De politiska partierna och författningen

Abstract

Political Parties and Constitutional Reform

The purpose of this article is to study how Sweden’s political parties handled the process of constitutional review from 2004-2008. In particular the analysis examines how parties choose between their office-seeking, policy-seeking and vote-seeking goals and the desire to maintain intra party agreement. Three expectations are identified: (a) parties’ different strategic situations lead them to advocate different long-term goals; (b) different party levels will take different stands in order to increase their influence vis-a-vis other levels; (c) party leaderships will try to increase their freedom to negotiate with others by avoiding extensive intra party debates or decisions. The study is based on 30 interviews with representatives closely involved in the constitutional-reform process. The conclusion is that parties have self-interested goals as regards the question of how the political game should be regulated. The conflict between different intra-party levels is also obvious. However, due to party members’ disinterest in the constitutional review, party leaders did not need to adopt a variety of strategies to avoid a large scale intra-party debate. It was enough for them to claim that the resulting compromise was actually something of a victory for each party.