Mellan tvång och val : Hur Sveriges övergång från guldmyntfoten 1931 motiverades och legitimerades i riksdagen

Sammanfattning

Sweden left the gold standard on 27 September 1931, and this paper asks how that decision was justified in parliament during the spring of 1932. The empirical basis is the parliamentary record from both chambers, read through Vivien Schmidt's discursive institutionalism with the Mundell-Fleming trilemma as a structural backdrop. What stands out is how thoroughly the language of compulsion dominated the debate. Legislators from almost every party described the departure as something that had been forced on Sweden by external circumstances, yet what they meant by that compulsion differed. Social Democrats blamed international capital owners, Conservatives pointed to fiscal mismanagement at home, and the Farmers' League kept returning to what the high interest rate was doing to indebted farm households. Parliament, in other words, was not where the decision got made. It was where the decision got sold. The actual choices had been made weeks earlier by a small group of officials and economists working outside the parliamentary arena. The paper builds on work by Jonung, Berg and Jonung, and Carlson, but shifts attention from the intellectual elite and the press to the chamber floor itself. Keywords: gold standard, Sweden 1931, political legitimation, discursive institutionalism, Mundell-Fleming, monetary policy, interwar economy, price stabilisation, riksdag, riksbank.