There are various reasons to expect Swedish parties to demonstrate a high degree of intra-party democracy. However, data collected by the Political Party Database Working Group suggests that Swedish parties do not actually outperform most other Western democracies in this respect. What is more, we know that Swedish party leaders are chosen in a way that observers in many other countries would regard as profoundly undemocratic. In this paper, we look more closely at this particular aspect of intra-party democracy in Sweden. We describe how the leader-selection process works, focusing on three recent instances. An important objective is to develop a set of fine-grained, qualitative indicators that can be used in cross-national, comparative studies of how parties delegate to their leaders and hold them accountable.