The Struggle for the People. The Conservatives and the People 1870-1930

The project, with one researcher during three years from 2023, takes as its starting point that the democratic breakthrough, a protracted process, should be understood as a struggle for the people, a struggle for the right to define and make claims to represent the people.

The study analyses five conservative organisations from the first single-issue pro-tariff lobby in the 1880s to the national conservative association, founded 1904, and how they worked to muster support from wrokers and women.

Central questions are how they understood and used basic political concepts such as ´the people´ and ´the citizen´ and how they organised their activities on the local and national levels.

More broadly, the study is about how the right-wing in Swedish politics, the side that defended the old order and generally disliked parties and mass organisations, acted in the age of mass politics where demands for expanded political rights were raised.The study´s conceptual-historical perspective, focused on the conservative understanding the key concepts of people, nation and citizen and the different ways in which class and gender played in, is supplemented by theories and methods from political cultural history which are used to analyse the day-to-day business of doing politics and making representative claims: meetings, marches and election campaigns etc.

In addition to the performative aspects of political communication, the structure and social base of organisations will also be analysed.