ABSTRACT Sweden was unique in early modern Europe, in that its parliament included a peasant farmer estate. It is commonplace in Swedish and international research to consider the peasant farmer politicians as guarantors of a liberal and egalitarian path of development. In the Swedish-language literature on political history, these people are often seen as rather narrow-minded, their common political programme limited to the issue of keeping (their own) taxes as low as possible and opposed to any expansion of social policy and citizenship rights. To revisit the role of peasant parliamentarians, this paper presents a novel dataset of their social and economic status, with benchmarks for the 1769, 1809, 1840, 1865 and 1895 parliaments. We show that the politicians were normally three to four times wealthier than their electorate, in the 1895 parliament even seven to eight times wealthier. They were more likely to take bourgeois surnames and their children were likely to move out of the peasant class and into the middle class. The exclusiveness of the peasant politicians, which increased over the nineteenth century, has implications for their policies and helps explain the increasing conservatism and rightward drift of Swedish farmer politics over the century.

中文翻译：

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农民贵族？1769-1895 年瑞典农民议员的财富、社会地位和政治

摘要瑞典在现代早期的欧洲是独一无二的，因为它的议会包括一个农民庄园。在瑞典和国际研究中，将农民政治家视为自由和平等发展道路的保证人是司空见惯的。在有关政治历史的瑞典语文献中，这些人常常被视为思想狭隘，他们共同的政治计划仅限于保持（他们自己的）税收尽可能低的问题，并且反对任何社会政策和公民身份的扩张权利。为了重新审视农民议员的作用，本文提出了一个关于他们的社会和经济地位的新数据集，其中包括 1769、1809、1840、1865 和 1895 年议会的基准。我们表明政治家通常比他们的选民富有三到四倍，在 1895 年的议会中，其财富甚至增加了七到八倍。他们更有可能取资产阶级姓氏，他们的孩子可能会离开农民阶级而进入中产阶级。农民政治家的排他性在 19 世纪有所增加，这对他们的政策产生了影响，并有助于解释瑞典农民政治在一个世纪中日益保守和右倾。