ABSTRACT
Swedish politics since 1932 have been dominated by the Socialdemokratiska Arbetarepartiet. The beginning of Social Democratic Labour politics in Sweden, the establishment of the Social Democratic Party (SAP) in 1889 marks the beginning of a nationally organised labour movement. The constitution provided for parliamentarianism and the continuing right of the Swedish people to tax themselves via the Riksdag, but the aristocracy continued to dominate the state bureaucracy. Despite the SAP’s avowed goal of real and sustained social reform, the ‘boom’ years of the 1950s and 1960s headed off any demand for the restructuring of industry in terms of ownership and control. Broad working-class support for the SAP is decisive; as most observers affirm, the Swedish SAP is a working-class party with a high and consistent level of support amongst manual workers and lower-level white-collar workers. The SAP’s nineteenth-century Marxist ideology was modified over the first two decades of the twentieth century.
