Corruption and Corruption Control

Democracy in the Balance

Staffan Andersson, Frank Anechiarico

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351206976
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Corruption in politics and public administration is pervasive and difficult to eliminate. It has a strong effect on public attitudes toward government and is at the same time badly understood. A clear, comprehensive understanding of corruption is critical to the goal of ethical government that is trusted by the public.

In this short and accessible text, Staffan Andersson and Frank Anechiarico demonstrate how the dynamics of life in organizations both generate corruption and make it difficult to prevent without undermining the effectiveness of government. They argue that how we define corruption, how we measure it, and how we try to combat it are strongly interrelated and should not be seen as separate issues. The authors demonstrate how this integrated approach, together with a focus on the damage caused by corruption to civic inclusivity and participation, can serve as an entry point for understanding the quality of democracy and the challenge of good governance.

Using examples from mainly the United States and Sweden, Andersson and Anechiarico establish that recent anti-corruption reforms in public administration have often been narrowly focused on bribery (exchange corruption) and law enforcement approaches, while doing too little to other problems and forms of corruption, such as interest conflict.

Corruption and Corruption Control: Democracy in the Balance will be of great interest to all students of politics, public administration and management, and ethics.

1

DEMOCRATIC GOVERNANCE, CORRUPTION, AND CORRUPTION CONTROL

The purpose of this book is to investigate the way in which public administration becomes corrupt and which reforms are best suited to restoring the ideal of public service. This introductory chapter will outline the problem of corruption in national and international settings and open a discussion of the causes and effects of corruption that will continue in later chapters. We will also define corruption and explain how the definition of corruption is related to the way we understand official misconduct, efforts to prevent it, and the way the definition needs to change as public administration itself is changing.

The Best and the Worst

A good way to start this book is with a provocative quote from the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (1889, Section X): “The corruption of the best things gives rise to the worst.” Hume was referring to the way that the “best” of religious faith and charity can be corrupted into the “worst” of idolatry and hatred. But what he says about religion applies to all important values and institutions like justice, education, and defense; once they are corrupted, they become devious, dangerous, and, in some cases, deadly.

The ugliness of official, political corruption is caused by despoiling trust. In the absence of trustworthy government the only guarantees of life, liberty, and property are force and violence. Thomas Hobbes noticed this in the wake of the English Civil War in the 17th century and we can see it for ourselves today in a number of places around the world. The devastation of Syria by warring factions, foreign powers, and its own government has forced Syrians by the hundreds of thousands to seek refuge where stable, honest governments will allow them to rebuild their lives.

The longer Hume’s “worst” continues, the harder it is to recover important, public values. In Syria that recovery will be extraordinarily difficult. Syria, before the beginning of the civil war in 2011, was ruled by decree under emergency powers granted to the president in 1963. It has been governed, according to most accounts, by a corrupt, autocratic regime. The corruption in Syria that can be directly connected to the outbreak of the civil war was of two types. First, there was what we might call exchange corruption: every interaction, from ordinary license applications to trouble with the police, would be accompanied by requests for bribes. In most instances, the routine was so well known that no request was necessary. This kind of ordinary, daily corruption rots governance from the bottom up. Over time, “government” becomes a synonym for “corruption” and the expectation of fairness and neutral justice morphs into cynicism.

The second kind of corruption in Syria is related to the first but even more damaging. That is the exclusion and oppression of individuals or groups (Gersh, 2017). Syria was characterized as a model of ethnic and religious tolerance up to the onset of the civil war. The Alawite ruling elite, however, reacted to pro-democracy demonstrations during the 2011 Arab spring by playing on sectarian distrust of the large Sunni majority.

The first demonstrations attracted hundreds of thousands of people of different faiths. So the regime stoked sectarian tensions to divide the opposition. Sunnis, it warned, really wanted winner-take-all majoritarianism. Jihadists were released from prison in order to taint the uprising. As the government turned violent, so did the protesters. Sunni states, such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, provided them with arms, cash and preachers. Hardliners pushed aside moderates. By the end of 2011, the protests had degenerated into a sectarian civil war.

(The Economist, 2018)

This is governance corruption. Once the Assad regime made it clear that it saw Sunnis as instigators of unrest, rather than as participants in peaceful protests, which they were at first, the bottom fell out. As in Tunisia and Egypt, the prime motive behind the early demonstrations and rallies was exchange corruption. In December 2010, when a fruit and vegetable seller in a rural Tunisian town was unable to pay bribes demanded by the police, his cart was seized and he was slapped and berated in public. Humiliated and deprived of his livelihood, he stood in front of a government building and set himself on fire. The protests that followed toppled the government, but did little to deal with the underlying culture of bribery and extortion. However, in 2018 another anti-corruption movement started in Tunisia.

Governance corruption includes bad and abusive official behavior, as the above examples indicate, but only when it is intentionally used to exclude individuals or groups from taking part in decisions that critically affect them. There are lots of errors, mistakes, and abuses that emanate from public agencies that are harmful but do not fit our definition because they are not intentional and which, though harmful, are not exclusionary. This will be explored in more detail in later chapters. But one question should be answered before we go further: can a dictatorship avoid the governance corruption label? The answer is, not for very long. There is a period after a government comes to power through a coup d’état or broader revolution—or even an election—when its leaders are faced with a choice. Either they decide to open participation in governance by recognizing opposition parties and holding elections or they decide to consolidate power and justify their authority as the embodiment of the people’s will. The French Revolution was followed by a brutal dictatorship and then the creation of the empire under Napoleon. The American Revolution was followed by a weak, central government under the Articles of Confederation and then a stronger one that recognized opposition parties (though they were not organized as such until 1800) and held elections. The Communist revolutions of the 20th century in Russia, China, and Cuba all had broad support at first, but chose one-party rule and never recognized opposition.

Once an authoritarian direction has been selected, the process of exclusion begins. Political enemies, both individuals or groups, are identified, watched, and punished by banishment, internal exile, prison, or death. This radical exclusion is the hallmark of governance corruption in dictatorships and other authoritarian regimes. Singapore’s government, often mentioned as an example of “clean” authoritarianism because of its intolerance of exchange corruption, has a long history of summary punishment for those considered a threat to the government’s power. Thus, while the international non-governmental organization Transparency International (2018) rates Singapore as the sixth least corrupt country in the world in 2017, in terms of its reputation regarding exchange corruption, Human Rights Watch sees Singapore quite differently:

Singapore’s political environment is stifling. Citizens face severe restrictions on their basic rights to freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly through overly broad criminal laws and regulations. In 2017, the country tightened the already strict limits on public assemblies contained in the Public Order Act, which requires police permits for any ‘cause-related’ assembly outside the closely monitored “Speakers’ Corner.”

Leaders of the ruling Peoples’ Action Party (PAP), which has been in power for more than 50 years, have a history of bankrupting opposition politicians through civil defamation suits and jailing them for public protests. Suits against and restrictions on foreign media that report critically on the country have featured regularly since the 1970s and restrictions on public gatherings have been in place since at least 1973.

(Human Rights Watch, 2017)

What looks like a “clean” government from the perspective of exchange corruption looks very different when we include governance corruption. The example of Singapore makes it clear that that our standard for integrity in governance should be democratic inclusion.

These examples indicate the necessity of using a broad definition of corruption that includes both more traditional exchange corruption as well as governance corruption. A definition that relies only on exchange corruption would be clear and relatively distinct from other governance problems, but confining the definition to exchange corruption would also ignore the injustice and lack of accountability of dysfunctional politics caused by exclusionary governance. A narrow definition of corruption and the tendency to equate it with bribery will have consequences not only for how we understand the problem but for how we approach reform as well. We argue that far too often anti-corruption campaigns focus on rooting out exchange corruption while neglecting governance corruption that is far more damaging. A narrow focus tilts the measures adopted to fight corruption toward laws, regulations, and sanctions of individual transgression and away from measures based on shaping and regulating the institutional structures and organizational dynamics that determine ethical behavior.

Contemporary Corruption Issues and Problems

Ethical misconduct by public officials, corporate executives, and leaders of prominent non-profit organizations has become a staple of media coverage. The release in 2016 of the Mossack Fonseca Papers, the so-called Panama Papers (Garside, Watt, & Pegg, 2016; Harding, 2016) deservedly received enormous coverage around the world. The Papers contained detailed information about the financial arrangements in tax havens used by individuals in the political and economic elites to avoid paying taxes at home, which was illegal in some cases, especially when the tax havens were used to conceal conflicts of interest and the proceeds from exchange corruption. Similar revelations resulted from the leak of confidential documents in 2017 labelled the Paradise Papers (Garside, 2017; Hopkins & Bengtsson, 2017). These documents revealed offshore investments to reduce or avoid paying taxes by major international corporations and by elite individuals.

Also in 2017, the #MeToo Campaign exposed widespread sexual assault and harassment and how powerful men (and a few women) used their positions of power not just to commit sexual harassment and assault but also to cover them up. The Campaign also raised the question of how to deal with accusations of harassment and ethical transgressions directed toward public officials and those in the private sector who are possible targets of politically motivated charges (e.g. Teachout, 2017).

Another, execrable example of an abuse of power followed by a cover-up is the sexual abuse of children by clergy in the Catholic Church. This abuse started to get attention in the 1980s and 1990s, first in Ireland, Canada, the United States, and Australia, and later in other countries. Revelations concerned the abuse itself but also how in a great many cases Church authorities, abetted by state authorities, had covered up cases to protect the Church, instead of seeking justice for the child victims and preventing further abuse. At a meeting in 1975, presided over by an Irish archbishop, children who were victims of abuse signed vows of silence concerning accusations against a pedophile priest (BBC News, 2010). Similarly in Australia an archbishop was found guilty by a court for having covered up sexual abuse of altar boys by a pedophile priest in the 1970s (BBC News, 2018b). The Vatican and local Church authorities were slow to respond and when they did they labelled the allegations as exaggerated. But the truth began to come out around the turn of the century. By 2018 all of the Catholic bishops in Chile offered their resignation after an investigation by the Pope criticized them for neglect in handling of sexual abuse cases (BBC News, 2018a). Here, as in the other examples in this section, violations of the law are shielded from public view, which expands the harm done and ensures the political exclusion of victims.

Corruption Is World-wide

There are examples too numerous to mention of corruption scandals with huge implications for countries in all parts of the world, but we will raise a few to illustrate the consequences of exchange and governance corruption, when they engulf a political system. In Brazil, corruption allegations have been directed toward two recent presidents, Lula da Silva and his successor Dilma Rousseff, concerning their connection to the state majority-owned oil company Petrobas. In 2018 Lula was sentenced to prison for corruption while leading in opinion polls for election to another term as president, while Rousseff was impeached and removed from office during her second term for breaking budget laws and for knowing or choosing not to know about huge payoffs by Petrobas to politicians (Cowie, 2018; ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Democratic Governance, Corruption, and Corruption Control
• 2 What Corruption Was, Is, and Is Not
• 3 Can We Know How Much Corruption There Is? On the Measurement of Corruption
• 4 Corruption Control in Public Administration
• 5 The Connection between Public Integrity and Democratic Governance: Four Case Studies
• 6 Is Corruption Inevitable? Can It Be Controlled?
• 7 The Future of Public Integrity
• Index