In Sweden, too, the specter of revolution played a role in DPM’s rise.
The Kingdom of Sweden had been growing increasingly constitutionalized
since early in the nineteenth century, yet it did not become a DPM
until after the First World War. In his classic study of the emergence of
Swedish democracy, Dankwart Rustow notes that when the leader of the
lower house asked King Oscar II to dissolve it so that a vote could be
held on widening the suffrage and curtailing the veto powers of the less
democratically elected upper house, he “flatly refused.” It was only in
the threatening context of 1918—when the German and Russian monarchs
had fallen and Swedes were protesting on behalf of republicanism
and even revolution—that Oscar’s son King Gustaf V acceded to universal
manhood suffrage in both houses and thus, in Rustow’s judgment,
at last accepted “parliamentary cabinet government” (that is, a DPM)