This thesis investigates changes in the institutional structures of the Swedish police from the late nineteenth century to the post-war era. State-appointed investigative commissions and parliamentary debates about police reforms are analysed in order to establish the long-term political goals of policing. Until the nationalisation of the entire police system in 1965, the Swedish police consisted of three main institutions: municipal city police, municipal rural police, and regional state police forces. Conceptually, the divide lay mainly between urban and rural policing.

In the cities, poor working conditions brought the idea of a unifying Police Act to the fore, and Parliament decided on national regulations in 1925. In the countryside, the main issue was with policing itself. Local authorities did not have enough resources to adequately maintain order and investigate crimes. This was addressed by a number of reforms attempting to solve the problem by issuing state subsidiaries, diverting resources from nearby cities, and adding new police forces to the countryside.

Policing was defined as a state interest by most politicians from left to right, and from an early-stage nationalisation of the different police forces was established as a long-term political goal. Conceptually, the differences between cities and the countryside decreased over time, making the idea of a single national police institution more and more attractive. 

Conflicting ideas about the short-term solutions to problems in urban and rural districts, however, affected Parliament’s ability to implement reform, making it increasingly difficult to merge the three police institutions and to take the necessary steps towards nationalisation. This can be explained through historical institutionalism and the lock-in effects of path dependence. The institutional structures of the city police, rural police, and regional police made cooperation unfavourable. New police reforms sought ways to facilitate cooperation or consolidation but, in the end, politicians conformed to the existing institutions by further accepting, and even enhancing, the differences between urban and rural policing. This was contradictory to the main political idea behind nationalisation: to create a uniform and more flexible police system. 

Nationalisation could only be achieved after the institutional structures had been torn down. The main steps had been taken in the 1940s as major changes in Sweden’s administrative system took place, altering the trajectory of police reform. At the same time policing had gone through the aforementioned crucial conceptual changes, easing the transition to a single organisation. Thus, the police changed from three separate institutions to a single national police institution. The process was slow and gradual, taking almost a century to achieve.