Minister and Government Departments – Executive Supreme Court – Judiciary Norway Parliament – legislature The King, Prime Minister, Cabinet of Norway, Government Departments and Civil Service – executive The Supreme Court, High Courts and lower courts – judiciary A note on the status of separation of power, checks and balances, and balance of power in Norway today. In the original constitution of 1814 the Montesquieu concept was enshrined, and the people at the time had the same skepticism about political parties as the American founding fathers and the revolutionaries in France. Nor did people really want to get rid of the king and the Council of State (privy council). King and council was a known concept that people had lived with for a long time and for the most part were comfortable with. The 1814 constitution came about as a reaction to external events, most notable the Treaty of Kiel (see 1814 in Norway). There was no revolution against the current powers, as had been the case in the U.S. and France. As there was no election of the executive, the king reigned supremely independent in selecting the members of the Council of State, no formal political parties formed until the 1880s. A conflict between the executive and legislature started developing in the 1870s and climaxed with the legislature impeaching the entire Council of State in 1884 (see Statsrådssaken [Norwegian Wikipedia page]). With this came a switch to a parliamentary system of government. While the full process took decades, it has led to a system of parliamentary sovereignty, where the Montesquieu idea of separation of powers is technically dead even though the three branches remain important institutions. This does not mean that there are no checks and balances. With the introduction of a parliamentary system, political parties started to form quickly, which led to a call for electoral reform that saw the introduction of Party-list proportional representation in 1918. The peculiarities of the Norwegian election system generate 6–8 parties and make it extremely difficult for a single party to gain an absolute majority. It has only occurred for a brief period in the aftermath of World War II where the Labour Party had an absolute majority. A multi-party system parliament that must either form a minority executive or a coalition executive functions as a perfectly good system of checks and balances even if it was never a stated goal for