The structure of Sweden's government is well‐suited for this type of analysis because it is not based on a separation of powers, with the purpose of limiting state power, but rather on the separation of government polity from the application and implementation of public policy by experts and officials employed within government agencies (Lundquist, 1998). Specifically, we use Sweden's pandemic response to shed light on and analyze the implications of concentrated versus dispersed specialized information, with particular focus on the role, use, and influence of experts and expertise in government (Easterly, 2014 Koppl, 2018). Instead, we are primarily interested in the processes and the institutional structure by and through which Sweden's distinct policy response was engendered.

In this article, our intended aim is not directed specifically at the nature or outcomes of Sweden's policy measures (or lack thereof), although these are relevant to our inquiry (see, e.g., Herby, 2020 Klein et al., 2020 Salo, 2020 Baral et al., 2021). This unique approach has been both held up as a good example (e.g., Karlson et al., 2020) and a bad one (e.g., McGann and Reynolds, 2020). In stark contrast to the policy template that nearly all other political bodies adopted, that is, the strong imposition of rules and regulations to enact and enforce behavioral practices of hand washing, social distancing, and mask‐wearing to slow the infection rate, Sweden relied upon individual responsibility and information sharing. Thus, the recent pandemic offers empirical evidence and insights regarding the role of Hayekian knowledge problems in engendering a technocratic “tyranny of experts” and how such effects can be structurally mitigated.Īmong the policy responses to the 2020 SARS‐CoV‐2 pandemic's first wave, which in most cases include one or a combination of lockdowns, curfews, and the closing of “nonessential” business (Choutagunta et al., 2021 Jiang, 2020), Sweden's COVID‐19 policy stands out. We review the history of the responses to the pandemic and show how the “tyranny of experts” was severe within the typical technocratic policy response, and attenuated in Sweden's. There are two parts to this research question: (1) why did virtually all other nations follow a radical lockdown protocol despite limited evidence to its effectiveness and (2) why did Sweden not follow this same protocol despite strong political pressures? The answers to these questions lie within typical government technocracy versus Sweden's constitutional separation of government and technocracy. In this article, our interest is primarily on how and why Sweden's approach to the pandemic was so unique.

Whereas most countries in the COVID‐19 pandemic imposed shutdowns and curfews to mitigate the contagion, Sweden uniquely pursued a more voluntarist approach.

Tyranny of the majority definition