Contract Parliamentarism

Contract parliamentarism is a way of governing in a minority through a detailed written agreement with support parties. Rather than assembling a fresh majority for each question — a hopping majority (hoppande majoritet) — the cabinet signs a programme with named parties that binds them on both policy and the way they work together, for a whole mandate period rather than a single vote.

The technique was not invented by Sweden’s 2010s agreements. The term was coined by Aylott & Bergman (2003) and developed by Tim Bale and Torbjörn Bergman (2006), describing the Social Democratic minority governments supported by the Left Party and the Greens from the late 1990s on. That is a necessary correction: no single later agreement “introduced” the technique — political science had named it long before.

Sweden’s line of agreements hardens step by step. The December Agreement (2014) bound only procedure — who is allowed to form a government. The January Agreement (2019) bound policy in 73 numbered points, but kept the support parties outside the machinery of government. The Tidö Agreement (2022) bound both the policy and the machinery itself.

That is where Tidö’s novelty lies. The support party outside the cabinet — the Sweden Democrats — gained “full and equal influence” over matters within the cooperation projects, “in the same way as the governing parties”: taking part in the preparation of inquiry directives, government bills, and regulatory changes. To exercise it, the party got its own coordination office staffed inside the Government Offices (Regeringskansliet) — without a single ministerial post, and so without the constitutional answerability to the Riksdag that a post carries.

Hence two distinct lines of criticism that are worth keeping apart. The constitutional one: a party shapes the government’s work while standing outside the chain of responsibility. And the human-rights one, about content: Civil Rights Defenders and Amnesty International judged the agreement itself incompatible with Sweden’s human-rights and rule-of-law commitments. The first is about who exercises power; the second about what the power is used for.