ABSTRACT
Switzerland can be taken as an example of a political system where consensual power was maintained into the period of industrialization and mass suffrage, so that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that country has reported very few cases of corruption. The Scandinavian countries of Sweden and Denmark have used different techniques to inhibit corruption, even in recent periods when the same political party has remained in control of local and national power over many decades. The concepts of corruption employed by the American colonists partly anticipated the manner in which concepts and terms were employed in some subsequent American crises, but also relate to concepts employed by such founding fathers of western political thought as Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle. They and some modern political theorists have employed the notion of the "corruption of the bad polity," to characterize situations which they perceived as marked by the decay of the moral and political order.
