Restraining the Governors: The Nordic Experience with Limiting the Strong State

Abstract

The combination of a tradition of arbitrary royal government and popular intolerance, with the existence of extensive, unitary and highly centralized institutions of government, and with the dominance of government by a single, reformist party for more than a half century would seem a potent recipe for governmental abuse of individual and minority group rights. That is especially true in the absence of the formal constitutional safeguards used to preserve rights elsewhere Yet the Nordic democracies have in fact proved exemplary in protecting civil liberties Why? This article challenges the view that Nordic political societies are consensual historically or by nature, and it describes the limited traditional institutional checks on abuse of individual and minority rights by government Instead it finds the basis for the Nordic democracies' excellent record in civil liberties in the combination of (1) the development of new, non‐traditional institutional checks on government. (2) the use of direct democracy as a check on parliamentary majorities. (3) the pervasive use of corporatist channels encompassing the major oppositional interest groups to draft and implement legislation, and (4) the effective constraints placed on decisions by parliamentary majorities by the pattern of fierce partisanship in the finely balanced parliamentary party constellation These protections for individual and minority liberties arise primarily from the assumption that basic conflicts of interest are a fact of political life and that they should be institutionalized.