Shifting Regimes : State Formation and Political Reform in Early Modern Sweden

How, and in what ways, could early modern state formation have promoted the development of modern democratic institutions? The research project Shifting Regimes: Representation, Administrative Reform and Institutional Change in Early Modern Sweden propose to answer this question by studying the interaction between the political and the administrative spheres during regime shifts in Sweden, c. 1527–1810. The wider purpose is to analyze the agency behind institutional change by comparing the actions of political leaders with those of major administrative bodies. To study how key decision-makers acted to influence the organization of the state the project will focus on several “critical junctures”, or periods when the Swedish state experienced substantial change in a relatively short time. This paper presents preliminary findings from one of the case studies in the larger project: the political regime shift and its consequences in 1765–1766. The case study applies the concept of ‘state capacity’ to give a theoretical explanation for the regime changes in Sweden in the mid 1760s.Shifting Regimes: Representation, administrative reform and institutional change in early modern Swede