Exploring Shades of Corruption Tolerance: Three Lessons from Iceland and Sweden

Abstract

It is sometimes argued that tolerance for corruption is universally low, i.e. that corruption is shunned among all individuals, in all societies and cultures. Against this backdrop, this paper engages in two interrelated tasks: to descriptively map variations in corruption tolerance in two low-corrupt countries, and exploratively identify factors that influence tolerance of corruption at the individual level. We note that although corruption tends to be widely disliked, there are shades to this dislike. In particular, three results stand out from our analyses. First, we reject the ‘pureness of the people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’-hypothesis, observing that if anything, politicians are less tolerant of corruption than the general public. Second, we find striking differences in corruption tolerance between such homogenous, low-corrupt and in other respects such similar nations as Iceland and Sweden; differences we argue could be traced back to their different paths to representative democracy and strong state-capacity respectively. Third, analysing within-country variations in these countries, we observe that civil-servants generally tend to have a lower tolerance for corruption than do e.g. the ‘ordinary public’ and ‘politicians’. This last result lends strength to the argument that bureaucracy and professional civil-servants should be given discretion and a high degree of autonomy from the influence of politicians to be able to lend support to a credible commitment to non-corruption.