At the symbolic level, few citizens would say that they are against good governance and fewer still would endorse bad governance or corruption. However, because of their symbolic power, the terms governance and corruption are applied indiscriminately to describe what people like or dislike. Without standards for defining these terms, the result is confusion.
Because the words governance and government share the same Greek root, they are often used interchangeably. Governance is a behavioural relationship between governors and governed. Government is a set of institutions established by a constitution and laws. A narrow definition of governance is that it is about relations within the government between principals, who decide what government institutions do, and public officials who act as their agents in the process of governance (cf. Peters and Pierre 2004). While these relationships are important for high-level politics, this focus ignores how public officials deal with the great mass of citizens living outside the national capital.
Governance and government are linked. Institutions provide the laws, money and public employees that produce public services, while governance determines the experience that ordinary people have when they deal with officials delivering these services. These outputs include both the âgoodâ goods of public policy, such as education and health care, and necessary but not always welcome services, such as court orders.
The delivery of services can be in keeping with the standards of good governance or corruption. How the process of governance is evaluated reflects the standards used to define corruption, as well as by how public officials behave. When ordinary Russians describe politicians as corrupt they usually have in mind officials abusing their public office for private gains that can be worth billions of roubles. When Britons refer to politicians as corrupt, they often have in mind behaviour that would be unacceptable among friends or people at work or that they would be ashamed of doing themselves. When dictators in poor countries are accused of corruption because they take money in return for awarding public contracts to private enterprises, they may claim that they are not acting corruptly but simply following their countryâs traditional cultural practices.
1 What Corruption Is About
To define corruption as a departure from good governance is logically clear but in practice of little help because the term governance has been stretched to cover a jumble of activities and political processes. For example, the World Bank defines governance as:
The traditions and institutions by which authority in a country is exercised. This includes the process by which governments are selected, monitored and replaced; the capacity of the government to effectively formulate and implement sound policies; and the respect of citizens and the state for the institutions that govern economic and social interactions among them. (http://âinfor.âworldbank.âorg/âgovernance)
Social scientists are likewise expansive in their views. The Quality of Government Institute of the University of Gothenburg eclectically includes more than 2500 variables in its database about political institutions and processes, including some indicators of institutions that may facilitate corruption.
To describe governance in positivist language as the normal way in which public officials relate to citizens can be taken to mean that the way public officials usually behave is how they ought to behave. In countries, where good governance tends to prevail, this can be a distinction without a difference. However, where officials often do not behave as they ought to, a positivist definition ignores the normative difference between good and bad governance. Where corruption is persisting, a behavioural characterization may interpret activities that appear corrupt by international standards as an equilibrium maintained by the holders of power delivering policies that benefit themselves and their supporters and that are accepted with resignation by people who lack the political influence to promote good governance (Mungiu-Pippidi 2015).
The practice of governance also changes across time. Prior to the introduction of nineteenth-century reforms, Englandâs aristocratic governors used customary practices to maintain their political power and the material benefits of office. Until late Victorian times offices now regarded as public, such as seats in Parliament, could be bought and sold as private property. Those excluded from power campaigned successfully for the reform of traditional practices that they stigmatized as âOld Corruptionâ (Rubinstein 1983). In the United States, urban politicians used democratic institutions to create political machines that controlled governance for the benefit of themselves and those who voted for them. Public contracts were given to major supporters and cash, food or low-level public jobs were given to ordinary voters in exchange for their votes. The practice of judging governments by what they do rather than by how they do it was embodied in the boast of Chicago machine politicians that it is âthe city that worksâ. The phrase leaves open how it works.
To compare good and bad governance in countries around the world today, a definition of corruption is needed that goes beyond endorsing that whatever is accepted in a given national context is internationally acceptable as good. It is even more needed by intergovernmental organizations such as the World Bank, which annually spends many billions in trying to improve economic and social conditions in countries in which its efforts can be frustrated when its money gets into the hands of officials who accept corruption as a normal part of governance. Making the definition of a concept relative to national context or loading it up with a dozen or more different meanings risks stretching it to the point at which it is no longer scientifically useful.
Socially constructed definitions. The meaning of corruption cannot be confined to the black and white letters of a dictionary. It is socially constructed according to the context in which it is used and the normative standards of those using the term, whether they are social scientists, journalists, politicians or ordinary people. Review articles chronicle many different contemporary uses of the word (Varraich 2014; Kurer 2015). The number of meanings increases greatly when comparisons are made across time and space (see e.g. Heidenheimer and Johnston 2002: Part One).
The English word corruption is derived from the Latin corrumpere, something that fails to meet a particular standard (Oxford English Dictionary 1936, vol. 1: 400). A computer programme can be described as corrupt if it does not meet the standard set by the computerâs operating system. The best-known political use of the term is Lord Actonâs dictum: âPower tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutelyâ. The statement leaves open the standards that are broken by the corruption of power.
In philosophical terms, corruption has a family of meanings with a degree of kinship; it also has family disputes. Because corruption invariably has negative connotations, it tends to be used as a synonym for bad governance. The positivist approach of contemporary social science favours reducing the meaning of corruption to a single characteristic that can be expressed numerically for use in quantitative analyses testing theories of the causes and consequences of corruption. A legal approach is likewise narrow but it relies on written texts that specify illegal practices in the delivery of public services, the only numbers employed are those used in enumerating the clauses of a law.
The most commonly quoted definition is that of Transparency International: âthe abuse of entrusted power for private gainâ (www.âtransparency.âorg). Its anti-corruption glossary lists 60 entries with different examples of corruption, such as mutually beneficial collusion in money-laundering. Imputing so many different meanings to the term threatens to drain corruption of any particular meaning. Like democracy, another concept that has dozens of different meanings, the significance of corruption for governance means that it cannot be abandoned. It also challenges writers to be clear about what they mean when they describe activities as corrupt.
In this book, the core meaning of corruption is that it violates formal bureaucratic standards or informal normative standards about how public office-holders ought to behave, or both. Formal bureaucratic standards are set out in laws and regulations. Violations of these standards can be assessed through normal legal processes and enforced by courts. Informal standards are norms about how governors ought to behave. These standards are âsoftâ laws. They are social psychological expectations held in the mind rather than recorded in statute books. In a political system of good governance, informal norms can re-enforce legal standards, for example public officials ought not to take money in exchange for doing favours. If there is a consensus within a society that a public official has broken an informal standard, then he or she can be punished for corrupt behaviour in the court of public opinion.
When both formal and informal standards of political behaviour are weak or lacking, then politicians will be left to their own devices to decide how to behave. When the breakdown of the Soviet Union led to the transformation of Communist societies, behaviour that appeared corrupt to Western advisors was justified on the grounds of the âprimacy of surviving by mutual social favoursâ (Sajo 2002: 2; cf. Rose 2009: Chapter 5). The primacy of survival is today specially relevant in failed states. An economic theory based on the premise that individuals pursue their own self-interest can lead to public officials profiting surreptitiously from the sale of state-owned assets such as the trade in oil or even âstealing the stateâ by transferring assets to a new breakaway entity that they control (Solnick 1998). In the absence of a state with the effective power to enforce any standards, the optimal outcome is, in the words of an economist, âefficient predatory behaviour in a lawless worldâ (Dabla-Norris 2002).
A necessary condition of characterizing the behaviour of officeholders is that there are laws formally setting standards that public officials ought to apply impartially when making decisions about who receives benefits or must comply with obligations. In short, public officials should behave like bureaucrats in Max Weberâs universalistic definition of a modern state (1947). If they do not, then their behaviour is corrupt. In a political system that has not adopted the bureaucratic rules of a modern state, corruption in this sense cannot exist. If an official shows favouritism in dispensing services to relatives and friends, this may be considered appropriate by the standards of the national culture. If an official is given money after delivering a benefit to an individual or waiving an obligation, in the absence of a law making this illegal, it is not bribery. Anthropologists describe this as a customary act of gratitude and economists as a rational transaction in which you get what you pay for. In such a context, only by importing modern standards can customary behaviour be described as corrupt.
Bureaucratic governance in the Weberian sense is a nineteenth-century development in Europe (Anderson and Anderson 1967; Finer 1997). In countries and continents, where its standards have been incorporated slowly and incompletely in the past half-century, public officials can operate by a mixture of informal traditional standards and formal laws and regulations modelled on contemporary international standards. In states with a legacy of MarxistâLeninist standards or some other form of dictatorship, those in power can enforce laws selectively to their own advantage a...