Political Corruption

In Beyond the Nation State

Robert Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134563814
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medizin
• Subtopic: Gesundheitsversorgung

This book, combining scholarship with readability, shows that political corruption must itself be analysed politically. Spectacularly corrupt politicians - the exception rather than the rule - are usually symptoms, not causes, and much political corruption is simply normal politics taken to excess. But in a world in which anti-corruption strategies themselves are often thinly disguised examples of political corruption, the ways in which political systems address their own corruption are as varied and fascinating in character as crucial to comprehend. A valuable read for anyone studying social science disciplines such as politics, international relations, sociology, anthropology, criminology and public policy. As well as the global community of anti-corruption activists, professional politicians, police, business people and lawyers.

1 The idea of political corruption (I): conceptual and definitional issues

Meno: But how will you look for something when you don’t in the least know what it is? …

Socrates: … Do you realize that what you are bringing up is the trick argument that a man cannot try to discover either what he knows or what he does not know? He would not seek what he knows, for since he knows it there is no need of the inquiry, nor what he does not know, for in that case he does not even know what he is to look for.

Meno: Well, do you think it is a good argument?

Socrates: No.

(Plato, Meno, 80–DE)

Political corruption is a multifaceted and mutable concept, defiant of precise or comprehensive definition. Although in an interconnected world almost all areas of social and political science present definitional or conceptual problems at the margins, in political corruption these margins are especially wide. Domestically, because political corruption is often so intimately interconnected with business enterprises, legitimate as well as shady, the term is sometimes used in situations better understood as simple fraud or embezzlement. Globally the fractures in the international system arising from national sovereignty, jurisdictional disputes and lack of coordination among international organizations give political corruption many forms to take and many cracks in which to hide. Hence we shall argue that political corruption can no longer be plausibly analysed only within a nation state framework.

In addition, the line between what is and is not corrupt can be so fine as to be indiscernible even to those involved. Where this is not so and corruption is manifest it is often impossible to disentangle political from other forms of corruption. A kleptocracy¹ like Mobutu’s Zaïre, for example, could not have functioned without corrupting the civil servants, judiciary and generals who together constituted an interdependent and secretive power elite; the same applies in high-corruption countries from the Philippines and Indonesia to Moldova and Georgia.

Many problems, analytic, conceptual and investigative, face students of political corruption. For example, in the United States it is clearly the formal duty of elected representatives to serve the people without fear or favour; equally clearly, in practice the political system works on rather different principles. Party discipline is weak and interest groups strong, and, in the absence of a Burkean representational system, Congressmen can effectively become advocates for powerful interests within their own electorates. Hence emerge both ‘fixers’, those descendants of old-fashioned party bosses who ensure that the vacuum created by weak parties is filled by strong interest groups (Rogow and Lasswell 1963: 22), and ‘iron triangles’ of congressional committees, civil servants and private interest groups (Smith 1988; Tullock 1993). In such situations the symbiotic nature of political, bureaucratic and interest-group relations creates a collusive structure impermeable to external influence and largely invisible to electors:

Bureaux are adept at responding to threatened budget cuts with promises to eliminate services most valued by voters, thus marshalling the vote motive in favour of their bloated budgets. … The major armament manufacturers together with individuals who live around and service military installations ally themselves with congressmen dependent on defence military contracts for their constituents and with bureaucrats from the Department of Defense whose budgets are dependent on high military appropriations from the US Congress. Such iron triangles are very resistant to voter attacks even in circumstances that clearly call for budgetary retrenchment.

(Tullock 1993: 56–57)

In politics a gap almost inevitably exists between public discourse and private reality. In most western democracies the only acceptable rhetorical justification for entering politics is to serve the people. But since the reality of politics is no less self-seeking than that of any commercial organization politicians juggle an altruistic public discourse with a private one in which, as with any job, their motives are geared primarily to personal ambitions such as self-advancement or securing a comfortable lifestyle. This dissonance between appearance and reality sets the scene for the theatre of deception which democratic politics can easily become. The cognoscenti Washington insiders, Westminster villagers and trusted members of the press corps know what is going on, but the reality presented to the public, except on the exciting occasions when a scandal breaks, is normally a carefully spun tapestry.

This dissonance between appearance and reality also means that when minor scandals, which would be dealt with quietly if at all by most corporations, become public they are a source of fascination. Miscreant politicians in competitive democracies, whether corrupt or not, therefore risk being dealt with firmly once their conduct has come to public notice and been negatively received.² This is especially so if the conduct in question threatens the party’s electoral prospects and therefore their colleagues’ career interests. It is even more so if the politicians concerned lack a strong enough power base to be able to raise the stakes by heightening the risk attached to any action against them.

Most major scandals are events beyond the equilibrating capacity of the system to manage, events which cause it to spin out of control like a heating system with a faulty thermostat, until, at least in a mature state, adjustments to existing regulatory mechanisms or new ones bring it back into equilibrium. Such scandals should almost never be analysed individualistically. In Watergate,³ for example, only at one level did the corruption stem from Nixon the man – his paranoia, his resentment at the conspiracy of ‘insiders’ to keep him outside the magic circle, his self-imposed mission to save the United States from the subversive forces of permissiveness, and so on. At a second level it stemmed from the fact that all societies contain people like Nixon but not all states make them president.⁴ Hence whatever Nixon the man may have done, the presidency which enabled him to do it was a product of the US political system. While manipulating state agencies and his opponents’ decision-making,⁵ controlling information flows, heavy-handedly calling in political debts, pressurizing companies for contributions and conspiring with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to engage in illegal phone-tapping were certainly disgraceful, disgraceful presidential behaviour is not exactly unique. In fact Nixon was almost obsessively aware of the corruption, criminal associations and cover-ups perpetrated by his predecessors, not least the popular hero Kennedy whose legacy he so resented; and the White House tapes several times show that Nixon saw himself as acting no differently from his opponents. At a third level Nixon’s concern was to maximize his freedom to govern, an ambition which led him to try to centralize the bureaucracy, control public opinion and equate dissenting views about his ‘secret war’ in Cambodia and Laos with un-American activity. This in turn was a response to the fact that though, famously, the buck stops with the President, the President’s freedom to govern is inhibited by Madisonian checks and balances designed to keep him in semi-permanent tension with Congress. Hence Nixon is better understood not as a uniquely evil man, which he certainly was not, though as a driven and tormented one he may have been a risky president. Rather he was the product of a political system which, if similar problems were not to recur, required a step-change rather than fine tuning.

Of course both a very corrupt politician and a very honest one are easy to spot independently of culture; it is the shades of grey that give us pause. This applies both in less-developed countries (LDCs) with low literacy levels, immature or inadequate constitutional safeguards and poor communications, and in developed ones with an informed electorate, strong civil society and free press. Within the grey area political corruption for the most part involves a range of understood practices which give cause for concern only when some boundary is overstepped or when political, commercial or criminal purpose is served by exposure. The distinction between lobbying, the very stuff of democratic politics, and rent-seeking (putting one’s personal interests above those of the electorate) often has little practical meaning. That such a distinction exists, however, is probably a product of the myth, prevalent in the United States with its cultural adulation of the Founding Fathers, of a binary divide between the altruistic and the self-seeking politician. Once this binary divide is questioned, conventional views of political corruption require reconsideration.

These observations suggest three main points, all to be developed in this book. First, political corruption is, for the most part, best understood not as a discrete phenomenon but as an extension of normal political behaviour, presenting problems of quantity, where corruption is taken to excess, or quality, where it involves activities deemed unacceptable by local or international law or significant opinion formers. Second, it is a transnational and international activity, and analyses based on a nation state framework have been overtaken by events on the world stage. Third, it is an interstitial activity, operating in the cracks between different sectors in one state, or, transnationally, in those between the political frameworks of different states.

Following signposts: the impossibility of adequate definition

‘You know that it is much easier to ask questions than to answer them. But answer yourself, and… make your answer precise and accurate …’ … ‘Thrasymachus,’ I said trembling, ‘don’t be hard on us, for if Polemarchus and I have gone astray in our scrutiny of the argument, our sin has assuredly not been deliberate …We are in earnest, my friend, believe me, but the task, I fancy, is beyond our powers; and, therefore, you clever people should rather pity than scold us.’

(Plato, The Republic )

Boswell: Then, Sir, What is poetry?

Johnson: Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.

(James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson)

The literature on political corruption contains many attempts at definition, none of them entirely satisfactory. Heywood, for example, perfectly sensibly suggests that in liberal democracies it is best understood as ‘an abuse of trust and an attempt to control the political arena through an undemocratic use of power and influence’ (Heywood 1994: 3). This definition, however, excludes corruption in political systems where political leadership is not conceived of as a trust, where the head of state is above the law, or where democracy is not the norm. It is understandable that the chimera of a unified definition has preoccupied generations of scholars, for scholars are trained to follow the common sense proposition that it is hard to discuss something unless one knows what it is. But:

Definitions of corruption generally focus on one of several aspects of the phenomenon … ‘public-interest-centred’, regarding corruption to be in some way injurious to or destructive of the public interest… ‘market-centred’, suggesting that the norms governing the exercise of public office have shifted from a ‘mandatory-pricing model to a free-market model’, especially in circumstances where such governing norms are unclear or nonexistent – as in new states… ‘public-office-centred’, stressing the public office has been misused … ‘public-opinion-centred’ … legal criteria … difficulties surrounding the criteria … are clear…. Yet to narrow corruption to purely legal criteria in order to escape from these difficulties seems equally problematic.

(Szeftel 1983: 164)

Nonetheless it is hard to find an acceptable alternative. One approach is to analyse the numerous anthropological case studies which exist for areas of commonality, construct a grid of corruption-friendly and unfriendly circumstances and apply it to the available ethnographies. But this also only takes us so far: case studies are sui generis and rarely permit precise comparison. Another approach is to construct elaborate schemata intended to encapsulate the full range of corrupt activities. To Alatas, for example:

corruption may be divided into seven distinct types: transactive, extortive, investive, defensive, nepotistic, autogenic and supportive. … Failure to make the distinction between the different types of corruption and to place them in their proper evaluative context only leads to confusion and time wasting.

(Alatas 1990: 3)

This is a logical approach, and one need not share Alatas’s confidence in the clarity, exclusivity or applicability of his categories, or indeed his passionate anti-corruption ethic, to see that it could offer a basis for development. It has, however, still to be determined how fruitful such a development would be, and though further testing of the typology is necessary the possibility that it could lead to conceptual progress should certainly not be dismissed. Padhy, on the other hand, suggests a tripartite distinction involving nonfeasance (failing to perform a required duty), malfeasance (committing an unlawful act) and misfeasance (the improper performance of a legitimate action) (Padhy 1986: 3). This is an interesting approach, but by defining as corrupt all failures to do one’s duty it offers such a counsel of perfection that only the most saintly could claim to be other than intermittently corrupt.

Many single-sentence definitions characterize political corruption as the exploitation of elected public office for private gain; but these simply describe normal political behaviour which is only perceived as corrupt when it becomes quantitatively unacceptable (people become greedy), or qualitatively so, extending into areas deemed sacrosanct by significant opinion formers. Most politicians exploit public office for private gain when given legitimate opportunity to do so just as most individuals exploit such opportunities as their circumstances yield them. What political system does not make use of patronage? How many politicians fail to reward their supporters once in office? (One of patronage’s cruder manifestations, the spoils system, has a long pedigree in US politics: see Summers 1987: 23 et seq.) How many decline to benefit personally from office by generous interpretation of the perquisites available to them? Or, on demitting office, by parachuting into directorships, consultancies, after-dinner speaking engagements or book contracts?

To claim that most political corruption is better regarded as an extension of political activity than as a radical departure from it is not to retreat into a culturally pluralist, but ultimately nihilistic, cul-de-sac: the charms of such an approach have seduced too many scholars already. Neild, for example, defines political corruption, on the face of it perfectly reasonably, as ‘The breaking, for the sake of financial or political gain, of the rules of conduct in public affairs prevailing in a society in the period under consideration’ (Neild 2001: 1). Definitions such as this, however, present several difficulties. First, in that they are predicated on the assumption that there is, or can be, agreement in a given society as to what is and is not corrupt, they anticipate unrealistic levels of intra-societal consensus, not least among both the predatory classes and their victims. The negative public response to the dubious use of presidential pardons or immunities in countries ranging from the United States to Indonesia illustrates this point. Second, they assume all interest groups will have a view on the matter, whereas some may not. We cannot assume training in constitutionalism, the existence of a European-style scepticism towards politicians or even high levels of literacy in many countries whose occupants most regularly encounter corruption. More often in such countries the propaganda of corrupt leaders themselves shapes popular views on the subject, usually through media control or the influence of local placemen. Third, whether an act is corrupt may be unclear and necessitous of judicial determination. Entrepreneurs, political as well as commercial, by definition test the boundaries of legitimacy by operating in innovative and creative, not to say morally and legally ambiguous, ways. But such ambiguity is not synonymous with corruption, and the rules of politics and business are not always so clear as the legal divide between, say, stealing and not stealing a chocolate bar. Fourth, the logic of this kind of definition leads to the conclusion that in a kleptocracy, where no effective rules of political conduct exist, there can be no political corruption. This creates the self-evidently illogical proposition that, the rules being themselves the products of corruption, corruption is capable of abolishing itself. It would seem particularly absurd to deem non-corrupt an act that most international scholars, jurisdictions and inter-governmental organizations, to say nothing of educated people around the world, would consider such but which avoids the designation for reasons that are themselves corrupt. Fifth, such an approach is based on the assumption that rules concerning corruption are matters of national policy and legislation. This no longer suffices in the international and transnational world. If potential inward investors believe a country is corrupt they will either exacerbate whatever corruption exists by exploiting it or inflict collateral economic damage by declining to invest. Either way the country’s vulnerability is increased. Sixth, in a world fuelled by international trade and commerce the explanatory potential of cultural peculiarities is considerably diminished. While such peculiarities certainly exist, as any westerner who has traded in the Middle East, the Indian sub-continent or South-East Asia will testify, wise LDC traders are increasingly adapting to western norms. So while one should not be naive about the sweeteners paid by western companies, often in contravention of their own laws, a degree of cultural convergence is both discernible and inevitable.

A further problem exists with attempts to define political corruption by reference to criminal law. The efforts of virtually all criminologists or statisticians of crime are impeded by the problem of clandestinity, which creates a large dark figure of unknown criminal activity. The student of political corruption faces both this problem and a further one stemming from the fact that many transgressors lie (usually in both senses of the word) at the heart of their country’s power elite. Not surprisingly when the objects of suspicion may themselves be responsible for framing, interpreting or implementing constitutional and criminal law, numerous examples exist of powerful rulers being above those same laws. But are laws drafted on the instructions of those engaged in nefarious activity any more helpful to the task of defining corruption than a statute prohibiting housebreaking designed by a burglar so as to omit all reference to his or her preferred modus operandi?⁶

after President Trujillo, the ‘benefactor’ of the Dominican Republic (1930–61), took over the country’s only shoe factory there was no secret about the ensuing decree forbidding anyone in the capital from going barefoot…. Likewise President Zayas of Cuba (1921–5) made no secret of his attitude towards the National Lottery: ’his wife notoriously always drew the first prize and his daughter the second – both without shame’.

(Whitehead 1983: 148)

But the problem is not restricted to tin-pot dictatorships. Democratic governments may also, especially when long in power, become arrogant in attitude, blurring constitutional distinctions between party and government and between government and state. For example, in an effectively unaccountable legislature in Campania, Southern Italy, ‘the mayor demanded that 323 items be voted on as one block… most of these items concerned ratification of contracts awarded … as a result of private negotiation rather than public tendering’ (Behan 1996: 139). Prior to the 1990s it would have been hard to find a supposedly communist country in Eastern Europe where corruption was other than endemic. While in most such countries capitalist transformations have changed the character of corruption they have by no means inevitably diminished its extent: on the contrary, in a number of former ‘second world’ countries they have led to increases, a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• 1 The idea of political corruption (I): conceptual and definitional issues
• 2 The idea of political corruption (II): the contribution of political economy
• 3 National political corruption (I): the People’s Republic of China
• 4 National political corruption (II): the United Kingdom
• 5 Transnational political corruption (I): international finance
• 6 Transnational political corruption (II): organized crime, smuggling and the global political economy of drugs
• 7 Conclusion
• Bibliography