albeit growing, section takes up the effect of European integration on national political parties; and only a small proportion of that looks inside the parties at the internal mechanisms of democratic accountability that they contain. This paper is a part of an attempt to help fill this gap. It serves as a draft introduction to an ongoing research project that investigates the effect of European integration on Nordic political parties - that is, the parties represented in the national parliaments of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. The aims of the project are threefold. First, it seeks to peer into the black box of party organisation, and to do so through a rather conceptual lens, that of a principal-agent model. In doing so, we hope to derive a clearer understanding of how power within parties is delegated and accountability exercised. Second, the project compares these mechanisms of delegation and accountability according to how they work at two different levels: at the customary national level and at the EU level. Of course, such a comparison will be of limited scale in the parties operating in the two Nordic non-EU-member-states, Iceland and Norway. But it is far from meaningless even in those cases, thanks to the two countries' involvement in the process of European integration via the European Economic Area (EEA). Third, the project aims to compare these mechanisms across cases - that is, to shine a comparative light on the way that parties operate accross the Nordic region, with particular emphasis on the effect of European integration

Sweden and Coronavirus : Unexceptional Exceptionalism

The aims of this article are, first, to describe the Swedish authorities' strategy for dealing with the sudden onset of novel coronavirus in early 2020 and, second, to explain why that strategy differed markedly from those in nearly all other European countries. From an early stage, the Swedish government delegated decision making to the Public Health Agency, and its goal was to mitigate the effects of the virus rather than to suppress its spread. Society was never closed down in the same way as elsewhere. Using data from media reports and other publications, we argue that the agency was insulated from pressure to change course, even as the number of deaths associated with covid-19 rose far above those in Sweden's Nordic neighbours, by four conditions: (1) the structure of national public administration; (2) an outburst of nationalism in parts of the media; (3) the uneven impact of the virus; and (4) a political leadership that was willing to delegate responsibility for policy almost entirely. We conclude by briefly comparing the coronavirus strategy to previous episodes of Swedish policy exceptionalism. This emerging pattern, we suggest, raises normative questions about the functioning of Swedish democracy

Analysing intra-party power : Swedish selection committees over five decades

Unlike political parties in many other countries, Swedish ones have not adopted more inclusive methods for choosing their election candidates and party leaders. While the party congress formally selects important party offices, the process is managed, prior to the formal vote, by aselection committee vested with the task of filtering the pool of potential leaders and proposing one of them as the new leader. In this article, we survey the composition of these selection committees over time to investigate the extent to which change has taken place. Specifically, we investigate whether the composition of these powerful committees, which decide who joins the ranks of the country’s political leaders, has developed over time in relation to what prominent theories of intra-party power might lead us to expect. We derive testable expectations from prominent conceptualisations of intra-party power and apply these empirically. Specifically, we study the composition of party selection committees in Sweden over 50 years, 1969–2019. In total, this includes 40 different selection committees and almost 400 individuals. Contrary to conventional wisdom on intra-party power relations, the empirical analysis reveals a surprising degree of stability, raising questions about common claims of general power shifts within partiesPolitical Parties and their Leaders: Power and Selection in Comparative Perspective (PartLead