The elastic confines of governments in democracies: Nordic constitutional forms and discourses of 20th century
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DOI:
https://doi.org/10.63277/gsc.v51i.5339Keywords:
Nordic constitutions, parliamentarism, parties in interwar epoch, Nordic governments in the cold warAbstract
All the Nordic states remained constitutional and democratic throughout the 20th century. This defined the role of the governments. However, there were differences among the Nordic states. The Scandinavian monarchies (Sweden, Denmark and Norway) enacted liberal constitutions at the first part of the 19th Century formed by division of power and personal royal rule. For a while the strength
of the government rested in exploring the power between the monarch and the parliament. With the introduction of parliamentarism around 1900 the government became bound by new forms of party politics and during the interwar years there were in all countries several minority governments. The same goes for Finland that established itself as a new republic in 1919. During the rest of the 20th Century the Nordic governments became constitutionally and politically ‘stronger’ due to a more
standardized parliamentarism and not least due to the influential Social Democratic parties.
