Din Riksdag
Learning that Swedish democracy is far from perfect #
I came to Sweden in 2016 and as far as I can remember, I’ve always been fascinated by its democracy. During my first years in Stockholm, I was often visiting the parliament, sitting above the main chamber and listening to the debates. Swedish parliamentary democracy has something I didn’t grow up with: proportional vote systems, high levels of trust, less polarisation and a lot of consensus and respect for institutions and processes.
In my home country, distrust and anger were record high. But because of that, France was also bubbling with an enormous drive to hold politicians under scrutiny, accountable and from many citizens a will to get involved in the decisions that affected them. To meet this demand, countless innovative projects were started in the 2010s and the institutions were reformed (a little) to allow these new forms of democracy to have an impact.
When I arrived, I regarded Sweden as a pinnacle of democracy and was certain none of this was new here. I was wrong: maybe because of this high trust, until recently, information on elected representatives’ private interests had to be requested and collected physically until recently and they are yet to be made available as open data. Sweden is the only democracy around the Baltic sea that doesn’t give citizens the possibility to write petitions to start debates in its parliament. The official process to give feedback on future legislation (called remissprocess) is tailored for corporate interests and organised civil society but leaves very little room for grass-root engagement and greatly lacks transparency.
Building Din Riksdag, one workshop at a time #
Naively, but driven by a genuine drive to improve things, I started a project called Din Riksdag. Din Riksdag’s goal was to become a platform where citizens and grass-roots groups could get a better understanding of the legislative process and have an impact on it.
I quickly realised how little interest there was from institutions and political forces to reform the current system so I decided to build on it, much like how change was ushered in other European parliaments. I drafted two potential vehicles:
- citizen remissvar
- citizen motions
Both could be crafted collaboratively and receive supports, giving an increased legitimacy to the popular ones and making it easy for both the government chancellery and the parliament committees to include them in the making of the law when creating the proposition and the betankände respectively.
These ideas came from personal research but also through feedback and ideas from various workshops I did over the years 2017 and 2018.
Swedish civic tech? #
To support this new process, I also set up a digital platform where the whole legislation process was to be replicated and interactive, a website where citizens could browse through investigations, remisser, propositioner as well as parliament activity, and submit or support remissvar and motions. I used the leading civic tech tools of the time, first Consul then Decidim to that end, and developed modules to integrate Swedish legislative data.
Unfortunately, despite the parliamentary administration’s best effort, a lot of that data remains unavailable in a structured format. That is why I started projects like OpenRemiss and ultimately g0v.se to make it easier to reuse data from regeringen.se.
Turning the page #
Although I never officially ended Din Riksdag, I stopped investing my time in it around mid 2018. At that time, I met the first founders of Digidem Lab, Sanna, Anna and Petter and decided to join them to use my newly acquired skills in other participatory projects in Sweden. Together, we used Decidim in many municipalities here and abroad and introduced methods such as participatory budgeting and citizens’ assemblies.
My hope was that if I gave the national institutions a few years, they would probably mature and become more interested in letting citizens have their say. As I said earlier, I was very naive.