How the long-gone Habsburg Empire is still visible in Eastern European bureaucracies today →
Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom emphasised that trust in the key institutions of the state, and their proper functioning, is crucial in facilitating collective action (Ostrom 1998). The courts and the police as the enforcers of rules in collective action have a crucial role to play in supporting trust in interactions between citizens and the state. Trust in state institutions and the rule of law has to be built up over time and needs to be sustained by repeated positive experiences. “Failed states” around the world witness how difficult it is to create well-functioning and well-respected institutions.
Empires that ruled over long periods of time, sometimes for centuries, might have had enough time to build up formal and informal institutions that have lasted to the present day. In the context of Eastern Europe, the Habsburg Empire is considered to have had better administrative institutions than the Ottoman Empire or the Russian Empire (see Ingrao 2000). In contrast to these other empires in Eastern Europe, historians characterise the Habsburg bureaucracy as “fairly honest, quite hard-working, and generally high-minded” (Taylor 1948) as well as relatively well-functioning and respected by the population.
