Political parties's choices of who leads them can have a major bearing on politics. Recent research shows that selection procedures exhibit considerable variation, even among parties in broadly comparable European parliamentary democracies. The most common analytical approach is to focus on the ‘official story’–that is, what the parties’ statutes say that they do when selecting a leader. This, in turn, implies a heavy emphasis on the final stage of the selection procedure, in which the decision about who will lead the party is made by the ‘selectorate’. Yet this, the ‘official story’, is only a part of the process, and quite often not even the most important part. In this article, we seek to make the classification of selection processes more manageable and meaningful. We propose a typology of the ‘mode’ of selection, in which the emphasis is on the management of competition for the leader's position before the decision reaches the selectorate. We identify five modes of competition: open, enclosed, filtered, enclosed and filtered, and managed.

The Swedish parliamentary election of 11 September 2022 led to the removal of a Social Democratic government and the installation of a right-of-centre coalition. The change was made possible by the mainstream right's abandonment of the previous cordon sanitaire around the radical-right Sweden Democrats (SD). The new government, consisting of the Moderates, the Christian Democrats and the Liberals, concluded a comprehensive agreement with SD. In this article, we sketch the background to the election; describe how the campaign unfolded; and interpret the results and outcome.

This chapter has two aims. First, we describe the Swedish authorities’ management of the pandemic in 2020. Their approach deviated markedly from policies pursued in neighbouring countries, with respect to the authorities’ understanding of the virus; the measures adopted to counter the spread of the virus; the reliance on recommendations to citizens rather than legally binding instructions; and, most notably, the extensive delegation of policy-making by the government to a technocratic authority, the Public Health Agency. Second, we try to explain this policy deviation. We show that Swedish constitutional arrangements, with relatively autonomous, policy-delivering agencies, are a necessary but insufficient condition for explaining the outcome. Three additional conditions are needed: assertive leadership within the Public Health Agency; a weak and passive government; and citizens’ trust in public institutions, reflected in rallying around the flag and in supportive media coverage, all which cemented initial policy choices.

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 a selection 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 parties.

In this article, the aim is to enhance our understanding of who has power over leader selection in political parties. To this end, we apply an analytical framework in which the selection process is divided into three phases: gatekeeping, preparation and decision. The focus is on determining the extent to which each of these phases is influential for the outcome and thereby locating the distribution of intra-party power. Underpinning the analysis is the conviction that the comparison of leader selection is too limited if it relies solely on information about formal procedures, including the composition of the selectorate. We should also take the preselection phase of leader selection into account. Empirically, we examine a sample of recent selection processes in European parliamentary democracies. In contrast to previous research on intra-party politics, which has suggested an ascendancy of the party in public office, our results suggest an enduring strength of the party on the ground and the party in the central office.

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. 

Sweden’s management of the coronavirus pandemic, beginning in early 2020, hasbeen much discussed because it deviated from other countries’ equivalents. Set inthe context of scholarly debate about the balance between politicians and experts inpolitical decision-making, we argue that a necessary condition for this case of Swedishexceptionalism was the manner of policy-making adopted by the Swedish authorities. Inthis article, we describe this policy-making procedure, which involved a radical form ofdelegation by elected politicians to appointed experts, and seek to explain how it cameabout. We focus on the 1st year of the pandemic, and use media reports and other publicdocuments, including parts of a public inquiry, as our empirical material.

Beslutet att lämna EU har inte bara förändrat Storbritanniens plats i världen utan också skakat om den brittiska inrikespolitiken och förstärkt polariseringen mellan brexitanhängare och EU-vänner. På sikt kan brexit hota sammanhållningen i landet.