Setting the Agenda in the Swedish Riksdag: Partisan Politics and Commissions of Inquiry, 1971-2021

Who controls the legislative agenda? The legislative branch is generally responsible for determining which policy positions should be crystallized into law.

By the time the legislators see the items that are up for debate, however, a long list of bureaucrats, judges, ministers, and other stakeholders will typically already have had their say and contributed towards defining the problems and solutions that the legislators must now assess.

To understand how modern democracies actually work, one must accordingly also understand how they manage their legislative agendas—the procedures that surround them, the issues that constitute them, and above all, the political interests that control them.In this project, we will unpack the political construction of the legislative agenda using novel data from the Swedish government.

We will investigate (1) how party strategic considerations can affect the initial organization of the legislative process and (2) how the initial organization of the legislative process can affect the quality and contents of the legislative proposals that ultimately become law.

We will assemble an original database that tracks the preparation, formulation, and confirmation of all government bills between 1971 and 2021 and analyze the materials using modern statistical methods.

In addition to shedding new light on the internal operations of the Swedish government, the findings will have broad implications for theories of delegation and legislative organization.