Paying Bribes for Public Services

A Global Guide to Grass-Roots Corruption

R. Rose, C. Peiffer

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137509666
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137509673
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

This book documents what happens when people encounter public officials. It draws on multi-national Barometer surveys asking questions about corruption and bribery in 119 countries. Clear prose, tables and figures report the answers given by more than 250,000 people and the conclusion sets out six principles for reducing bribery.

1

Why Bribery Matters

Abstract: Bribery matters because each year it affects more than 1.6 billion people around the world. Bribes are paid to public officials in order to get health care, education and other public services to which they are entitled or to escape obligation. Such violation of bureaucratic standards is different in kind and impact from other types of corruption, such as the capital-intensive bribes that big companies pay politicians and political parties to get lucrative contracts from government or favourable legislation. To study bribery at the grass-roots of society, this book draws on a unique data base of sample surveys of the experience of more than a quarter million people in 119 countries on every continent. It uses this data to analyse key steps where bribery may affect the delivery of public services.

Keywords: bureaucracy; corruption; public services; surveys

Rose, Richard and Caryn Peiffer. Paying Bribes for Public Services: A Global Guide to Grass-Roots Corruption. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/ 9781137509673.0005.

When public officials take bribes as a condition of delivering everyday services on which citizens rely, it directly affects more than 1.6 billion people each year. This is because most of the world’s population live in developing countries where bribery is more widespread. Although grass-roots corruption does not have a big effect on citizens in many European democracies, it is a problem in Mediterranean countries such as Greece and Italy as well as countries such as Poland and Romania, where the aftereffects of Communist rule are still evident (Eurobarometer, 2014). The effects of bribery are felt at all levels of government. In a 2013 poll in Russia, the Levada Centre found that when it asked whether there was more corruption at the top-level of government or in local institutions, 48 percent answered that both levels of government were equally affected.

Globally, the total amount of money that ordinary people annually pay in bribes adds up to many billions. Bribery imposes a tax on citizens because it is an extra payment made in order to use or abuse public services. The costs are relatively higher for poor families squeezed to find money to pay a bribe for a service that they are entitled to get free, such as hospital treatment for a family member who is seriously ill. The actual amount paid can be higher for a well-to-do person wanting to evade taxes.

Bribery imposes costs on national economies because it reduces the effectiveness of investment for economic growth (Mauro, 1995; Aidt, 2011). In poor countries foreign aid given to promote the health, education and well-being of citizens can be siphoned off by officials for their private benefit and spent on buying foreign luxuries (ICAI, 2014). In countries rich in natural resources, multi-national firms can pay bribes to governors for lucrative licenses to exploit these resources and much of that money can end up in foreign bank accounts rather than being spent for national development.

Bribery imposes political costs too. People do not need to pay a bribe to form an idea about how public officials behave; they can learn this from discussions with friends and from stories about high-level corruption reported in the media (Rose and Mishler, 2010). If officials are perceived as corrupt, this tends to reduce trust in the government. This can breed sullen subjects whose resentment may unexpectedly lead to protests that challenge the power of corrupt governors. In democratic political systems a series of elections that do no more than result in a rotation of rascals who collect bribes encourages political apathy or alienation (Seligson, 2006; Clausen et al., 2009; Johnston, 2014). In the 2013 Global Corruption Barometer (GCB) survey of Transparency International, 51 percent of respondents considered corruption a very serious problem in their country and 22 percent described it as serious. However, concern varies greatly between countries. More than 90 percent think corruption is important in 11 countries surveyed, while in Scandinavia less than one in nine Danes describe corruption as serious or very serious.

Corruption: a word with many uses

The term corruption describes a variety of activities that violate standards of acceptable social behaviour. The category includes fraud, extortion, influence-peddling, nepotism and rigging elections (UNDP, 2008). A leading scholar in the field, Michael Johnston (2005: 11) defines corruption as ‘The abuse of a trust, generally one involving public power, for private benefit which often, but by no means always, comes in the form of money’. The idea of corruption can be traced to Aristotle and Cicero and it has similar significance in major European languages (Moroff and Blechinger, 2002). The word is derived from a Latin word meaning to spoil something or make it rotten, such as altering the text of a Shakespeare play or having a spoiled computer programme. It can also refer to the debasement of a moral or political standard, for example, a politician using his power to procure sexual favours. The word corruption has been in use in English since the sixteenth century (Oxford English Dictionary, 1936: vol.1: 400). It came into political prominence in the nineteenth century as campaigners for democratic reforms used it to challenge elites using vote-buying and the intimidation of electors as standard procedures for maintaining their control of public office (Heidenheimer and Johnston, 2002: part II).

Bribery is invariably prominent in discussions of corruption. It is here defined as an exchange between an individual and a public official in which the former gets a service to which he or she is not entitled and the official geta a material benefit. Bribery can involve patently illegal activities, for example, securing immunity from arrest by paying a bribe to a policeman. Bribes can also be paid to expedite actions that are not illegal but bend rules, for example, paying a local government official to deliver an urgently needed permit promptly rather than subject it to slow-moving office procedures. Bribes can be demanded before a service is delivered by asking for cash before a pupil is given a textbook that the state notionally provides free, or it can be paid after the event as a more or less expected expression of gratitude (Kornai, 2000).

Because bribery is about an interpersonal exchange, it focuses on tangible behaviour by identifiable public officials and citizens. The exchange is analogous to a micro-economic relationship between a buyer and seller (Lambsdorff, 2007). The chief difference is that the public official does not have the ownership or right to sell what he or she is providing in return for a bribe. By contrast, a governing party metaphorically buying votes by enacting tax laws favouring a large group of voters is a wholesale form of corruption because the exchange takes place between a formal organization and thousands or even millions of voters. Moreover, there is no certainty that both parties will benefit. Those affected by a tax benefit will pocket the money but the governing party has no means of being certain that it will receive their votes.

The assessment of bribery involves normative as well as empirical standards. Normative standards are used to label an exchange as politically unacceptable and to justify punishing officials who take bribes. Laws and rules establish the procedures that public officials ought to follow when delivering services, and they also set out penalties for violating these rules. Although they are not quantitative, they are empirical, that is, they are visible and authoritative criteria that establish what officials ought or ought not to do. In principle, government has the institutional means to enforce laws on its own employees if it chooses to use them. However, laws may permit actions that a majority of its citizens consider corrupt because they confer material benefits on governors and their friends. Johnston (2005: 11) emphasizes

Laws may have little legitimacy or may even be written by officials to protect themselves. Definitions of corruption must address the question of its social significance – not just its nominal meaning – and cultural standards of public opinion may thus offer more realistic definitions than laws.

In other words, the statute book is not the only standard by which actions can be deemed corrupt; the standard can also be derived from cultural or ideological values. For example,an evaluation of of bribery that excludes consideration of the rule of law can describe the payment of a bribe as ‘the optimal outcome’ of ‘efficient predatory behaviour in a lawless world’ (Dabla-Norris, 2002; cf. Rose, 1992). Insofar as practices that appear as bribery by the above definition are accepted as standard operating procedures within a society, the result is what an African anthropologist describes as ‘a moral economy of corruption’ (Olivier de Sardan, 1999).

Citizens are socialized from youth into a wide range of beliefs and values about what behaviour is appropriate for public officials. Those who hold jobs in the public sector as teachers, nurses or policemen are subject to additional formal instruction in the bureaucratic rules and procedures appropriate to their job. They also acquire informal norms of behaviour from their co-workers and from their experiences in dealing with people who seek their services. Insofar as cultures differ, then the norms for evaluating behaviour that would appear corrupt may also differ. In societies in which public officials are seen as representing alien governors – historically, Imperial rulers or latterly Communist apparatchiks – corrupt activities that break the law can be defended as a ‘culturally acceptable’ way of getting things done (Wedel,1986; Kotkin and Sajo, 2002). Bribery has also been characterized as an ‘instrumentally useful’ means of getting around cumbersome and costly regulations in a political system in which regulations are both numerous and onerous (Huntington, 1968). In the words of a Russian who was a minister in the initial stages of post-Soviet privatization and then moved into banking:

To become a millionaire in our country it is not at all necessary to have a good head or specialized knowledge. Often, it is enough to have active support in the government, the parliament, local power structures and law enforcement agencies. One fine day your insignificant bank is authorized to, for instance, conduct operations with budgetary funds. Or quotas are generously allotted for the export of oil, timber and gas. In other words, you are appointed a millionaire. (Peter Aven, quoted in Reddaway and Glinski, 2001: 603)

Whatever the choice of the standard for assessing governance, it is contestable. There are social scientists prepared to justify the exchange of bribes for public services and disagreeing about whether bribery is unacceptable because it undermines the rule of law and government efficiency or whether it can be tolerated as a way of relieving frustrations and reducing time wasted in contexts in which the inefficiencies and monetary demands of some officials fail to meet bureaucratic standards. Advocacy groups can use ‘corrupt’ as a label to discredit any government actions that they dislike while social scientists prefer more precise definitions that can be verified empirically (Anticorrp, 2015).

The logic of appropriateness takes into account both behavioural practices and normative standards involved in the relationship between ordinary people and public officials. Appropriate behaviour is action that is in accord with the practices and expectations that indicate how one ought to act in a specific political or social situation (March and Olsen, 2008: 689). If this set of beliefs and values are consistent with bureaucratic rules and procedures, then there is likely to be very little bribery. However, there can be a conflict between ethical and legal norms of how one ought to act and behavioural beliefs about what to do to obtain a public service. If the conflict is resolved, as Gary Becker (1968) suggests, by an amoral cost-benefit calculation that favours getting a service by paying a bribe, the result is behaviour that appears inappropriate from one perspective but not from another.

Bureaucratically inappropriate practices take many forms that Johnston (2005) describes as syndromes of corruption, such as elite cartels, influence-peddling, favouring those who are metaphorically part of one’s political family or clan, and officials acting with impunity to extort as much as they can from powerless subjects. Officials violate a cardinal rule of bureaucracy, impartiality, if they are partial, treating people in equal circumstances differently, whether or not the motive is the payment of a bribe (Rothstein, 2011: 12ff). Favouritism can be shown by an official giving unwarranted benefits to family and friends. Discrimination can also benefit those who have ties to the same ethnic group or political clan and penalize out groups. In some cases, such as the campaign donations that businesses give candidates, it may be unclear what is the ‘quo’ in return for the quid that is given. But the suspicion remains that those who give something expect to get something in return.

Politically inappropriate behaviour attracts substantial criticism because it violates normative standards about how people ought to behave, even if the actions criticized are not illegal. In a legal sense, inappropriate behaviour may not be corrupt, but in a broader social context it can be so labelled. For example, politicians who renege on their election pledges in exchange for gaining a seat in government can be described as having metaphorically sold out. Politicians who manipulate election laws and control the media can be denounced for corrupting democratic institutions. Whether behaviour is denounced as corrupt depends on the standards used; these standards may not be shared by the partisan supporters of their critics. An official who feels a sense of shame may give a sincere or insincere apology and, if that is not accepted by his or her supporters, have to resign office. If an action criticized is in the governing party’s interest, then criticism may be dismissed as partisan hyperbole or by a counter-attack that calls attention to the ways in which critics show partiality.

Behaviour at the grass roots

The best known quantitative measures of corruption are in the tradition of macro-economics: they generalize about countries as a whole from activities in the national capital involving national politicians and high-ranking officials who allocate public resources of value to large private enterprises. The top-down approach is taken by the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) of Transparency International, a non-governmental advocacy organization, and the World Governance Indicators of the World Bank (www.worldbank.org). Both indexes aggregate expert opinions from a multiplicity of sources, such as business consultants dealing with government, desk-based researchers evaluating institutions and scanning web sources, and journalists. Numerical values are imputed to each assessment and different assessments are then aggregated together in order to arrive at a single Index score. The CPI rates countries on a 0 to 100 scale. Instead of the median country being rated at the mid-point of the scale, two-thirds are rated below it. Consistent with transparency, each sponsor of an index publishes copious information about the statistical methods that are used to arrive at their Index numbers (Transparency International, 2013; World Bank, 2013).

Top-down indexes have been subject to many criticisms (cf. Sampford et al., 2006; Knack, 2007; Global Integrity, 2008; Heywood and Rose, 2014). In particular, critics emphasize that assigning numbers to prose judgments does not create objective measures. Expert opinions are subjective and so too are the numbers assigned to them. Aggregating different evaluations produced by different methods into a single quantitative Index creates further problems, given the diversity of sources and measures that are aggregated together. Scales lump together everything from knowledge that nationally based business consultants have about the payment of bribes for contracts to build a dam or an airport to anecdotal and ethnographic accounts of what it takes to get basic health care in a village. Reducing multi-faceted features of governance to a single Index number greatly limits the public policy use of Indexes, for it is impossible to identify the particular public services that are in greatest need for attention if bribery is to be reduced.

The purpose of this book is to shift attention from corruption at the top-level of government to bribery at the grass-roots where the great mass of citizens contact public officials delivering services that meet their everyday needs. Instead of concentrating on the power of political elites, it focuses on the challenge facing top office holders: How do you make sure that the services for which you are nominally responsible are delivered in accord with your wishes far from the national capital? The people delivering these services are not faceless bureaucrats but have the familiar faces of school teachers, nurses and policemen who live in their locality. As Weber (1972) has noted, ‘Power is in the administration of everyday things’.

A service-delivery approach is a necessary condition of promoting a major feature of good governance, the impartial administration of public services in accord with bureaucratic rules. Maintaining bribe-free governance not only contributes to good government but can also promote popular support by showing that the government does control what it should control, namely, how public officials behave when dealing with citizens.

The unique feature of this book is that we examine whether people pay bribes by using evidence from that familiar social science tool, sample surveys that interview a representative cross-section of a country’s citizens. Because surveys cover the whole of a country they avoid generalizing on the basis of media headlines of bribes paid high-ranking politicians whose opportunities and experiences are remote from those of ordinary people. Anthropological accounts of behaviour in a village offer detailed and colourful accounts of what people do to get public services. By definition, such accounts cannot be generalized within a country, let alone cross-nationally (Rothstein and Torsello...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Why Bribery Matters
• 2  Getting Things Done by the Book, by Hook or by Crook
• 3  Contact Is Critical
• 4  The Extent of Bribery
• 5  Perception Is Not Experience
• 6  Differences Across Time, Space and Individuals
• 7  Choices in Surveys
• 8  Reducing Bribes for Public Services
• Appendix
• References
• Index