ABSTRACT
There was a story current in Swedish political circles in the months following the defeat of the Social Democrats in the elections of September 1976 that one of the leaders of a party in the new bourgeois coalition had immediately sent out for all the copies of a well-known textbook on Swedish public administration to be found in the Stockholm bookshops. Whether apocryphal or not, the story does manage to capture something of the extraordinary quality of the Swedish Social Democrats’ hold on political office. If the non-socialist leaders needed to turn to academic experts to understand how the governmental system worked, it was hardly surprising. The last time those parties had experienced the tasks of government was at the invitation of the Social Democrats as part of a wartime National Coalition. Before that the previous exclusively non-socialist government had been a minority Agrarian Party caretaker administration in the parliamentary recess in the summer of 1936. It is usual to date the advent of Swedish Social Democratic dominance from 1932, and this being so no one who was below pensionable age in 1976 could previously have voted for a victorious bourgeois majority government.
