Committee assignment in parliamentary regimes: Evidence from Sweden, 2002-2018

Theories of committee assignment based on the US Congress are well-developed, but not sufficient for understanding the process in parliamentary regimes. This paper explores committee assignments in party-centred legislatures by focusing on the role of executives in the legislative process in parliamentary regimes. It does so by studying the committee assignment success of MPs, analysing a dataset of the Swedish Riksdag for four terms (2002-2018). Sweden’s powerful legislature, with experience of both minority and majority governments, offers a promising setting for developing and testing a theoretical framework of committee assignments in parliamentary regimes. Our dataset covers individual parliamentary voting records, electoral results, MPs’ education, employment, and links to associations, as well as four surveys of MPs, all with response rates of 90%+, which allow for detailed measurement of MPs’ preferences across a range of issues. We show, firstly, that committees are a microcosm of the floor in terms of both general ideology and committee-specific policy preferences. Secondly, arguing that MPs from government and opposition parties face very different incentives due to the key role played by the executive in parliamentary regimes, we show that MPs’ success in the committee assignment process in parliamentary regimes driven by the pursuit of information and access to re-election resources, but with significant differences between government and opposition party MPs.