Folkomröstningen som korrektiv
- en jämförande studie av riksdagens val av beslutsmetod i frågorna om EMU och EU-konstitutionen
Sweden has been a member of the European Union since 1995 and the power of the organisation to make decisions has increased over the years in a rate which hasn?t been followed by an equally increase in democratization. This is partly due to the lack of participation in the decision making process and at the national level the citizens don?t possess enough channels to compensate the loss of influence. To solve this democratic dilemma, more and more countries are turning to the referendum. My purpose with the study is to analyze under what circumstances the Swedish parliament initiate referendum and how this effect the opportunities for it to work as a corrective according to the popular will. I?ve compared the decision to join EMU, when the parliament decided to initiate, with the ratification of the EU-constitution when the parliament decided not to initiate and posed following questions: How did 1) Minority Weapon, 2)Division solving 3) Important question and 4) External Pressure impact the parties decision to initiate or not? I used statistics, parliamentary debates and home-pages to answer the questions. My conclusions are that the most important factors that promote an initiative are division solving and important question. External pressure seems to have little or no impact. This means that the parliament isn?t responsive to the opinion, has a big control over the initiation and combined with a critically bad representation it doesn?t provide much of an opportunity for the referendum to work as a corrective in the Swedish democracy.