Vem svarar på remiss? : Statistiska trender i 25 år av remissvar

This thesis analyzes how non-public actors’ participation in Sweden’s government consultation procedure (remissförfarandet) has changed over the past 25 years, focusing on and comparing legislative bills from the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Education. Using a descriptive statistical quantitative approach, approximately 1,200 proposition documents were collected and processed to extract and categorize consultations. Respondents were counted and computationally classified into public (state, regional, municipal) and non-public categories (civil society, private-commercial, other/unknown) using a LLM method. The results show a decline over time in the share of civil society responses in Ministry of Justice propositions, alongside a minor increase in the share of public-actor responses. No robust overall trend is identified for the Ministry of Education, largely due to incomplete and inconsistent availability of consultation lists. The study discusses potential implications of the statistical trends through the lens of democratic theory, while emphasizing that causal and normative conclusions are limited by data limitations and classification uncertainty.