Mauro Zamboni (Stockholm University - Faculty of Law) has posted The Role of Constitution in Sweden: Its Normative Patchy Floor and Its (Half-Way) Journey From Political to Legal Constitutionalism on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
If one thinks about the constitution in a well-established democracy, he or she certainly contemplate it as being the most important legal, political, and (to some extent) social document according to which the life of an entire national community has to be mold. Constitutions not only contain the basic structuring of a state in its fundamental components; they also indicate the fundamental values according to which (and for the fulfillment of which) both public and private actors have to operate. In a metaphorical sense, the constitution is the ground floor which each democracy is built upon.
However, if one starts to look around the realities, he or she can easily notice how this ideal-typical picture is exactly ideal-typical. In this respect, also Sweden can be said to belong to those well-established democracies which present an idea of constitution as “divergent” from the ideal-typical one of being the legal floor upon which the regulation of the entire national community should be built upon. In particular, the Swedish constitutional ground floor appears to have a nature of legal normativity of an uneven or “patchy” character. For various reasons, constitutional documents (or parts thereof) which should normally be considered as the bearing floor of a well-established and well-functioning Western-style democracy, they are instead generally perceived and used by both the Swedish legal and political actors more as “aspirational” policy documents, not really binding them and offering them a rather broad space of legal and political maneuver.
The purpose of this work is to present both this perception (and use) of the constitutional charters in Sweden which appears to deviate from the ideal-typical one and the factors behind such a “political” (rather than legal) role played by the parts of the constitutional provisions in the national legal discourse. At the same time, this work will also point out how some of these factors have recently changed and therefore it is maybe possible to detect nowadays tendencies pushing the Swedish major legal actors into a more “legal” vision of the constitution as “per se” fundamental floor for every legal and political discourse.
