Finland – Weak parliament

Helsinki Times is reporting a study by the National Research Institute of Legal Policy and the University of Eastern Finland showing that the Finnish parliament is quite weak.

Apart from confirming that parliament has brought down the government by a vote of no-confidence only four times since 1919 and the last being in 1958, the report shows that more than half of all government proposals go through parliamentary select committees without any changes being made. In other words, even members of the ruling coalition have very little influence over legislation.

For more on the Finnish parliament, see Tapio Raunio, ‘Finland: Moving in the Opposite Direction’, Torbjörn Bergman and Kaare Strøm (eds.), The Madisonian Turn: Political Parties and Parliamentary Democracy in Nordic Europe, 2011, University of Michigan.

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