Ett ansvarsmässigt tomrum?

Sammanfattning: The state administration is the last link in the chain of assignments and responsibilities, where the people vote for a parliament, which elects a prime minister, who appoints a government whose subordinate state administration must ensure that its policies are implemented. If you turn it around, the state administration is responsible to the government, the government to the parliament and the parliament to the people. The purpose of this study is to investigate how the process of accountability in the Swedish administration looks like and if it works as intended. To investigate this, I have analyzed the National Agency for Education and their responsibility for Swedish results in the Pisa survey 2018 and the transfer of the Swedish Social Insurance Agency's director general. The results of the study show that the Swedish constitution presupposes that there is a connection between power and responsibility, which is highlighted as an advantage in relation to other systems as it contributes to increased clarity about how power is distributed. On the other hand, these advantages are counteracted by the fact that recurring informal contacts between authorities and ministries are encountered, which creates ambiguities when responsibility is to be demanded.