The ‘Presidentialisation’ Thesis Revisited: Lessons from the Swedish Case

The ‘presidentialisation’ of politics thesis asserts that executive actors become increasingly empowered at the expense of parliamentary and party actors. Given the strong criticisms levelled against the thesis (see e.g. Karvonen 2010; Dowding 2013; Heffernan 2013), we aim to develop a more precise analytical framework to investigate the level of chief executive dominance in parliamentary democracies. We present a set of indicators to investigate this empirically, which is then applied in a least-likely case: Sweden. Our preliminary results indicate that, even in a country with strong consensual traits and collegial decision-making in cabinets, there are signs of a strengthening of executive power in recent decades. The findings confirm our belief that better indicators of the likely empowerment of executives are well needed, and should be applied in future comparative research.