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

Niklas Bolin,Nicholas Aylott

doi:10.1177/02633957211051638

Abstract

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.

Highlights

Political parties in many countries have adopted more inclusive methods for choosing their election candidates and party leaders
This is the selection committee, or valberedning. (From here, we use the English and Swedish terms as synonyms.) When a party chooses a new leader, a selection committee is vested with the task of preparing the formal vote
It filters the pool of potential leaders and, in the end, proposes one of them as the new leader

Summary

Introduction

Political parties in many countries have adopted more inclusive methods for choosing their election candidates and party leaders. Any form of delegation involves some scope for ‘agency loss’ – that is, for the agent to act in ways that promote its own preferences in addition to, and perhaps at the expense of, those of its principal In this context, the Swedish party custom of seeking to present a united front to the outside world when making its most important decisions does render the valberedning a site of significant intraparty power. Whereas policy formulation, the management of parliamentary life and the direction of national election campaigns are usually the prerogatives of the national leadership, candidate and leader selection tend to be sub-national competences (Carty, 2004; Cross, 2018).6 In relation to this literature, we can formulate hypotheses about possible change in the composition of the valberedning in Swedish parties. We survey the generality or particularity of any such trends

Method and data

Findings

Discussion