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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.
* 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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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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