From Participatory Orders to Democratic Drift

This preprint develops a structural account of the democratization of Sweden beyond conventional regime-centred and suffrage-centred narratives. Rather than treating democratization as a single transition from non-democracy to democracy, the paper analyses it as a historically extended reconfiguration of participatory form, political recognition, consequence-legibility, and institutional corrigibility. It distinguishes formal inclusion from consequence-bearing participation, democratic continuity from democratic viability, and widened suffrage from fully realised participatory symmetry. The paper combines a heuristic historical orientation with a scope-bound theorem-driven derivation. It formulates axioms, postulates, principles, corollaries, and three central theorems concerning democratization as structural reconfiguration, the conditions of democratic viability, and the possibility of democratic drift under preserved electoral and constitutional continuity. The Swedish case is mapped across six broad phases: early assemblies and local participatory orders, estate-based representation, the 1866 bicameral transition, suffrage expansion, the folkhem phase, and the later governance phase. This mapping is used to show how non-trivial participation may exist without democratic symmetry, how formal inclusion may expand without completing democratic viability, and how democratic form may persist while consequence-legibility and practical corrigibility weaken. This is Paper I in a two-paper sequence. It provides the substantive derivation and Sweden-specific structural mapping. The companion Paper II translates the completed structure into a theorem inventory, observation framework, indicator rules, boundary conditions, and a frozen package for later empirical use.