State Building and Capitalism: The Rise of the Swedish Bureaucracy

The purpose of this article is to answer the following question: When did Swedish bureaucracy arise? That is, to determine a point in time when the organizational technology that Weber called bureaucracy became dominant in the process of Swedish state formation, as well as when bureaucracy finally replaced the feudal form of government based on the authority of nobility and the hierarchical ties of individual loyalties. The importance of this question relates to the debate on the sequential logic of economic and political development. The change from an aristocratic/particularistic to a bureaucratic/universal state apparatus can be understood as a change from despotic to infrastructural state power. Most empirical material indicates that, in terms of institutional structure, the transition to a bureaucratic administration started in the 1850s. Contrary to what most Swedish historians have argued, the Swedish state remained feudal and particularistic all they way up to the mid-19th century. If any particular decade is key to this transformation, it would be the 1870s. By then the last of the noble privileges had disappeared, a uniform salary system had been introduced, and the various state apparatuses had begun reorganizing toward a higher level of efficiency and rationality.     

Representative voter theorems

The representative voter is an individual whose strict preference for any alternative x over any alternative y implies 1) x strictly defeats y by majority rule, if there are an odd number of voters, and 2) x weakly defeats y otherwise. This result holds for the median voter if x is his ideal point or if preferences satisfy a generalized symmetry property, but not in general. We examine a formal condition that guarantees the existence of a representative voter and an economic model in which this condition holds. We also indicate a method for estimating representative voting behavior that is justified when a representative voter exists, and compare this with a method for deriving median voting behavior from an estimated demand curve.     

Sweden: The Fall of the Strong State

From the 1930s to the 1980s, Swedish politics was based on the assumption that social change could be accomplished through a specific political and administrative process. National politicians decided the aims of policy, government commissions of inquiry engaged experts who compiled available knowledge, Parliament turned the resulting proposal into law, a civil service agency implemented the policy and local authorities put it into effect. This rationalistic model of social steering can be called 'the strong state'. This article documents the fall of the strong state. It also argues that these changes to the output side of government have troubling im-plications for the operation of democracy. The reason is that the strong state model provided citizens with a reasonably clear idea of how public policies were – or should be – produced and implemented. As a result of the strong state's decline, the link from elections to policy is partly obscure, partly broken. The question for the future is whether the strong state will be replaced by some new model that provides the necessary focal points for debates on public policy, or whether stable norms will remain absent due to an inherently obscure division of labour within Sweden's policy-making and administrative structures.     

Managing the Welfare State: Lessons from Gustav Möller*

The administrative problems of the present Welfare State have come into focus in recent research. The basic question being raised is whether an elected government can control the bureaucracies that handle the social programmes, i.e., whether the intentions of the parliamentary majority really can be translated into action when they reach the point of administrative implementation. The central subject of this study is the legendary architect of the Swedish Welfare State, Gustav Möller, who was Minister of Social Affairs 1924-26 and 1932-51. It is argued that many of the problems highlighted in present theories of public administration were already apparent to Möller. As the minister responsible for the administrative construction of the Swedish Welfare State, he developed several strategies to cope with the problems of bureaucracy. Having lost the battle over the Social Democratic party leadership in 1946, Gustav Möller left the government in 1951. Subsequently many of his original anti-bureaucratic administrative strategies were reversed.