1

The Birth of Social Democratic Sweden:

Organizations and Voting, 1911–1936

Erik Bengtsson & Jakob Molinder

Paper for 13th SOUND Economic History Workshop,

Gothenburg, 6-7 September 2018

Very early draft! Comments & criticisms very welcome!

Abstract

In the mid-20th century, Sweden became one of the world’s most organized and participatory

democracies. Since 1945, average voter turnout is 83.3 per cent, and in the postwar period 23-24

percent of the electorate were members of a political party, which meant that the Swedish electorate

along with the Austrian one was the most well-organized one in the world. But it was not always

thus. In the 1890s, Sweden had the lowest degree of suffrage in Western Europe – only one tenth of

adults could vote – and also the lowest degree of voter turnout. Political scientist Herbert Tingsten

complained that in the 1870s and 1880s, no other country with the corresponding level of education

had such a “primitive” political culture and low degree of political participation. Sweden

experienced a great transformation in political culture between the late nineteenth century and the

1950s, and we propose that this has to do with the late and rapid democratization experienced in the

country, marked by strong growth and influence of the popular movements, especially the labour

movement. The paper maps, by local area (hundred) and by city, the popular mobilization and

electoral growth of Social Democracy between 1911 and 1936 which fundamentally changed

Swedish politics and society. We argue for a power resources theoretical interpretation of the

“democratic breakthrough” in Swedish politics.

Keywords: Sweden, political participation, Social Democracy

Department of Economic History, Lund University & Economic History Unit, Gothenburg University.

erik.bengtsson@ekh.lu.se Department of Economic History, Lund University and Department of Economic History, Uppsala University.

jakob.molinder@ekhist.uu.se

2

1. Introduction

In the mid-20th century, Sweden distinguished itself as one of the most organized and

participatory democracies in the world. Since 1945, average voter turnout is 83.3 per cent,

which is the fourth highest in the world if countries with mandatory voting and new

democracies are excluded (Holmberg and Oscarsson 2004, p. 16). In the 1950s and 1960s, 23-

24 percent of the electorate were members of a political party, which meant that the Swedish

electorate along with the Austrian one was the most well-organized one in the world.1 But it

was not always this way. In the 1890s, Sweden had the lowest degree of suffrage in Western

Europe – only 6 per cent of adults could vote – and also the lowest degree of voter turnout. In

the 1896 election to the second chamber of parliament, only 45 per cent of the lucky few who

could vote, bothered to do so. This is in stark contrast to the 60 per cent who voted in Denmark

in 1898, 70 per cent in Norway in 1898, 61 per cent in Great Britain and Ireland in 1897, and

so on (SCB 1898, Table 20). The great early election researcher Herbert Tingsten complained

in his book on the growth of Swedish Social Democracy that in the 1870s and 1880s, no other

country with the corresponding level of education had such a “primitive” political culture and

low degree of political participation (Lewin 1971, p. 41). In those decades, only about a quarter

of the electorate – which was very small, limited to the well-to-do – actually voted.

What caused the great turnaround in political participation? In this paper we argue

that this has to do with the mode in which Sweden democratized. In 1909, suffrage was

extended to (almost) all adult men, while on the municipal level the allotment of votes was

changed from a proportional method which could give thousands of votes to high-income

earners (Mellquist 1974), to a 40-point scale. In 1919–20, universal suffrage was introduced.2

Democratization was rapid and drastic from the very exclusive system of the 1890s, to the failed

suffrage reform during the Liberal government of 1906, and on to universal suffrage in 1920.

Elites gave in to avoid worse outcomes, such as revolution (as in Acemoglu and Robinson 2000;

Aidt and Jensen 2014). Working-class mobilization was massive in the first decades of the

twentieth century: trade unions are central to our story, but free churches/dissenters and the

prohibitionist movement also played key roles in mobilizing the Swedish people (Lundkvist

1974, 1977).

1 Scarrow (2002, table 5.2) reports other figures, since there she does not count corporate members. We believe

that it is misleading in the Swedish context not to count union members as SAP members, since they were indeed

an important part of the labour movement and the party. 2 With the exception of some groups: poor relief recipients, prison inmates and so on.

3

We have created new datasets of popular for the elections of 1911, 1920, 1924,

1928, 1932 and 1936. We analyze the 1911 election on the local level and the 1920–1936

elections on the town level, investigating the influence of popular mobilization on (a) electoral

participation and (b) voting for the Social Democrats while controlling for the economic

structure and demographic characteristics of the locality. The paper thus helps us understand

the democratization of Sweden and why the country ended up on a Social Democratic

trajectory.

2. The Swedish transformation, 1870–1940

There is a widespread misunderstanding that Sweden experienced a continuous, smooth road

to democracy (Bengtsson 2018). Actually, the opposite is true: democratization was late and

rapid (Rustow 1971), occurring basically between 1909 and 1921. The reform which in 1865-

66 replaced the old four estates diet with a two-chamber parliament, was thoroughly

conservative. While the 1867 Reform Act in Britain meant that 59 per cent of adult men could

vote, and Bismarck granted universal suffrage to men in united Germany in 1871, the Swedish

1866 reform only gave 21 per cent of adult men the right to vote to the second chamber.3 To

this came the fact that the aristocratic first chamber acted as a conservative guarantee (Nilsson

1969). In the 1890s, when several other European countries had increased suffrage, still only

about one fifth of all adult men had the right to vote to the second chamber, and the share who

could vote to the upper house was about 2 per cent (Rustow 1971, p. 23).4 Politics was a staid,

boring, élite affair, which also meant that among those who had the right to vote, electoral

participation was very low. Political scientists have described the 1870s in parliament as one in

which “nothing happened” (Esaiasson 2012), and describe the political culture of the period as

one of “passivity” (Möller 2007). In 1872 election participation to the second chamber was 20

per cent and in 1884 25 per cent (Möller 2007, p. 34).

From this elitist and undemocratic order, Swedish politics changed fundamentally

in the first four decades of the twentieth century. Hurd (2000) provides one important piece of

the puzzle when she points out that the very exclusive nature of official politics in itself meant

3 On Sweden see Ohlsson (2014), p. 104; on Britain and Germany see Anderson (2000), pp. 5-7. 4 Tilton’s (1974) characterization is completely misleading: ”Swedish democracy does not owe its origins to a

revolution, but to a series of reform acts in 1866, 1909, and 1918 extending the franchise in a way reminiscent of

the English Reform Acts.” It is misleading because he does not consider the content and meaning of the – in fact

very exclusive and undemocratic – 1866 reform. In reality, democratization occurred in the short period 1909–

1920.

4

that very broad social coalitions – between excluded working and middle classes – could be

formed outside of parliament and work for democracy (cf. Vallinder 1962). This is the process

that we want to investigate.

2.2 The power of organizing

Walter Korpi (1981) has clearly outlined how Social Democracy during their long time of

government from 1932 to 1976 managed to reshape Swedish society, creating a relatively

generous and inclusive welfare state with egalitarian implications. Here, we want to provide the

historical background and explanation of this transformation: how could Sweden transform

from one of the most exclusive polities of Western Europe in the 1880s-1890s, to one of the

most inclusive and egalitarian?

As Korpi has pointed out, in a capitalist economy with political democracy, wage-

earners are dependent upon social organization and political participation to exert influence on

society, while capital owners can exert influence by virtue of their economic power. “The power

resources of wage earners depend primarily upon the extent to which they are willing and able

to act collectively, something which is expressed primarily through organizations like unions

and working class based parties.” (Shalev and Korpi 1980, p. 32) A string of studies has shown

the explanatory power of trade union organization and left party strength for explaining welfare

state policies and the degree of economic inequality (i.e. Korpi and Palme 2003; Huber, Huo,

and Stephens 2017). But for the Swedish case then we must know: how did it come about that

the working class was so well-organized in this country? Why did it transform in a couple of

decades from oligarchic and politically stale, to very participative?

We want to explain the growth of Social Democratic election support, but we also

want to explain something more fundamental: electoral participation. It is generally argued that

increased electoral turnout benefits the Left, because it is citizens with low economic status,

generally inclined to vote for the Left, who abstain from voting (Pacek and Radcliff 1995).

Trade unions, as they increase class consciousness and interest in politics, play an important

role in increasing electoral turnout (Radcliff and Davis 2000; Leighley and Nagler 2007). Thus

we investigate the effects of popular movements both on Social Democratic voting and on voter

turnout. For that matter, the extant Swedish literature is not rid of such discussion: Tingsten

(1937, p. 230) argued that a key explanation of the large Social Democratic election victory in

1936 was mobilization of previous non-voters (especially farm workers and working class

women); voter turnout increased by almost 10 percentage units from 1932 to 1936. Recently,

5

Jusko (2017) has argued that much of Social Democratic growth in elections before 1909 came

with extensions of the suffrage as more men earned enough to reach the threshold of the right

to vote.5

We argue that the Swedish U-turn, from the least democratic country in Western

Europe to the creation of Social Democratic Sweden, has to do with the contradiction c. 1870–

1910 between staid official politics and very dynamic popular movements, a struggle which

was eventually won by the movements. In Swedish historiography, the advent of the so-called

“popular movements” after c. 1870 plays a key role. These are the temperance movement, the

free churches, and the labour movement. While they were very different in spiritual content and

political aims, they all challenged the ancien regime of late nineteenth century Sweden. All

three mainly organized workers and lower middle class people. That this people were to a very

high degree disenfranchised meant that both the temperance movement and the free churches

needed to pursue universal suffrage – the temperance movement so that they could pursue their

aim of prohibition of hard liquor, the free churches to realize their ideals of religious freedom.

Furthermore, the temperance movement and the free churches both functioned as

“citizen schools”, in that they cultivated the intellectual facilities of their members and schooled

them in organization and self-governing (Lundkvist 1974; Ambjörnsson 1988). The free

churches were explicit opposition to the orthodoxy of the state church, playing a not dissimilar

role to the English free churches in their opposition to the Church of England and their support

of Liberalism in contrast to the Conservatism of the official church (Bebbington 1982). To

increase spiritual freedom and their rights to exercise their religion, they also needed to pursue

universal suffrage and broader influence over politics. We might see different types of effects

of free churches and temperance movement on the growth of the labour movement. One is the

perspective already presented, that these movements created organizational cultures which the

labour movement could draw upon and benefit from. Another, opposite hypothesis is that

temperance and free churches, especially the latter, would monopolize organization and make

it more difficult for unions and Social Democracy to win ground (Wörlund 1990, pp. 138-9).

While we are inclined to the first perspective, both are possible.

Table 1 highlights that the Swedish working class was among the most well-

organized in Europe around 1910, in terms of working-class party vote share, the number of

Social Democratic party members per capita, number of readers of labour movement

newspapers per capita, and union density. ”The Swedish working class at the beginning of the

5 Matthew, McKibbin and Kay (1976) show similar effects of Labour in Britain c. 1900–1920.

6

twentieth century was poor and disenfranchised and lived and worked in a deeply unequal

economy, but they were exceptionally organized.” (Bengtsson 2018)

Table 1. Working-class organization, c. 1910

Working-class

party vote share,

last election before

1914

Party members per

1000 inhabitants

Number of male

workers per

working-class

newspaper

Union density

Denmark 30 26.2 3.5 20

Norway 32 24.0 4.2 14

Sweden 36 26.0 4.9 13

Germany 35 19.4 9.0 17

Belgium 30 n.a. 9.0 11

Switzerland 10 8.4 13.0 10

Netherlands 19 4.6 39.0 16

France 17 2.5 53.3 4

Italy 23 1.5 67.8 n.a.

United Kingdom 6 n.a. 214 27

Note. The table is drawn from Bengtsson (2018). Sources: voting and newspaper data from Luebbert (1991), pp.

167, 188. Since Luebbert does not report the German vote share, it (for the 1912 election) is fetched from

wikipedia. Union density from Crouch (1993), pp. 114–122. Peak pre-1914 party membership from Eley (2002),

p. 66. Divided by country’s population in 1900 from Wikipedia.

With very little inclusion of the working class and lower middle classes in official politics, they

were driven to popular movements and this alternative public sphere.

2.2 Context: elections and contestation, c. 1890–1940

Popular opposition in the form of popular movements – labour, temperance, religious

movements – grew from the 1880s on, were active on the local level and aggregated opinions

(Forsell 2014, p. 26). Studies of the mid-Swedish towns of Nyköping and Enköping find that

the influence of the popular movements only became significant after 1900 (Hedenskog 1973;

Johansson 1974). Municipality politics in Enköping became organized by party lines from 1896

on. These two developments are related: it seems that the popular movements mainly reached

influence by influencing political parties (e.g. Åberg 1975). One example of such political

change comes from the West Sweden town of Åmål, where the election of a Baptist pastor S.P.

Gerdin to high office in 1892 led to a doubling of the municipality’s tax incomes, as Gerdin

7

refused the tax deductions that local corporations were used to enjoying (Forsell 2014, p. 34).

In other words, we do have reasons to believe that popular movements could make a difference

in Swedish electoral politics in the 1890s, although perhaps on the margin. In the 1890s a “ping-

pong politics” emerged where singular politicians in parliament took part in the popular

movements and took their concerns into official politics (Hurd 2000, pp. 103–5).

Elections to parliament were only after 1900 gradually mobilizing on a Left-Right

political scale. One could perhaps say that modern Swedish politics only begins around the

1909 reform. A Liberal government had come to power in 1906, with a suffrage reform as its

main aim, but failed on opposition in parliament, and fell. It was replaced by a Conservative

government which, understanding that some suffrage extension was unavoidable if one were to

avoid revolutionary threats.6 Thus in 1908 all men were given the right to vote, but with grading

according to one’s income. The 1908 election, when the reform was already passed but not in

effect, was contentious. The buildup saw the infamous “Amalthea” bombing of a ship of

strikebreakers, when anarchists killed one strikebreaker and injured more than twenty of them.

The Conservatives’ main slogan was “For or against socialists’ power in Sweden” (Esaiasson

1990, p. 106-109). According to Esaiasson, the 1908 election was the first in Sweden which

was fought with modern organizational means by the parties. All elections around these years

saw intense opposition between Left and Right and high electoral participation (cf. Larsson

1967, p. 386, on Stockholm 1911).

The labour movement was the late comer of the three, starting to mark its

influence only in the 1880s, and the one which very explicitly opposed the old regime. As party

leader Hjalmar Branting explained in an 1886 speech, very explicitly outlining what Acemoglu

and Robinson (2000) call a revolutionary threat: “If the upper class wishes to respect the will

of the people even when they demand the abolition of its own privileges, then the Socialists

will not wantonly appeal to violence... Universal suffrage, then, is the price for which the

bourgeoisie may purchase its liquidation by way of reorganization rather than by bankruptcy

proceedings conducted before the tribunal of revolution.” (Rustow 1969, p. 52)

The Social Democrats’ share in the elections to parliament in our period was 28.5

% in the election of 1911, 30.1 % in the spring of 1914, 36.4 in the autumn of 1914, 39.2 % in

1917, 36.1 % in 1920, 39.4 % in 1921, 41.1 in 1924, 37.0 % in 1928, 41.1 % in 1932, and 45.9

6 Lewin (2010, p. 40) in his sympthatetic biography of the Conservative prime minister Lindman says that Lindman

understood that universal suffrage in the long run was unavoidable and he only wanted to minimize damages. That

would be done by changing from a majoritarian election system to a proportional representation one, so that the

Social Democrats would not win too large majorities.

8

% in 1936. By the end of our period, the SAP had achieved the hegemonic position in the party

system which they would keep, arguably, until the 2000s. The Social Democrats were stronger

in urban areas than in the countryside: in the cities, they got 50 % in the 1936 election. Figure

1 shows histograms of voting participation in the parliamentary elections of 1911 (by hundred),

1920 and 1936 (by town). In 1911, in about 40 per cent of the hundreds, less than a fifth voted.

Figure 1. Histogram of Voter Turnout in Hundreds and Towns in the Parliamentary Elections

of 1911, 1920 and 1936

There were several spurts in voter participation in these years, and in the remainder of the paper

we explore the causes for the rise during these years of Swedish inclusive participatory

democracy.

3. Data and method

3.1 The election of 1911

Our dataset for the parliamentary election of 1911 consists of information combined from three

sources. The information on membership in unions, free churches and the temperance

movement is drawn from The Popular Movement Archive (Andrae and Lundqvist, 1998), from

the popular movements project which has been discussed above (see Lundkvist 1977 for the

Hundreds 1910

Cities 1920

Cities 1936

02

04

06

0

Vo

ter

Tu

rno

ut

(%)

20 40 60 80Share of Hundreds or Cities (%)

9

final report of the project).7 The dataset is structured at the level of the local organizational

branch and provides information on geographic location down to the level of individual

parishes. However, since many of the local branches extended beyond a single parish, it is not

possible to do analysis at this level of detail. For this reason, our final dataset is at the level of

the hundred (härad), the local judicial unit. The towns formed their own hundred.8

Our source for information on local economic and social structure is the digitized

Swedish full-count census provided by the North Atlantic Population Project (NAPP) for the

years 1880-1910. The Swedish census was conducted every ten years. Before 1920, the census

includes the same information the priests were continuously keeping on their subjects: name,

sex, age, occupation and other demographic information such as marital status and parish of

birth. Since we have access to information on every individual, we are not restricted by any

preprocessing of the data and can calculate a multitude of variables at the level of the individual

hundred.

Our source on voting participation and election results come from Berglund

(1988) who has digitized official voting data for all parliamentary elections between 1911 and

1944 (henceforth referred to as SES). The data is provided at the level of election districts and

give information on the number of votes for each party alongside the number of eligible voters

and actual participation in each election.

To create our dataset, we link information from these three sources. Our starting

point is the set of hundreds available in the popular movements data (371 hundreds in 1910).

In a second step, we link all parishes in NAPP to their corresponding hundred in the PM data.

There are 14 hundreds in the PM dataset that do not correspond to a hundred in the NAPP data,

so from this link, we end up with a total of 357 places. In the final step, we merge this set of

hundreds to those in the election data. Our final dataset consists of 357 hundreds for 1910.

3.2 Towns and cities 1920 – 1936

We have election data for all Swedish towns and cities from 1920 to 1936.9 The dependent

variables on voting are again from Berglund (1988), the control variables on population and

economic structure from NAPP, and the organization data from the PM project.

7 Also used in electoral research by Wörlund (1990); see p. 6 for discussion. 8 We calculate total membership in each organizational group by summing up the membership in all local branches

active in each hundred. We use the maximum number of members reported over a period of three years around

the time of observation. This is to avoid measurement errors that could arise due to gaps in the reporting of

individual branches at specific points in time. 9 The reason that we don’t have rural data in these years is that the data have been collected for a paper on elections

and strikes in cities: Enflo, Karlsson and Molinder (2018).

10

4. Analysis: elections, 1911–1936

4.1 The election of 1911

Across the hundreds in 1910, average membership in unions, free churches and temperance

organizations stood 1.8, 1.4 and 5.5 percent respectively among the population age 15 to 65.

The standard deviation was largest for the temperance movement: 4 percent, followed by unions

at 3.6 and the free churches at 1.8. The spread in union membership is especially large given

the small fraction of the population that was organized in the average hundred. This reflects the

different stages of organizational development that the three popular movements were in around

1910. While the free churches and temperance organizations had been around for several

decades by this point, union organizing had only taken off from the 1890s and were still in an

early expansive phase. In the case of the free churches, they had already started to see falling

membership and would continue to do so in the interwar period (Lundkvist 1977).

The left panel of Figure 2 shows that there is a strong correlation between trade

union density and voter turnout in the election of 1911.10 However, this is an unconditional

regression without controlling for the economic structure of the hundreds. The right panel adds

such controls and as we can see, then the estimated effect of unions disappears. This tells us

that voter turnout was higher in more industrial areas where unions were stronger, but it seems

that unions did not make an independent contribution to turnout.

Table 2 shows that there is a very strong effect of the temperance movement on

voter turnout, while there is no such effect of free churches. The baseline model suggests that

a 1 percentage point increase in the fraction of the population organized in a temperance

organization lifted voter turnout by half a percentage point. This indicates that this popular

movements might have played different roles in the mobilization of the Swedish people.

10 In the next version of the paper we will also incorporate the election of 19OX on the hundred level.

11

Figure 2. Relationship Between Union Density and Voter Turnout in the election of 1911

Note: The figure shows binned scatterplots with 20 equally sized bins and linear regression lines. The left panel

indicates the unconditional relationship between union density and voter turnout while the right panel depicts the

association between union density and voter turnout after including the same set of baseline controls as in Table

2. The controls in the baseline specification are: membership in free churches, membership in temperance

organizations, share of population involved in agriculture and the log of population.

.52

.54

.56

.58

.6

.62

Vo

ter

Tu

rno

ut

(%)

0 .05 .1 .15

Union Density (%)

Unconditional

.52

.54

.56

.58

.6

.62

-.05 0 .05 .1

Union Density (%)

With Controls

12

Table 2. Voter turnout, 1911

(1) (2) (3)

Baseline Weighted Additional controls

Union memb/Pop -0.017 0.250 0.133

(0.170) (0.155) (0.141)

Free church memb/Pop -0.185 -0.096 0.006

(0.336) (0.339) (0.300)

Temperance org memb/Pop 0.507*** 0.315** 0.631***

(0.143) (0.144) (0.131)

Farm pop % -0.119*** -0.084*** -0.103***

(0.033) (0.030) (0.032)

Log(Population) 0.009 0.007 0.001

(0.007) (0.005) (0.006)

Share ages 16–65 -0.013

(0.219)

County-fixed effects No No Yes

Observations 357 357 357

R2 adj 0.084 0.112 0.441

We move on to our second dependent variable: voting for the Social Democratic party. Figure

3 shows again the unconditional correlation in the left panel, and the conditional correlation in

the right-hand panel. There is a strong positive relationship between union density and the vote

share of the Social Democratic party. The right panel shows that this relationship holds also

when we control for economic structure and population, and for other popular movements. The

three strongest Social Democratic hundreds in 1911 where Västerbergslag (67 per cent of the

votes) and Grythytte and Hällsefors (71 per cent) in the central mining and iron works district,

and Jukkasjärvi Lappmarks (82 per cent) in the very north. There were several hundreds where

they got 0 per cent, indeed did not run at all (cf. Jusko 2017).

13

Figure 3. Relationship Between Union Density and Votes for the Social Democratic Party in

the election of 1911

Note. The Social Democrats was the only left party in the elections of 1911. Controls as in Table 2.

Given that the trade unions and the Social Democratic Party were “two branches of the same

tree”, to use their own metaphor, it is perhaps not very strong that the party was strong in the

same places as the unions. Wald (1982) finds for British elections 1885–1910 in 115 localities

a correlation between union density and Labour voting growing from 0.3 to 0.5. The results in

Table 3 indicate that the correlation was even stronger in Sweden, around 0.6. This is

compatible with our argument on the especially important role of organizing in the Swedish

context. In Britain there was still unions with Liberal affiliation in the early twentieth century.

Not surprisingly, Social Democrats got a larger share of the vote in areas with

many industrial workers; the coefficient is about 0.5 (columns 4-5). There is, however, in

contrast to Tingsten’s argument (also Carlsson 1963) no evidence that votes for SAP increased

exponentially with the number of industrial workers due to a kind of “social pressure” from the

local environment. (Results not reported.) Union density interacted with manufacturing workers

(not reported) shows that unions had a stronger effect in places with a lower share of workers.11

11 In further work on the härad level we will also control for the agrarian structure in the sense of the share of farm

units which were very small or possibly very large, using data from Sundbärg (1910). There are many arguments

in the literature that estate-dominated areas would vote differently than peasant-farmer dominated areas; for

.1

.2

.3

.4

.5

Sh

are

of

Vo

tes

(%)

0 .05 .1 .15

Union Density (%)

Unconditional

.1

.2

.3

.4

.5

-.05 0 .05 .1

Union Density (%)

With Controls

14

Table 3. Voting for the Social Democrats, 1911

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

Baseline Weighted Add. controls Class str. Class str. + add.

controls

Union memb/Pop 0.652** 0.992*** 0.547** 0.922*** 0.589**

(0.301) (0.324) (0.236) (0.262) (0.229)

Free church

memb/Pop -0.286 0.248 -0.947*

0.374 -0.556

(0.594) (0.706) (0.501) (0.518) (0.495)

Temperance org

memb/Pop 0.057 0.297 0.589***

-0.110 0.425**

(0.253) (0.301) (0.218) (0.224) (0.213)

Controls:

Farm pop % -0.355*** -0.372*** -0.485*** -0.310** -0.328**

(0.058) (0.063) (0.054) (0.150) (0.132)

Log(Population) 0.031*** 0.013 0.041*** 0.013 0.026***

(0.012) (0.009) (0.010) (0.010) (0.010)

Share ages 16–65 -2.502*** -1.648***

(0.366) (0.405)

Class structure:

Elite % 0.437 -0.001

(0.920) (0.836)

Upper middle % -1.721*** -0.693**

(0.323) (0.323)

Skilled work. % -0.623*** -0.297

(0.174) (0.181)

Farmers % -0.476*** -0.133

(0.130) (0.130)

Ind. workers % 0.512*** 0.472***

(0.131) (0.121)

County-fixed effects No No Yes No Yes

Observations 357 357 357 357 357

R2 adj 0.201 0.334 0.568 0.411 0.606

example Moore (1966) in the general sense, but also more specific claims on the ”politics of deference” and elite

domination (for example Ziblatt 2017, ch. 6 on elite dominance and election malfeasance in Germany). Frånberg

(1983) argues for Västerbotten county in the North that this county had a peculiar brand of small farmer-liberalism

expressed in the temperance movement and radical liberal politics.

15

Free church membership is negatively correlated with Social Democratic voting. This

contradicts Bengtsson’s (2018) argument but may mean that free churches strengthened the

Liberals at the expense of the Conservatives. In Appendix A we run the same analysis on the

share of votes for the liberals. Votes for the liberals were positively correlated with membership

in free churches, just as we would expect from the British literature (Bebbington 1982).

When we control for county-fixed effects in columns 3 and 5, membership in

temperance organization is strongly correlated with social democratic electoral success. This

seems to go along with the findings of Wörlund (1990, ch. 6) that the temperance movement

was quite compatible with the labour movement, while the free churches frequently fought the

labour movement and were detrimental to its development. The temperance movement created

an “organizational culture” which the labour movement could benefit from, as well as a

recruitment pool for the movement. A reason why this effect appears when we use exploit only

within-region variation could possibly be that the temperance organizations were stronger in

rural areas where voter turnout was lower, and when we control for the wider social and

economic context of a broader region the positive impact of the temperance movement at the

local level appears more clearly.

The map in Figure 4 visualizes the county-fixed effects from column 3 of Table

3. The map highlights how, conditional on economic structure and patterns of organizational

strength, the support for the Social Democrats varied across regions. The numbers in the legend

give the percentage point effect relative to the mean for the party in 1911: 22 per cent. The

fixed-effect for Stockholm city is not shown in the map. In 1911, the party had its best

performance in the capital gaining 48 per cent of all votes. The weakest localities for the party

were the predominantly agricultural areas in the south and the north, while industrial areas in

the centre-south (Svealand) were strongholds. This conforms well with Korpi’s (1981, p. 111)

pointing out that Halland, Gotland and Skaraborg were the only counties to vote predominantly

bourgeois 1921–1979.

16

Figure 4. County-Fixed Effects on Votes for the Social Democrats in 1911

Note: The map plots the county-fixed effects of the vote share for the Social Democrats from the regression in

column 3 of Table 3. All effects are scaled relative to the mean result for the Social Democrats of 22 per cent of

the vote. Stockholm City, where the party won 48 per cent of the electorate is not shown in the map.

4.2 Towns 1920 – 1936

We move on to the elections of 1920 to 1936. Median turnout in the towns was 57 per cent in

1920, 56 per cent in 1924, 68 per cent in 1928, 68 per cent in 1932 and 75 per cent in 1936; this

was a period of increased political contention. Social Democratic election success varied

markedly across towns: in the 1920 election SAP got 3 per cent or less of the votes in the

northern coastal towns of Skellefteå, Örnsköldsvik and Umeå (where the break-out Communist

Party were very strong), but 60 per cent in Eskilstuna, 68 per cent in Landskrona and 71 per

cent in Trollhättan. The three latter were all markedly industrial towns, in central or southern

Sweden.

Table 4 shows our main results for voter turnout in these years. Union density is

significantly related to voter turnout, also when controlling for economic structure and

population. Participation increases by about 0.12 per cent for each per cent in increased union

density. Given that union density grew by seven percentage points in the median town from

5.5,13-2.5,5.5-12,-2.5-30,-12

17

1920 to 1936, this implies an increase in voter turnout by 0.8 percentage points, or roughly four

percent of the total increase in turnout.

Table 4. Voter turnout, 1920–1936

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

By period

Pooled Weighted 1920-1921 1924-1928 1932-1936

Union memb/Pop 0.119** 0.167*** 0.231* 0.275** 0.131*

(0.053) (0.060) (0.129) (0.108) (0.067)

Free church memb/Pop -0.127** -0.269*** -0.142 -0.221** 0.001

(0.057) (0.078) (0.106) (0.111) (0.081)

Temperance org memb/Pop -0.061 -0.311*** 0.037 -0.217 -0.562***

(0.062) (0.078) (0.084) (0.137) (0.185)

Baseline controls:

Manufacturing emp % 0.079 -0.241*** 0.122 0.054 -0.118

(0.075) (0.108) (0.138) (0.123) (0.128)

Trade and Com emp % -0.003 -212* 0.031 -0.022 -0.164

(0.078) (0.109) (0.140) (0.131) (0.136)

Services emp % -0.004 -0.314*** 0.028 0.004 -0.170

(0.073) (0.105) (0.135) (0.121) (0.124)

Log(Population) 0.001 0.006*** 0.007 -0.007 -0.004

(0.003) (0.002) (0.006) (0.006) (0.005)

Year-fixed effects Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Observations 623 623 208 208 208

R2 adj 0.596 0.596 0.140 0.504 0.309

Contrary to unions, free church membership is negatively related to turnout. For each percent

increase in membership, the model suggests a fall in voter participation by 0.13 percent.

Membership increased only little over the period, from 5 to 5.8 percent, so the estimated

influence is small: a decline by 0,01 percentage points. However, the lack of a positive effect

is interesting as it contradicts Bengtsson’s (2018) argument, built on Lundkvist (1977) of a

generally mobilizing effect of popular movements, and rather supports a view of the free

churches as having a conservative effect (Söderberg 1993, p. 117, on this juxtaposition).

Unions did not only increase turnout, they also turned voters to the left. This is

highlighted in Figure 5; Appendix Figure 3 repeats the exercise not only for SAP but only the

18

Communist parties which appeared after 1917. More unionized towns voted more for the Left,

also when controlling for economic structure and population.

Figure 5. Relationship Between Union Density and Votes for the Social Democratic Party in

Towns, 1920-1936

.2

.3

.4

.5

.6

Sh

are

of

Vo

tes

(%)

0 .1 .2 .3 .4

Union Density (%)

Unconditional

.2

.3

.4

.5

.6

.05 .1 .15 .2 .25 .3

Union Density (%)

With Controls

19

Table 5. Voting for the Social Democrats, 1920–1936

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

By period

Pooled Weighted 1920-1921 1924-1928 1932-1936

Union memb/Pop 0.375*** 0.632*** 0.768*** 0.528*** 0.093

(0.077) (0.096) (0.198) (0.159) (0.090)

Free church memb/Pop -0.328*** -0.819*** -0.293* -0.346** -0.457***

(0.084) (0.125) (0.164) (0.164) (0.109)

Temperance org memb/Pop -0.447*** -0.771*** -0.511*** -0.431** 0.078

(0.092) (0.125) (0.129) (0.202) (0.247)

Baseline controls:

Manufacturing emp % 0.189* 0.057 -0.115 0.262 0.390**

(0.110) (0.173) (0.213) (0.181) (0.172)

Trade and Com emp % -0.305*** -0.359** -0.574*** -0.203 -0.193

(0.115) (0.174) (0.214) (0.194) (0.181)

Services emp % -0.146 -0.434*** -0.480** -0.007 0.056

(0.108) (0.168) (0.207) (0.178) (0.165)

Log(Population) 0.021*** -0.001 0.025*** 0.021** 0.013*

(0.005) (0.003) (0.009) (0.009) (0.006)

Year-fixed effects Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Observations 623 623 207 208 208

R2 adj 0.481 0.472 0.427 0.391 0.437

Note. For results with Left voting generally as the dependent variable, see Appendix Table 4.

A larger share of citizens organized in free churches was severely detrimental to Social

Democratic voting in the towns; this coefficient is statistically significant in every specification,

varying between between -0.293 and -0.819. This speaks against Bengtsson’s (2018) emphasis

– following Lundkvist (1974, 1977) – on the free churches as “citizen schools”, but accords

with a familiar piece of Swedish electoral geography. The electoral strength of the socialists

correlated the strongly with the share of industrial workers in the population, but the socialists

under-performed on the west coast and in the northern county of Västerbotten, as well as in the

textile production region around Borås. In all these three places, free churches had a hold among

the voters (Lewin 1971).12 It also accords with Ericson’s (1991) study of the religious

12 In further work we would like to investigate also the Conservative role of the Church of Sweden. Anecdotal

evidence (e.g. in Söderberg 1993, ch. 6) suggests that the state church agitated against reforms and socialism and

were a hinderance to the spread of the labour movement for example in Kronoberg and Jönköping counties.

20

stronghold of Jönköping, where the churches agitated against socialism and hindered the growth

of the labour movement.

A question arises: did trade unions increase Social Democratic – and more

generally Left – voting by convincing former non-voters (who were many, as we have seen in

Figure 1) to start voting and do so for the Left, or did they convince former bourgeois voters to

vote for the Left? The mediation model allows us to estimate the direct as well as the indirect

effect of union organizing on votes for the political left and the social democrats. In the model,

the influence of unions can go through persuading those who are already politically active to

cast their ballot on a working-class party: the “direct effect”, as well as through the activation

of non-voters by expanding the electorate: the “indirect effect”. Table 6 shows the results of

estimating the direct and indirect effect of unions in this way. Our baseline model that pools all

elections from 1920 to 1936 suggests that the influence of unions on votes for the political left

was substantial: the point estimate of 0.65 for the total effect indicates that increasing local

union presence by ten percentage points would raise the vote share for the working-class parties

by 6.5 % after controlling for our baseline covariates including sector shares of employment.

The result implies that in two towns with similar percentages of manufacturing in employment,

votes for the left varied substantially with the ability of unions to persuade and activate potential

voters.13

The model results suggest that around 80 % of the total effect of unions on votes

went through the direct channel of persuading existing voters, while 20 % came through

expanding the voter base. The results are similar but slightly higher in the model that weights

observations in proportion to town population, shown in column 2. As the size of towns with

town charters varied significantly in Sweden, this model gives higher sway to Stockholm than

to the smaller market towns. Weighting also implies that the results from this model are

representative of urban Sweden as a whole. While the proportion of the total effect going

through the persuasion channel is similar, about 80 %, the full impact of local unions presence

is 0.84 compared to 0.65 in the model without weights. The models in columns 3 through 5 also

breaks down the results by period so that each model cover two elections. It seems that the

effects of unionism were larger in the 1920s than in the 1930s, which might indicate a saturation

effect where after a while unionism was so widespread everywhere that the estimated effect

declines.

13 In further work we also want to control for unemployment. In the literature on German interwar voting, it is a

stable result that the unemployed disproportionally voted for the Communist Party KPD instead of the Social

Democrats (Stögbauer 2001; Falter 2014).

21

Table 6. Mediation models, 1920–1936

Vote share of political left

Vote share of

Soc.Dem

By period

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

Pooled Pooled

(weighted)

1920-

1921

1924-

1928

1932-

1936

Pooled

Total effect (TE):

Union memb/Pop 0.65*** 0.84*** 0.98*** 0.86*** 0.21** 0.51***

(0.08) (0.00) (0.17) (0.15) (0.09) (0.08)

Direct effect (DE):

Union memb/Pop 0.53*** 0.66*** 1.00*** 0.69*** 0.17* 0.34***

(0.07) (0.00) (0.17) (0.15) (0.128) (0.75)

Voter turnout 0.20*** 0.19*** -0.05 0.40*** 0.35*** 0.30***

(0.05) (0.00) (0.09) (0.96) (0.97) (0.57)

Indirect effect (IE):

Union memb/Pop 0.12*** 0.18*** -0.21 0.18*** 0.04* 0.17***

(0.03) (0.00) (0.41) (0.06) (0.02) (0.04)

DE % of TE 82 % 79% 100% 80% 81% 66%

Median vote share 0.46 0.54 0.40 0.44 0.53 0.41

Median UM/P 0.13 0.16 0.11 0.12 0.18 0.13

90th pct – 50th pct of UM/P 0.09 0.06 0.07 0.07 0.09 0.09

Baseline controls Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Year-fixed effects Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Observations 624 624 208 208 208 624

Union density grew by 7 percentage points from 1920 to 1936, voting participation by 19

percentage points and the vote share for the left by 17 percentage points and for the Social

Democrats by 16 percentage points. This implies that the growth of trade unions explains 21

per cent of the growth in voter turnout, 27 per cent of increase in left voting and 22 per cent of

the electoral success of the Social Democrats.

22

5. Conclusions

We started from a puzzle: in the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s, Sweden was one of the least

democratic countries in Western Europe, but after the 1930s it emerged as a model country of

social inclusion and political participation. In the 1890s, only 21 per cent of adult men had the

right to vote to the second chamber (2 per cent to the first chamber), and only about 45 per cent

of them actually did so. But in the 1950s, Sweden displayed very high voter turnout (above 80

per cent), and one of the most well-organized electorates in the world.

What have we contributed to the understanding of this great transformation? The

paper is at a very early stage, so it is still too early to draw firm conclusions. We have

documented a clear correlation on the local level in Sweden 1911–1936 between trade unionism

and (a) vote participation and (b) vote for the Social Democrats and the Left more generally.

We believe that the investigation can make a significant contribution to our understanding of

how Sweden became a “Social Democratic” country in the twentieth century, but we need to

work more on specifying the channels through which union organizing – and popular movement

organizing more generally – strengthened the Social Democrats.14

14 One idea that we have is to investigate the effects of the establishment of “People’s Parks” (Folkets park), the

labour movement affiliated entertainment centers which blossomed in the early twentieth century, providing cheap

entertainment infused with labour movement values.

23

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Appendix A: Additional Results

Appendix Figure 1. Free churches and liberal electoral success in the election of 1911.

.35

.4

.45

.5

.55

.6

Sh

are

of

Vo

tes

(%)

0 .02 .04 .06 .08

Share free churches (%)

Unconditional

.35

.4

.45

.5

.55

.6

-.02 0 .02 .04 .06

Share free churches (%)

With Controls

26

Appendix Table 1. Voting for the Liberals, 1911 (1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

By period

Baseline Weighted Add. controls Class str. Class str. +

add. controls

Union memb/Pop -0.674** -0.840*** -0.486* -0.704** -0.325

(0.307) (0.310) (0.287) (0.303) (0.284)

Free church memb/Pop 1.024* 0.713 1.260** 1.123* 1.323**

(0.606) (0.677) (0.610) (0.599) (0.614)

Temperance org

memb/Pop 0.769*** 1.092*** -0.018 0.828*** 0.204

(0.259) (0.288) (0.266) (0.258) (0.264)

Controls:

Farm pop % 0.251*** 0.335*** 0.253*** -0.112 -0.005

(0.059) (0.060) (0.065) (0.173) (0.164)

Log(Population) -0.005 0.000 -0.018 0.011 -0.010

(0.012) (0.009) (0.012) (0.012) (0.012)

Share ages 16–65 1.016** 1.236**

(0.446) (0.502)

Class structure:

Elite % -0.403 -0.929

(1.063) (1.037)

Upper middle % 0.807** -0.434

(0.373) (0.401)

Skilled work. % -0.392* 0.146

(0.200) (0.224)

Farmers % 0.156 -0.253

(0.150) (0.162)

Ind. workers % -0.629*** -0.682***

(0.151) (0.150)

County-fixed effects No No Yes No Yes

Observations 357 357 357 357 357

R2 adj 0.120 0.295 0.321 0.168 0.359

Appendix Figure 2. County fixed effects for Liberal voting in 1911

27

-25.5,1-34.5,-25.5-39,-34.5-46,-39

28

Appendix Figure 3. Relationship Between Union Density and Votes for the Political Left in

Towns, 1920-1936

.3

.4

.5

.6

.7

Sh

are

of

Vo

tes

(%)

0 .1 .2 .3 .4

Union Density (%)

Unconditional

.3

.4

.5

.6

.7

.05 .1 .15 .2 .25 .3

Union Density (%)

With Controls

29

Appendix Table 2. Voting for the left in towns, 1920–1936

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

By period

Pooled Weighted 1920-1921 1924-1928 1932-1936

Union memb/Pop 0.557*** 0.695*** 0.995*** 0.796*** 0.220**

(0.074) (0.079) (0.174) (0.155) (0.096)

Free church memb/Pop -0.284*** -0.614*** -0.252* -0.303* -0.400***

(0.080) (0.103) (0.144) (0.160) (0.117)

Temperance org memb/Pop -0.445*** -0.551*** -0.504*** -0.545*** 0.134

(0.087) (0.104) (0.113) (0.197) (0.266)

Baseline controls:

Manufacturing emp % 0.350*** 0.170 0.106 0.330* 0.570***

(0.105) (0.143) (0.186) (0.177) (0.185)

Trade and Com emp % -0.135 -0.193 -0.361* -0.121 0.017

(0.110) (0.144) (0.188) (0.189) (0.195)

Services emp % 0.014 -0.288** -0.197 0.051 0.199

(0.103) (0.139) (0.182) (0.174) (0.178)

Log(Population) 0.019*** 0.008*** 0.017** 0.018** 0.016**

(0.004) (0.003) (0.008) (0.009) (0.007)

Year-fixed effects Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Observations 623 623 207 208 208

R2 adj 0.553 0.614 0.522 0.481 0.468