According to Transparency international, Norway was the 5th least corrupt country in the world in 2024. Spain placed number 46. Having worked in public construction in both countries--a sector where corruption often takes place--I have some ideas about what may cause the difference.
When I worked in Spain, a big scandal broke out. Construction companies had been paying 3% of every contract as a bribe to the biggest political party in Catalonia. It was a pay-to-play scheme. Companies that did not pay, would never be awarded any contracts. Honest companies would always get low evaluations of their technical competence when they submitted bids. Officials instructed by politicians would divide the contracts between companies who paid.
Contracts were awarded based on a mix of price and technical qualifications, with ample room for subjective evaluations. Officials could set a very high technical competence score to their chosen vendor and it was almost assured to win.
I have never experienced something similar in Norway. I don't think it is because Norwegian politicians or officials are more honest, but rather because the way public procurement is organized in Norway makes corruption more difficult. In Spain, it is always a high ranking official or board, a political appointee or a politically controlled board, who has the formal authority to award public contracts. In Norway, contracts are awarded at a much lower level in the public administration. In Norway, it is the construction manager and the project manager who have responsibility for the tender process.
The advantage of the Norwegian system is that officials who work on public procurement are several levels removed from political influence, therefore political corruption is less likely to happen. There are fewer incentives for companies to try to bribe decision-makers as well. A contract or project manager, may start a tender process maybe once every two years. Even if some of them were corrupt, the impact would be quite small. And for companies it would be much less lucrative and more risky. If they wanted to corrupt a public servant, they would have to try a new one every time, and the probability of one of them being honest and denouncing the company would be very high.
In Spain, high ranking officials who award contracts participate in many tender processes. This means that both for the official and for companies, corruption may be advantageous. The official has the opportunity to collect lots of bribes, and for the company, to get many contracts by bribing a single person, so the risk is very low.
Zoning laws in both Norway and Spain are a municipal matter. Regulations and permitted uses on land, have a huge influence on its value, and therefore zoning is an area where corrupt practices flourish.
In Spain, zoning regulations are strict and thoroughly enforced, but they can be changed by a political process within the municipality. There have been many cases where a developer bought cheap land zoned for agricultural use and bribed politicians to re-zone it for industrial or residential use, thereby making it much more valuable overnight.
I am not aware of similar corruption cases in Norway, but zoning regulations here have a quirk. Developers can always ask for an exception in their projects, and it is up to the politicians to accept it or not. For example, a parcel may be regulated for single-family construction with a maximum occupancy of 25%, but a developer can ask for an exception and get approved a higher occupancy.
The Norwegian system is very vulnerable to influence peddling. This does not get registered as corruption, but it is rampant. From individuals who get an exception to build a bigger cabin than regulations allow, to retail chains who open shops where they shouldn't, all it takes is a local politician willing to sponsor your exception in the city council.
Corruption tends to be narrowly defined as involving a payment. Influence peddling is not always illegal, but it is also socially damaging. It is discriminatory and leads to lower social benefit, just as corruption does. Influence peddling in Norway is often referred to as local politics, or local democracy, but to many outsiders it clearly looks like what in many places would be considered illegal influence peddling.
An example that I know of, is when a developer, who had gotten permission to build several residential buildings in a former industrial plot, convinced the local politicians to let the municipality assume the risk of cost-overruns in the part of the project consisting of streets, sewers and other infrastructure that the municipality had required be built in order to approve the project. The normal procedure is that a developer builds the infrastructure itself (roads, streets, water network, sewers, and so on) and then the municipality takes over. In this case, the developer paid a fixed amount to the municipality in exchange for the municipality procuring all the infrastructure. The catch is that it was a fixed price based on a preliminary cost assessment, and budget overruns are almost guaranteed in this kind of projects.
Another example is when a regional administration spent millions replacing an existing pedestrian bridge with a road bridge. The existing bridge was located in a place where the river and the main road run parallel. A little village lies on the other side of the river and was serviced by two bridges, a road bridge near the local center and the old pedestrian bridge to be replaced, located upstream in the outskirts. The pedestrian bridge serviced 6 families. Several official reasons were given for why the old pedestrian bridge needed replacing with a road bridge, all of them centered around the need to invest in the "territory" or the (non-existent) local importance of the bridge. I could not fail to notice that the bridge would make the mountain side very accessible from the main road, thus opening it for cabin development. Coincidentally, the landowner happened to be a childhood friend of the politician in the regional administration that was the main sponsor for the new bridge.
Several studies show low economic returns of Norwegian road projects compared with similar Swedish projects. I suspect that low returns are a consequence of influence peddling. Project selection in Norway is not based on economic criteria, but is politically directed, and politicians will favor their friends and their economical interests.
I think that influence peddling is worse than corruption in two ways. Corruption is more democratic. You only need money to bribe someone, but you need to be part of an inner circle to influence a politician in Norway. And in a moderately corrupt place, at least the right infrastructure gets built, if only at a higher cost. In Norway, infrastructure gets built to the benefit of special interests.
My thought is that maybe there is some link between corruption and influence peddling, such that in the extreme, the factors that make it possible to reduce one, make the other increase. That would mean that societies with very little corruption always experience high levels of influence peddling. Maybe the best one can hope for is a place in the Pareto frontier where both corruption and influence peddling are at reasonably low levels. Different societies that take reducing corruption seriously may end at different places on the frontier, though.
Last updated: 2025-03-09