SWEDISH DEMOCRACY IN CRISIS?

Abstract

This article evaluates the democratic status of the established political institutions in the Swedish political system through an ‘intensive’ case study of deliberation in complex decision-making. More precisely, the decision-making process underpinning the first power transmission link between Sweden and Poland is reconstructed and assessed from a deliberative democratic perspective. The analysis is structured around an analytic approach derived from Jürgen Habermas's discursive conception of deliberative democracy. The research findings support earlier observations indicating the declining vitality of established institutions, and they suggest that Swedish democracy is in crisis. But the results also give reason to believe in a brighter future for Swedish democracy. The article observes that citizens are willing to devote considerable time and effort to politics, and that a devoted and well-informed local opposition was able to relatively successfully compete with the economic and social power of private enterprises and the administrative power of the Government and the state administration. The article further demonstrates that local opposition forced the private enterprises to introduce an alternative technology – a technology that, through a limited increase in costs, eliminated the major negative environmental impacts of the project. In other words, local mobilisation against the project resulted in the implementation of a more rational technology.