Political Corruption

Concepts and Contexts

Michael Johnston, Michael Johnston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351498968
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• 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 I Terms, Concepts, and Definitions

Introduction to Part I

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.

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 (OED), 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 favor; 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 unwhole-someness 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.

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, G. Myrdal, and J.S. Nye—who have concerned themselves with the problems of development in various continents.

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.

Examining the wording of American statutes relating to bribery, Lowenstein (Handbook, 1990) finds that one of five elements generally mentioned, that relating to the involvement of a public official, is least ambiguous. More open to interpretation are conditions that

1. the defendant must have a corrupt intent;
2. that benefits of value must accrue to the public official;
3. that there must be a relationship between the thing of value and an official act; and,
4. that the relationship must involve the intent to influence or be influenced in the carrying out of an official act.

J.S. Nye (chapter 17) 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-Cente red Defin itions

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 clearl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Terms, Concepts, and Definitions
• Introduction to Part I
• 1 Corruption Concepts in Historical Perspective
• 2 Defining Corruption
• 3 Conceptualizing Political Corruption
• 4 What is the Problem about Corruption?
• Part II Comparing Across Time and Countries
• Introduction to Part II
• 5 Corruption as a Historical Phenomenon
• 6 The Sale of Public Offices
• 7 Early Modern Corruption in English and French Fields of Vision
• 8 Handling Historical Comparisons Cross-Nationally
• Part III Perceptions and Distinctions
• Introduction to Part III
• 9 Perspectives on the Perception of Corruption
• 10 Gradients of Corruption in Perceptions of American Public Life
• 11 Right and Wrong in American Politics: Popular Conceptions of Corruption
• Part IV Political Development
• Introduction to Part IV
• 12 The Development of Political Corruption in Israel
• 13 Corruption, Machine Politics and Political Change
• 14 Exchanging Material Benefits for Political Support: A Comparative Analysis
• Part V Modernization and Corruption
• Introduction to Part V
• 15 Modernization and Corruption
• 16 Corruption as a Hindrance to Modernization in South Asia
• 17 Corruption and Political Development: A Cost-Benefit Analysis
• Part VI Corruption and Economic Growth
• Introduction to Part VI
• 18 Economie Development Through Bureaucratic Corruption
• 19 Corruption and Development: A Review of Issues
• 20 The Effects of Corruption on Growth and Public Expenditure
• 21 When is Corruption Harmful?
• Part VII Endemic Corruption and African Underdevelopment
• Introduction to Part VII
• 22 Corruption in the Neo-Patrimonial States of Sub-Saharan Africa
• 23 Political Corruption in South Africa: From Apartheid to Multiracial State
• 24 The Institutional Framework for Corruption Control in Uganda
• 25 A Comparative Analysis of African and East Asian Corruption
• Part VIII The Asian Exception? Corruption as a Lesser Handicap
• Introduction to Part VIII
• 26 Patron-Client Networks and the Economie Effects of Corruption in Asia
• 27 The Politics of Privilege: Rents and Corruption in Asia
• 28 Responses to Corruption in Asian Societies
• Part IX Reactions to Corruption in Authoritarian Regimes
• Introduction to Part IX
• 29 Soviet Political Culture and Modes of Covert Influence
• 30 Bribery and Other Ways of Coping With Officialdom in Post-Communist Eastern Europe
• 31 Corruption and the Future of Economic Reform in China
• 32 Corruption under German National Socialism
• Part X Corruption in the Levels of American Government
• Introduction to Part X
• 33 Variations in Corruption among the American States*
• 34 Corruption Concepts and Federal Campaign Finance Law
• 35 Corruption Control in New York and Its Discontents
• 36 American and German Fund Raising Fiascoes and their Aftermath
• Part XI Political Parties and Corruption
• Introduction to Part XI
• 37 Corrupt Exchanges and the Implosion of the Italian Party System
• 38 Party Finance and Political Scandal: Comparing Italy, Spain, and France
• 39 Parties, Campaign Finance and Political Corruption: Tracing Long-Term Comparative Dynamics
• 40 Party Systems, Competition, and Political Checks against Corruption
• Part XII Corruption Inheritance: Entrenched or Transitional
• Introduction to Part XII
• 41 High Level Political Corruption in Latin America: A "Transitional" Phenomenon?
• 42 A Theory of Limits on Corruption and Some Applications
• 43 Public Trust and Corruption in Japan
• Part XIII Corruption Terms, Measures, and Methodologies
• Introduction to Part XIII
• 44 Measuring the New Corruption Rankings: Implications for Analysis and Reform
• 45 Corruption Terms in the World Press: How Languages Differ
• Part XIV International Efforts to Control Corruption
• Introduction to Part XIV
• 46 Judicial Anti-Corruption Initiatives: Latin Europe in a Global Setting
• 47 Corruption as an International Policy Problem
• 48 Controlling Business Payoffs to Foreign Officials: The 1998 OECD Anti-Bribery Convention
• Guide to Articles in Previous Editions of Political Corruption
• Contributors