Routledge Handbook of Political Corruption

Paul Heywood, Paul M. Heywood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317575924
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Since the early 1990s, a series of major scandals in both the financial and most especially the political world has resulted in close attention being paid to the issue of corruption and its links to political legitimacy and stability. Indeed, in many countries – in both the developed as well as the developing world – corruption seems to have become almost an obsession. Concern about corruption has become a powerful policy narrative: the explanation of last resort for a whole range of failures and disappointments in the fields of politics, economics and culture. In the more established democracies, worries about corruption have become enmeshed in a wider debate about trust in the political class. Corruption remains as widespread today, possibly even more so, as it was when concerted international attention started being devoted to the issue following the end of the Cold War.

This Handbook provides a showcase of the most innovative and exciting research being conducted in Europe and North America in the field of political corruption, as well as providing a new point of reference for all who are interested in the topic. The Handbook is structured around four core themes in the study of corruption in the contemporary world: understanding and defining the nature of corruption; identifying its causes; measuring its extent; and analysing its consequences. Each of these themes is addressed from various perspectives in the first four sections of the Handbook, whilst the fifth section explores new directions that are emerging in corruption research. The contributors are experts in their field, working across a range of different social-science perspectives.

Part I
Understanding corruption

1
The Definition of Political Corruption

Mark Philp

To conclude. The Light of humane minds is Perspicuous Words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity; Reason is the pace; Encrease of Science, the way; and the Benefit of man-kind, the end. And on the contrary, Metaphors, and senselesse and ambiguous words, are like ignes fatui (will-o’-the wisp); and reasoning upon them, is wandering amongst innumerable absurdities; and their end, contention, and sedition, or contempt.

(Hobbes 1991: 36)

Hobbes’s clarity is appealing, although he seems to demand a lot from the irremediably inexact social sciences. Nonetheless, the discipline of politics includes many who believe that something like a Hobbesian programme of definition ‘first snuffed and purged from ambiguity’ followed by ‘science’ is possible. This is certainly the case for many who write on political corruption, and, while that strategy has some things in its favour, it also has pitfalls. The past thirty years of writing on political corruption and its definition provide eloquent testimony to both.

A definition can have two dimensions: it may articulate the meaning and use of a word, and it can provide a tool in the construction of an explanation. The linguistic and cultural turns in philosophy, history and anthropology have made many scholars more interested in the former, while the social sciences have focused more on the latter. Both programmes are defensible, but neither should be conducted in ignorance of the other, as Hobbes was aware.¹

Understood as a tool, a definition aims to identify a set of criteria that serve as necessary and sufficient conditions in picking out a distinct phenomenon or class of phenomena. That phenomenon (or class), once distinguished, can be understood or explained by reference to sets of antecedents or causal conditions. If we conflate the definitions with the causal conditions we get tautologies. For example, we cannot explain the fact that increasing numbers of young men are failing to marry by saying that they are bachelors. Nor do we explain the fact that people are using their offices to generate income for themselves by saying that they are corrupt. That may be a redescription of the state of affairs, but it is not an explanation. Explanations are in something of a state of tension with definitions. Ideally, one’s class of events (picked out by a definition) is a class that also has some explanatory unity, in the sense that members of the class are susceptible of the same causal explanations. Yet we do not want to identify the class by the fact that the same explanation works, since we need to pick out the criteria that unite the class independently from the conditions that explain its occurrence.

Consider, for example, ‘economic’ definitions of corruption that use ‘principal-agent theory’, that is, economic theory that looks at ways of designing incentives to induce agents to act in ways that are optimal for those employing or directing them (their principals), when the agent’s behaviour cannot be directly observed. On these accounts, corruption is defined ‘in terms of the divergence between the principal’s or the public’s interest and those of the agent or civil servant: corruption occurs when an agent betrays the principal’s interests in pursuit of her own’ (Klitgaard 1988: 24). Here the definition – it is a case of corruption when the agent ‘betrays’ the principal in pursuit of her own interests – is quickly tied into an account in which the focus is on the conditions under which it is possible for the agent to pursue her own interests with impunity. Such conditions usually entail a monopoly of certain goods, discretion in their distribution and a lack of accountability. But these causal conditions risk being too closely linked to the definition, in virtue of the background assumptions about agent motivation. If we assume that people act self-interestedly and think of politics as a realm in which the interests of those holding public office are potentially divergent from the interests of the public at large, then we produce an explanation of corrupt behaviour by reference to the conditions under which self-interest can be pursued by public office holders with impunity. Probity in public office, then, is explained by the absence of monopoly and discretion and the existence of high levels of accountability – that is, we get probity when the principal–agent problem is diminished to zero, since behaviour is rendered observable. Moreover, the definition includes the term ‘betrayal’ but remains silent on the range of issues concerning what counts as a ‘betrayal’. What counts as a betrayal must depend on the relative rights and responsibilities of principal and agent and must refer to norms concerning their respective roles and responsibilities. Corruption, then, is derogation from these norms, but it is not just any derogation. Incompetence is not the same as corruption. Nor are all derogations that involve the pursuit of self-interest corrupt, since some (such as treason on the one hand, or informal collective bargaining to raise wages on the other) should be distinguished from corruption. What should be clear is that the definition now seems less convincing, since a huge amount depends on the structure of norms and expectations that frame the agent’s relationship to her principal, and frame the range of legitimate expectations the principal may have. These elements must inform our definition of corruption, making it, inevitably, a more complex, and more local, matter.

Definitions carve up the world of objects and events in ways that allow us to think more clearly and consistently about our world. But, in many areas of the social sciences, they are not picking out discrete natural objects, so much as types or ranges of behaviour. And, in defining behaviour as corrupt, we define it not solely in terms of an external description of bodily movements but as a motivated social action. That means that we are distinguishing types of agent motivation, and thus differences in the meaning associated with the act by the agent, and are acknowledging that the categories of meaning with which men and women engage are not solipsistic in character but are linked to the broader social world in which they participate.

Moreover, corruption is a term of appraisal: in calling something corrupt we attach negative connotations to it – or, at the very least, we report it in terms to which those involved would attach negative connotations. Because it is a widely used category of social meaning with powerful negative connotations, more specialised, technical and professional use of the term often clashes with the meanings which are ascribed to it by ordinary people, politicians and public servants, the media and commentators, each of whom may have different concerns and different interests in identifying certain types of conduct as corrupt. And, lest we think that our scholarly position guarantees our objectivity, a vast quantity of the now voluminous literature on corruption is clearly and deeply marked by a set of Western assumptions about the need for free markets and liberal constitutional orders, coupled with a suspicion of political power and the state. Indeed, the thrust of most literature emanating from economics and drawing on rent-seeking and principal-agent models is close to suggesting that politics is inevitably a force for corruption.

This does not mean that we cannot reach any degree of objectivity in definition, although doing so is a lot more difficult than the literature generally assumes. The great majority of those writing about corruption deal with the definition of corruption rather dismissively, suggesting that, while there are issues about definition these tend to muddy the water to no real purpose, and they take this as sufficient warrant to adopt a one-line definition, usually following the model of bribery, which they then apply to the argument in hand – being helped along by metrics such as the Corruption Perception Index, which rely heavily on perceptions of bribery. Stipulating in this way rides roughshod over social meanings. But if we argue that corruption is an entirely local phenomenon, wholly defined by local norms, mores and cultural values, then we abandon the idea of family resemblances that would allow us to see it as an instance of a more general cross-cultural category. The definitional problem of political corruption then is bounded by the unappealing options of relativism (in which local definitions are treated as untranslatable to other contexts) or stipulation (in which we insist on a technical definition). With a strong behavioural turn in political science and its emphasis on quantitative analysis, it is not surprising that scholars tend to opt for the latter, or follow others who do so.

Certainly, acknowledging definitional complexities introduces problems in analysis and tends to render rather meaningless a number of pieces of work that treat the term as effortlessly capturing the same phenomenon across vastly differing cultures. But the fact that work must be done on a conceptual tool for it to work in different contexts should be accepted as part of the price for a political science that is sensitive to differences in social and cultural systems, meanings and values. Does this approach take us away from Hobbes’s injunction? Not at all. Hobbes was a nominalist: what he sought to do was to put together a clearly defined lexicon that could render the political world coherent and orderly for people in virtue of it being itself orderly and coherent. If people understood terms in very different ways there could be no order. This meant that definitions had to mesh with people’s more inchoate understandings, serving to systematise these into a coherent world view. That, for Hobbes, was a central objective of his science. In a similar spirit, this chapter explores the difficulties of definition in the field of political corruption and argues for a deeper conceptual understanding that identifies the place which the problem of political corruption occupies within Western political thinking. With Hobbes, it argues that getting the terminology right is also a way of both understanding and ordering the political world.

The particularities of political corruption

Corruption in the West has a very particular history, tied to a conception of the decay and decomposition of a thing. As the OED defines it, it is ‘The destruction or spoiling of anything, esp. by disintegration or by decomposition with its attendant unwholesomeness; and loathsomeness; putrefaction.’ Or, in a more general sense, the ‘Destruction, dissolution of the constitution which makes a thing what it is.’

In this chapter, I am concerned more generally with political corruption, that is, with the decay or destruction of the political (although the term may also be applied elsewhere – as in economic corruption). This Western understanding of political corruption, then, presupposes an understanding of the character of politics and the political order, which is why it is not surprising that the most extensive analysis of political corruption is given in classical and republican texts in which there is a sense of the unity and cohesiveness of the political order being harmed or destroyed by malign influences. That sense of a political order as involving a shared political culture, with public offices being directed to securing the public interest or the public good, plays a major part in ancient Greek and Roman thinking and goes on to be profoundly influential on Machiavelli’s republicanism and on the languages of political theory in early modern Europe that J. G. A. Pocock and others have traced through Britain and America.²

We inherit from this tradition a sense that politics can work: that is, that there can be ways of resolving differences that do not involve simply the domination of one group by another or the design of institutions and rules to facilitate that domination. The Western conception of political corruption, in so far as it is an intelligible and coherent one, derives its meaning in large part from the sense that political order has (at least potentially) a certain function and character and that this is suborned and subverted when interests turn the political system to their own ends. We can disagree about what politics requires and about what supports or harms it. But, in the West, we have this concept because we think that politics can be prevented from working as it should, with damaging long-term consequences, when people use their power for their own ends, or where the exercise of public office is subverted by forces that lack legitimate standing within the political system. Moreover, while the technical discussion of corruption is often very precise and may seem unconnected with this tradition, there is also a public discourse in which corruption is used by people to describe their sense that political power is being subverted by sectional forces. This tension between technical and popular understandings can give rise to confusion for which there is no simple solution.

Technical definitions are also dogged by the clear normative connotations that are intrinsic to the term ‘corruption’. At the same time, popular understandings, while they express this normative element, are often imprecise and highly emotive and may attribute to corruption a range of failings in the political or economic system that are not in any clear sense corrupt. At the same time, the absence of popular concern certainly cannot be taken as indicating the absence of corruption. One middle route between highly technical definitions and relying on popular understandings has been to appeal to the intrinsic character of a particular political system as a basis for identifying corrupt deviations. Dennis Thompson, for example, in his work on ‘mediated corruption’ (2005: 143–73) partly appeals not only to shared norms but also to the character of the democratic system.³ The difficulty with this route is in justifying the norms that are taken to be integral to the type of political system. (In an appeal to standards of democracy should we think of this as reflecting norms of democracy tout court, or of democracy in the USA, or, more broadly, of constitutional democracies or representative political systems?)

On the account I am proposing, corruption arises within a set of largely Western assumptions about politics and its character.⁴ This encourages us to extend the focus of concerns about cultural differences and the importance of local understandings from a concentration on what behaviour people classify as corrupt, to identify the framework in which they make these judgements. That is, by grasping how they understand the political system and its operation, and how far they have a sense of the political as a sphere in which conflicts could be resolved in ways that can be widely legitimated. The challenge for political scientists, from this perspective, is to recognise the diversity of political orders and the various judgements that are made about the forces that threaten the stability and legitimacy of these orders. Exactly what counts as corruption may be relative, but our understanding of it is rooted in a conception of politics that sees it as a distinct sphere of allocation and exchange and as one that can be subverted in ways that attack its basic ‘nature’ or function, and that we call corrupt. The underlying conception of politics is often deeply contested, and its precise character and scope will vary across different contexts, but people’s concerns with corruption are predicated upon it. People’s conception of politics can be flawed: by seeing politics as appropriate where other systems of rules or norms – social, familial, religious – provide a basis for distribution and exchange and are able to command a sufficient consensus, which politics may destabilise or damage; or by failing to recognise the contradictions in their conception – as when they expect both direct accountability to popular pressure and procedural fairness. But, while conceptions can be flawed and contested, it is the underlying conception of politics that is at stake, and that is something that is not infinitely varied. There are feasibility constraints and limits on what conceptions can provide sufficient normative content to fuel judgements of corruption, both of which give some objective and cognitive character to the debate. And, while some cultures do not have an understanding that delineates politics from other realms (such as religion) or that subordinates politics to those realms, we can understand the growing universality of the language of political corruption ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: scale and focus in the study of corruption
• PART I Understanding corruption
• PART II Causes
• PART III Measurement
• PART IV Consequences
• PART V New directions
• Index