Social History

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rshi20

The social origins of democracy in Sweden: the

role of agrarian politics

Erik Bengtsson

To cite this article: Erik Bengtsson (2022) The social origins of democracy in Sweden: the role of
agrarian politics, Social History, 47:4, 419-445, DOI: 10.1080/03071022.2022.2112865

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03071022.2022.2112865

© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa

UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
Group.

Published online: 06 Oct 2022.

Submit your article to this journal

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rshi20
SOCIAL HISTORY
2022, VOL. 47, NO. 4, 419–445
https://doi.org/10.1080/03071022.2022.2112865

The social origins of democracy in Sweden: the role of

agrarian politics
Erik Bengtsson
Lund University

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
In discussions of Scandinavian democratisation, it is com­ Democratisation; agrarian
monplace to argue that long-standing farmer representation politics; Sweden; class
in parliament and a lack of feudalism facilitated early demo­ politics; farmers
cratisation. The present essay questions this interpretation in
the Swedish case. It centres on a re-interpretation of farmer
politics at the national level from the 1866 two-chamber
parliament reform to the alliance between the farmers’
party and Social Democrats in 1933. It is shown that demo­
cratisation was late and rapid; the 1866 reform was pro­
foundly undemocratic. Swedish farmers did not organise
themselves independently of nobles and landowners until
the 1920s, and did not play the role of an independent pro-
democratic force. The broad-based organisations of farmers
in the 1920s and 1930s, with their democratic, participatory
culture, were heavily influenced by the political culture of
liberals and the labour movement. The implication for ana­
lyses of democratisation is that deep roots are less decisive
than often supposed, and that modern political agency and
organisation conversely, in contrast to influential research
traditions and theories of democracy, can reverse undemo­
cratic traditions.

Why did Sweden become a stable democratic country? Furthermore: why

did a Social Democratic model, rather than a more liberal model, evolve?
Classical answers to both questions point to the political choices made by
farmers during the Great Depression: while farmers in Germany supported
Fascism, in Scandinavia they went into coalitions with Social Democracy,
entailing Keynesian economic policies and building welfare states.1 Other
researchers also focus on the farmers as the key group for (social) demo­
cratic outcomes in this region, but look for deeper roots of the farmers’
influence. In this stream of the literature it was not the red–green alliance of
the 1930s that gave rise to a democratic society, but rather the farmers
themselves, with a tradition going further back in history, with the

CONTACT Erik Bengtsson erik.bengtsson@ekh.lu.se

1
G. Esping-Andersen, Politics against Markets: The social democratic road to power (Princeton, NJ, 1985), 37, 71–73;
G. Luebbert, Liberalism, Fascism or Social Democracy: Social classes and the political origins of regimes in interwar
Europe (New York and Oxford, 1991), 267–72, 277–303.
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduc­
tion in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
420 E. BENGTSSON

establishment of a political culture of egalitarianism.2 The agrarian-oriented

account of Swedish democratisation has something to say for it: 80% of the
Swedish population in 1900 resided in rural areas, and farmers constituted
a large share of the population.3 Hence agrarian politics must be an impor­
tant part of the story of Swedish democratisation.
However, contrary to the conventional account, there was no steady
contribution of farmer politics to democracy, no continuity from early
modern peasant representation to twentieth-century social democracy. To
make this point, this article takes a step back and re-evaluates the role of
agrarian interests in Swedish democratisation c.1866–1933. This period
begins with the constitutional reform of 1866 which abolished the four-
estates diet of medieval descent and replaced it with a two-chamber parlia­
ment. The analysis ends in the 1930s, with the epoch-making ‘red–green’
coalition of the Social Democrats and the Farmers’ League. The period here
considered thus straddles the key suffrage reforms of 1909 and 1918 and the
establishment of parliamentary (instead of royal) government in the 1910s,
which together made Sweden a democracy.4 The contribution of this article
is twofold. First, it provides a new analytical account of the changing stance
of the farmer class with regard to democratisation. Class interest is highly
relevant in understanding politics; however, we should not expect a constant
policy stance of a class, but rather a varying stance depending upon the
varying salience of different social conflicts, and the shaping of class alli­
ances over time. Second, by investigating farmer politics, the article explains
the emergence of a stable democratic – more precisely, Social Democratic –
regime in twentieth-century Sweden. Sweden is often presented as an
emblematic case of stable democratisation, so understanding this case is
essential.5

2
Material interests: F.G. Castles, ‘Barrington Moore’s thesis and Swedish political development’, Government and
Opposition, 8, 3 (1973), 313–31; T. Tilton, ‘The social origins of liberal democracy: the case of Sweden’, American
Political Science Review, 68, 2 (1974), 561–71; P. Baldwin, The Politics of Social Solidarity: Class bases of the
European welfare state 1875–1975 (Cambridge, 1990); M. Alestalo and S. Kuhnle, ‘The Scandinavian route:
economic, social, and political developments in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden’, International Journal of
Sociology, 16, 1 (1987), 3–38. Political egalitarianism: B. Stråth, ‘Continuity and discontinuity in passing front
I and II: Swedish 19th century civil society’ in Stråth (ed.), Democratisation in Scandinavia in Comparison
(Gothenburg, 1988), 21–41; Stråth, ‘The cultural construction of equality in Norden’ in S. Bendixsen, M. Bente
Bringslid and H. Vike (eds), Egalitarianism in Scandinavia: Historical and contemporary perspectives (London,
2018), 47–64; L. Trägårdh, ‘Statist individualism: on the culturality of the Nordic welfare state’ in Ø. Sørensen
and B. Stråth (eds), The Cultural Construction of Norden (Oslo, 1997), 253–85.
3
SCB, Historisk statistik för Sverige: Del 1. Befolkning 1720–1967 (Stockholm, 1969), 45–46.
4
On the democratisation process see D. Rustow, The Politics of Compromise: A study of parties and cabinet
government in Sweden (Reprint. New York, 1969); S. Olsson, Den svenska högerns anpassning till demokratin
(Uppsala, 2000).
5
See several works discussed in the second section, but also D. Ziblatt, Conservative Parties and the Birth of
Democracy (Cambridge, 2017), ch. 10; D. Acemoglu and J.A. Robinson, The Narrow Corridor: States, societies, and
the fate of liberty (New York, 2019), ch. 6.
 SOCIAL HISTORY 421

Democratisation and agrarian politics

Analysis of macro-political change and democratisation in relation to agrar­
ian class structure has a long tradition. In Barrington Moore’s influential
analysis, the bourgeoisie, through its association with liberalism, was the
guarantor of liberal democratic development.6 Researchers following Moore
but focusing on Sweden have pointed out that historically the Swedish
bourgeoisie was relatively weak, but the country still ended up on a liberal
democratic trajectory. These researchers then turned to the strength of the
farmer class: according to Francis Castles, who points to the unique peasant
representation in the estates diet since the 1500s, ‘the peasants were already
in the parliamentary arena, and could act as an important counterweight to
plutocratic influence. . . . in a sense, the farmers held the line until indus­
trialism produced a liberal middle class capable of asserting its own rights’.7
Timothy Tilton similarly asserts that ‘in Sweden the peasants often played
the role that the bourgeoisie played elsewhere’.8 Various versions of the
peasant-legacies-guaranteeing-democracy thesis crop up in the literature;
one example is the bold assertion that ‘Swedish traditions of peasant
democracy helped to cement an alliance with the Peasants League in the
1930s which allowed the Social Democrats to form their first effective
government’.9 Farmers’ local political power in villages and parishes has
often been located in the tradition of a peculiarly Swedish political culture of
negotiation and ‘peasant democracy’, putting Sweden on a democratic
Sonderweg.10
However, the present article questions this proposed continuity from an
early modern ‘peasant democracy’ to the 1930s. A short discussion of the
theory, or assumption, of connections between the farmer class and certain
political outcomes is warranted. What kind of values can we expect farmers
to have in common? Farmers value and defend their independence and try
to sustain a lifestyle built on ownership and independence, combined with
an acceptable material standard of living, relative to society as a whole. Stein
Rokkan, in his study of the Norwegian farmers’ party, pointed to a duality in

6
B. Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and peasant in the making of the modern world
(Boston, 1966). For a critique of Moore’s conflation of bourgeoisie and liberalism, see D. Blackbourn and G. Eley,
The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois society and politics in nineteenth-century Germany (Oxford, 1984),
16, 56–61.
7
Castles, op. cit., 327.
8
Tilton, op. cit., 565. The image from Tilton of a farmer-dominated, relatively egalitarian rural economy in Sweden
is reproduced also in the more recent political science literature – see B.W. Ansell and D.J. Samuels, Inequality
and Democratization: An elite-competition approach (Cambridge, 2014), ch. 3, but it misrepresents the situation,
and ignores the very real importance of the nobles – see E. Bengtsson, A. Missiaia, M. Olsson and P. Svensson,
‘Aristocratic wealth and inequality in a changing society: Sweden, 1750–1900’, Scandinavian Journal of History,
44, 1 (2019), 27–52.
9
C. Levy, review of Paper Stones by A. Przeworski and J. Sprague in History Workshop Journal, 27, 1 (1989), 210.
10
E. Österberg, ‘Bönder och centralmakt i det tidigmoderna Sverige’, Scandia, 55, 1 (1989), 73–95; P. Aronsson,
Bönder gör politik: Det lokala självstyret som social arena i tre smålandssocknar, 1680–1850 (Lund, 1992);
N. Kayser Nielsen, Bonde, stat og hjem: Nordisk demokrati og nationalisme (Aarhus, 2008), 152–57, 546.
422 E. BENGTSSON

farmers’ politics.11 On the one hand, they are believers in private property.
In defending property rights – and opposing (agrarian) trade unions – they
sometimes unite with Conservative parties. On the other, they want to
uphold their material living standards, and when the market does not
guarantee these, farmers may demand protectionism, subsidies and state
regulation, which can all carry them into alliances with labour politicians
who support state regulation of the economy. This pendulum swing
between left and right is amply illustrated in the literature, for example in
Seymour Lipset’s analysis of Saskatchewan wheat farmers’ turn to socialism,
as well as in analyses of farmer fascism in Europe during the Great
Depression.12 Farmers, given their market position, also face multiple inter­
est conflicts with other social groups: with banks about interest rates;13 with
middlemen and merchants about wholesale prices;14 with agrarian trade
unions on farm labourer wages.15
The takeaway is that farmers’ ‘class interest’ is not unitary and pre-
determined, but must be articulated and organised, and how this happens
is contingent upon the relative salience of the various conflicts. Existing
farmer-oriented explanations of Swedish democratisation take a static view
of a class as a constant ‘thing’, instead of a relationship.16 In analyses such as
those of Castles or Tilton, the role of the farmers is constant over time – as
carriers of liberal values or even, as for Bo Stråth, ‘figures of equality’.17
Instead, we need to consider the farmers’ relation to other classes in terms of
political and ideological leadership. The political scientists Dietrich
Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens and John D. Stephens contend
that farmers in Sweden organised independently of estate owners and thus
were able to become a pro-democratic force.18 Following Moore in finding
estate owners a naturally anti-democratic force, since they rely on cheap
labour and tend to support the repression of workers to keep wages low,19
farmers led by estate owners are assumed to have been nullified as a pro-
11
S. Rokkan, ‘Geography, religion, and social class: crosscutting cleavages in Norwegian politics’ in S. Lipset and
S. Rokkan (eds), Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-national perspectives (New York, 1967), 402.
12
S.M. Lipset, Agrarian Socialism: The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation in Sasketchewan. A study in political
sociology (Revised and expanded edition. Berkeley, CA and London, 1971); J.E. Farquharson, The Plough and the
Swastika: The NSDAP and agriculture in Germany 1928–1945 (London and Beverly Hills, CA, 1976).
13
E. Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, workers and the American state, 1877–1917 (Chicago and London, 1999),
ch. 7.
14
S. Berger, Peasants against Politics: Rural organization in Brittany 1911–1967 (Cambridge, MA, 1972); Lipset, op.
cit., 68–86.
15
A. Cardoza, Agrarian Elites and Italian Fascism: The province of Bologna, 1901–1926 (Princeton, NJ, 1982);
T. Aasland, Fra landmannsorganisasjon til bondeparti: Politisk debatt og taktikk i Norsk Landmandsforbund
1896–1920 (Oslo, 1974), 81–83.
16
Compare the criticism of Moore’s ‘sweeping trajectories’ in G. Capoccia and D. Ziblatt, ‘The historical turn in
democratization studies: a new research agenda for Europe and beyond’, Comparative Political Studies, 43, 8/9
(2010), 931–68, and their advocacy of ‘contingency’.
17
Stråth, ‘Cultural construction of equality in Norden’, op. cit., 48–49, 56.
18
D. Rueschemeyer, E. Huber Stephens and J.D. Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy (Cambridge,
1992), 100–02.
19
See M. Albertus, ‘Landowners and democracy: the social origins of democracy reconsidered’, World Politics, 69, 2
(2017), 233–76.
 SOCIAL HISTORY 423

democratic factor. I am convinced by the theoretical argument but will show

that it is empirically faulty for Sweden in the 1860s; only gradually from the
1900s on did the farmers found their own organisations and parties, and
break free from the leadership of the estate owners.

Swedish farmers, mid-nineteenth century

In mid-nineteenth century Sweden, where the empirical analysis of the article

begins, the definition of a peasant farmer (bonde) was a person who tilled taxed
farmland and was not a member of the nobility or gentry. In 1845, freeholders
owned 60% and farmers tilled 80% of the land.20 The discrepancy indicates the
presence of a rather large group of tenant farmers. The nobility (about 0.5% of
the population) owned 17% of the land, non-noble landlords owned 12%, and
the Crown owned 11%. To be a farmer gave political rights: freeholders and
crown tenants (but not tenants of the nobility) could vote for the farmers’ estate
in the diet. They also had political power in the parishes, which were responsible
for poor relief, schooling and the like, along with purely ecclesiastical issues.21
With the enclosure movements of the late nineteenth century, the village
became less important as a political unit and the parish more important.22
Farmer households in 1750 had constituted about four-fifths of agrarian
households, but by 1870 this share had shrunk to a half, because the agrarian
underclasses, landless and semi-landless, had grown substantially.23 Sweden
experienced an ‘agricultural revolution’ of growing productivity from 1750
to 1870, led by agrarian elites as well as ordinary farmers who acted to
increase production and yields, for example by arranging enclosures.24
Commercialisation also grew in the second half of the nineteenth century,
with increasing exports of oats to Britain and, after having to compete with
cheap grains from America and Russia, increasing sales of butter and milk in
the 1870s and 1880s. Besides exports, sales opportunities improved drama­
tically with increased industrialisation and urbanisation after c.1870.25
However, economic disparities within the farmer group also grew.
Farmers in areas adjacent to cities or transport centres (such as ports)
benefited more than isolated farmers, and the group of farmers with very
small holdings grew substantially.26 To understand the politics of Swedish
20
C-J. Gadd, Den agrara revolutionen 1700–1870 (Stockholm, 2000), 204.
21
H. Gustafsson, Sockenstugans politiska kultur: Lokal självstyrelse på 1800-talets landsbygd (Stockholm, 1989). The
parish as a political unit was replaced by the municipality in 1862. Voting rights in the municipality were
awarded according to one’s wealth and income. See E. Mellquist, Rösträtt efter förtjänst? Riksdagsdebatten om
den kommunala rösträtten i Sverige 1862–1900 (Stockholm, 1974), 115–36.
22
Gadd, op. cit., 208–10.
23
ibid., 194–95.
24
P. Svensson, ‘Peasants and entrepreneurship in the nineteenth-century agricultural transformation of Sweden’,
Social Science History, 30, 3 (2006), 387–429.
25
M. Morell, Jordbruket i industrisamhället: 1870–1945 (Stockholm, 2001), 84–101.
26
See E. Bengtsson and P. Svensson, ‘The wealth of the Swedish peasant farmer class, 1750–1900: composition
and distribution’, Rural History, 30, 2 (2019), 129–45.
424 E. BENGTSSON

farmers c. 1850 we must, then, consider them not only in relation to cities
and urban dwellers, as is conventional,27 but also in relation to the agrarian
upper class of estate owners, and a rapidly growing agrarian underclass. We
must also consider the growing socio-economic fragmentation within the
farmer class itself.

Farmers as conservatives, mid-nineteenth century

The idea that farmers led the way on Sweden’s road to democracy is related
to the notion of its relatively early and harmonious democratisation.28 To
get the contribution of the farmers right, we also need to get democratisa­
tion right. It is important, then, to understand that the two-chamber system
established in 1866, which replaced the four-estates diet (nobility, clergy,
burghers and farmers) descending from the medieval model, was compara­
tively plutocratic. The wealth and income censuses meant that only about
20% of adult men had the right to vote for the second chamber and 2% for
the first chamber. This became an important guarantee of conservativism.29
The Second Reform Act of 1867 in Britain gave about one-third of adult
men the right to vote; in Bismarck’s Germany, all adult men had this right;
and among Sweden’s Scandinavian neighbours, 73% of Danish men and
33% of Norwegian men had the right to vote.30 Its 1866 reform made
Sweden stand out as quite undemocratic, and there were no suffrage exten­
sions until 1909. Geoff Eley in Forging Democracy has pointed to the
constitutional moment of the 1860s, when so many European states
reformed their political rules of the game, as ‘establishing the enduring
framework for popular politics until a new series of radicalized conflicts
began to dissolve it during 1905–14’.31 Eley does not elaborate on this point
for the Swedish case, but it is highly relevant in Sweden, where reform or not
of the conservative political system created in 1866 was the main constitu­
tional issue for farmers and other political actors alike until the system was
finally reformed in 1909 and 1921.

27
For example, Carlsson’s brilliant study of farmer politics in the 1890s is framed as ‘Farmer politics and
industrialism’, as if industrialism was the exogenous variable and farmers were reacting to it. Mohlin in
a later study dogmatically follows the modernist-industrial paradigm. S. Carlsson, Lantmannapolitiken och
industrialismen: partigruppering och opinionsförskjutningar i svensk politik 1890–1902 (Stockholm, 1953);
Y. Mohlin, Bondepartiet och det moderna samhället 1914–1936: En studie av svensk agrarianism (Umeå, 1989).
28
For a discussion of this idea, see E. Bengtsson, ‘The Swedish Sonderweg in question: democratization and
inequality in comparative perspective, c. 1750–1920’, Past & Present, 244, 1 (2019), 123–61.
29
On the reform and its implications see G.B. Nilsson, ‘Den samhällsbevarande representationsreformen’, Scandia,
35, 2 (1969), 198–271. On the suffrage rules see also Rustow, op. cit., 20–23.
30
Norway: J. Nerbovik, Norsk historie 1870–1905 (Oslo, 1973), 54. Denmark: Ø. Østerud, Agrarian Structure and
Peasant Politics in Scandinavia (Oslo, Bergen and Tromsø, 1978), 210. Britain and Germany: M.L. Anderson,
Practicing Democracy: Elections and political culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton, NJ, 2000), 5–6.
31
G. Eley, Forging Democracy: The history of the left in Europe, 1850–2000 (Oxford, 2002), 4–5.
 SOCIAL HISTORY 425

Agrarian social movements and politics in the 1840s and 1850s:

a Scandinavian comparison
Let us go back, before moving into the post-1866 period, and ask: what kind
of policies did the farmer estate pursue in the final decades of the estates
diet, before the 1866 reform? Following the arguments above, the farmers’
relationship to the unrepresented classes is key. Farmers represented in the
four-estates diet showed very little interest in protecting tenant farmers
when they went on strike in the 1770s and the 1860s; tenant farmers, who
did not have the right to vote, were assumed to be represented by their
landlords.32 That freeholders and crown tenants in parliament showed no
interest in the plight of the tenant farmers under the nobility betrays
a certain lack of solidarity within the farmer class itself. Furthermore, farmer
members of parliament in the 1840s and 1850s generally advocated for
harsh regulation of the work of proletarians, acting in their self-interest as
employers themselves.33
The thesis of a long-standing tradition of peasant democracy assumes
continuity: proto-democracy then (in the early modern period) evolved into
democracy now (post-1920). However, the actual convulsions of
Scandinavian farmer politics in the 1840s and 1850s call for a more complex
account. Whereas Norway and Denmark had major pro-reform, pro-
democratisation farmer movements in the late 1840s, these had no counter­
part in Sweden.34 These movements succeeded in pushing through reforms
in Denmark: both a new, relatively liberal constitution in 1849, and a new
crofter law which limited corvée labour. Strikingly, the Danish representa­
tion reform of 1849 was more democratic than the Swedish reform of almost
20 years later. Why, then, did Sweden lack such popular agrarian move­
ments in the 1840s? Øyvind Østerud explains this by reference to the ‘co-
optation of the Swedish peasantry’, while Niels Kayser Nielsen in his Nordic
comparison comments that ‘in a way, the Swedish farmers paid the price for
having “first arrived”’, meaning, having achieved representation in parlia­
ment and parish.35 Here we must complicate the issues. Not all farmers paid
equally (or arrived equally) – rather, the poorer farmers, the tenants of the
nobility, and the proletarian and semi-proletarian groups paid for the
relatively generous inclusion in the system of the more wealthy farmers
who were freeholders or tenants of the Crown.36 The inclusion of parts of

32
S. Smedberg, Frälsebonderörelser i Halland och Skåne 1772–1776 (Uppsala, 1972); M. Olofsson, Tullbergska
rörelsen: Striden om den skånska frälsejorden 1867–1869 (Lund, 2008).
33
C. Uppenberg, ‘Masters writing the rules: how peasant farmer MPs in the Swedish Estate Diet understood
servants’ labour and the labour laws, 1823–1863’, Agricultural History Review, 68, 2 (2020), 238–56.
34
Østerud, op. cit., 237–50; T. Pryser, Norsk historie 1800–1870: Frå standssamfunn mot klassesamfunn (Oslo, 1993),
322–39. On the Danish reforms see J. Engberg, Det daglige brød: Bønder og arbejdere 1650–1900 (Copenhagen,
2011), 251–59.
35
Østerud, op. cit., 205; Kayser Nielsen, op. cit., 156.
36
Olofsson, op. cit., 251.
426 E. BENGTSSON

the peasantry meant – following a divide-and-conquer logic – that the

farmers who had been included could unite with the upper classes and
disregard possible chances of solidarity with unrepresented farmers and
agrarian underclasses. To be sure, there were farmer MPs in the 1840s and
1850s who took a radical view, criticised fundamental injustice in society
and proposed universal suffrage and universal schooling, but they, like the
great radical and eccentric Sven Heurlin, were rather marginalised in an
estates diet stuffed with privileged nobles and conservative clergy.37 As we
will see, the conservatism of Swedish elite farmers – the ones with a say in
local and national politics – had lasting implications.

Civil society

The civil society of mid-nineteenth century Swedish farmers was strikingly

weak, between the break-up of the villages with the enclosures in the first
half of the nineteenth century, and the new forms of organisation emerging
from the 1880s and 1890s on. As one historian lamented about the social
consequences of the enclosures and the break-up of the villages: ‘The old,
happy village festivals were irrevocably over. In many parts of the country,
the farmers were transformed from jolly co-operators and collectivists to
sombre individualists’.38 The main organisations for agricultural improve­
ment ran top-down: the county-level Hushållningssällskap were, according
to statute, led by the King’s man in the county, the county governor
(landshövding), and the agricultural meetings, venues for discussions to
improve the industry that started in 1846, were dominated by the estate
owners.39 In Denmark in the 1840s, 1850s and 1860s, farmers took the
initiative of holding their own agricultural improvement meetings and
forming agrarian cooperatives. A very different comparison but with the
same result would be with the Midwest and the South of the United States:
the organisational landscape of the Swedish farmers in the 1860s and 1870s
is distinctively less impressive than what is found in US studies of the
Granger movement, the Farmers’ Alliance and related movements in the
Midwest and the South.40 The Grange might have been diverse and declined
rapidly after its high point in the 1870s, but it was a genuine farmers’
37
On Heurlin, see J. Christensen, Bönder och herrar (Gothenburg, 1997), 153, 278–81; for an eyewitness account
see Sven Rosenberg, En dagbok ligger öppen: Utdrag från riksdagsmannen och kantorn Sven Rosenbergs
memoarer (Karlshamn, 1934), 248–49.
38
O. Bjurling, ‘Frihet och tvång i jordbrukspolitiken’ in R. Adamson and L. Jörberg (eds), Problem i svensk
ekonomisk historia (Lund, 1972), 13.
39
Gadd, op. cit., 334–36; O. Brandesten, Lantbrukarnas organisationer: Agrart och kooperativt 1830–1930
(Stockholm, 2005), 125–27, 134, 146. Agricultural meetings: M. Jonasson, ‘Allmänna möten för lantbrukare
i Finland, Sverige och Danmark 1845–1860’ in F. Eriksson and P. Eriksson (eds), Perspektiv på lantbrukets
organisering (Stockholm, 2016), 147–67.
40
R.C. McMath Jr., ‘Sandy land and hogs in the timber: (agri)cultural origins of the Farmers’ Alliance in Texas’ in
S. Hahn and J. Prude (eds), The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation (Chapel Hill, NC and London,
1985), 205–29; Sanders, op. cit.
 SOCIAL HISTORY 427

movement – in Sweden, one could say that nothing of the kind appeared
until 1929; cooperatives emerged from the 1880s onwards, but a broader
‘farmers’ union’, as we will see, did not emerge until 1929.
A fascinating case study is provided by the historian Lars Nyström in his
study of a major potato-producing estate in the west of Sweden. Nyström
asks why, when the estate was up for sale in 1857, it was not split up into
a multitude of farms, in this period of supposed farmer enrichment and
advancement.41 Instead, the estate was sold as a whole to a bourgeois.
Nyström’s answer is telling: the land was by turns too damp and too dry,
and needed an irrigation system to augment productivity. Such a project
could not have been coordinated by farmers in the conditions of the time,
Nyström argues: the village system had been broken up by the enclosures,
and the farmers had no new traditions or cooperative organisations.
Therefore, a single owner was the only viable economic form of ownership
for those lands. Swedish farmers 70 or 80 years later became famous for
their degree of organisation and corporatist activity, but Nyström’s analysis
reveals the recent date of this organisational culture. The lack of connection
between the older forms of farmer cooperation – work-sharing in the
village, parish-level risk-sharing – and the producer and consumer coop­
eratives growing in importance from the 1890s has been noted,42 and had
implications for the political articulation of class consciousness.

The hegemony of estate owners: the Country Party, 1867–1904

At the level of party politics, Swedish farmers were weaker in self-sufficient
organisation than we might expect. In Denmark and Norway, by the 1860s
farmers were organised in Left parties pitted against the Conservative
parties of the estate owners.43 These farmers indeed played the role of
democratisers that we would expect from the literature. However, the
situation in Sweden was very different.
The farmers represented in the estates diet of the 1800s were drawn from
the wealthier members of their class, and by definition excluded the tenants
of the nobility. The relatively elite nature of the farmer MPs did not escape
the attention of the many landed nobles of the noble estate. In the 1840s,
conservative estate owners known as the Junker Party in the noble estate
were already seeking a cross-estate alliance with wealthy farmers.44 In the
41
L. Nyström, Potatisriket: Stora Bjurum 1857–1917 (Gothenburg, 2003), 46–50.
42
S. Osterman, 100 år av samverkan: Minnesbok om Lantmännen – vår äldsta fria lantbrukskooperation (Stockholm,
1982), 25–26; Brandesten, op. cit., 293.
43
H. Lund and A. Fog Pedersen, Et folk vågner: Venstre i 125 år, 1870–1901 (Copenhagen, 1970); I. Hornemann
Møller, Den danske velfærdsstats tilblivelse (Frederiksberg, 1992), ch. 4–5; Kayser Nielsen, op. cit. ch. 5–6.
44
On the elite nature of the farmer MPs see E. Bengtsson and M. Olsson, ‘Peasant aristocrats? Wealth and social
status of Swedish farmer parliamentarians 1769–1895’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 45, 5 (2020), 573–92. On
the Junker Party see S. Förhammar, Reformvilja eller riksdagstaktik? Junkrarna och representationsfrågan 1847–54
(Stockholm, 1975).
428 E. BENGTSSON

debate on representation reform, this Junker group wanted to keep the

estates diet, but amend it (to include a gentry estate, for example), rather
than opt for the more ‘liberal’ solution of a two-chamber parliament. To
reach this solution, the Junkers, who saw that the farmer class was becoming
richer but also more differentiated, and that the agrarian underclasses were
growing, strove for a coalition with the wealthy farmers, to counter
a possible liberal coalition of farmers and burghers.
The proposed coalition of estate owners and wealthy farmers failed in the
1840s, but succeeded in 1866, ironically enough when the coming two-
chamber parliament, against which the Junkers had fought, called for new
alliances. An exclusively noble party was no longer enough. Someone who
realised this perhaps earlier than anyone was Count Arvid Posse,
a conservative estate owner, vigorous opponent of the representation reform
and ‘agrarian capitalist of the purest water’ – he had significant stakes in
banking and industrial interests, and was a large exporter of agricultural
products.45 He sought to organise a conservative opposition to the reigning
‘moderate-liberal’ government, along the lines of a rural identity.46 The
common interpretation of Posse’s initiative to build an estate owner–farmer
alliance, even in his own time, was that its main motive, if not vanity, was to
nullify any possibility of farmer radicalism in the new two-estate chamber.47
He would easily fit into a Prussian stereotype of the fusion of agrarian and
industrial interests in support of authoritarianism – ‘iron and rye’ – but
since he does not fit into the Swedish teleology, his importance has been
underestimated, by Swedish historians and comparativists alike. The party
formation for which he was crucial, the Country Party (Lantmannapartiet),
is misrepresented throughout the international literature, for example when
Gøsta Esping-Andersen claims that ‘In 1867, the farmers formed the
Lantmannapartiet, basically a liberal parliamentary group . . . ’.48 This is
problematic both in that it obscures the role of noblemen like Posse and
gentry men like Emil Key in forming the party, and in that the party cannot
rightfully be characterised as liberal. Both errors reinforce a preconception
of the continuity of democracy in Swedish farmer politics, which is repro­
duced in more current literature as well.49

45
S.A. Söderpalm, ‘Arvid R F Posse’ in Svenskt Biografiskt Lexikon, vol. 29 (Stockholm, 1997), 459. R. Bokholm,
Kungen av Skåne: En bok om statsmannen Arvid Posse (Lund, 1998), 78, 95.
46
E. Thermaenius, Lantmannapartiet: Dess uppkomst, organisation och tidigare utveckling (Uppsala, 1928), 150–57.
On the founding of the Country Party and the role of Posse see also the eyewitness account of the participant
and MP Sven Rosenberg in ‘Tio års riksdagserfarenheter’, a manuscript from 1892 published in E. Thermaenius
(ed.), Svensk bondepolitik: Memoarer och brev från ståndstidens slut och Lantmannapartiets tidigare år
(Stockholm, 1931), 92.
47
E. Holmqvist, Aristokrater, bönder och byråkrater (Stockholm, 1980), 88–89, 156; Bokholm, op. cit., 144–47.
48
Esping-Andersen, op. cit., 83.
49
S. Bendixsen, M. Bente Bringslid and H. Vike, ‘Introduction: egalitarianism in a Scandinavian context’ in
Bendixsen, Bente Bringslid and Vike (eds), Egalitarianism in Scandinavia: Historical and contemporary perspec­
tives (London, 2018), 1–44, 12–17.
 SOCIAL HISTORY 429

The main political tendency of the party was the will to shift taxation
from the land to the non-agricultural economy, and an overall
conservatism.50 A good deal can be said about Posse’s authoritarian person­
ality and role in Swedish society; some basic facts must suffice. In the
election campaign to parliament in 1869, he threatened his tenant farmers
with eviction unless they voted for him, and manipulated the counting of
votes; and when in 1867–1869 a wave of tenant farmer strikes and claims to
land held by nobles swept over the south of Sweden, where Posse’s estate
was located, he personally sued the leader of the farmers’ movement.51 Even
his biographer, whose admiration for his subject shines through on every
page, admits that Posse’s rule over his subordinates and over his party was
authoritarian.52 That this man as party leader deliberately deferred all
parliamentary decisions on suffrage extension when the issue arose should
not be seen as surprising. It must be emphasised that the system defended by
Posse and the Country Party was one of the most undemocratic in Europe.
The period after 1866 in Sweden should, then, be seen as one of landlords’
hegemony over the farmers, in the sense that Gramsci used the concept to
denote the intellectual, moral and political leadership of one class by another.53
In the nation’s politics, the landlords – Posse, Key and the like – led the farmers
very directly through the Country Party, and they also led the agrarian improve­
ment societies and meetings. In their rhetoric the Country Party represented the
ordinary people of the countryside, but in practice they represented the interests
of estate owners and the wealthiest strata of farmers. The Country Party stood
for the right of the master-employer to physically discipline his workers;
repression of the trade unions;54 and the preservation of plutocracy in munici­
pality and country. Unlike the farmers’ party Venstre (the Left) in Denmark,
they did not challenge royal power.55 Nevertheless, later research on political
history has reproduced an image of the Country Party as the representative of
the ‘agrarian interest’ tout court – in other words, reproduced precisely the
hegemonic claims of the leadership. There had been waves of farmer radicalism
in the early 1840s and late 1860s, but they were defeated politically, and it would
take a new wave of popular organising from the 1880s and 1890s on to
reformulate any kind of counter-hegemonic movement in Swedish society.56

50
Thermaenius, Lantmannapartiet, op. cit.; P. Hultqvist, Riksdagsopinionen och ämbetsmannaintressena: från
representationsreformen till 1880-talets början (Gothenburg, 1954); Morell, op. cit., 115–17.
51
Olofsson, op. cit., 130–31, 186. On Posse’s frivolities in connection to the 1867 election see also Thermaenius,
Svensk bondepolitik, op. cit., 249–50, 365.
52
Bokholm, op. cit., 399.
53
A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London, 1971), 57–58.
54
E. Bengtsson, ‘The Swedish labour market c. 1870–1914: the labour market regime without repression?’ in
M. Millan and A. Saluppo (eds), In Defence of Freedom: Corporate policing, yellow unionism, and strikebreaking,
1890–1930 (London, 2020), 62–78.
55
On Venstre and royal power, see Lund and Fog Pedersen, op. cit., 35–45.
56
On the marked conservatism of Swedish politics after the 1866 reform, see G. Wallin, Valrörelser och valresultat:
Andrakammarvalen i Sverige 1866–1884 (Stockholm, 1961); P. Hultqvist, Försvar och skatter: Studier i svensk
riksdagspolitik från representationsreformen till kompromissen 1873 (Gothenburg, 1955).
430 E. BENGTSSON

Farmer radicalism: the New Liberals and dissenters within the Country Party
The Country Party was hegemonic, c.1866–1900, in the sense that it domi­
nated the definition of the agrarian interest, united estate owners and
farmers, and provided the first political and ideological focal point for any
aspiring farmer politician. Then again, as we know, all hegemonies are
unstable and subject to challenges. Not all farmers were convinced by the
conservative tendency of the Country Party. In 1869 a radical rival party,
with ambitions to speak to and for farmers as well as urban radicals,
intellectuals and workers, was launched: the New Liberals (Nyliberala
partiet).57 The ‘new’ in their liberalism was that they represented a radical,
reformist enlightenment liberalism with republican tendencies, proposing
universal suffrage, pacifism and similar policies. This was in contrast to the
‘old’ Manchester-style liberalism of free markets but oligarchical principles
in politics.58
Intellectuals led in launching the party and their programme was written
by the newspaper editor S.A. Hedin, yet their breakthrough in fact came in
conjunction with a farmers’ rebellion in the south of Sweden. Here, in the
region that used to be Danish until 1658 and where old nigh-feudal rules
were still in place for the many tenant farmers on noble land, tenants in the
late 1860s went on corvée strikes and claimed, inspired by a populist lawyer,
that they had the ancient right to own the land and to take it from the
noblemen.59 The radical project of the New Liberals withered away in a few
years but, as I will come back to, some of its members – but not Hedin, who
joined the Intelligence Party – enlisted in the Country Party and became
a radical (and marginalised) wing of the larger party.

The popular movements and oppositional farmers in the era of the Country
Party
The New Liberal party disappeared from the scene quickly, and there was no
distinct political party vehicle for radical farmer politics from the early 1870s
to the late 1890s when new Liberal parties evolved, with an important
agrarian component.
From the 1870s to the 1890s, the civil society basis for radical farmer
politics was the new social movements labelled in Swedish historiography as

57
The founding of the New Liberal party is described in a very helpful way by Wallin, op. cit., 152–58.
58
The distance between the New Liberals and the Country Party was quite marked. See for example how the MP
Sven Rosenberg discusses the radical competitors in his memoirs, and how Carl Ifvarsson, leading Country Party
politician, does the same in his letters from 1869 and 1870. These sources are printed in Thermaenius, Svensk
bondepolitik, op. cit., 98–99, 107–10, 152–53, 165, 171–72, 176. Essentially, Rosenberg and Ifvarsson depict the
New Liberals as impatient, power-hungry radicals who want reform for reform’s sake. Ifvarsson also points out
(176) that the radicalism of the New Liberals made some persons of standing join the Country Party as a bulwark
against radicalism and reforms.
59
On this movement, see Olofsson, op. cit.
 SOCIAL HISTORY 431

folkrörelserna (the popular movements). This encompasses especially the

free churches that challenged the authority of the Church of Sweden, and
the sobriety movements. It is clear that these movements were based both in
cities and in the countryside, but unfortunately, much of the relevant
research, influenced by modernisation theory with its urban bias, has
focused on the urban context.60 This means that we do not know a great
deal about farmers vis-à-vis the new civil society developing from the 1870s.
(It would be a fruitful avenue for further research.) We do know of one civil
society innovation during the period in which farmers took the lead. This
was the ‘folk high school’ (folkhögskola), a new educational institution that
provided courses and education programmes varying in length from just
a summer or winter to a full two years, for those who had previously enjoyed
only a few years of mandatory schooling.61 The first three folk high schools
in Sweden opened in 1868, and were all led by farmers. The schools taught
practical agricultural skills, but also civic knowledge, and were partly moti­
vated by the need for enlightened (farmer) citizens after the representation
reform of 1866. As an example, we can look at the initial curriculum of one
of the first three schools, Herrestad. Their first six-month course was
directed towards young men ‘from the agricultural class’ (från jordbruksk­
lassen) and taught Swedish, practical agricultural skills, municipal politics,
singing, physical education, and the use of weapons.62 Many young men
from a farmer background attended the folk high schools in the ensuing
decades, and the months spent at the school, away from day-to-day life on
the farm, were remembered by several farmer politicians as a formative time
where one widened one’s views, got to know people, and learnt about
politics and civic knowledge.63
Civil society was not unchanging, then, in the time of Country Party
hegemony. Furthermore, the Country Party was very large, with over 100
MPs of the second chamber within its ranks, and there was always a degree
of dissent,64 a tendency probably reinforced by the ideal in place at the time
of the MP as an independent actor. The Country Party in the 1870s and
1880s contained some dissenters who had once been members of the New

60
The foundational contribution is S. Lundkvist, Folkrörelserna i det svenska samhället 1850–1920 (Stockholm,
1977). For a discussion of Lundkvist’s urban bias, see V. Wåhlin, ‘Omkring studiet af de folkelige bevaegelser’,
Historisk Tidskrift 99, 2 (1979), 113–51; and F. Eriksson, ‘En inledning och en forskningsöversikt’ in F. Eriksson and
P. Eriksson (eds), Perspektiv på lantbrukets organisering: historiografi, begreppshistoria och källor (Stockholm,
2016), 11–40.
61
See E. Tengberg, ‘Folkhögskolans uppkomst’ in A. Degerman, E. Tengberg, P. Terning and G. Vestlund (eds),
Svensk folkhögskola 100 år. Del 1 (Stockholm, 1968), 11–134. The folk high school concept was imported to
Sweden from Denmark and has played an important role in modern Scandinavian history; see Kayser Nielsen,
op. cit., 276–83.
62
Tengberg, op. cit., 114.
63
K. Petersson, En bondedemokrat: Alfred Petersson i Påboda (Stockholm, 1965), 17–19. On the political and civic-
minded discussions at the folk high school, see O. Josephson, ‘Att ta ordet i sin makt: Folket och det offentliga
språket i det sena 1800-talet’ in G. Broberg, U. Wikander and K. Åmark (eds), Tänka, tycka, tro: Svensk historia
underifrån (Stockholm, 1993), 197–218.
64
See Carlsson, op. cit., 53.
432 E. BENGTSSON

Liberals or in other ways stood for a liberal line.65After Arvid Posse became
the speaker of the second chamber of parliament, he became less of a party
politician (and when he formed a government in 1880 it was explicitly not
a Country Party government). Parallel to this, some liberal farmers joined
the Country Party after having left the New Liberals or the Ministerial party.
Some scholars argue that in this way the party in the early 1880s took steps
to the left.66
Thus, while the Country Party was hegemonic as a political vehicle for
agrarian interests, and estate owners and the wealthier farmers leading in
agrarian civil society organisations, we must also keep in mind that through­
out the period there were also streams of dissent among farmers, not least
those articulated in sobriety organisations and free churches, and in some
liberal, subdued, tendencies in politics. This theme does, however, call for
further research, and it would be difficult to give a more precise account
here.67

The ancien régime and the Country Party

In the 1890s, after the increased popular mobilisation since the 1870s in
the folkrörelser and a line-drawing battle on grain tariffs starting in 1887
(which the protectionists won), Swedish politics formed on a Left–Right
political scale. The Country Party, reunited in 1895 after a temporary
split over the tariff issue, was by then a consistently conservative party
opposed to suffrage extensions and expansions of social policies, and
wedded to the King and Nation.68 Farmer MPs of liberal bent joined
one of the Liberal parties. The conservative establishment ruled com­
fortably with the estate owner E.G. Boström as Prime Minister (1891–
1900 and 1902–1905), steering the country with a ‘rikspolitik’

65
See the portraits of Per Nilsson in Espö in Holmqvist, op. cit., 60–78; and of Nils Larsson in Tullus in H. Larsson,
Frihetskämpen från Tullus: en jämtländsk bonde i storpolitiken (Östersund, 2006). A pessimistic view of how
a former New Liberal farmer was treated by the Country Party is given by Lennart Thorslund in his study of the
radical farmer from Dalarna, Bälter Swen Ersson, who was in bitter competition, locally and on the national
stage, with the conservative Liss Olof Larsson, one of the leading farmer politicians of the time. Thorslund, Bälter
Swen Ersson och hans tid (Mora, 2016), 209–27, 231–48. Larsson in Tullus, portrayed by Larsson, op. cit., 99–100,
was active in the Ministerial party from 1867 to 1870 when he transferred with hesitation to the Country Party
where he, a former chairman (talman) of the farmer estate, became a backbencher. It is notable that neither
Holmqvist, Thorslund nor Larsson were academically active historians at the time of writing their books, but all
were affiliated with political parties (Social Democrats, Centre Party, Liberal party) and interested in the history
of their respective movements. This underlines the fact that farmer politics has not been a fashionable topic
among academic historians.
66
L. Kihlberg, Den svenska ministären under ståndsriksdag och tvåkammarsystem: Intill 1905 års totala ministerskifte
(Uppsala, 1922), 270–92; Bokholm, op. cit., 275, 286, 294–95.
67
Swedish liberalism in the 1890s, 1900s and 1910s was built on farmers as well as on urbanites – see Luebbert,
op. cit., 72, although the more detailed studies of liberal politicians of the time have been devoted to urbanites.
The great study by M. Hedin, Ett liberalt dilemma (Stockholm, 2002), is for example devoted to three Stockholm
intellectuals.
68
See Carlsson, op. cit., ch. 5–7.
 SOCIAL HISTORY 433

influenced by Bismarck’s Reichspolitik.69 Under the capitalist status quo

of the Boström regime, to borrow a concept from Eley,70 profits grew
for industrialists and estate owners alike, and by 1900, wealth inequality
was steeper in Sweden than in the United States, and on par with that
of the UK.71 Non-action can of course prolong a status quo in favour of
the elites,72 and this was the case in Sweden in the 1880s and 1890s.
The growing strength of the popular movements and coherence of the
Liberal organisations in the 1890s, joined with the strength of the establish­
ment, meant that politics in the 1890s was quite polarised. In 1892 the
suffrage movement collected several hundred thousand names for a suffrage
reform, but when the leaders sought to meet the prime minister, they were
refused. This insouciance and lack of interest in any popular mobilisation
are typical of Swedish conservatives during this period. The comment of
a leading Country Party politician, Nils Persson in Runtorp, also reveals
much: ‘the noise that they make at their suffrage meetings shows that they
are not worthy of the right which they demand’.73 Since the 1870s farmer
MPs from the Country Party had ceased to propose any reforms to the
uniquely unequal suffrage system in place at the municipal level.74
The conservative character of the Country Party is underlined by the fact
that in 1904 it dissolved into the new Right party, with its electoral organi­
sation Allmänna Valmansförbundet, an ‘alliance of steel and rye’.75 While
the Swedish agrarian party became a constituent part of the Conservative
party, its Danish and Norwegian colleagues became the main Liberal parties
in their countries.76 The fusion of conservative forces into one united party
also meant that when pressure from the Liberal–Social Democratic party led
to partial democratisation in 1909, the farmers stood without a party of their
own. This situation would not last.

69
T. Nyman, Kommittépolitik och parlamentarism: Statsminister Boström och rikspolitiken 1891–1905 (Uppsala,
1999); Carlsson, op. cit., 93–94, 210; Rustow, op. cit., 38–39.
70
G. Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical nationalism and political change after Bismarck (Ann Arbor, MI,
1991), 353–54.
71
E. Bengtsson, A. Missiaia, M. Olsson and P. Svensson, ‘Wealth inequality in Sweden, 1750–1900’, Economic
History Review, 71, 3 (2018), 772–94.
72
On the importance of ‘drift’ for institutional and social change, see J. Hacker, P. Pierson and K.Thelen, ‘Drift and
conversion: hidden faces of institutional change’ in J. Mahoney and K. Thelen (eds), Advances in Comparative-
Historical Analysis (Cambridge, 2015), 180–208.
73
On 1892 see T. Vallinder, I kamp för demokratin: Rösträttsrörelsen i Sverige 1866–1902 (Stockholm, 1962), 99–100.
The Persson in Runtorp quote is from p. 65.
74
Mellquist, op. cit., 159, 178.
75
F. Eriksson, Det reglerade undantaget: Högerns jordbrukspolitik 1904–2004 (Stockholm, 2004), 59, 64, 75, 90. The
quote is from p. 57.
76
Rustow, op. cit., 41, made this insightful observation. More specifically, the Country Party became a second-
chamber wing of the Conservative Party. In 1912 it fused with another second-chamber group to form the
Farmer and Bourgeois Party (Lantmanna-och borgarpartiet). See Eriksson, Det reglerade undantaget, op. cit., 65–
68.
434 E. BENGTSSON

The development of popular politics and its implications for agrarian

politics
The political scientist David Ziblatt in a recent influential book has argued
that the difference between Britain and Germany, and one that explains why
democracy in the early twentieth century made steady progress in the
former but not in the latter, is that British Conservatives were organised
into a strong party, which meant that they expected to win elections and stay
in power under democracy.77 The German Right, Ziblatt argues, being less
organised, had less trust in their electoral machine, and so they desperately
fought democracy. As can be inferred, however, I am not convinced that the
Swedish case, which Ziblatt also discusses, fits this explanation. The Swedish
Right was by no means well organised, either; they formed an extra-
parliamentary party only in 1904, and this did not have much organisational
reach. Instead, the key to the Swedish Right’s acceptance of gradual demo­
cratic reforms lies rather in the imposition of constitutional guarantees, in
particular the continued role of the undemocratic first chamber. Even after
the 1909 reform, which gave all adult men the right to vote for members of
the second chamber (albeit on a 40-vote scale related to income and wealth),
the first chamber still gave the elites a political veto.78
An example of inspiration from Germany may illustrate the long-
standing insouciance of the Swedish elites vis-à-vis political organisation.
In 1894 and 1895 the German Bund der Landwirte (BdL), (in)famous in the
literature on German political history for its far-right influence, inspired
Swedish estate owners to form two new organisations for far-right, protec­
tionist agrarian politics: Svenska agrarföreningen and Sveriges agrarförbund.
Affiliated MPs in the second half of the 1890s pursued a nationalist line in
relation to the union with Norway, proposed anti-trade union laws, and
fought any democratising initiatives.79 However, before 1903 this was
a purely parliamentary organisation. While the BdL in 1896 had 18 travel­
ling agitators,80 the Swedish estate owners saw no need for such populism:
with the extreme restrictions of suffrage in place, popular mobilisation or
persuasion was unnecessary.
By 1910, however, the splendid isolation of the 1890s was no longer an
option for elite politics. Civil society organisations had grown since the
1870s, as we have seen, and gradually the extra-parliamentary political
pressure grew. By 1910, mass politics had undoubtedly made
a breakthrough. This was shown in several ways: for one thing, the member­
ship of Socialist trade unions grew from 8400 in 1890 to a high of 230,000 in

77
Ziblatt, op. cit.
78
Olsson, op. cit., 160–64, 284–5; see Ziblatt, op. cit., 364ff.
79
Carlsson, op. cit., 162–64, 220–34, 259, 289–92, 400.
80
H-J. Puhle, Agrarische Interessenpolitik und Preußischer Konservatismus im Wilhelminischen Reich (Hannover,
1967), 62.
 SOCIAL HISTORY 435

Table 1. The development of mass politics in Sweden.

Year Activity Number of participants
1895 Votes for a ‘People’s Parliament’ 149,856
1897 Suffrage movement’s petition for general suffrage 363,638
1902 Political three-day mass strike for universal suffrage ~120,000
1909 General strike and lock-out 305,771
1909 Appeal for prohibition 1.9 million
1912 Sven Hedin’s militaristic brochure Word of Warning distributed 1 million
1913 Petition for female suffrage 351,000
1914 Farmers’ March: participants and signatures ~70,000
1914 Workers’ March ~45,000
Sources: People’s parliament and suffrage petition 1897 from Vallinder, op. cit., 90, 202. General strike 1902, see
H. Branting, Tal och skrifter II (Stockholm, 1927), 200. Strike 1909 from Kommerskollegium 1912. Prohibition
appeal from S. Lundkvist, Politik, nykterhet och reformer: En studie i folkrörelsernas politiska verksamhet 1900–
1920 (Uppsala, 1974), 74–75. Sven Hedin from J. Stenkvist, ‘Sven Hedin och bondetåget’ in K. Johannesson,
E. Johannesson, B. Meidal and J. Stenkvist (eds), Heroer på offentlighetens scen: Politiker och publicister i Sverige
1809–1914 (Stockholm, 1987), 246–48. Suffrage petition from C. Florin and J. Rönnbäck, ‘Gamla och nya rum
i politiken: Kvinnorösträttsrörelsen som bildningsprojekt’ in C. Jönsson (ed.), Rösträtten 80 år: forskarantologi
(Stockholm, 2000), 16. Farmers’ March and Workers’ March from R. Frykberg, Bondetåget 1914: Dess upprinnelse,
inre historia och följder (Stockholm, 1959), 63, 81 and Bondetågets arbetsutskott, Fram, fram, bondemän!:
minnes- och maningsord till bondetågets ledamöter (Stockholm, 1914), 11.

1905.81 Moreover, the free churches had been demanding a less privileged
position for the Church of Sweden since the 1870s; in 1902 the trade unions
mounted a three-day general strike for universal suffrage; the temperance
movement in 1909 collected 1.9 million signatures supporting prohibition,
and so on. Table 1 presents statistics showing the development of mass
politics in Sweden. For comparison, the country had 5.1 million inhabitants
in 1900 and in the 1902 riksdag election, 180,527 men voted.82
By the 1910s, even the Right needed to organise politically; as Eley
remarks on a European level, the constitutional settlements of the 1860s
set ‘the enduring framework for popular politics until a new series of
radicalized conflicts began to dissolve it during 1905–14’.83 In 1906, the
Conservative party leader Lundeberg lamented that ‘The left is well orga­
nized, the right superior and indolent’.84 With the 1909 suffrage extension
and the increased mobilisation of Liberals and Socialists, the Right now
needed to compete in mass politics too.

Social turbulence and populism in the 1910s: the Farmers’ March

In 1911 the first election with the 1909 suffrage reform rules was held,
producing a Liberal–Social Democratic landslide at the expense of the
Conservatives. The lawyer Karl Staaff, who in 1906 had failed with suffrage
reform, came back into government. The years of the second Staaff govern­
ment comprise perhaps the most turbulent and polarised period in Swedish

81
G. Sayers Bain and R. Price, Profiles of Union Growth (Oxford, 1980), table 7.1.
82
Population: SCB, op. cit., table 4. Voting: L. Lewin, The Swedish Electorate 1887–1968 (Stockholm, 1971), table 3.
83
Eley, Forging Democracy, op. cit., 5.
84
Rustow, op. cit., 72–73.
436 E. BENGTSSON

political history. Staaff was seen by the Conservative establishment as

completely unfit for office, according to his latest biographer, and the
smear campaign against him was uniquely brutal: ‘it is fearsome how thin
the varnish of civilization can be when the interests of the privileged are
challenged’.85 Anti-Russian sentiment was rampant, and the Conservatives
insisted that military spending had to increase dramatically.
The turbulent situation around the Staaff government would lead to
a specific populist appeal in 1912–1914. Here the policy issue of re-
armament was conjoined with broader constitutional issues of constitu­
tional reform. Since the 1880s, parliamentary principles – that the govern­
ment should be responsible to parliament rather than to the King, as was the
Swedish custom – had slowly advanced.86 The debate on royal rule versus
parliamentary rule pitted Conservatives against Liberals. By the 1910s, this
discussion had heated up in response to the geopolitical situation, and to the
hatred of Staaff among the Right. This matters here because the revolt
against parliamentary government, specifically a Liberal policy, took the
form of a populist appeal to the ‘true nation’, which was symbolised by the
farmer class. Eley, building on the German case, provides a fascinating
description of the situations in which populist appeals may gain currency:

they are a signal that the ability of the dominant classes to speak for the ‘people in
general’ has become impaired, normally through a powerful challenge from below or
a breakdown of internal cohesion at the level of the power bloc or the state. In such
situations attempts are made to find a new universalizing vision, in this case an ideal
of national community amongst citizen-patriots.87

Eley argues that this situation occurred in Germany in the 1890s. In Sweden,
it occurred around 1908–1914. In 1908, the election slogan of the conserva­
tives had been ‘front against Socialism’.88 In the 1890s, Conservatives such
as Boström and the Country Party politicians had simply ignored Socialists
and democrats, branded them as extremists who would be better suited to
police repression than to political debate.89 By 1908, the Right also needed
popular appeal, and saw the need to fight back against Socialism. The
circumstances in which this occurred were tumultuous.
The explorer Sven Hedin, the last Swede to be ennobled, became a travelling
agitator in the service of re-armament. He was a man of the Right who was well-
connected in certain circles, including among army officers, and had a feeling
for theatrical flourish that could work in the new, heated, political
85
P. Esaiasson, Karl Staaff (Stockholm, 2012), 108, 110, 119; see O. Nyman, Högern och kungamakten 1911–1914
(Uppsala and Stockholm, 1957).
86
A. Brusewitz, Kungamakt, herremakt, folkmakt: Författningskampen i Sverige 1906–1918 (Stockholm, 1951); O.
Nyman, Högern och kungamakten, op. cit.
87
Eley, Reshaping the German Right, op. cit., 202.
88
Petersson, op. cit., 145–47; P. Esaiasson, Svenska valkampanjer 1866–1988 (Stockholm, 1990), 106–09.
89
On the police surveillance of socialists: J. Langkjaer, Övervakning för rikets säkerhet: Svensk säkerhetspolisiär
övervakning av utländska personer och inhemsk politisk aktivitet, 1885–1922 (Stockholm, 2011).
 SOCIAL HISTORY 437

environment.90 In 1912–1913 he toured churches, student unions and army

regiments speaking for increased funding for the military, and his wealthy
sponsors also paid for the mass distribution of his brochure, A Word of
Warning (Ett varningsord) in 1912.91 In the brochure, Hedin disparaged party
politics and the Liberal government, and instead appealed to citizens who had
not ‘been blinded by party feuds’ and could ‘stand outside of the political
quarrel’. ‘Party politics’ was the target of invective for conservatives in the
1910s;92 instead, Hedin, in line with populist tradition, appealed to the true
Swedish people, and warned against a future in which the fatherland was
occupied by Russian troops. In 1912–1913, two separate initiatives appealed
for funds from the public to pay for the battleships that the Liberal government
did not want to build, and succeeded in collecting a lot of money for this
purpose. The mass circulation of Hedin’s brochure and the fundraising for the
battleships signified something new in Swedish conservative politics: a more
popular (and populist) approach.93
It was in this atmosphere that the estate owner Uno Nyberg and the
merchant and estate owner Jard Frykberg planned an initiative that would
become known as the Farmers’ March.94 The acknowledged motive was to
convey the farmers’ support for the King, as master of the government, against
parliamentary principles. In a nationalist-romantic demonstration of power,
playing very deliberately on romantic conceptions of farmers as the ‘true
people’, farmers from all over the country were to travel to Stockholm and
march to the royal castle to demonstrate their support for the King. The
organisers turned to the nationalist history-writing of the day, which portrayed
the bonds between farmers and the King as strong throughout Swedish
history.95 The instructions to the participants included a ban on top hats.96
Farmers or not (and the participant lists reveal that many in fact were not
farmers), the march was to give a popular impression.

90
The fullest analysis of Hedin’s role is J. Stenkvist, ‘Sven Hedin och bondetåget’ in K. Johannesson, E. Johannesson,
B. Meidal and J. Stenkvist (eds), Heroer på offentlighetens scen: Politiker och publicister i Sverige 1809–1914
(Stockholm, 1987), 246–48; Stenkvist, op. cit. See also J. Torbacke, ‘Försvaret främst’: Tre studier till belysning av
borggårdskrisens problematik (Stockholm, 1983), 160–63, and L. Lewin, Ideologi och strategi: Svensk politik under
130 år (Stockholm, 2017), 136–37, who emphasises Hedin’s personality and taste for the spectacular.
91
Stenkvist, op. cit., 246–48, 267–84, 287.
92
Nils Elvander, Harald Hjärne och konservatismen: Konservativ idédebatt i Sverige 1865–1922 (Stockholm, 1961).
93
Luebbert, op. cit., 72, argues that the second Staaff government’s fall was due to the rural–urban split,
specifically over military expenditure. However, the Farmers’ March should not be seen as an expression of
rural opinion per se; rather, it was an orchestrated effort by the Right, part of the Left–Right conflict between
Liberals and Conservatives. The misreading of the 1914 conflict as a rural–urban one shows up the wider
tendency to see agrarian elites’ expressions as representative of their sector tout court; compare the interpreta­
tions discussed above of the Country Party as ‘the agrarian interest’.
94
For the general background see O. Nyman, Högern och kungamakten, op. cit. For an insider account, see the
book by Frykberg’s daughter: R. Frykberg, Bondetåget 1914: Dess upprinnelse, inre historia och följder (Stockholm,
1959). This to a large extent builds on his notes from 1913–1914.
95
On this historiography, see Patrik Hall, Den svenskaste historien: Nationalism i Sverige under sex sekler (Stockholm,
2000), 118–25, 215–17.
96
This instruction is in a memo sent out to participants from the organisers. Uno V. Nyberg and J.E. Frykberg, ‘Till
landskap och kommittéer!’, Uppsala, 19 January 1914. Archived at the Royal Library (Kungliga Biblioteket) in
Stockholm, in its collection of Vardagstryck. Folder: Politik Sv Allm- Kronol. 4:o. Bondetåget 1914.
438 E. BENGTSSON

Romantic visions aside, the project naturally required complex logistics:

to transport the farmers (and other supporters) to Stockholm, to house
them and feed them. Handily, the organisers were well-connected members
of the elite and could count on the support of the state railroad company
(for 35 specially chartered trains), and of the army and wealthy citizens of
Stockholm (for housing in barracks and private homes), the state church
(for a morning service for all participants in churches all over the city), and
the best restaurants of the capital (for gala dinners for the participants).
About 30,000 participants, farmers and others, travelled to Stockholm
before the set date of 6 February. Even before the morning Church service,
those participants allotted to working-class neighbourhoods were already
complaining about the taunts and harassment they had faced from political
opponents,97 but the day was in general a Nationalist feast. On the day, the
leading liberal daily Dagens Nyheter reported from the preparations that
Stockholm had not seen such excitement and fun since the summer of 1912,
when the Olympic Games were held in the city.98
After the march to the Stockholm Castle, King Gustav V met the march­
ers in the main courtyard, where he markedly referred in his speech to ‘my
army’ and ‘my government’, indicating his stance against parliamentary rule
and for royal power; to accommodate all the participants the prince gave the
same speech in another courtyard. The entire day was a powerful manifesta­
tion of the unity between the traditional elites – the Church, the army, the
universities, the crown and the large landowners. Even those who could not
be in Stockholm could celebrate. Around 45,000 signed a petition to show
their support of the march, and the support especially manifested itself in
the two old university towns of Uppsala and Lund. In Uppsala, 1200 of the
university’s 1800 male students signed a petition in support of the march
(female students were not allowed to participate); a cathedral service in
support was followed by a party with music by the popular chorus Orphei
Drängar in the main building of the university, where the guests heard
a speech from the rector. In Lund a large patriotic party was arranged at the
Museum of Cultural History, with speeches by leading professors of the
university.99
Liberals and Social Democrats were affronted by this celebration of and
invitation to a royal power grab, and two days later 50,000 walked through
Stockholm in a Workers’ March counter-demonstration. Nonetheless,
Prime Minister Staaff, in the face of open opposition from the King, the
Army, the Church and the conservative elites, found his situation untenable

97
See M. Schürer von Waldheim, Bondetåget från Malmöhus län 1914: Historik på förtroendenämndens uppdrag
(Second, revised edition. Malmö, 1914), 159; Frykberg, op. cit., 75.
98
Dagens Nyheter, February 6, 1914, 9.
99
Frykberg, op. cit., 75; C. Skoglund, Vita mössor under röda fanor: Vänsterstudenter, kulturradikalism och bildning­
sideal i Sverige 1880–1940 (Stockholm, 1991), 125; Schürer von Waldheim, op. cit., 43–49.
 SOCIAL HISTORY 439

and resigned. His government was replaced by an allegedly apolitical con­

servative government, a ‘de facto royal council’.100 The Farmers’ March was
not a farmers’ initiative, but it came to shape agrarian politics in the years to
come.

Agrarian politics from authoritarianism to the green–red alliance

In February of 1914, the politicised farmers were pitted against the workers
and Social Democrats in fierce political combat, with far-reaching conse­
quences – a new government, and growing political polarisation. Only
19 years later, in the political aftermath of the Great Depression, the
Farmers’ League, an agrarian party founded in 1913–1914, entered into
a coalition government with the Social Democrats (SAP,
Socialdemokratiska Arbetarepartiet), thereby cementing a Social
Democratic power that was to persist. In exchange for guaranteed prices
for agricultural products, the Farmers’ League accepted the SAP’s proto-
Keynesian economic policy and nascent welfare state project, in the so-
called ‘cow trade’.101 This despite the fact that the farmer party was devoted
to defending the rural way of life, and its ideology in the 1910s and 1920s
infused with authoritarianism and race ideology.102 How could there have
been such a turnaround: from the almost militant opposition of 1914 to the
coalition of 1933?
Conventional accounts skate over the discontinuity of farmer politics in
the turbulent 1910s, assuming instead that the 1933 coalition sprang out of
an older cooperative tradition between farmers and workers.103 A proper
contextualisation instead highlights the need to explain this U-turn in
farmer politics. (We should also note that the SAP hesitated to seek
a coalition with the Farmers’ League, which they feared was infested with
authoritarian ideas.104) A central part of the explanation for the farmer
party’s shift is a generational shift, which took the shape of a palace coup,
within the party. The septuagenarian party leader Olsson in Kullenbergstorp
was a staunch conservative and fierce opponent of Social Democracy, but
his internal opponents, led by the younger and more liberal Axel Pehrsson
in Bramstorp, went behind his back, undermined his authority within the
party, and signed a coalition with the SAP. The generational shift within the
100
M. Svegfors, Hjalmar Hammarskjöld (Stockholm, 2010), 42–52, 88.
101
On the short-term dynamics of the ‘cow trade’, see the detailed account in O. Nyman, Krisuppgörelsen mellan
Socialdemokraterna och Bondeförbundet 1933 (Uppsala and Stockholm, 1944). On the long-term ramifications,
see especially Esping-Andersen, op. cit., and Luebbert, op. cit.
102
On the early period of the Farmers’ League see Mohlin, op. cit., 49–57. On the far-right tendencies, see
R. Torstendahl, Mellan nykonservatism och liberalism: Idébrytningar inom högern och bondepartierna 1918–1934
(Stockholm, 1969), 195–96.
103
For example, Esping-Andersen, op. cit., 314; Levy, op. cit.
104
O. Nyman, Krisuppgörelsen, op. cit., 26–59; A. Isaksson, Per Albin, IV: Landsfadern (Stockholm, 2000), 128, 202,
239–45.
440 E. BENGTSSON

Farmers’ League was a question not only of age, but also of shifting political
socialisation. The younger generation represented a ‘new sort of farmer’.105
This new farmer was optimistic; educated in folk high schools that, as we
have seen, started in 1868; and a member of free churches, the temperance
movement and farmers’ organisations such as the cooperative movement.
Bramstorp had never been attracted by the Farmers’ March and its blood-
and-soil rhetoric. The elitism of counts and barons in his home district
Scania had put him off the Right; thus, in 1914 he was a Liberal party
politician. (Kullenbergstorp, on the other hand, had been the leader of the
Scania section of the Farmers’ March.106) This also meant that when the
Depression hit, Bramstorp was a leading farmer politician who still had fond
memories of the 1918 Liberal–Social Democratic coalition in support of
universal suffrage. This, much overlooked in a historiography which has
romanticised the role of farmers and underestimated the importance of Lib-
Labism, was the real continuity from the 1910s to 1933. Beyond the personal
importance of Bramstorp’s liberal past, furthermore, we must look at the
wider social context.

The social and material basis of the ‘new farmer’

In the mid-nineteenth century, following the break-up of the villages but
before the spread of any popular movement, the farmers were relatively
isolated and disorganised. By the 1930s, this had changed fundamentally. In
the 1880s, the increased intensity of investment in agriculture led to the first
formation of farmers’ cooperatives; they were set up to cut prices, especially
of concentrate and fertilisers.107 At the same time, the move to dairy
production in the 1870s and 1880s in response to the global fall of grain
prices also led to nascent dairy cooperatives; the first was started in 1880 at
the Hvilan folk high school, and the movement took off in the 1890s. The
number of milk producers in the cooperatives grew from 40,000 in 1890 to
100,000 in 1914; at this time, cooperative dairies handled 68% of the milk
produced. Cooperative slaughterhouses grew in much the same way.108
In the consumer cooperatives the workers and urban liberals were com­
pletely dominant until the 1910s. In 1910, 50% of the members of Finnish
consumer cooperatives, and 73% in the Danish, were farmers, but in Sweden
it was only 8%.109 If we see social capital and cooperative spirit as conducive
105
J. Bjärsdal, Bramstorp: Bondeledare, kohandlare, brobyggare (Stockholm, 1992), 124, 181. O. Nyman,
Krisuppgörelsen, op. cit., also discusses the generational shift within the Farmers’ League as a key factor for
the coalition.
106
Schürer von Waldheim, op. cit., 122.
107
T. Johansson and P. Thullberg, Samverkan gav styrkan: Lantbrukarnas föreningsrörelse 1929–1979 (Stockholm,
1979), 10; Osterman, op. cit., 26–30.
108
R. Rydén, ‘Att åka snålskjuts är icke hederligt’: De svenska jordbrukarnas organisationsprocess 1880–1947
(Gothenburg, 1998), 65–79.
109
O. Ruin, Kooperativa förbundet 1899–1929 (Lund, 1961), 198.
 SOCIAL HISTORY 441

to the formation of cooperatives,110 then we must admit that the Swedish

farmers lagged behind in this respect. However, by the 1920s, the Swedish
farmers were playing a key role in retail and producer cooperatives. At the
same time, since the 1870s they had often been organised in free churches
and temperance movements, and attended folk high schools. The increased
marketisation and differentiation of the farmer class in the post-enclosure
period of Swedish agriculture had finally been complemented by new social
organisations and cohesions.
By the 1920s, Sweden was well on its way to a corporatist organisation of
agriculture: by 1928, government agricultural policy was supporting orga­
nised farmer interests rather than laissez-faire capitalism,111 and the Social
Democratic–Farmers’ League policy after 1933 continued on this path. By
1938 the milk cooperatives controlled 91% of the market, and the butcher
cooperatives 65% of their market; in 1980, 80% of Swedish grain was
produced by cooperative farms.112
The political position of the farmers changed fundamentally as industry
eroded the previously unthreatened position of agriculture as the nation’s
economic backbone, and as the labour movement and the reformist urban
liberals undermined the hegemony of estate owners and pushed through
democratic reforms, especially in 1909 and 1918. The ‘master of my domain’
(Herr im Haus) presumption embodied in the Country Party politics of the
1880s and 1890s was no longer tenable in the 1910s and 1920s – especially
when one considers the economic and social fragmentation of the farmer
class, and the large social stratum which by the 1920s combined small-scale
agriculture with some degree of wage labour, such as seasonal (wintertime)
work in forestry.113 By the 1940s, corporatist agricultural policy was being
formulated with the aim of guaranteeing smaller farmers – the majority of
farmers – an economic standard comparable to that of an average male
industrial worker.114 The farmers were no longer themselves the norm.
In this regard, it makes sense that in 1929 the first ‘trade union’ for
farmers was founded, explicitly influenced by the Socialist trade unions
for workers: Riksförbundet Landsbygdens Folk (RLF). The key aim at the
outset was to collaborate as a producer cartel in local markets and set
common prices for produce; as is typical for farmers’ organisations, the
profits of middlemen and traders were among its main targets.115 The
initiative came from the relatively poor and egalitarian north, and was an

110
This argument has been made in the context of dairy cooperatives by K. O’Rourke, ‘Culture, conflict and
cooperation: Irish dairying before the Great War’, Economic Journal, 117 (2007), 1357–79.
111
G. Hellström, Jordbrukspolitik i industrisamhället (Stockholm, 1976), ch. VI; M. Micheletti, The Swedish Farmers’
Movement and Agricultural Policy (New York, Westport, CT and London, 1990), 14–18, 59–71.
112
On milk: Morell, op. cit., 165–67; on grain: Osterman, op. cit., 14.
113
B. Persson, Skogens skördemän: Skogs- och flottningsarbetareförbundets kamp för arbete och kollektivavtal 1918–
1927 (Lund, 1991); Rydén, op. cit., ch. 3.
114
L. Nanneson, Rationalitetsvariationerna inom det svenska jordbruket (Stockholm, 1946).
115
See Berger, op. cit.; Sanders, op. cit., 179–84.
442 E. BENGTSSON

explicit attempt to organise small farmers, as distinct from the older, elite-
dominated organisations. The RLF’s founder and first chairman, Viktor
Johansson, was a northern family farmer and a very active left-liberal
politician. He was also a driving force in the local dairy cooperative.116
The difference from the initiatives of the 1890s and 1910s is striking. The
Agrarförbund of the 1890s was an initiative by estate owners from the grain-
producing plains in the south of the country, and the Farmers’ March of
1914 was an initiative by estate owners, merchants and capitalists from the
wealthy areas around Stockholm. Unlike these earlier initiatives, the RLF
project came from the relatively poor and marginal north, and its founder,
just like the Farmers’ League leader Bramstorp, had a background in Liberal
party politics. Thus, while common explanations of the democratic Swedish
trajectory have stressed the continuities in farmer politics, its discontinuities
were in fact sharp. Not organised by magnates from above, as the Country
Party was, the self-organising and democratic farmer of the 1920s and 1930s
should be seen as deriving from the underestimated strength of Swedish
Liberalism and renewed civil society of the 1890s and first decades of the
twentieth century.

Conclusions
The conventional wisdom is that a relatively egalitarian and powerful farmer
class contributed to shaping Swedish society in the twentieth century in
a democratic and egalitarian fashion; either as a force in itself with deep
roots in the social and political tradition of the country, or as a more
modern movement, marked by independent organisations (rather than
being subservient to the estate owners) and through an alliance between
the Farmers’ League and the Social Democrats in the 1930s.117 Thus, in the
comparative literature on the origins of political regimes, Sweden stands out
as a paragon of stable and deeply rooted democracy.
The argument of this article is that this conventional wisdom is mislead­
ing. Sweden in the decades around 1900 was a much more undemocratic
and unequal society than is widely assumed,118 and farmer politicians in
alliance with estate owners in the Country Party did very little to alleviate
any of this inequality. The farmer MPs of the late 1800s, who were quite
wealthy capitalist farmers with important side interests in other lines of
business,119 had no problem in uniting first with estate owners in the
116
On RLF generally and their difference to previous farmer organisations see Rydén, op. cit., 120ff. On Viktor
Johansson see P. Thullberg, Bönder går samman: En studie i Riksförbundet Landsbygdens Folk under världskrisen
1929–1933 (Stockholm, 1977), 7.
117
Castles, op. cit.; Tilton, op. cit.; Esping-Andersen, op. cit.; Alestalo and Kuhnle, op. cit.; Sørensen and Stråth, op.
cit.; Bendixsen, Bringslid and Vike, op. cit.; Luebbert, op. cit., ch. 8.
118
See Bengtsson, ‘The Swedish Sonderweg in question’, op. cit.
119
Bengtsson and Olsson, op. cit.
 SOCIAL HISTORY 443

Country Party and, after 1904, with those in the Conservative Party.
Although even newer works tend to interpret the conservatism of the
Riksdag farmers at the turn of the century as continuous, with historical
agrarian scepticism towards experimentation and innovation,120 their con­
servatism should rather be seen as modern, capitalist Conservatism with
a capital C.
However, with the growth of the popular movements – teetotalism, free
churches, and the labour movement – a counter-tendency also emerged. To
go back to Rueschemeyer et al.’s analysis, ‘it is the growth of a counter-
hegemony of subordinate classes and especially the working class – devel­
oped and sustained by the organization and growth of trade unions, work­
ing-class parties and similar groups – that is critical for the promotion of
democracy’.121 Precisely this type of counter-hegemony developed in
Swedish popular politics around the 1890s and 1900s. This affected the
farmers too; to cite Rueschemeyer et al. again, ‘the subjective interests of
social classes are historic social constructions and cannot be read off of
social structure in a one to one fashion’.122 In the new, democratic and
organised Sweden, with folk high schools, cooperatives, farmers’ unions
and, in the end, the Farmers’ League, the farmers did organise themselves,
escaping the leadership of estate owners, under such leaders as Bramstorp
and Viktor Johansson who had been schooled in Liberal party politics. It is
conventional to see twentieth-century Social Democracy as an epipheno­
menon of an alleged egalitarian precedent in farmer society.123 The analysis
here shows the opposite: it was the strength of popular movements –
Liberalism, Social Democracy and Lib-Labism – in Swedish civil society
that shaped a democratic farmer class.
Why did the Swedish farmers in the 1920s and 1930s change their
political stance from conservatism to a more compromising line? What
kind of ‘contingency’ was in play here?124 And what are the theoretical
implications of this Swedish case study? I would argue as follows. There
were two contextual factors that changed the stance of Swedish farmers
to pro-democratic middle-of-the-road politics. First, the economic: gra­
dually, from the 1870s onwards, the socio-economic supremacy of
farmers over workers was undermined by the striking productivity
growth seen in the industrial sector. While farmers in the 1880s or
even 1890s could still rule supreme in local politics in their rural
municipalities along with a few noblemen, bourgeois families and per­
sons of standing, in the safe knowledge that the proletariat was
120
B. Stråth, Union och demokrati: De förenade rikena Sverige-Norge1814–1905 (Nora, 2005), 525.
121
Rueschemeyer et al., op. cit., 50. On the broad pro-democratic alliance in Sweden see M. Hurd, Public Spheres,
Public Mores, and Democracy: Hamburg and Stockholm, 1870–1914 (Ann Arbor, MI, 2000).
122
Rueschemeyer et al., op. cit., 101.
123
Trägårdh, op. cit.; Bendixsen, Bringslid and Vike, op. cit.
124
As in Capoccia and Ziblatt, op. cit.
444 E. BENGTSSON

disenfranchised, by the 1910s this was no longer the case. A significant

minority of the farmers did express their dissatisfaction at this loss of
status in reactionary ways – as in the Farmers’ March and the marked
prevalence of authoritarian ideas in the Farmers’ League in its early
years – but step by step, a more accommodating and humble stance
became more attractive.
This conversion in turn had to do with the second ‘contingent’ factor: the
massive popular organisation (often of Liberal or Social Democratic bent) in
free churches, teetotalling organisations, the labour movement and folk high
schools. This spread new ideas and values in the broader population, and
large swathes of the (by the early twentieth century) socio-economically
levelled farming class were receptive to such ideas. The adoption in the
1930s and 1940s of the strike as a political method is a remarkable example
of this process.125
Thus, the analysis here supports the emphasis on contingency and on
politics in the recent ‘historical turn’ in democratisation studies. In
literatures following Barrington Moore’s influential Social Origins of
Dictatorship and Democracy, or the German Sonderweg debate, or in
less class-oriented theories of national political culture, Sweden has
been seen as a case of persistence in politics.126 As demonstrated here,
this view overstates the persistence of social structures and political
traditions. Organised and concerted action fundamentally shaped
Sweden’s democratisation and road to a Social Democratic model;
politics mattered. Classes, such as farmers, cannot be ascribed transhis­
torical allegiances to ideologies or policies – ideology and policy change
with the circumstances.127 A social forces approach to Swedish demo­
cratisation is relevant, but not with assumptions of unchanging social
and ideological characteristics of the classes. Sociologists such as Lipset
and Rokkan, Rueschemeyer, Huber Stephens and Stephens, Esping-
Andersen and Luebbert have, in pioneering studies, mapped the impor­
tance of class coalitions for macro-political outcomes in western
European countries in the first half of the twentieth century. The
historical approach used here shows the need for further research into
the social and political construction of those class coalitions, taking into
account economic structure and changes but without economic deter­
minism, to understand the historical routes taken.

125
See Johansson and Thullberg, op. cit., 67–69, 93–104.
126
For example, Moore, op. cit.; Stråth, ‘Continuity and discontinuity’, op. cit.; Kayser Nielsen, op. cit.
127
A point made well by Blackbourn and Eley, op. cit., 56–61.
 SOCIAL HISTORY 445

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Agnes Cornell, Josefin Hägglund, Anton Jansson, Felix Kersting, Johannes
Lindvall, Mats Olsson, Jan Teorell and Carolina Uppenberg, and to participants in the
Economic and Social History Colloquium, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the
STANCE seminar, Lund, for their comments.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
This work was supported by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond under [Grant P16-0412:1].

ORCID
Erik Bengtsson http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1523-0565