Popular movement archive 1881-1950

In 1965 a research project on the history of Swedish popular movements was initiated at the Department of History, Uppsala University. The history of the people's movements was described based on the local associations and their functions. A main question was whether there is a particular type of society or environment where popular movements develop more easily. It became necessary to draw up a special code for the administrative division of Sweden. Before 1952 there were more than 2,500 municipalities, and over time several of them had changed their borders, new municipalities had come into existence, and old municipalities had been incorporated into the rapidly growing urban municipalities. A code system, GEOKOD, was created to take account of all such changes. It wasn't just the municipalities that changed. The organizations also changed, this applied to a particularly high degree to the trade unions. It had to become a research task to systematize the entire flora of associations in Sweden, mainly all the trade unions that arose, dissolved, or merged into one another. To map the spread of the major popular movements, information was collected on the number of members in each local association as of December 31 each year. The free church movement, the temperance movement, the trade union movement, and the social democratic party was included. The database contains data from over 4,000 trade union departments.