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In the 20th century, Sweden distinguished itself as one of the most organized and participatory democracies in the world. But in the late 19th century the situation was much the opposite – Sweden had for Western Europe a low degree of suffrage, and low political participation. To explain the turnaround, this paper explores the evolution of a democratic political culture in the final third of the 19th century, in opposition to the oligarchic system. The empirical material consists of digitalized newspapers from the south of Sweden in the period 1866 to 1900, studying about 2700 articles that mention 'popular meetings', folkmöten, which was the contemporary description of political meetings. In the 1860s and 1870s a farmer-centred democratic critique dominated, combining proposals for widened suffrage with criticisms of banks and the bureaucracy. In the 1880s and 1890s, the social base was widened as urban workers – socialist and antisocialist – took a greater part and the ideological composition became more heterogeneous. The paper suggests that the folkmöten constituted an important arena for democratic socialization in a country with an oligarchical political system, creating a road forward for democratic reforms and a democratic society.

AbstractThis paper revisits the development of the canonical Swedish wage bargaining model, from the 1930s to the 1950s. The question at the core of the debate is: how did Sweden achieve "good" wage bargaining institutions -- good, in the sense of facilitating investment, employment, and controlled inflation? The conventional account focuses on the actions of employers and trade unions in export industry, and a cross-class alliance between the two. This paper questions this account. The paper builds on archival sources in the Swedish Labour Movement's Archives and Library in Stockholm: the minutes from the main trade union confederation's yearly wage policy discussions, in preparation for bargaining rounds. In total, some 1,500 pages of wage policy discussion. I find that the export sector cross-class alliance played a very small role, and that macro-corporatist concerns, that the labour movement had to take responsibility of all of society and pursue a planned wage policy, was much more important. This has theoretical implications for the analysis of wage bargaining institutions in general and the Swedish model in particular.

In the mid-twentieth century, Sweden distinguished itself as one of the most organized and participatory democracies in the world, with high levels of voting turnout and party membership. But in the late nineteenth century the situation was much the opposite – Sweden had for Western Europe a low degree of suffrage, and low political participation. To explain the turnaround, this paper explores extra-parliamentary political activity in the period of the very exclusive two-chamber system of 1866. The contribution of the paper is to explore and describe the evolution of political meetings in Sweden in the final third of the nineteenth century and in this way provide an analysis of the evolution of a democratic political culture, which widened the scope of those who could act and participate politically. The empirical material consists of digitalized newspapers from the south of Sweden in the period 1866 to 1900, studying about 2,700 articles that mention "popular meetings", folkmöten, which was the contemporary description of political meetings. The findings highlight the existence of a farmer-centred democratic critique in the 1860s and 1870s, which combined proposals for widened suffrage locally and nationally with criticisms of banks and the bureaucracy. In the1880s and 1890s, the social base of the folkmöten widened as urban workers – socialist and anti-socialist – took a greater part, and the ideological composition of the meetings became more heterogeneous. The systematic investigation of newspaper coverage shows that folkmöten were numerous and involved large numbers of people. This indicates that the Swedish population was more politically active than one would infer from looking at the electoral participation, which captures only the activity of the enfranchised, a minority of the population. The folkmöten was a major arena for democratic socialization in a country with an oligarchical political system.

That export-led industry sets the wage norm for the whole economy, acting as the "wage leader", is a celebrated part of the Swedish wage bargaining and labour market model. Export- led wage leadership is assumed to lead to controlled, non-inflationary wage increases, as wages are set with international competition in mind. This paper maps the origins of this export industry wage leadership model, showing that the conventional cross-class alliance story focusing on the 1930s does not square with the facts. Going through the central trade union wage bargaining protocols from 1939 to 1959, I show that industry wage leadership was non- existent in the 1930s. In fact, wage formation at the time was quite decentralized. Instead, industry wage leadership was created only in the 1950s. The driving force behind it was not a cross-class alliance between workers and employers in export industry against home market workers, but rather the integration of the trade union wage policy into a Social Democratic macroeconomic project.

In discussions of Scandinavian democratization, it is commonplace to argue that long- standing farmer representation in parliament and a lack of feudalism encouraged a democratic-participatory civic culture within the peasant farmer class – or perhaps in the population as a whole. The present essay questions this interpretation in the Swedish case. It centers on a re-interpretation of farmer politics at the national level from a two-chamber system of representation after the 1866-67 reform to the alliance between the farmers' party and Social Democracy in 1933 and offers a new analytical account of the way that one class's attitude to democratic inclusion can change over time, owing to changed political and economic relationships to other classes. I show that Swedish farmers did not organize themselves independently of nobles and land-owners until the 1920s, and that they did not play the role of an independent pro-democratic force. On the contrary, the broad-based organizations of farmers in the 1920s and 1930s, with their democratic, participatory culture, appear to have been heavily influenced by the political culture of liberals and the labor movement, which in democratic society opened the door to a re-shaping of Swedish farmer politics that abandoned the old (subservient) alliance with estate owners. It was notdemocratic farmers who gave rise to Social Democracy – rather, it was Social Democracy that caused farmers to become democratic. Understanding farmer politics correctly also opens up a new understanding of the determinants of Swedish democratization.

This article studies conflicts in the Swedish Labour Court that have occurred between trade unions and companies concerning the pay and working conditions for European Union migrant workers in Sweden during the period 2004–2010. During this period, unions and employers entered into disputes over: unions' rights in Sweden to be consulted when a company uses a subcontractor, the definition of an employee (the issue of 'bogus self-employment'), the application of Swedish collective bargaining agreements to and for workers active in Sweden, how to determine wages for temporary staffing agency workers, and workers' rights to join a trade union. The article discusses the conflicts in the context of a widespread concern about 'social dumping' in the European Union, and in the context of weakening trade unions and institutional change in labour markets.