The Legislative Advantages of Government Formation: Conflict, Cooperation and Lawmaking in the Swedish Riksdag 1971-2025

In parliamentary democracies, the right to form a government is widely regarded as the grand prize of the electoral process. However, while the governing parties’ political advantages are often taken for granted, political scientists have long debated the true scope of their influence. Some argue that the government ministers can effectively decide the law of the land on their own, others that the ministers' legislative discretion is heavily constrained by the parties in their supporting coalition, and still others that all depends on who controls the parliament's median legislator. Since the governing and opposition parties often have conflicting policy preferences, determining whose interests generally prevail is integral to our understanding of the broader democratic system.

In this project, we will field fifty years of lawmaking data from the Swedish riksdag to investigate how different configurations of government control might affect the political parties' legislative fortunes. We will draw on positive political theory to develop a set of competing hypotheses about which parties should tend to come out as winners and losers across varying legislative situations. We will assess the hypotheses by analyzing tens of thousands of roll-call votes with quasi-experimental methods. In addition to shedding new light on the political evolution of the riksdag, the findings will have broad implications for theories of political representation and legislative organization.