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This article investigates the creation and circulation of class knowledge among Sweden’s political parties as Swedish representative democracy took shape, 1911–1940. When the expanded franchise for men was introduced in the general election of 1911, the National Statistics Bureau (SCB) was tasked with categorising voters to measure the effects of the reform. They created a taxonomy made up of three social groups. The study situates this innovation in election statistics in the general interest in social class, which was used as a frame for understanding and intervening in societal matters around 1900. The political scientist Pontus Fahlbeck’s influence on SCB is considered. His taxonomy of society, created 1892, reflected his conviction that a class structure was vital for maintaining and developing Western civilisation and its culture. However, the political parties soon found a way of using SCB’s divisions for their own ends, mobilising it for a variety of political projects. For the Social Democratic Party, the numerical majority of social group III – a class they claimed to represent – legitimised their claim to rule. The conservative parties instead focused on how in their view they were truly democratic because their voters were drawn from all social groups. The article uses insights from the cultural history of statistics – a field which holds numbers to be a form of communication, and which underlines how phenomena and concepts change when quantified – to contribute to the history of class concepts. I show how class was made into statistics, transforming it from a fuzzy category into something concrete, exact, and calculable. Election statistics and Fahlbeck’s taxonomy were the political parties’ shared resource in their pursuit of election wins. Through this process, a common understanding of Swedish society as ordered into three societal groups was established, which would prove highly influential continuing into the second half of the twentieth century.

This article studies the rise of market research and opinion surveys in Sweden from the 1930s and onward. By focusing on the promotion of empirical knowledge by actors between the academic and the commercial world, such as the economist Gerhard Törnqvist, the article shows how new practices of classifying consumers into social classes were established among marketers and advertisers. These approaches were passed on to the Swedish Gallup, which produced opinion surveys from the early 1940s. The final section of the article charts Swedish newspapers’ preoccupation with classifying practices of the Swedish population into classes. The article investigates market research and opinion surveys through following “the social life of methods”, a theoretical perspective that sees methods of knowledge as political. I analyze how a class taxonomy constructed by the Swedish statistical bureau in 1911 migrated and became productive in the commercial sector starting in the 1930s. These taxonomies could be called “difference machines” in that they repeatedly produced statistical differences as new knowledge.

Class in the age of the pool of talent: Taxonomic struggles in and through Swedish education research, c. 1945–1960. This article studies conceptualisations of social class in Swedish education research, c. 1945–1960. The article follows knowledge produced about talent and class in state commissions and in the newly expanded social sciences, and how it in turn was interpreted and used in political debates and in the media. I show that the taxonomy of the population in social groups (Socialgrupper) was key for conceptualising notions of talent and framing education policy, beginning with debates around ”the pool of talent” (Begåvningsreserven) in 1948. At the same time as becoming a standard tool for mapping social difference in Sweden, the social group taxonomy was criticised for being unscientific.

This article discusses changing word- and concept-usages after the political radicalisation of the 1960s in Sweden. Following the concept of låginkomsttagare, low-income earner, in mainly newspapers, I show how different meanings were attributed to it by different users in the political spectrum. The theory and method used was inspired by historians like Reinhart Koselleck and Dror Wahrman in their history of concepts. Low-income earner was first used by social scientist and bureaucrats in the state commission "Låginkomstutredningen" (1965–1971), instigated to map the low-income earners in Sweden. These actors, mainly from the political left, described and statistically counted Swedish society according to income-groups, but they also shaped the political debate to give focus to what they described as growing inequalities and a society in social conflict. The concept of låginkomsttagare saw a remarkable career in usage in all sorts of contexts, pointing towards how wide the political radicalisation of the late 1960s spread – the concept became a part of the everyday Swedish vocabulary. However, soon the concept was overtaken and transformed by actors with different political goals in a struggle for the definition of who really were low-income earners. Låginkomsttagare gained a sort of moral status as society’s forgotten social group, and many wanted to claim that they belonged to this group.