bs_bs_banner

ISSN 0080–6757 Doi: 10.1111/1467-9477.12048

© 2015 Nordic Political Science Association

Getting to Sweden, Part II: Breaking with

Corruption in the Nineteenth Century

Bo Rothstein† & Jan Teorell*

Issues about corruption and other forms of ‘bad government’ have become central in large
parts of the social sciences. An unresolved question, however, is how countries can solve the
issue of systemic corruption. In this article, based on Elinor Ostrom’s theory of common pool
resource appropriation, a new theoretical model for explaining this type of institutional change
is developed. Sweden during the nineteenth century is used as an illustration of the model by
showing how the country made a transition from being largely patrimonial, nepotistic and
corrupt to a modern, Weberian, efficient and impartial state structure. Building upon a com-
panion article about the importance of losing a war as a precondition for breaking systematic
corruption, this article stresses the importance of three additional factors in Sweden: previous
changes in courts and the legal system; recognition of the problem by the main contemporary
political actors as shown in debates in the Diet; and the new liberal ideology that made an
important impact on the Swedish political scene during this period.

What Does It Take to Move a Country Out of

Systemic Corruption?
From being seen as a quite uninteresting problem, issues about corruption
and other forms of ‘bad government’ have become central in large parts of
the social sciences. The reasons behind this change are manifold, but one is
that empirical work has shown increasingly that countries endowed with
low corruption and high-quality government produces more human well-
being than the opposite type of societies, when level of democracy and
economic factors are controlled for (Norris 2012; Uslaner 2008; Ott 2010;
Holmberg & Rothstein 2012). Another reason is the increased importance
given to the quality of political institutions for economic prosperity, human
well-being and social policy (Acemoglu & Robinson 2012; Rodrik 2007; Ott
2010; Svallfors 2013; Bentzen 2012). However, while the positive effects of
having high-quality government institutions are by now well-established,
the knowledge of ‘how to get them’ are much more limited. Some studies

* Jan Teorell, Department of Political Science, Lund University, Box 52, 22100 Lund, Sweden.
E-mail: jan.teorell@svet.lu.se
†
Department of Political Science, Quality of Government Institute, University of Gothenburg.

238 Scandinavian Political Studies, Vol. 38 – No. 3, 2015

 © 2015 Nordic Political Science Association

have pointed to the importance of historical or structural variables such as

geography (Goel & Nelson 2010), inherited institutional legacy, religious
dominance (Treisman 2000), economic prosperity (Gundlach & Paldam
2009), and the existing level and type of corruption (Billger & Goel 2009).
While structural and historical factors such as these may be perfectly correct
predictors for the variation in levels of corruption from a scientific perspec-
tive, they do not lend themselves to policy intervention or understanding
change. However, this type of analysis delivers one very important insight:
the role of historical precedent and inertia in the prevalence of corruption,
which implies that change is both a rare and a complex phenomenon.
Empirically, as it can be measured, countries’ levels of corruption turns out
to be very stable (Uslaner 2008, Chapter 8). This, however, is a main argu-
ment for our approach, which is to make sense of a case study of a country
that did manage to break with the historical inertia that seems to make
systemic corruption a stable equilibria in most countries.
In a companion article (Teorell & Rothstein 2015), we argued that
nineteenth-century Sweden provides a rare instance of such a country. As
shown by Rothstein (2011), a large number of reforms were introduced and
implemented between 1855 and 1875 that amounted to a type of ‘big bang’
change that moved the country out of a patrimonial and relative corrupt
setting to a clean and Weberian state in a process of institutional choice (cf
Collier 2002). This ‘big bang’ change seems to have made this new Weberian
and much less corrupt system stable or, in other words, it stabilised Sweden
into a new equilibrium. However, what is missing in this analysis is the
fundamental question of what caused this major and lasting transformation
of the country. The mechanism that explains this major change from one
equilibrium to another is a theory of how collective action problems were
overcome and how new rules of the game came to be enforced in practice.
Whereas we highlighted an important exogenous trigger of change (war-
making) in our companion article, in this article, and drawing on Ostrom
(1990), we put forward what we call an ‘endogenous theory of institutional
change’ (cf Popa 2011) based on the idea that purposively motivated and
forward-looking actors can ‘get their act together’ and come to grips with
their dysfunctional situation. For Ostrom, there is a clear connection
between endogenous and exogenous factors since positive change will only
come about once the agents understand that if they do not take action, they
as a group (or small society) are in for a major disaster. As we will show, the
same logic appears in the Swedish case since the central agents, after the
defeat against Russia in 1809, came to believe that the future existence of
Sweden as an independent state was at stake. This logic builds on the idea
that systemic corruption should be understood as a problem of collective
action (Persson et al. 2013; Rothstein 2011) in which the agents perceive
that they would stand to gain if they could transform their un-cooperative

Scandinavian Political Studies, Vol. 38 – No. 3, 2015 239

© 2015 Nordic Political Science Association

behaviour into a ‘game’ based on cooperation. Drawing on the debates in

the Swedish Diet of Estates during the first decades of the nineteenth
century, we argue that the Swedish political elite made such a connection
between a perceived several external threat and the need to reform the
country that made them replace the old order with a new one. Although
lessons from history must be treated with caution – and the Swedish case is
certainly no exception in that respect – we believe that the Swedish expe-
rience has some broad-ranging implications for how to combat corruption
in the world today.
The article is organised as follows. In the next section we develop our
theoretical model for explaining institutional change, departing from
Ostrom’s (1990) theory of common pool resource appropriation. Having
introduced the Swedish case in our companion article, we present in this
article our findings pertaining to the debates in the Swedish Diet of Estates
during the early decades of the nineteenth century, followed by our inter-
pretation of what explains the Swedish transition in light of our theory. We
conclude by summarising our thinking on what lessons could be learnt from
the Swedish case.

An Endogenous Theory of How to Break Out of the

Corruption Trap
In order to advance our understanding of how to explain the transition from
a largely patrimonial, nepotistic and corrupt society to a modern, Weberian,
efficient and impartial state structure, we will draw upon and contribute to
the literature on corruption.Two theories have hitherto dominated the field.
The first is the so-called ‘principal-agent model’, popularised by the work of
Susan Rose-Ackerman (1978) and Robert Klitgaard (1988). Consider the
model of corruption developed in Becker and Stigler’s (1974) classic treat-
ment. The problem is seen as how to raise the quality of law enforcement by
discouraging malfeasance, such as the taking of bribes, among law enforcers.
The state, being the principal in this model, cannot perfectly observe which
law enforcers behave honestly. This opens the possibility for bribery. Taking
bribes is of course rewarding for the agents (individual law enforcers/
bureaucrats), but it is also risky: being detected means being fired and
forced to take up another occupation, possibly at a lower wage. Although
this simple setup has been elaborated in various ways (see, e.g., Van
Rijckeghem & Weder 2001), it is immediately clear that the extent of
corruption in this model hinges on three factors: the value of the bribe
offered (the motivation), the probability of being detected when collecting
bribes, and the loss incurred by being detected (in this case the wage differ-
ence, more generally in terms of the legal remedies applied as punishment).

240 Scandinavian Political Studies, Vol. 38 – No. 3, 2015

 © 2015 Nordic Political Science Association

As a way of understanding and remedying bureaucratic corruption in

situations where there is a clear political will to tackle the problem, this
approach certainly has its strengths (Di Tella & Schargrodsky 2003; Olken
2007). Nevertheless, a key theoretical problem with the Becker-Stigler
model, severely restricting its domain of applicability, is that it presumes
the existence of a benevolent principal (Aidt 2003). More specifically, it is
assumed that leaders, such as autocrats, high-level officials or elected poli-
ticians, are genuinely interested in curbing corruption. This is a fairly
heroic assumption on a general scale. If the main problem concerning
corruption in the world today was how to make corrupt bureaucrats
respond to the cues of benevolent state leaders, we would arguably
already have taken a gigantic stride towards a solution since it is well-
known how to change incentives. A deeper problem is that since the
principal-agent theory is based on the assumption that all social agents are
rational, self-interested utility-maximisers, the honest and altruistic princi-
pal is not supposed to exist within the theory. What the theory present us
with is in fact an ad hoc solution to the problem of corruption (Persson
et al. 2013).
According to another family of corruption theories, no assumptions are
made about the existence of a particular set of actors (‘principals’) whose
overall goal it is to curb corruption. Rather, it is assumed that almost
everyone has something to gain from a corrupt system as long as a large
enough body of actors continues to play foul. In line with this argument, a
large number of game-theoretic scholars have argued that the rewards of
corruption can be expected to depend critically on how many other indi-
viduals in the same society are corrupt (Andvig 1991; Bardhan 1997; Aidt
2003). Lui (1986), Cadot (1987) and Andvig and Moene (1990), for example,
take into account the fundamental observation that both the profitability
and costliness of corruption depend on its frequency: as more public officials
become corrupt, it becomes more profitable to be corrupt too because the
costs for auditing corrupt officials increase (also see Sah 2005). As should be
clear, this structure of incentives leads to a collective action problem:
despite the fact that everyone realises that another outcome would be
preferable, if most others are expected to play foul, everyone will play foul.
It is thus more expensive in the short term not to play by ‘the rules of the
game’, even if most people realise that they as a collective stand to lose from
the ongoing corrupt practices and morally condemn them (Karklins 2005;
Persson et al. 2013). This builds on the presumption that agents in a sys-
temically corrupt setting understand that corruption is hurting their societ-
ies and that the normative distinction between corruption and the opposite
to corruption. Recent quantitative anthropological research, as well as
surveys from highly corrupt countries, clearly points in this direction
(Rothstein & Torsello 2014; Widmalm 2005).

Scandinavian Political Studies, Vol. 38 – No. 3, 2015 241

© 2015 Nordic Political Science Association

Although the collective action theory in our view is a more appropriate

tool for diagnosing the problem of corruption, it is not very useful for
understanding the forces of change. If corruption is such a strong and
self-reinforcing equilibrium, how can real-world actors break out of it?
Whereas we highlighted a key structural trigger in the companion article –
the importance of losing a war (Teorell & Rothstein 2015) – we also need a
theory of the process of change when seen from the actors’ perspectives.The
argument we would like to put forward is that state actors may become
aware of the collective action problem they are facing, as well as the collec-
tive costs they bear for retaining their corrupt and dysfunctional equilib-
rium behaviour, and thereby work out solutions that enable them to break
out of this equilibrium (cf Popa 2011).
The primary source of inspiration for this theory is Elinor Ostrom’s
(1990) seminal approach to explaining the evolution of institutions for
solving collective action problems in ‘common pool resource’ (CPR) set-
tings.1 Recall the prototypical setup of the problem Ostrom tried to solve:
Some fishermen lay their nets in the same lake. Since each of them in the
short run profits directly in proportion to the number of fish he can catch,
each has a similar incentive to lay as many nets as he can possibly afford.The
net result of these individual efforts, however, is overfishing in the long run,
leading to a diminishing fish yield per fisherman. The fishermen are thus
facing a collective action problem, the solution to which would be an insti-
tution, such as a collective decision-making board, that could allocate fishing
ratios or efficient rotation systems that would enable everyone to make a
decent and sustainable living out of the fish. But such an institution would
itself constitute a public good, so its establishment is but another collective
action problem, now of the second order (cf Bates 1988).
By solely taking the pure incentive structure of collective action problems
into account, it is hard to account for the establishment of efficient (i.e.,
honest and impartial) institutions to resolve them. As Ostrom (1990) shows,
however, there are numerous examples of ways in which real actors in real
world situations, outside the analytical models, have resolved these issues
and successfully established socially efficient institutions. By learning from
these examples, she urges us to provide the building blocks of what she calls
a ‘behavioral theory of rational action’ (Ostrom 1998). Drawing on this
analogy, what we propose is a model where the state agents are the fisher-
men, and their corrupt, patrimonial or otherwise dysfunctional behaviour is
their laying of too many nets in the same lake, with short-term benefits
reaped by each but long-term harm incurred on all. We thus wish to retain
the collective action theory of corruption as the appropriate tool for diag-
nosing the problem, but we want to supplement it with Ostrom’s (1990)
behavioural theory of rational action as a means of understanding how this
set of state actors themselves, through endogenous mechanisms, may not

242 Scandinavian Political Studies, Vol. 38 – No. 3, 2015

 © 2015 Nordic Political Science Association

only understand why change is necessary but also establish a new set of
enforceable behavioural rules that restricts dysfunctional and corrupt
behaviour.We also want to emphasise that the differences between handling
a Ostrom type of local common pool resources problem and the way a
whole state administration operates are very large – not least in terms of the
specific institutional arrangements that must be put in place. It is therefore
not the specific list of ‘design rules’ put forward by Ostrom that we apply
here, but rather the basic logic of her model for explaining how actors are
able to break out of a collective action problem.
In Ostrom’s (1990, 42–5) view, explaining the rise of collective goods
institutions can be separated into three separate puzzles: the problem of
supply, the problem of credible commitments and the problem of mutual
monitoring. The first problem is just a reformulation of the second-order
collective action problem: who will supply the new set of institutions in a
setting where everyone benefits most from carrying on business as usual?
The second problem pertains to the long-term enforcement of abidance to
the new rules: how can the actors credibly commit to not reverting to
shirking in the future? This, in turn, depends on the third problem of how
to organise a system of mutual monitoring so that everyone conforms to the
new rules. In the case of natural resource appropriators such as herders or
fishermen, Ostrom (1990, 89–100, 185–6) could show that the solution to the
latter two problems was facilitated by the extent to which a group con-
formed to a set of ‘design rules’, such as clearly defined boundaries of the
common pool resource, attentiveness to local conditions, participation by
the appropriators in collective-choice arrangements, monitoring executed
by the appropriators themselves or actors accountable to them, and not
shirking being sanctioned by using graduated as opposed to ‘stark’ or
‘shock’ punishment. The solution of the initial crucial problem of supply, in
turn, could be explained by referring to the appropriators’ information on
the expected benefits of introducing the new institutional setting, the costs
involved in making the transformation, the extent to which they discounted
or cared about the future, and the evolution of internalised norms about
appropriate behaviour (Ostrom 1990, 192–207).
The possibility we propose is that public administrators in a patrimonial
and corrupt setting face the same problems as the appropriators of a
common pool resource (albeit on a somewhat larger scale). They must
overcome the problems of supply, credible commitment and mutual moni-
toring. Moreover, their level of information of the consequences of their
situation, of transformation costs, discount rates and internal norms as well
as the design rules to which they must abide could become cornerstones in
an endogenous theory of how they solve these problems. Following Hardin
(1995) and Medina (2007), we argue that if the collective action problem
comes to be seen a coordination problem by the agents, and not as a pure

Scandinavian Political Studies, Vol. 38 – No. 3, 2015 243

© 2015 Nordic Political Science Association

‘prisoners dilemma’ situation,2 cooperation becomes more likely as the

payoff of the collective good increases. However, for this to be possible, the
agents must be convinced that ‘another world is possible’ – meaning that
they can to some extent envision a situation in which the collective action
problem is solved. This implies that new ideas and ideology should be an
important ingredient in the solution for solving the collective action
problem.

The Debates in the Diet of Estates

Thanks to a new electronically available register created by a special (vol-
untary) project (www.runeberg.org), we have been able to analyse parts of
the debate about a number of specific issues related to corruption and state
capacity in the Swedish Diet (Riksdag) between 1809 and 1858. This mate-
rial, consisting of minutes from the debates in the four estates, is very large
and we can at this stage only present a few illustrations of how the deputies
argued. We have also searched the regular indexes of the minutes from the
Swedish Diet for this period.
To repeat the historical context from our companion article, Sweden lost
Finland in the war with Russia in 1809. This in turn precipitated a military-
backed but civilian-led coup against the incumbent regime, ousting the king
and replacing him with one of Napoleon’s generals imported from France,
but also leading to several other more fundamental transformations of the
Swedish constitution and its system of rule. At the level of the actors, which
is what mostly interests us here, we may conclude three things from this
rapid and very dramatic set of events. The first is that the central actors
perceived that very existence of Sweden as an independent country was at
stake. The second is that, at least in part, the military defeat was blamed on
the incompetence of the officer corps, which in part was seen as a result of
the patrimonial system for recruitment and promotion. Third, as argued by
Edgren (2005, 55), it was clear to most of the political elite that Sweden
badly needed a ‘new start’ in order to secure the very existence of the
country as an independent nation.
So how did this then affect the reasoning among the Swedish political
elite? One example is the view about the separation of ‘private’ and ‘public’
money. In the patrimonial order, the view of the public position was for it to
be akin to a fiefdom from which the holder of a position could extract
private resources as long as a certain dividend was delivered to the state.
This implied that there was no clear line between private and public money,
and civil servants frequently took ‘loans’ from the public coffers. But in
1823, a government bill was put forward to deal with embezzlement. In the
existing legislation, civil servants who embezzled public money but, after
having been discovered, paid back the ‘loan’ were to be given a lesser

244 Scandinavian Political Studies, Vol. 38 – No. 3, 2015

 © 2015 Nordic Political Science Association

sentence than those that could not or would not return the money. The
government bill stipulated that this should no longer be the case because
‘since the nature of the crime is the same, the punishment should be the
same’.3 The bill also stated that all categories of civil servants should be
included in this new legislation, which was a novelty pointing in the direc-
tion of universalism. Three of the estates agreed to this, indicating a that a
change had taken place in this important trait of Weberianism. Interestingly
enough, some opposition came from the estate of the clergy who argued
that civil servants that just used public money ‘temporarily’ and could pay
back should not be sentenced harshly.4
The Riksdag also discussed the ‘accord system’ that prevailed in the
Swedish state and the military. ‘Accord’ was a sum of money that a person
wanting promotion to a higher position had to pay to the holder of that
position. The sums were considerable and it was generally believed that one
reason for why the Swedish army did so badly against the Russians in the
1808–9 war was the accord system (Nordensvan 1908; cf Larsson 2000).
Officers of limited capacity and training were, via this system, promoted to
positions for which they were not capable of taking responsibility (Isaksson
2009; Artéus 1982; Larsson 2000). No less than five laws and regulations
stating that ‘accord’ was to be prohibited were issued by the Swedish gov-
ernment during the first part of the eighteenth century, but to no avail.
Instead, the system was formally regulated in 1757 and the sums to be
allowed were decided (Larsson 2000, 28). However, regulation of the sums
did not work and was formally abolished in 1767. The accord system was
again outlawed in 1774, but also this time to no avail (Larsson 2000).
After a new decision in 1793, the system became partly legal and sums
were stipulated by the government, but it frequently happened that the
holder of the position demanded and got higher payments. In the Riksdag of
1828–30, a private bill was put forward arguing that the illegal accords
should be punishable because they inhibited the development of a ‘good
esprit’ within the civil service since the person who got promoted had not
gotten his position thanks to ‘merit and competence’, but rather with money,
which put the civil servant in a ‘despicable and dependent’ position and had
a ‘detrimental effect on the State’s finances’.5 The motion, which was sup-
ported by the estate of the nobility, proposed that persons who had obtained
their position by illegal accord sums should lose their position and the
money paid confiscated by the state. The bill was defeated with the argu-
ment that it would not be possible to enforce such a ruling and that the
government was preparing a different legal strategy for handling this issue.6
The issue was hardly addressed in the ensuing Riksdag meetings and the
accord system was not finally abolished until the 1870s, when a regular
pension system for civil servants and military officers was introduced
(Larsson 2000). For some special positions, like that of county governor, the

Scandinavian Political Studies, Vol. 38 – No. 3, 2015 245

© 2015 Nordic Political Science Association

accord system lasted until the early twentieth century (Rothstein 1998). The
estate of the burghers, for example, had a very intense debate about the
accord system in 1834 and the representatives argued that, although it was
illegal,‘everyone knows’ that positions in the army and the civil service have
been bought. Moreover, the arguments from the representatives in the
burghers’ estate were Weberian to the point, holding that the positions of
high-level civil servants should not be seen as ‘property in the hands of the
beholder’, but rather as being based on the consent and trust of ‘the
people’.7 Positions should be filled based on merit, and money should not be
involved because it would impinge upon the ‘impartiality’ of the civil
servant.8
There are a couple of things that are important to notice concerning the
accord system. The first is that already in the early nineteenth century,
possibly as an effect of the defeat of the Swedish army in 1809, there is an
awareness among parts of the political elite that the accord system is dys-
functional.9 There is also awareness that the system is heavily misused,
especially in the military. The reason that it is not dealt with is primarily
related to cost. The accord system worked like a ‘pyramid-type’ pension
system and, without the establishment of a regular pension system for civil
servants and military officers, laws and regulations against it would have
little or no effect. Thus, recognition of the need for a more Weberian system
came well before the money, making it possible for the state to introduce the
system. This is also an explanation for the rather long time that passed
between the external threat that the military defeat in 1809 caused and the
actual reform period which started some four decades later. The country
after 1809 was on the brink of economic collapse and it took quite some
time for the economy and public finances to recover (Schön 2012). This is
comparable to what Sundell (2014) has shown for how the ‘sportler’ system
came to an end. The problem was partly overcome by legalising previously
illegal payments to civil servants and military officers. According to the
Riksdag commission that handled this issue, the idea was that in a future
regulation of the state’s wage system, those who had paid ‘accord’ for their
positions but who after the regulation came into effect could not expect to
be paid in their turn, should be compensated by state.10 This was supposed
to be an expensive affair.
It should also be noted that in the debate about the accords in the 1834
Riksdag, the central arguments for Weberianism based on legitimacy are put
forward especially by deputies of the burghers’ estate, but also in the estates
of the peasants and the nobility (the clergy were more wishy-washy). The
civil service needed to be seen as legitimate by the people, which required
recruitment based on merit and service based on impartiality as essential
ingredients.11 State positions should not be seen as ways to collect rents
(näringsfång), but as common/public good services. Thus, from what can be

246 Scandinavian Political Studies, Vol. 38 – No. 3, 2015

 © 2015 Nordic Political Science Association

seen in the minutes, in the mindset of the elected representatives in three of

the estates at the 1834 Riksdag, legitimacy principles from the feudal/
aristocratic/patrimonial society based on divine principles and/or heritage/
tradition were no longer seen as valid. The following quote from the
parliamentary committee that dealt with the issue in 1829 gives a flavour of
the reasoning:
The committee has realized the drawbacks of the so-called accord system within the army
. . . but since this is an evil which it is difficult and not without the greatest sacrifices of the
State can be fully abolish, a purpose, although alluded to but could not be won by the
accords regulation of 1793, the Committee considers it may be better that this time-honored
abuse is formally allowed, but it should trough stringent regulations be held within defined
limits.12

The idea that the accord system constituted an illegitimate and socially
inefficient praxis was thus high on the political agenda several decades
before it was de facto abolished (Edgren 2005, 139). However, if this system,
along with the ‘sportler’ system, should fall under the label of ‘corruption’ is
debatable as it was both legal and customary. However, it was clearly seen
as illegitimate in the debates in the Diet and must fall under the concept of
‘patrimonialism’ since the system blurred the distinction between private
and public money that is central to the Weberian model of public adminis-
tration. The arguments put forward was that the accord system made civil
servants work for their own sake instead of the ‘public good’ and that the
system led to a position in the civil service being perceived as private
property thereby preventing fairer, meritocratic recruitment.13 The debating
legislators also realised the limited effect that central rules and regulations
had upon this ‘time-honored’ practice. The reason it could not be dealt with
was not a lack of awareness of the problem and its consequences, but
something much simpler: the lack of money.
Motive for change is not enough to explain the direction of change.
Where did the specific ideas of meritocracy, impartiality, professionalism
and accountability in the civil service come from? Our answer is that these
ideas were rooted in the type of enlightenment liberalism that formed the
base for the political opposition against monarchial rule and the power of
the conservative aristocracy that dominated the Swedish state during the
first half of the nineteenth century. This political conflict between the new
liberal political ideology (mostly imported to Sweden from France and the
United Kingdom) and the ‘ancient regime’ became quite strong from 1830s
and it was fueled by three things. First, compared to other countries, there
was a high degree of press freedom which resulted in the liberal press
coming to dominate political life in Sweden from the mid-1830s. Second, the
estate of burghers, which until then had been dominated by local judges and
civil servants often appointed by the king and his council, came to incorpo-
rate more elements from the new more independent and liberally oriented

Scandinavian Political Studies, Vol. 38 – No. 3, 2015 247

© 2015 Nordic Political Science Association

capitalist class of industrialists and merchants (Wichman 1927, 11; cf

Andersson 2003). And third, the estate of peasants in the Diet, which until
the late 1820s had been easy prey for all kinds of bribery and domination
from the king and his allies, became a much more independent and self-
assured political force that often went into an alliance with the liberal
politicians in the burgher’s estate. There were also several liberal members
of the estate of nobility in the Diet (Wichman 1927). Taken together, these
forces not only demanded the abolition of the old estate Diet and its
replacement with a more representative parliament and a government that
respected the constitution and other laws. Following the liberal ideas of
political equality, they also demanded meritocratic recruitment, profes-
sional competence and accountability for the civil service and ‘absolute
impartiality in the implementation of the laws’ (Wichman 1927, 12). In
particular, the liberal opposition and the liberal press reacted strongly
against the way the king and his council (and close secret advisors) favoured
members of the aristocracy, political allies and relatives in recruitment and
promotion within the civil service (Wichman 1927, 12, 24–6). The liberal
opposition’s critique against the civil service for succumbing to favouritism
and massive incompetence was also very outspoken (Edgren 2005, 138–9).

Toward an Endogenous Explanation of the Process

of Change
We now turn to how this Swedish process of change can be explained in
theoretical terms. To begin with, it should then be noted that we have failed
to secure any evidence of a reform-minded principal in the early nineteenth
century set on a mission to reform the bureaucracy. Not even the case of
Gustavus III and the inauguration of the High Court in 1789 is a good
example of a reform introduced in this manner, since, as pointed out in our
companion article (Teorell & Rothstein 2015), the king’s motivation for the
reform was short-sighted and not at all aimed at coming to grips with
corruption or malfeasance in public administration.
We would instead suggest applying Ostrom’s (1990) endogenous theory
of institutional change to understand the Swedish case. To begin with the
problem of supply, the picture that emanates from our study of the debates
in the Diet of Estates is clearly one of awareness and information. The key
actors of the era seem to have foreseen the benefits of establishing new
institutions for avoiding patrimonial shirking, and in a way that did not
discount the future too heavily (Edgren 2010). At the same time, as shown
above, the Diet also clearly saw the financial costs involved in the transfor-
mation and – at least at the beginning of the nineteenth century – weighed
the latter heavier than the former. As to their internal norms, this is of
course something that is extremely hard to observe from the historical

248 Scandinavian Political Studies, Vol. 38 – No. 3, 2015

 © 2015 Nordic Political Science Association

record, but two observations can be made. According to Coleman (1990),

the likelihood for an internalised norm (one that does not require external
sanctions) in a social system is directly related to its degree of closure, which
basically means the density of social interactions. The first observation to
make in this regard is that the Swedish public administration by the early
nineteenth century was not a huge organisation. The public officials at
the central level numbered slightly less than a thousand in 1823 (Nilsson
2000, 5), and if we add the local administration to that number we end up
with roughly another 1,700 people (Carlsson 1973, 55, 77). This relatively
modest size increases the chances of closure and thus favourable norm
development.
We may also make some general observations on the ‘design rules’ in
place for upholding the new equilibrium institution of Weberian adminis-
tration in the Swedish case. One concerns what Ostrom (1990, 93–4) terms
participation by the ‘appropriators’ in collective choice arrangements. It is
indeed the existence of such an important collective choice arrangement
that made our study of debates possible – namely the Swedish Riksdag. It
should be remembered that except for the house of peasants, the Diet was
predominantly populated by public officials. In the house of nobility, two-
thirds of the deputies held a position in public administration (although this
figure also includes the military) (Flodström 1936, 67). In the house of
burghers, moreover, around a third of the deputies were local judges (Höjer
1936, 96), whereas all of the clergy in the house of clerics were ‘civil servants’
(albeit of a peculiar kind). This means that a substantial number of public
administrators were part of the decision-making process through which the
legislative reforms were enacted.
In sum, we view this as supportive evidence for interpreting the Swedish
transition from a patrimonial and semi-corrupt to a Weberian order as
compatible with the endogenous theory of institutional change. Neverthe-
less, there are two important points to make about the conditions under
which this process took place, with the first having to do with the monitoring
and sanctioning system just discussed. Obviously everything cannot change
at once, and if our interpretation of the historical record is correct, one
prerequisite for the endogenous process of institutional change to ‘ignite’
seems to have been that a reasonably fair and clean court system had
already been established. How this could come about needs further study,
but as our companion article documents (Teorell & Rothstein 2015), it
seems clear that the court system seems to have worked fairly well handling
corruption-related matters and malfeasance from the early nineteenth
century; and the same goes for Denmark (Frisk-Jensen 2008). Without a
reasonably uncorrupt court system, it becomes meaningless to press charges
against corrupt public officials. Simply put, you have to start with something
and at least in these cases, the court system went first.

Scandinavian Political Studies, Vol. 38 – No. 3, 2015 249

© 2015 Nordic Political Science Association

A second precondition is ideological – namely the rise of liberalism and

an organised liberal opposition as a powerful political force in Swedish
politics from the 1830s.The latter was heavily dependent on the rise of a new
sphere of public debate in the form of widely circulated newspapers. Thus,
in combination with our companion article (Teorell & Rothstein 2015), we
can point at one institutional precondition (the courts), one important criti-
cal event (the loss of the war with Russia and the 1809 revolution that
followed) and one ideological factor (liberalism) as the conditions for the
institutional change towards a Weberian civil service. The more important
contribution of this article, however, has been to suggest that the Swedish
political elite, after having experienced what they interpreted as a real
threat to the very existence of the Swedish state, was able to replace the old
order with a new one in a manner similar to the actors in Ostrom’s (1990)
story about how to overcome common pool resource problems.

Conclusions
‘Getting to Denmark’ has recently become a catchphrase in development
research, especially among economists (Pritchett & Woolcock 2004; cf
Fukuyama 2011). What this indicates is that there may be some lessons to be
learnt from how countries such as Sweden (and Denmark) managed to
move from ingrained systems of patrimonialism, and what today would be
defined as systemic corruption, to a Weberian type of state. In general we
agree with this sentiment. There seems to be a fairly good general under-
standing within donor circles of what system of governance developing
countries should try to adopt. However, far less is known about how the
transition to this ideal state from a dysfunctional system actually works. In
this sense, it is of outmost importance to try to learn from the few examples
there are of having completed this transition.
Yet it must also be recognised that the policy implications of these pre-
vious examples might not be portable; they could even be ethically indefen-
sible. The policy advice ‘try to lose a war, and lose it big time’ is, for example,
not quite what one would expect any sensible aid-recipient country wants to
hear. We must thus take a very cautious stance toward developing ready-
made ‘lessons’ from the history of one set of countries to the present day
situation of another.
Having said this, we still believe it makes sense to at least tentatively
discuss some broader implications of the findings from this and our com-
panion article. First of all, anti-corruption reform takes time. Judging from
the trends in malfeasance cases in both Sweden and Denmark, it took at
least 40 years for the bulk of malpractices to leave the system. If we add to
this the hard-fought reform of the salary and pension systems for the public
employees, as well as the new penal code for misconduct, the time period

250 Scandinavian Political Studies, Vol. 38 – No. 3, 2015

 © 2015 Nordic Political Science Association

was even longer. We should therefore not expect reforms against corruption
to pay off in the short term.
Second, it is important to notice that the general awareness that some-
thing was seriously wrong with the patrimonial system became established
among a broad spectrum of the political elite quite early in the process and
several decades before industrialism and modern market economy capital-
ism developed in these countries (generally seen as starting in the 1870s).
With political liberalism came also ideas about political equality and impar-
tiality in the implementation of the laws that served to give direction to the
type of reforms that were needed. While this is not tantamount to stating
that the new Weberian ideology and later practice caused industrialisation
and economic development more broadly, we can at least state that it cannot
have been the other way around. In other words, economic growth and
modernisation are not necessarily prerequisites for anti-corruption reform.
A third, well-known conclusion is that the impartial/universalist/
impersonal state machinery developed before representative democracy
was in place in both Denmark and Sweden (it is typically viewed as being a
twentieth-century phenomenon). The policy implication of this is somewhat
unpleasant since democracy as a system of values has so many other good
things speaking for it. It is important to note, however, that the fact that
many countries in the Western world made the transition under authoritar-
ian rule should not be interpreted as an argument in favour of authoritari-
anism today. Rather, the important implication is that we should not simply
expect electoral representative democracy to do the job for us – at least not
on its own.
Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, the endogenous theory of institu-
tional change which we have found support for in the Swedish case sets
some limits for reform-minded aid donors in the West with the agenda to
make transformations from corruption to ‘good governance’ possible in the
Third World. As pointed out by Fukuyama (2004), not only has our knowl-
edge of this fundamental change in our own societies been under-
developed, but it is also far from evident that we have the capacity to
transfer that knowledge to other contexts and parts of the world. What we
have shown in this article is that this ‘bring it in from the outside’ approach
might be misdirected from the outset. If the endogenous theory of anti-
corruption reform proves applicable to other cases, it seems that this fun-
damental change could very well be brought about from the inside.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank Alice Johansson, Sofia Jonsson and Dan Johansson for indispensable
research assistance in preparing the empirical material for this article, and Per Andersson,
Andreas Bågenholm, Carl Dahlström, Kim Olsen and Anders Sundell, as well as participants
of the workshop ‘Building State Capacity: The Other Side of Political Development’, Radcliffe
Institute, Harvard University, 4–5 May 2012; at the Quality of Government Institute project

Scandinavian Political Studies, Vol. 38 – No. 3, 2015 251

© 2015 Nordic Political Science Association

conference in Barcelona, 7–9 January 2013; at the 20th International Conference of

Europeanists, Amsterdam, 25–27 June 2013; and at the Annual Meeting of the American
Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, 29 August–1 September 2013, for invaluable com-
ments on earlier drafts.

NOTES
1. A related approach, that we found less useful for our purposes, is the otherwise
theoretically encompassing and historically framed theory of institutional change
advanced by North et al. (2009). They neither acknowledge the fight against corruption
is a key feature of the change from a ‘natural state’ to the ‘open access order’, nor do
they conceive of the latter as a process facing collective action problems.
2. Prisoners dilemma-type situations are games with a single equilibrium where shirking
always pays off, regardless of what others do. Coordination-type situations, by contrast,
are games with multiple equilibria where the rational choice of strategy for each
individual depends on his or her expectations of what all others will do (see, e.g.,
Hardin 1995; Medina 2007, Chapter 2).
3. Bihang till Riksståndens protokoll 1823, vol. 7 avd. 2, s. 1296.
4. Bihang till Riksståndens protokoll 1823, vol. 7 avd. 2, s. 1300.
5. Bihang till Riksståndens protokoll 1828–30, vol. 7, avd. 2, ss. 3–4.
6. Ibid, p. 7–8.
7. Borgarståndets protokoll 1834, vol. 2, pp. 78–82 and 94–8.
8. Bihang till RiksStåndens Protocoll 1834, vol. 8, s. 6.
9. See Bihang till Riksståndens protokoll 1828–9, betänkande nr. 132, vol. 4, sec. 2, s. 186.
10. Minutes from the Estate of the Burghers, 1834, vol. 2, pp. 78–82 and 94–8; Minutes from
the Estate of the Peasants, 1834, vol. 4, pp 23–8; Minutes from the Estate of the Nobility,
1834, vol. 6, pp. 18–23; Minutes from the Estate of the Clergy, 1834, vol. 3, pp. 401–4.
11. Bihang till Riksståndens Protokoll 1828–9, betänkande nr. 132, vol. 4, sec. 2, s. 186.
12. Ibid.
13. Bihang till RiksStåndens Protocoll 1834, vol. 8, sec. 2, ss. 94–8.

REFERENCES
Acemoglu, D. & Robinson, J. A. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and
Poverty. New York: Crown Business.
Aidt, T. 2003. ‘Economic Analysis of Corruption: A Survey’, Economic Journal, 113(491),
F632–F652.
Andersson, L. I. 2003. ‘I Revolutionens svallvågor 1800–1850’, in Sveriges historia under 1800-
och 1900-talen. Stockholm: Liber.
Andvig, J. 1991. ‘The Economics of Corruption: A Survey’, Studi economici, 43(1), 57–94.
Andvig, J. & Moene, K. O. 1990. ‘How Corruption May Corrupt’, Journal of Economic Behav-
ior, 13(1), 63–76.
Artéus, G. 1982. Krigsmakt och samhälle i frihetstidens Sverige. Stockholm: Militärhistoriska
förlaget.
Bardhan, P. 1997. ‘Corruption and Development: A Review of Issues’, Journal of Economic
Literature, 35(3), 1320–46.
Bates, R. 1988. ‘Contra Contractarianism: Some Reflections on the New Institutionalism’,
Politics and Society, 16(2–3), 387–401.
Becker, G. & Stigler, G. 1974. ‘Law Enforcement, Malfeasance and Compensation of Enforc-
ers’, Journal of Legal Studies, 3(1), 1–19.
Bentzen, J. S. 2012. ‘How Bad is Corruption? Cross-country Evidence of the Impact of Cor-
ruption on Economic Prosperity’, Review of Development Economics, 16(1), 167–84.
Billger, S. M. & Goel, R. K. 2009. ‘Do Existing Corruption Levels Matter in Controlling
Corruption? Cross-country Quantile Regression Estimates’, Journal of Development Eco-
nomics, 90, 299–305.
Cadot, O. 1987. ‘Corruption as a Gamble’, Journal of Public Economics, 33(2), 223–44.

252 Scandinavian Political Studies, Vol. 38 – No. 3, 2015

 © 2015 Nordic Political Science Association

Carlsson, S. 1973. Ståndssamhäle och ståndspersoner 1700–1865. Studie i det svenska

ståndssamhällets upplösning. Lund: Gleerups.
Coleman, J. 1990. Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Collier, M. 2002. ‘Explaining Corruption: An Institutional Choice Approach’, Crime, Law and
Social Change, 38, 1–32.
Di Tella, R. & Schargrodsky, E. 2003. ‘The Role of Wages and Auditing during a Crackdown on
Corruption in the City of Buenos Aires’, Journal of Law and Economics, 46(1), 269–92.
Edgren, H. 2005. Publicitet för medborgsmannavett: Det nationellt svenska i
Stockholmstidningar, 1810–1831. Dissertation, Department of History, Uppsala University.
Edgren, H. 2010. ‘Traumakonstruktionen, Svensk historieskrivning om rikssprängningen 1809’,
Scandia, 76(1), 9–39.
Flodström, G. 1936.‘Ridderskapet och adeln 1809–1866’, in Studier över den svenska riksdagens
sociala sammansättning. Uppsala och Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell.
Frisk Jensen, M. 2008. Korruption og embedsetik: Danske embedsmænds korruption i perioden
1800 til 1886. Doctoral dissertation, Aalborg University.
Fukuyama, F. 2004. State-building: Governance and World Order in the Twenty-first Century.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Fukuyama, F. 2011. The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French
Revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Goel, R. K. & Nelson, M. A. 2010. ‘Causes of Corruption: History, Geography and Govern-
ment’, Journal of Policy Modeling, 32, 433–47.
Gundlach, E. & Paldam, M. 2009. ‘The Transition of Corruption: From Poverty to Honesty’,
Economics Letters, 103, 146–8.
Hardin, R. 1995. One for All: The Logic of Group Conflict. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Holmberg, S. & Rothstein, B. eds. 2012. Good Government. The Relevance of Political Science.
Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Höjer, C.-H. 1936. ‘Borgarståndet 1809–1866’, in Studier över den svenska riksdagens sociala
sammansättning. Uppsala och Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell.
Isaksson, A. 2009. Kärlek och krig: revolutionen 1809. Enskede: TPB.
Karklins, R. 2005. The System Made Me Do It: Corruption in Post-communist Countries. New
York: M.E. Sharpe.
Klitgaard, R. 1988. Controlling Corruption. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Larsson, E. 2000. Officerskåren i Sverige under 1700-talet: En studie av tjänsteställning, avlöning
och tjänsteköp. Doctoral thesis, Uppsala University.
Lui, F. 1986. A Dynamic Model of Corruption Deterrence, Journal of Public Economics, 31(2),
215–36.
Medina, L. F. 2007. A Unified Theory of Collective Action and Social Change. Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press.
Nilsson, T. 2000. ‘Ämbetsmannen i själva verket – rekrytering och avancemang i en
moderniserad stat 1809–1880’, SCORE rapportserie 2000: 5. Stockholm: Samtidshistoriska
institutet, Södertörns högskola.
Nordensvan, O. 1908. Synpunkter och betrakelser. Stockholm: Bonnier.
Norris, P. 2012. Democratic Governance and Human Security: The Impact of Regimes on
Prosperity, Welfare and Peace. New York: Cambridge University Press.
North, D., Wallis, J. J. & Weingast, B. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Frame-
work for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Olken, B. 2007. ‘Monitoring Corruption: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia’,
Journal of Political Economy, 115(2), 200–49.
Ostrom, E. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ostrom, E. 1998. ‘A Behavioral Approach to the Rational Choice Theory of Collective Action’,
American Political Science Review, 92(1), 1–22.
Ott, J. C. 2010. ‘Good Governance and Happiness in Nations: Technical Quality Precedes
Democracy and Quality Beats Size’, Journal of Happiness Studies, 11(3), 353–68.
Persson, A., Rothstein, B. & Teorell, J. 2013. ‘Why Anticorruption Reforms Fails: Systemic
Corruption as a Collective Action Problem’, Governance, 26, 449–71.

Scandinavian Political Studies, Vol. 38 – No. 3, 2015 253

© 2015 Nordic Political Science Association

Popa, M. 2011. Political Corruption: A Model of Endogenous Reform and a Test Using British
Data. Paper presented at the 2011 APSA Annual Meeting, Seattle, WA, 1–4 September.
Pritchett, L. & Woolcock, M. 2004. ‘Solutions When the Solution is the Problem: Arraying the
Disarray in Development’, World Development, 32(2), 191–212.
Rodrik, D. 2007. One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions and Economic
Growth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Rose-Ackerman, S. 1978. Corruption: A Study in Political Economy. New York: Academic
Press.
Rothstein, B. 1998. ‘State Building and Capitalism: The Rise of the Swedish Bureaucracy’,
Scandinavian Political Studies, 21(4), 287–306.
Rothstein, B. 2011. ‘Anti-corruption: The Indirect “Big Bang” Approach’, Review of Interna-
tional Political Economy, 18, 228–50.
Rothstein, B. & Torsello, D. 2014. ‘Bribery in Pre-industrial Societies: Understanding the
Universalism-Particularism Puzzle’, Journal of Anthropological Research, 70, 263–82.
Sah, R. 2005. Large and Persistent Differences in Corruption across Countries and Regions.
Unpublished manuscript, University of Chicago
Schön, L. 2012. An Economic History of Modern Sweden. London: Routledge.
Sundell, A. 2014.‘Understanding Informal Payments in the Public Sector:Theory and Evidence
from Nineteenth Century Sweden’, Scandinavian Political Studies, 37(2), 95–122.
Svallfors, S. 2013. ‘Government Quality, Egalitarianism and Attitudes to Taxes and Social
Spending: A European Comparison’, European Political Science Review, 5(3), 363–80.
Teorell, J. & Rothstein, B. 2015. ‘Getting to Sweden, Part I: War and Malfeasance, 1720–1850’,
Scandinavian Political Studies, forthcoming.
Treisman, D. 2000. ‘The Causes of Corruption: A Cross-national Study’, Journal of Public
Economics, 76, 399–457.
Uslaner, E. M. 2008. Corruption, Inequality and the Rule of Law: The Bulging Pocket Makes the
Easy Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Van Rijckeghem, C. & Weder, B. 2001. ‘Corruption and the Rate of Temptation: Do Low Wages
in the Civil Service Cause Corruption?’, Journal of Development Economics, 65(2), 291–307.
Wichman, K. 1927. Karl XIV Johans regering och den liberala oppositionen. Göteborg:
Pehrssons Förlag.
Widmalm, S. 2005. ‘Explaining Corruption at the Village Level and Individual Level in India’,
Asian Survey, 45, 756–76.

254 Scandinavian Political Studies, Vol. 38 – No. 3, 2015