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Rh Government. Without changing a line of the Instrument of Government, Sweden adopted a parliamentary system, with a Government whose strength depended on the number votes it could command in the Riksdag. The process was slow and met resistance. The usual view is that the definitive breakthrough for the parliamentary system came in 1917 with the creation of a coalition Government of Liberals and Social Democrats.

A new Instrument of Government and a new Riksdag Act

The introduction of a parliamentary system shifted the balance of power in the Instrument of Government without any amendments to the text. In practice, other changes in the form of government also took place. A right to judicial review for the courts was recognised towards the end of the life of the Instrument of Government. With the increasing complexity of society and the growth of the public sector, the Riksdag was compelled to pay less attention to details. Decisions of principle came into fashion. The importance of being in government grew in general, among other things because the Government had privileged access to the machinery of research.

The dominance of the Social Democratic Party in post-war Sweden encouraged the opposition to take a hard look at the Constitution. They wished to determine whether changes in the Constitution could possibly lead to an opening for them. They first trained their searchlight on the referendum process, followed by the bicameral system. The First Chamber with its successive partial elections and its eight-year electoral periods gave rise to a lag in the composition of the Chamber. It took some time for stable shifts in electoral opinion to have their full impact. Between the wars this lag had been to the advantage of the non-socialist parties, but from the early 1940s it favoured the Social Democrats. The two-chamber system, however, was intimately bound up with the electoral system, which in this way also became drawn into the debate. It was thus high time to take the classical Swedish step of appointing an all-party commission of inquiry.

The first inquiry, the Commission on the Constitution, was appointed in 1954 and presented its final report in 1963. In the course of its work, the inquiry reached agreement on a number of important points. Among other things, it set out proposals for a completely new Instrument of Government and a completely new Riksdag Act. In the opinion of the Commission, it was not possible to introduce the principle of parliamentary government into the old text of the Constitution in a satisfactory manner. The Commission also agreed that it would not propose a transition to full-majority elections, that it would limit any extension of the referendum process, that a special chapter in the Instrument of Government would be dedicated to civil rights and freedoms, and that there both was and should be a right to judicial review for the courts. On Rh