Aristotle wrote that "there are three kinds of constitution, or an equal number of deviations, or, as it were, corruptions of these three kinds...The deviation or corruption of kingship is tyranny. Both kingship and tyranny are forms of government by a single person, but...the tyrant studies his own advantage... the king looks to that of his subjects."
Was Aristotle, when he described tyranny as a corrupt form of monarchy, using the concept of corruption much as we would apply it today to an official who secretly accepts a bribe to decide a policy issue differently than he otherwise would have?
Carl Friedrich, following Aristotle, holds that both applications derive from the basic core meaning, which he formulates as "deviant behavior associated with a particular motivation, namely that of private gain at public expense" (chapter 1).
However, today this attempt sacrifices clarity to brevity, insofar as it leaves too implicit how or why behavior is deviant from which norms for those whose conceptions are not based on Aristotelian ideal types. Some institutional framework seems a definitional prerequisite. We have less disagreement with Friedrich's formulation that corruption exists, "whenever a power holder who is charged with doing certain things, that is a responsible functionary or office holder, is by monetary or other rewards, such as the expectation of a job in the future, induced to take actions which favor whoever provides the reward and therefore damage the group or organization to which the functionary belongs, more specifically the government."
How prevalent has corruption thus defined been in various countries over recent times? His answer is:
That corruption is endemic in all government is practically certain. That there are striking differences in the extent of corruption between governments which are formally similar such as Great Britain, Switzerland and the United States, all functioning constitutional democracies, is equally patent.
It is possible that a law could be stated that would say that the degree of corruption varies inversely to the degree that power is consensual.
Switzerland can be taken as an example of a political system where consensual power was maintained into the period of industrialization and mass suffrage, so that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that country has reported very few cases of corruption. The Scandinavian countries of Sweden and Denmark have used different techniques to inhibit corruption, even in recent periods when the same political party has remained in control of local and national power over many decades.
How time-bound are these perceptions? If, for instance, we turn back to the eighteenth century, how were these countries ranked on corruption by Americans in the decades preceding the American Revolution?
We are not surprised to find that eighteenth century Americans regarded the British system of that period as "corrupt." At the time Robert Walpole and his friends ruled Britain by assembling majorities in parliament, which they largely recruited through money payments and the trading of patronage favors. But the traditional English concept of "corruption" on which the eighteenth century writers built related not only to means, but to the ends of politics. It was the encroachment of the executive power on that of the legislature and of the elites it then represented, which constituted the core of the definition of corruption used by many Englishmen as early as 1700:
The executive possesses means of distracting parliament from its proper functions; it seduces members by the offer of places and pensions, by retaining them to follow ministers and ministers' rivals, by persuading them to support measures.-standing armies, national debts, excise schemes-whereby the activities of administration grow beyond Parliament's control. These means of subversion are known collectively as corruption.
In the period in which American protest boiled up to culminate in the revolution, Americans echoed and escalated such charges against George III and his ministers. But how did they rank Sweden and Switzerland, countries not particularly allied with Britain or involved in North America?
Very differently from each other. Switzerland was regarded as a country which had not only maintained local direct democracy usages similar to those employed in New England towns, but had protected its local institutions and effectively resisted the encroachment of potential political centralizes or 'despots.' Denmark and Sweden, by sharp contrast, were seen as systems which had become corrupted because their estates had allowed the powers of their parliaments to be undermined by centralizing monarchs who deprived the nobility and citizens of legislative rights which they had earlier enjoyed. Their people and elites had failed to maintain effective checks on the wielders of power. The Americans believed that it had been lack of vigilance that had brought liberty in Denmark to its knees, for there is a corrupt nobility, more interested in using its privileges for self-indulgence than for service to the state, had dropped its guard and allowed in a standing army which quickly destroyed the constitution and the liberties protected by it.
Sweden was a subsequent case in point.
The colonists themselves could remember when the Swedish people had enjoyed liberty to the full; but now, in the 1760s, they were known to "rejoice at being subject to the caprice and arbitrary power of a tyrant, and kiss their chains.
The concepts of corruption employed by the American colonists partly anticipated the manner in which concepts and terms were employed in some subsequent American crises, but also relate to concepts employed by such founding fathers of western political thought as Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle. They and some modern political theorists have employed the notion of the "corruption of the bad polity," to characterize situations which they perceived as marked by the decay of the moral and political order. As Friedrich writes about one of them: "Rousseau was deeply concerned with what he believed to be the corruption of his age, and he looked upon himself as the wise man who must raise a warning voice:...Rousseau's concern with corruption is primarily with moral corruption, and only indirectly with political corruption, as providing the setting for moral corruption." Another writer notes that, "The arguments about corruption are scattered throughout the Western political tradition but a coherent theory of corruption has never been fully articulated."
As some of the above examples illustrate, there may be some overlap between the broader 'institutional decay' concept of corruption, and the more delineated one which defines corruption in terms of the acceptance of money or money's worth by public officials for misusing official powers. But analytically the two concepts are fairly clearly distinguishable. There will tend to be some "corrupt" public officials in most political systems which are not widely believed to be becoming corrupt in the sense of the decay of their vital moral or constitutional rules of behavior. But by and large even radical critics have come not to link the establishment of standing armies and the growth of national debts as indicators of political system corruption in the way that eighteenth century critics did.
At times shocking revelations about the misuse of political, and especially executive powers, have tended to revive the associations and partly archaicized usages linked with the concept of institutional decay. Watergate was a marked instance of that. When it became apparent that President Nixon and his White House aides had boldly abused the powers of their offices to undermine their opponents, the issue of corruption reappeared starkly on the American national scene.
The Watergate revelations revealed clear violations of political rules in the shape of a television drama, which seemed to come, "straight out of the American Christian literary tradition...revealing naked ambition, Christian piety, lust for power and tragic betrayal." Americans watching it got the overwhelming impression that "all the president's men were satanic minions, that the president himself was villainy incarnate, and that the highest office in the land had been lamentably stained." (Eisenstadt, 1990) In its drama and consequence the Watergate revelations, leading as they did to the near-impeachment and resignation of the president and the imprisonment of many of his closest advisers, far exceeded both the drama and political import of such "normal" American scandals of earlier days, like Teapot Dome and Credit Mobilier.
Yet the prevailing definitions of political corruption by recent political scientists have fairly consistently defined corruption in terms of transactions between the private and public sectors such that collective goods are illegitimately converted into private-regarding payoffs.
The intrigues and plots which composed portions of the illegal chain in which operatives of the Nixon White House abused executive powers did not clearly conform to such and similar definitions of corruption. By contrast to the typical patterns of bribery, nepotism, patronage, misappropriation of funds, sale of office, and the like, Watergate did not involve primarily private-regarding payoffs, the president's tax returns and home remodeling notwithstanding. All the President's Men were not interested in private gain. Watergate thus differed from such cash-oriented scandals as Teapot Dome, Credit Mobilier, or the Agnew affair.
Many political scientists whose attention to political corruption phenomena antedated the Nixon/Watergate period reacted critically to these proposed, more broadened definitions. We are inclined to agree with a British colleague that the looseness of contemporary definitions provides infinite scope for argument. Unethical behavior or behavior which violates "the norms of the system of public order" may include almost anything. The danger here seems to be that clarity and consistency in analysis may have been sacrificed for comprehensiveness. The fundamental weakness of the recent literature on corruption lies in the use of vague criteria and inappropriate perspectives which distort, exaggerate or otherwise over-simply explanations of corruption in the United States.
