Political Corruption

Readings in Comparative Analysis

Michael Johnston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138530133
• eBook ISBN: 9781351308342
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Corruption is once again high on the international policy agenda as a result of globalization, the spread of democracy, and major scandals and reform initiatives. But the concept itself has been a focus for social scientists for many years, and new findings and data take on richer meanings when viewed in the context of long-term developments and enduring conceptual debates. This compendium, a much-enriched version of a work that has been a standard reference in the field since 1970, offers concepts, cases, and fresh evidence for comparative analysis.Building on a nucleus of classic studies laying out the nature and development of the concept of corruption, the book also incorporates recent work on economic, cultural, and linguistic dimensions of the problem, as well as critical analyses of several approaches to reform. While many authors are political scientists, work by historians, economists, and sociologists are strongly represented. Two-thirds of the nearly fifty articles are based either on studies especially written or translated for this volume, or on selected journal literature published in the 1990s. The tendency to treat corruption as merely a synonym for bribery is illuminated by analyses of the diverse terminology and linguistic techniques that help distinguish corruption problems in the major languages. Recent attempts to measure corruption, and to analyze its causes and effects quantitatively are also critically examined. New contributions emphasize especially: corruption phenomena in Asia and Africa; contrasts among region and regime types; comparing U.S. state corruption incidence; European Party finance and corruption; assessments of international corruption rating project; analyses of international corruption control treaties; unintended consequences of anti-corruption efforts. Cumulatively, the book combines description richness, analytical thrust, conceptual awareness, and contextual articulation.

PART 1

The Context of Analysis

Part 1 of this book is generally preliminary in nature, providing the basic tools, critical standards, and background information that will enable the student to approach and evaluate the subsequent readings with the proper perspective. Thus the three chapters that comprise the first section contain reading selections that approach the subject of corruption from different but equally fundamental points of view.

DEFINITIONS, CONCEPTS, AND CRITERIA (CHAPTER ONE)

Any attempt to analyze the concept of corruption must contend with the fact that in English and other languages the word corruption has a history of vastly different meanings and connotations. In some eras, for instance the 1900s in the United States, corruption was one of the most frequently employed terms in the political vocabulary. According to a critic contemporary with this period, Robert C. Brooks (see Selection 6), party orators, journalists, reformers, political philosophers, and historians “stigmatize[d] in this way transactions and conditions of very different kinds … [with] little disposition to inquire into the essential nature of corruption and to discriminate in the use of the word.” The only connotation that the many usages of the word corruption had in common in this period was that it was somehow the antithesis of reform, rationality, and the demands of the public weal.

Thus, even the more thoughtful and objective writers of this earlier era would have been nonplussed had they read Samuel Huntington’s judgment (Selection 50) in a 1968 publication that “corruption may thus be functional to the maintenance of a political system in the same way that reform is.” As is implied in Huntington’s usage and elsewhere in the contemporary social science literature, the term corruption has developed a more specific meaning with regard to kinds of behavior and a much less polarized meaning with regard to ethical connotations. At times, indeed, it is employed in a context that is almost totally value-free, as in this passage (from Selection 52) by the economist, Nathaniel Leff:

Corruption is an extra-legal institution used by individuals or groups to gain influence over the actions of the bureaucracy. As such the existence of corruption per se indicates only that these groups participate in the decision-making process to a greater extent than would otherwise be the case.

VARIETIES OF MEANINGS

A careful examination of what past and present writers seem to have intended when they employed the term corruption in political contexts reveals an even broader catalog of usages and potential ambiguities. Some reasons for this become more apparent by referring to the Oxford English Dictionary, where we find that only one of nine commonly accepted definitions for the term is applicable to political contexts: “Perversion or destruction of integrity in the discharge of public duties by bribery or favour; the use or existence of corrupt practices, especially in a state, public corporation, etc.”

The OED categorizes the nine meanings of corruption as follows:

1. Physical—for example, “The destruction or spoiling of anything, especially by disintegration or by decomposition with its attendant unwholesomeness and loathsomeness; putrefaction.”

2. Moral—the “political” definition already given comes under this category. Another definition in this category is: “A making or becoming morally corrupt; the fact or condition of being corrupt; moral deterioration or decay; depravity.”

3. The perversion of anything from an original state of purity—for example, “The perversion of an institution, custom, and so forth from its primitive purity; an instance of this perversion.”

The present usage of the term corruption in political contexts has obviously been colored by the meanings in the “moral” category, and in earlier times usage was frequently colored by the meanings in the two other categories, especially by those in the third category. Thus the author of a nineteenth-century encyclopedia article entitled “Corruption in Politics” developed his discussion essentially in terms of meanings derived by way of Montesquieu from Aristotle, who, for instance, conceived of tyranny as a “corrupted” variant of monarchy.¹

CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL SCIENCE DEFINITIONS

The variety of definitions employed by contemporary social scientists interested in corruption fortunately does not cover as wide a span as those given in the OED. Among them we can identify usages that seek to define corruption in terms of one of three kinds of basic models or concepts. The largest group of social science writers follow the OED definition and relate their definitions of corruption essentially to concepts concerning the duties of the public office. A smaller group develop definitions that are primarily related to demand, supply, and exchange concepts derived from economic theory; while a third group discuss corruption more with regard to the concept of the public interest.

Public-Office-Centered Definitions

Definitions of corruption that relate most essentially to the concept of the public office and to deviations from norms binding upon its incumbents are well illustrated in the work of three authors—David H. Bayley, M. McMullan, and J. S. Nye—who have concerned themselves with the problems of development in various continents. According to Bayley’s definition of the word (Selection 54),

Corruption, while being tied particularly to the act of bribery, is a general term covering misuse of authority as a result of considerations of personal gain, which need not be monetary.

M. McMullan (Selection 32) says that

A public official is corrupt if he accepts money or money’s worth for doing something that he is under duty to do anyway, that he is under duty not to do, or to exercise a legitimate discretion for improper reasons.

J. S. Nye (Selection 58) defines corruption as

… behavior which deviates from the normal duties of a public role because of private-regarding (family, close private clique), pecuniary or status gains; or violates rules against the exercise of certain types of private-regarding influence. This includes such behavior as bribery (use of reward to pervert the judgement of a person in a position of trust); nepotism (bestowal of patronage by reason of ascriptive relationship rather than merit); and misappropriation (illegal appropriation of public resources for private-regarding uses).

Market-Centered Definitions

Definitions in terms of the theory of the market have been developed particularly by those authors dealing with earlier Western and contemporary non-Western societies, in which the norms governing public officeholders are not clearly articulated or are nonexistent. Leff’s definition, cited earlier, would fall into this category, as would the definitions of Jacob van Klaveren and Robert Tilman. Van Klaveren (Selection 2) states that

A corrupt civil servant regards his public office as a business, the income of which he will … seek to maximize. The office then becomes a “maximizing unit.” The size of his income depends … upon the market situation and his talents for finding the point of maximal gain on the public’s demand curve.

Robert Tilman (Selection 7) holds that

Corruption involves a shift from a mandatory pricing model to a free-market model. The centralized allocative mechanism, which is the ideal of modern bureaucracy, may break down in the face of serious disequilibrium between supply and demand. Clients may decide that it is worthwhile to risk the known sanctions and pay the higher costs in order to be assured of receiving the desired benefits. When this happens bureaucracy ceases to be patterned after the mandatory market and takes on characteristics of the free market.

Public-Interest-Centered Definitions

Some writers feel that the first set of definitions is too narrowly conceived and the second set too broadly conceived. They tend to maintain that the embattled concept of “public interest” is not only still useful but necessary to illustrate the essence of concepts like corruption. Carl Friedrich, for instance, contends that

The pattern of corruption can be said to exist whenever a power-holder who is charged with doing certain things, i.e., who is a responsible functionary or officeholder, is by monetary or other rewards not legally provided for induced to take actions which favour whoever provides the rewards and thereby does damage to the public and its interests.²

Arnold A. Rogow and H. D. Lasswell (Selection 5) maintain that

A corrupt act violates responsibility toward at least one system of public or civic order and is in fact incompatible with (destructive of) any such system. A system of public or civic order exalts common interest over special interest; violations of the common interest for special advantage are corrupt.

WHOSE NORMS SET THE CRITERIA?

The definitions employed in the first and third of the categories just discussed directly raise the question encountered in all normative analysis: Which norms are the ones that will be utilized to distinguish corrupt from noncorrupt acts? If the definitions are public-office-centered, then which statement of the rules and norms governing public officeholders is to be employed? If the definitions are public-interest-centered, then whose evaluation of the public’s interest is to be operationalized? Definitions couched in terms of market theory appear to bypass this problem, but in fact they do not. They too imply that somewhere there is an authority that distinguishes between the rules applicable to public officials and those applicable to businessmen operating in the free market, or that there are certain characteristics that distinguish a “black market” from the free market.

Political scientists of an earlier generation tried to deal with the problem of norm setting with reference to the legal rules provided by statute books and court decisions. Thus behavior was judged by James Bryce to be either permissible or corrupt in accordance with the criteria established by legislators and judges:

Corruption may be taken to include those modes of employing money to attain private ends by political means which are criminal or at least illegal, because they induce persons charged with a public duty to transgress that duty and misuse the functions assigned to them.³

But most contemporary social scientists would echo the skepticism that Robert Brooks articulated in 1910 (Selection 6) as to whether legal definitions alone would suffice:

Definitions of corrupt practices … found in every highly developed legal code … are scarcely broad enough to cover the whole concept as seen from the viewpoint of political science or ethics. The sanctions of positive law are applied only to those more flagrant practices which past experience has shown to be so pernicious that sentiment has crystallized into statutory prohibitions and adverse judicial decisions. Even within this comparatively limited circle clearness and precision are but imperfectly attained.

The author of the article on “Corruption, Political,” in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences agreed that “the question of formal legality … is not the essence of the concept.” The normative judgments that should be used as criteria, he thought, were the judgments of the elite: “Where the best opinion and morality of the time, examining the intent and setting of an act, judge it to represent a sacrifice of public for private benefit, then it must be held to be corrupt.”⁴

The definition suggested by Senturia raises numerous problems, namely those related to the difficulties of identification, operationalization, and uniqueness. Although social scientists often select particular elite groups with reference to status and other criteria, few claim to have developed specific techniques for identifying in any society a sample that would represent “the best opinion of the time.” Even if this were accomplished, Senturia’s particularistic emphasis would require that this fairly large body of elites serve as a jury for each particular case. Their findings, in effect, would relate only to their society of that particular era.

A consensus of the “best opinion” in a time and place, such as Britain in 1960, could presumably establish criteria beyond which private-regarding behavior would be considered corrupt in the contemporary setting. However, it would then be impossible to compare either the extent or the varieties of political corruption between the situations prevailing of Britain in 1960 and in 1860 because of the uniqueness of the suggested definition. This difficulty would apply equally to attempts to compare, say, bureaucratic corruption in nineteenth-century Russia and twentieth-century Chicago. Another difficulty in relying too much on any one elite opinion is that the incumbent elite may change drastically as the result of revolution or decolonization. Thus, in the course of decolonization, the criteria by which the colonial rulers had punished corruption among native officials and subjects were radically diluted within a short time when the opinion of the postcolonial native politicians de-emphasized many of the taboos that had been attached to private-regarding behavior. Still later, in many African and Asian countries, behavior that was widely accepted by the ruling politicians one month was heavily stigmatized the next month after spartan-minded officers successfully carried through a coup d’état.

WESTERN VERSUS NON-WESTERN STANDARDS

If one does not accept the criteria established by law or the norms of a small elite group as delimiting political corruption, how far can one go in delineating the relevant norms with reference to the standards of a more diverse set of reference groups and codes? At present this problem presents itself most directly for those social scientists who have sought to analyze corruption in developing countries where mores rooted in two very distinct milieu govern the standards of political and bureaucratic behavior. David H. Bayley (Selection 53) has outlined the resultant problem posed for the objective investigator:

It not infrequently happens … in developing non-Western societies that existing moral codes do not agree with Western norms as to what kinds of behavior by public servants should be condemned. The Western observer is faced with an uncomfortable choice. He can adhere to the Western definition, in which case he lays himself open to the charge of being censorious and he finds that he is condemning not abhorrent behavior, but normal acceptable operating procedure. On the other hand, he may face up to the fact that corruption, if it requires moral censure, is culturally conditioned. He then argues that an act is corrupt if the surrounding society condemns it. This usage, however, muddies communication, for it may be necessary then to assert in the same breath that an official accepts gratuities but is not corrupt.

Given this alternative, authors like Bayley prefer to build upon the “Western denotative meaning of corruption,” even in analyzing non-Western systems. This “imposition” on the rest of the world of Western standards in evaluating behavior may well be, at this stage of research and theory building, a prerequisite to meaningful comparative analysis of political corruption phenomena. In general terms (more with regard to bureaucratic than to electoral corruption) there probably does exist today a broad consensus among Western elites and nonelites as to which kinds of behavior are clearly conceived of as corrupt. This consensus has gradually developed over the past century as will be traced in the subsequent section. But the norms embodied in a definition such as that of Nye, quoted earlier, are surely built upon more than the personal preferences of a small clique of academic political moralizers. It is highly probable that any elite or even mass survey of attitudes in Western countries would result in overwhelming support for the proposition that the kinds of deviations from public rules and the kinds of self-regarding behavior that are included in Nye’s definition should be labeled corrupt, and guilty practitioners stigmatized...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part 1 THE CONTEXT OF ANALYSIS
• Part 2 THE ANALYSIS OF ADMINISTRATIVE CORRUPTION
• Part 3 THE ANALYSIS OF ELECTORAL AND LEGISLATIVE CORRUPTION
• Part 4 CORRUPTION AND MODERNIZATION
• Select Bibliography