Political Corruption and Political Geography

Peter J. Perry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429826603
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First published 1997, this volume examines the way in which political corruption remains neglected as a matter of scholarly enquiry and research. There is still a powerful and traditional taboo which is quite out of the step with the topic's real world significance and the increasing attention it receives from serious sections of the media. The book aims by systematic exposition and case study to break down that taboo and to demonstrate the topic's importance within a framework provided by the discipline of geography. The novelty of the book is then that it considers a formerly unconsidered factor - corruption - as part of the world's geography, as both part of the geographical context in which human activity takes place and as a spatially variable condition explicable at least in part in terms of other geographies. The conclusion is that much geographical scholarship ignores this factor at the risk of its credibility.

1 Political corruption: introduced and discussed

Most of the scholarly disciplines which might a priori be expected to have a great deal to say about political corruption – political science, economics, sociology for example – in fact say very little. There remains an ‘unwritten section on graft’ to quote the cogent observation of The Economist in 1957 (Economist, 15 June 1957). The paraphernalia of academic success and respectability, books, articles, journals, conferences, research grants, are few and the sole specialist journal – Corruption and Reform – lasted less than a decade before in 1993 it was absorbed into another – Crime, Law and Social Change. Resort to abstracting journals or the indexes of books on places and subjects where corruption has an evident role produces similarly frustrating results. (Perhaps the very structure of many disciplines marginalises the topic?) Such results are a better indicator of the topic’s scholarly status than are the bibliographies constructed by the authors of books on the subject, impressive and wide ranging as they may be. For whatever reason – several are proposed below – there is a huge disparity between the real world significance of political corruption and the amount of scholarly attention which it receives.

Experience provides a different perspective. In many parts of the world everyday corruption on a modest scale does not even have to be sought out. The evidence is there on the streets to say nothing of only slightly less public manifestations, in the Post Office and the police station for example. Petty corruption, small scale payments to officials for services which ought to cost nothing, is in many countries commonplace and endemic. Grand corruption, of cabinet ministers and senior officials, may often be less immediately conspicuous (though this is commonly not the case with the proceeds) and it is also part of the experience of a smaller segment of the population but it too is widespread and of more fundamental significance. As I began reading for this book early in 1993 Italy and Japan in particular featured in these latter terms on an almost daily basis in Britain’s quality press. Five years earlier Italy merited six such entries in the index to the Financial Times. Corruption of a similar kind in the third world has lost much of its newsworthiness by repetition. As I revise this text political corruption appears to exist on an even wider scale. Events since 1993 have almost completely cut the ground away from both popular and scholarly complacency. It ought no longer to be possible in Britain for example for serious newspapers to argue the unimportance of political corruption even if it remains the case that Britain is probably less corrupt than Italy let alone say Nigeria. Recent spectacular examples are common enough, Westminster, Lambeth for example; but recall also that two decades ago, between 1974 and 1980, corruption trials explored and exposed the governance of five British cities and thirty smaller authorities, scarcely evidence that corruption is a new issue formerly of little significance (Gillard and Tomkinson, 1980, viii). New Zealand has had a similarly complacent tradition exploded by the ongoing Cook Islands tax evasion scandals and by rumours as to the integrity of the planning process in the Auckland region. In both Britain and New Zealand, and probably more widely, a growing belief in the corruptibility of the political system is one foundation among several of a high level of popular political cynicism. There are very good reasons to believe that political corruption is a stronger and more widespread force than politicians and civil servants would by word or action have us believe. After all they have a vested interest in minimising the problem just as journalists and the media are open to the reverse accusation. All this is to argue a vital role for the scholar and to lament his or her as yet insignificant contribution.

Most scholarly authors claim to write about neglected situations or at least to cast new light upon those as yet but partly explored. The first of these claims certainly applies in this case and is a reason for writing this book; it is compounded by a second – practical importance. This book has no claim to be a manual of practice or prevention; but nor can it deny the subject matter’s real world significance. Knowledge of how corrupt politics and administration works is in many countries a matter of life or death. How to work the system, how to get round it, how to expose it to public view and how to combat it all operate on such terms. The subject has a practical dimension. A third matter is equally important and less obvious – the extreme intellectual challenge of the topic. As the book unfolds the reasons why corrupt politics and related geographies are much harder to study than the honest versions will become evident. That intellectual challenge is the best of reasons for any work of scholarship, but after three decades at work on topics of limited immediate usefulness I gain some satisfaction in even a rather theoretical approach – I think I have been bribed only once in my life but of course I can never be sure – to a serious and understudied real-world issue. For it is no longer uncommon to find political corruption in a significant place in studies of for example third world poverty, where its role was often suspected but rarely articulated thirty years ago; the same is true of communist régimes in Europe and their collapse. In other words the depressing situation outlined at the very start of this book is beginning to change for the better, at least inasmuch as corruption is taken more seriously, even while and in part because its incidence probably goes on increasing. This book aspires to a place in that beginning, from and for the geographer’s perspective – of which more anon – but first there is a great deal more to learn from the period and circumstances of wilful neglect.

Scholarly neglect is not something new in this context. There never has been a strong tradition of scholarly enquiry into political corruption save perhaps in parts of Europe (Huberts, 1995, 316–7) and the world of public affairs has generally been portrayed in unrealistically honest terms. The absence of such scholarship is surprising. Noonan (1984) for example, writing on the more specific but very closely related theme of bribery, notes its absence from United States legal writing between 1900 and 1970 (1984, 536–7) and, by contrast, from post-Reformation theology (1984, 538–43), geographical and historical contexts where bribery was evidently of significance. Bribery, Noonan also notes (1984, xvi) is one of only two crimes mentioned by name in the United States constitution. (The other is treason (Reisman, 1979, 3).) Rose-Ackermann observes in Heidenheimer’s vast overview of the subject that ‘the simple expedients of corrupting the inspector or juggling the books are seldom part of the analysis’ (Heidenheimer, 1989, 661). The International Political Science Association Index has no entry under corruption for the period 1950–75, a cogent indicator of its lowly intellectual standing. What such absences indicate is not only disinterest, public and maybe influential complacency, but also methodologies which self-perpetuatingly ignore or marginalise the topic. The situation continues: Hawkesworth and Kogan’s Encyclopaedia of Government and Politics (1992) lacks a main entry for corruption and is content with five very superficial references. By contrast Alatas (1993) provides a short but cogent piece for the Oxford Companion to the Politics of the World. Almost unbelievably a 1994 text (Furlong, 1994) on Italian politics has two index entries on corruption. However one leading authority on Italian politics of recent decades, La Polambara, might reasonably be described as a convert from scepticism and complacency (La Polambara, 1964, 295–6) to a rational belief in the seriousness and significance of the phenomenon (Transparency International, 1994, 75–89). He is simply the best known among several such. Positivist and to a degree Marxist approaches, albeit for different reasons, are especially prone to subdue and eliminate discussion of corruption. The evidence is rarely such as to allow rigorous testing of hypotheses, and the phenomenon of corruption appears to be not only largely independent of modes of production but ubiquitous. In brief, disciplines which should have a lot to say about corruption generally and for various reasons say very little. This is not an explanation: it is to expand upon a deficiency in scholarship which calls for an explanation. The topic is dirty, difficult, dreary and disagreeable for sure, but that is not the explanation. If it were then war and domestic violence might be expected to be understudied. In fact the reverse is the case. What then is the explanation?

When that question is asked it must first of all be admitted that enquiry into corruption, journalistic or scholarly, raises extraordinary practical and methodological problems largely outside the experience of geographers in other branches of the subject and of scholars in general. There is an obvious risk of violence as a way of stopping the researcher from finding out, or in retaliation. An interview with a locally well known writer on issues of this kind in an English town was conducted in a ‘fortified’ garden shed because he had good reason to fear for the safety of himself and his evidence. He was careful, possibly eccentric, but certainly not irrational. In other countries more extreme precautions are needed. More generally the whole question of data collection is problematic. Orthodox field work is the exception; subterfuge and concealment are as necessary for researcher as for practitioner. (I am not sure what response universities, other funding agencies and their ethics committees might give to this aspect of any request for support.) The result is scholarship often dependent on the work of others, on journalists in particular skilled and courageous in the discovery and presentation of deliberately concealed data. This is not to argue that scholars cannot and should not investigate but rather it is to note the inapplicability of much standard social science methodology practice and data, the pre-tested questionnaire and the carefully constructed sample to say nothing of official statistics for instance. The heartland of the evidence is commonly the domain of rumour and anecdote. And in Coke’s words (Cecil, 1964, 107–8), over three hundred years ago, when Lord Chancellor Bacon was tried for corruption: ‘in such works it is a marvel that there are any witnesses’. The evidence is a tiny part of the totality.

More fundamentally all our data, anecdotal or otherwise, is unrepresentative, and unrepresentative to an unknown and unknowable degree. The perfect cases of political corruption – and such probably exist – are those of which even the existence is unsuspected. Apparently ‘clean’ communities may in fact be very ‘dirty’. A recent example of the generally unsuspected coming to light is the $2 million corruption case against a cantonal restaurant and bar inspector in Zurich (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 6 April 1994 to 18 September 1996). The honesty of Swiss officials has generally been taken for granted. There is then no place for elegant numerical models (if very occasionally some room for abstraction) and even our verbal models will be tentative and approximate. Occasional citations of a number, a percentage rake off, the size of a bribe must be treated with caution. Such stories may lose little in the telling but on the other hand strong forces are at work with a vested interest in downplaying the scale of corruption. Above all the relation of particular to general is unclear. Holmes (1993, 146) observes: ‘all that is being analysed here is reported corruption; this may or may not correlate closely with actual corruption. If it does not – and there is no way of knowing this then it is even more questionable to make correlations’. This is unfamiliar ground to the geographer, but not quite so unfamiliar to the archaeologist, the ancient historian (and even the historical geographer) seeking to explore an inaccessible world on the basis of non-random fragments.

If these difficulties look like good grounds for abandoning enquiry before it is begun, especially to scholars of a post-modernist or positivist persuasion, there is more and worse to come. At the heart of corruption are such issues as deceit, lying, secrecy and subterfuge, themes rarely, on their own admission, explored by philosophers let alone by a diversity of disciplines, from anthropology to sociology, in which their role is central. Historians go so far as to recognise the importance of these issues as part of the human condition without according them any centrality, but at least they are in their recognition of the importance of corruption far ahead of geographers. Only one discipline appears to focus strongly on such issues – accountancy. Bok (1978, 5) writes that a ‘reluctance to come to grips with deception can stem from an exalted and all-absorbing preoccupation with truth’. (And I would add order.) Interestingly and alone among substantive writers on corruption Waquet (1991, 104–18) devotes a whole chapter to lies. However as Markovits and Silverstein (1989, 258) point out: ‘it is the fact of concealment that enables us to distinguish genuinely scandalous behaviour in politics from the merely incompetent, simply stupid or stubbornly wrong headed’. The intractable methodological issues have a positive dimension which we must later address.

A third methodological problem, the least often discussed, is the very status of corruption. It has traditionally nearly always been seen, and usually condemned, as aberrant behaviour and abnormal process, as anomaly or residual, as secondary or non-vital. In contemporary Eurocentric terms and despite a recent apparent increase in the incidence of corruption in many western democracies – which may or may not correspond to a real increase – this remains a defensible position, capable also of support in terms of the logic of proceeding from the healthy to the morbid. On a global and historical view it is harder to justify. For most of the world’s population and for most countries corruption plays a significant, and not infrequently the most significant, part in the process of political decision-taking at all levels. A Martian intellectual commissioned ab initio to give an account of earth politics – and perhaps too a thoroughly committed empiricist might just as well start here as with the rule of law and its honest administration.

Scholarly neglect of political corruption then owes much to practical and methodological difficulties. It is not only the most blinkered survivors of the quantitative revolution who are persuaded that these are insurmountable and that the topic is thus inappropriate for scholarly enquiry. But for some of us the real world importance of the issues and the intellectual challenge disqualify the arguments rehearsed above. Geographers are committed to study the world as it is not the limited part of the world which currently fashionable methodologies believe it is possible or appropriate to handle. After all journalists and a few scholars have met with success in their studies of corruption, not merely by satisfying peers and reviewers in the latter case but in the former attaining the high standards of proof required in the courts and even occasionally contributing to topple (and reconstruct) corrupt administrations. They have provided raw materials, foundations and examples of scholarly enquiry into corruption, demonstrating that the problems may be real but are surely not overwhelming.

What has been said above remains an incomplete account of the intellectual neglect and marginalisation of the topic. It is not only difficulty but also complacency which has this effect both upon scholars and also upon governments and administrations, complacency compounded by ignorance and malice, and even by political correctness. Thus Alexander and Caiden (1985, 149) comment upon: ‘textbooks on US public policy and administration where one looked in vain for any account of public immorality, official lawlessness, bureaucratic deceit, administrative corruption, and the subversion of government by special interests’. A decade later this is no longer quite so much the case. There is also the complacency of affluence and influence, of cosmetic cures wherein successful action against a conspicuous few engenders relapse into inertia. It is not however a coincidence that corruption has risen up the public agenda of awareness at a time of economic recession and collapsing social and political confidence in western democracies (and not only there), where complacency was most evident and the role of corruption most often denied. Very occasionally a country publicly and realistically recognises the seriousness of the problem and acts accordingly. Corruption was officially deemed one of the three great evils in China in 1952, alongside waste and, significantly, bureaucracy, and ahead of bribery (a sub-set of corruption), tax evasion and theft of government property (Fitch and Oppenheimer, 1966, 118). The agenda was more political than philosophical, hence the conceptual overlaps, but evidence suggests that for a time it was acted upon to good effect, a remarkable achievement in the Chinese context. Ironically corruption is now resurgent even rampant in China.

Complacency is not however a total explanation for the neglect by scholars of corruption, especially in the second and third worlds. In the communist case there was some initial success in reducing corruption and the official line that such campaigns had succeeded and that it was impossible for corruption and Marxism to coexist proved remarkably durable. For most of the period of communist rule external access to reliable information was controlled, and scholars who wrote about the communist world were either sympathisers inclined to discount rather than believe evidence of corruption, or of a hostile persuasion and focused upon seemingly more important targets. The local press and legal profession were subject to constraint. Corruption in these countries and eventually and evidently on the grand scale was for these reasons only slowly and belatedly exposed to the rest of the world. The local populations were well aware of what was happening at a much earlier date since corruption was for them both a burden and a survival mechanism – to introduce a very important distinction – in a failing social and economic order, and thus a growingly important dimension of everyday life. As an increasingly public scandal at the highest political levels corruption contributed to the dramatic turn of events of the later 1980s.

In the third world the extent of corruption was – it scarcely remains – an equally well kept secret. Here corruption in the loosest sense is indigenous, much older than European contact or colonisation. All empires appear to suffer from low level corruption and not a few, the later Roman Empire and Belgium in Africa for example, were totally permeated. As far as the British Empire is concerned many authorities note an evident growth and expansion of corruption at all levels during World War Two in a context where scarcity and shortage were coupled with fast growing political aspirations – a situation not unlike the last decade or so of communist Europe – and that this corruption flourished as and after independence was gained (Fitch and Oppenheimer, 1966, 48–52; Monteiro, 1966, 30–8). What was evident to residents and visitors was however ignored by all but a few scholars. Myrdal, a Nobel prize winner in economics and certainly not unsympathetic to newly independent states was among few prepared to point up the paradox:

Although corruption is very much an issue in the public debate in all South Asian countries… it is almost taboo as a research topic… the explanation lies in the general bias that we have characterised as diplomacy in research… the taboo on research on corruption is indeed one of the most flagrant examples of this general bias (Myrdal, 1968, 938–9).

Change has been far from complete. The Economist reports on 5 March 1994:

In public the (World) Bank tiptoes delicately around state crookery, scarcely mentioning the word ‘corruption’, and never in the same breath as an individual country.

To be fair a new chairman may bring in radical change in this context (FT, 2 July 1996). The Commonwealth only began to discuss the topic in 1990 and it does not feature in the 1995 Millbrook Declaration. It is also worth noting that the Far Eastern Economic Review, a benevolent apologist in the 1960s (Engels, 1993, 14) now strongly asserts the opposite position. To return to Myrdal (939), he went on to comment on prevailing explanations of third world corruption: universality, colonial heritage, economic necessity and utility. Chapter 20 of Myrdal’s Asian Drama remains a classic account of third world corruption. But a form of political correctness still serves to some degree to marginalise corruption, and one particular interpretation of the history of the last century or so added to the present world economic order is seen completely to satisfy the need to explain present day third world dilemmas, corruption included. Explanations of particular economic and social problems in such terms as bribery and nepotism still run the risk of accusations of patronising neo-colonialism or even racism even when they admit the role of the colonial past, and attempts are still made to exclude them from the intellectual and practical agenda, ironically in countries which are not themselves among the most corrupt. The exceptions are few and courageous, most notably in addition to Myrdal they include two French agronomists, again of the political l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures (Cartoons)
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Political corruption: introduced and discussed
• 2 Defining political corruption
• 3 What political corruption has to do with geography
• 4 Political corruption: characterised and described
• 5 Case studies
• 6 What causes political corruption: prerequisites
• 7 What causes political corruption: proximates
• 8 The consequences of political corruption
• 9 The functions of political corruption
• 10 Cures and controls
• 11 Afterthoughts: the future of political corruption
• Appendix. A letter to a newspaper and a response
• Bibliography
• Index