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.

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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

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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).

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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).

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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

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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

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‘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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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© 2015 Nordic Political Science Association

conference in Barcelona, 7–9 January 2013; at the 20 th 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.

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