Political Corruption

11 Key excerpts on "Political Corruption"

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  Political Corruption in Comparative Perspective

  Sources, Status and Prospects

  • Charles Funderburk(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 1Political Corruption: Causes and Consequences Charles Funderburk

  Bribery, extortion, kickbacks, public officials on the take, abuse of authority, scandals and cover-ups, police corruption, money laundering, and organized crime. These topics are the stuff of headlines, politics, and criminal investigations. While Political Corruption is an ancient and dishonorable endeavor, it is also an increasingly important reality of modern politics and the globalized economy.

  Political Corruption is about more than immorality and dishonesty. Corruption refers to a process that destroys or subverts honesty and integrity. Defined narrowly, corruption refers to acts by public officials that are dishonest or illegal, most often for private gain. More broadly, corruption includes actions by public officials that may be legal or illegal but are questionable in terms of the integrity of a system of legitimate government and the rule of law. To the extent that stable governmental institutions and the rule of law are related to economic and political development (they are), corrupt activities that undermine or manipulate the political system for private gain and political advancement impose real costs on societies. Corruption distributes resources in ways that benefit dishonest people at the expense of law-abiding citizens, and favors the wealthy over those unable to pay off corrupt officials. Graft cheats the government and taxpayers, and corruption of public officials is essential to organized crime.

  In their analysis of corruption, Berg, Hahn, and Schmidhauser discuss why Political Corruption should be defined more broadly than simply the commission of acts contrary to existing law. Since those who hold power decide what is legal, the powerful are at liberty to define corruption and legality in a manner beneficial to their interests:

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  Institutions, Governance and the Control of Corruption

  • Kaushik Basu, Tito Cordella, Kaushik Basu, Tito Cordella, Kaushik Basu, Tito Cordella(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Corruption hurts life outcomes in a wide variety of ways. Economically, it diverts resources away from their most productive uses, and acts like a regressive tax that supports the lifestyles of elites at the expense of everyone else. Corruption incentivizes the best and the brightest to spend their time gaming the system rather than innovating or creating new wealth. Politically, corruption undermines the legitimacy of political systems by giving elites alternative ways of holding on to power other than genuine democratic choice. It hurts the prospects of democracy when people perceive authoritarian governments performing better than corrupt democratic ones, and undermines the reality of democratic choice.

  However, the phenomenon labeled corruption comprises a wide range of behaviors whose economic and political effects vary greatly. It is remarkable that for all of the academic effort put into the study of corruption, there is still no broadly accepted vocabulary for distinguishing between its different forms. Before we can tackle corruption, we need some conceptual clarity as to what it is, and how it relates to the broader problem of good government.

  Corruption as a Modern Phenomenon

  Corruption can exist in many contexts, from bribery in a sports organization to a secretary stealing from the office pool. I am here going to focus on Political Corruption, which concerns the abuse of public office for private gain.1

  The first point to note is that corruption is a modern phenomenon. The very terms public and private did not always exist in earlier historical times. In the European Medieval era, virtually all regimes were what Max Weber labeled “patrimonial”: that is, political authority was regarded as a species of private property which could be handed down to descendants as part of their patrimony. In dynastic times, a king could give away an entire province with all of its inhabitants to his son or daughter as a wedding present, along with all of the inhabitants living there, since he regarded his domain as a private possession. Under these circumstances it made no sense to talk about public corruption.2

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  An Introduction to Political Crime

  • Ross, Jeffrey Ian(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Policy Press

    (Publisher)

  2 corruption is less of a problem. Thus, in many advanced industrialized countries when corruption is discovered by either the news media or a watchdog organization, like Congress Watch, the Center for Public Integrity, or Transparency International, it has the potential to become a scandal.

  History

  Bribery and corruption both have long histories (Chambliss, 1971). Because of their unique positions and poor remuneration, the first state officials had something to exchange that others, who were not in their jobs, did not possess. In fact, bribe taking by public officials has been documented over the past four millennia (Noonan, 1984). One of the most recent (1994) estimates of bribe money passed to both public and private officials in the US, for example, ranges from US$3 billion to US$15 billion annually (Coleman, 1995, p. 254).

  Effect of Political Corruption

  Political Corruption is a betrayal of the public trust, and therefore, the citizenry is the ultimate victim of this type of political crime. This leads the public to become increasingly cynical and apathetic about politics, politicians, and their deeds and misdeeds (Greider, 1992). Political Corruption can cause far-reaching social harms, as the public is deceived, lied to, and in some cases, denied the impartial representation due them from state officials. The subsequent distrust can also lead to increased scrutiny of public officials, making their jobs more burdensome, and causing government to function less efficiently, more expensively and consuming additional taxpayer money.

  The most serious harms resulting from corruption are symbolic. In advanced industrialized democracies, elected and appointed officials are viewed increasingly with skepticism and cynicism by the citizenry. Politicians have been accused of participating in Political Corruption, resulting in reduced faith in public institutions and elected and appointed officials. This shift is manifested in declining numbers of voters and growing political apathy and distrust of public officials (Nye et al., 1997).

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  Corruption in contemporary politics

  A new travel guide

  • James L. Newell(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  With that in mind, we begin by considering what Political Corruption is or might be, for the study of anything requires that we have a clear understanding of its nature. We then discuss the different types of corruption and say something about why their study might be important.

  What is corruption?

  To understand what political corruption is, we must first understand the meaning of the word ‘corruption’. Dictionaries define it as a form of decay or adulteration. For instance, Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (1953) offers three definitions of the verb ‘to corrupt’: (1) ‘to make putrid; to taint’; (2) ‘to change from good to bad; to debase’; (3) ‘to draw aside from rectitude and duty, to pervert’. The first definition refers to both decay and adulteration in a physical sense – since ‘putrid’ means ‘rotten’, while ‘to taint’ means ‘to pollute’ or ‘to contaminate’; the second can refer to the debasement of currency and precious metals; the third definition clearly refers to a process of moral adulteration, because ‘rectitude’ and ‘duty’ are moral terms: we use them when we want to express judgements about what we think ought or ought not to be the case.

  Definitions of the term ‘Political Corruption’ have been heavily influenced by the meanings of corruption that fall into the moral category, as we shall see; and they have in common the idea that corruption is something that involves the adulteration of public interests by private interests, or a transgression of the rule that what is public and what is private should be kept rigidly separate. In one respect this idea is as old as humanity itself, for human beings have always attempted to understand the world by placing the things into different categories, which in itself reflects beliefs about what should rightly be kept apart. Mary Douglas (1966 ) uses this idea to explain why, in the Old Testament book of Leviticus, some animals are considered clean and others unclean, as Peter Bratsis (2003 : 20) notes:

  The animals that are true to life in the sky are birds; they have feathers and two feet and they fly. All birds that do not fly are unclean since they defy these principles, as do all things that fly but are not birds. The animals true to life in the water are fish with scales and fins; all creatures in the water that do not have these characteristics are unclean. Animals that roam the earth are four-footed and move by walking, jumping or hopping. Animals that seem to have two feet and two hands, like crocodiles, mice and weasels, are unclean. All creatures that swarm are unclean since that mode of propulsion is proper to neither sky, nor land, nor water. Thus worms, snakes and the like are unclean.

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  Routledge Handbook of Political Corruption

  • Paul Heywood, Paul M. Heywood(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  8 Combining these elements we can arrive at a suitably tentative definition:

  Corruption in politics occurs where a public official (A), violates the rules and/or norms of office, to the detriment of the interests of the public (B)9 (or some sub-section thereof) who is the designated beneficiary of that office, to benefit themselves and a third party (C) who rewards or otherwise incentivises A to gain access to goods or services they would not otherwise obtain.10

  Note, the definition does not assume that A’s behaviour must break the law. Legal definitions of corruption can fail to capture some of the worst cases of corrupt activity because corrupt transactions can be institutionalised in the laws of the state or economy, as recognised in work by the World Bank on ‘state capture’ – that is, where corrupt relations are used to pass laws that entrench, extend and render ‘legitimate’ corrupt gains (World Bank 2000 ).

  Although I have emphasised ‘political’ corruption, it is clear that the term can also be applied in other domains. We can talk of economic corruption, or corruption in a range of public services, such as health or education. But all corruption has the same conceptual structure: first, a recognition of certain formal responsibilities attached to an idea of office or a position of trust, which imply certain responsibilities and constraints on certain types of self-interested behaviour; second, the violation of rules and norms concerning the exercise of that office or trust; with third, the (intended) harming of one set of interests identified by the rules and norms as legitimate, to serve others deemed illegitimate; and fourth, the benefitting of those not formally entitled to benefit and, thereby, the subversion of the legitimated ends of the office.

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  Ethics in Governance in India

  • Bidyut Chakrabarty(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  6 Contemporary politico-ideological efforts towards arresting the ethics deficit in governance and corruption

  The ethics deficit and corruption are dialectically interconnected. Hence it is argued that corruption is a contextual phenomenon, which means that contextual distortions due to the ethics deficit in governance provoke citizens to raise their voices. In laymen’s perception, corruption is an abuse of public authority for personal gain that is largely attributed to the decline of ethics in public life. This is a commonly construed definition of corruption, which, despite being clearly spelt out, does not seem to be adequately equipped to conceptualize its complex character, given the fact that corruption is hydra-headed, and misuse of public office is only one of the forms in which it is articulated. Implicit here is the assumption that public and private interests are mutually exclusive and hence the pursuance of the latter in the name of the former will always be considered as deviant. This is well-captured by Joseph Nye, who defined corruption as ‘behaviour which deviates from the formal duties of a public role because of private-regarding (personal, close family, private clique) pecuniary or state gains; or violates rules to justify certain types of private-regarding influence’.1 Unlike the conventional conceptualization of the phenomenon, Nye sought to view corruption as a deviant function directed towards fulfilling partisan goals by resorting to means which are justified since they are connected with the public domain. In such circumstances, public servants misuse the trust reposed on them rather willingly, simply to meet private ends. In her understanding of the concept, Shumer highlighted this aspect by stating that ‘one dimension of … corruption is the privatization both of the average citizen and those in office. In the corrupt state’, she argues further, ‘men locate their values wholly within the private sphere and they use the public sphere to promote private interests’.2

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  Everyday Life and the State

  • Peter Bratsis(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  It is deviant behavior associated with a particular motivation, namely that of private gain at public expense. But whether this was the motivation or not, it is the fact that private gain was secured at public expense that matters. Such private gain may be a monetary one, and in the minds of the general public it usually is, but it may take other forms. (Friedrich 1989, 15) 1 1 For a discussion of the various ways that Political Corruption has been defined, see Heidenheimer, Johnston, and LeVine (1989). They argue that there are three ways that corruption has been defined: “public office centered,” as a deviation from the requisites of public office, “market centered,” as rent-seeking activity by civil servants, and “public interest centered,” as action that does damage to the public interest. All three of these forms of definition contain the idea that the public is subverted by the private. The relevancy of the concept of corruption to the question of the public/private split is apparent. Contained within the modern understanding of corruption are two interrelated assumptions: that mutually exclusive public and private interests exist and that public servants must necessarily abstract themselves from the realm of the private in order to properly function. The significance and relative historical novelty of this definition has been ignored in the contemporary literature on Political Corruption. The tendency has been to emphasize the continuity of the concept of Political Corruption from the ancient to modern times. Carl Friedrich has argued that the basic understanding of corruption as, “a general disease of the body politic” (Friedrich 1989, 18), is common to the ancients and the moderns. John Noonan (1984) has argued that the category of bribery, the most obvious form of Political Corruption, goes back at least to the fifteenth century B.C

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  Political Corruption

  Concepts and Contexts

  • Michael Johnston, Michael Johnston(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The discussion thus far has separated corruption from the related problems of abuse, fraud, and organized crime. Fraud and organized crime are clearly different from corruption, since they are not themselves the acts of public officials. Official corruption and official abuse, however, have many similarities.

  In turning to the different sources which can be used in forming a definition of corruption, there is a much more serious problem. Yale University political scientist James C. Scott has stated this problem very clearly: "Corruption, we would all agree, involves a deviation from certain standards of behaviour. The first question which arises is, what criteria shall we use to establish those standards?" (Scott, 1972: 3).

  2.1 Legal Definitions of Corruption

  To answer Professor Scott's question, one thought would naturally be to use the criteria set forth in official statutes. These criteria are very straightforward: if an official's act is prohibited by laws established by the government, it is corrupt; if it is not prohibited, it is not corrupt even if it is abusive or unethical. Lawyers will appreciate the virtues of this formal or positivist definition: it is clear, and officials, government employees, and ordinary citizens can be expected to know the requirements and prohibitions spelled out in statutes. These conditions justify punishing violators. In public education as well as enforcement efforts, the fact that something is illegal as well as unethical provides something firm—something tangible—to focus on. Even if the corruption laws are not perfect, the legislature can amend the laws to deal with new problems.

  While the legal or statutory definition of corruption may be convenient and unambiguous, Professor Scott stresses a major problem with this type of definition:

  Our conception of corruption does not cover political systems that are, in Aristotelian terms, "corrupt" in that they systematically serve the interests of special groups or sectors. A given regime may be biased or repressive; it may consistently favour the interests, say, of the aristocracy, big business, a single ethnic group, or a single region while it represses other demands, but it is not ipso facto corrupt unless these ends are accomplished by breaching the formal norms of office. (Scott, 1972: 5)

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  Analysing Corruption

  • Dan Hough(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Agenda Publishing

    (Publisher)

  The leading social science journals in America rarely discussed it, and when they did, corruption was only infrequently regarded as a phenomenon that needed to be explained; it was corruption’s impact on other things that generally grabbed people’s attention. Peters and Welch blamed this apparent neglect on the challenge of defining the concept, but the prevailing analytical and methodological assumptions of their discipline no doubt also played a role. When your aim is to use data systematically to test hypotheses and you want to use increasingly sophisticated statistical techniques to do so, then corruption is by no means a straightforward concept to get a handle on. Given that, it should come as no great surprise that empirical political science did not – at that point, at least, and with a small number of notable exceptions – have much to offer in terms of corruption analysis. 1 The analyses that existed up until then tended to focus on one of three things: there were broad historical diagnoses of what was understood as corrupt practice; there were what Colin Leys has described as “inquisitional studies” of a broader range of predominantly English-speaking countries; and, finally, there were sociological studies, in which corruption appeared as just one of a number of phenomena to be unpacked (Leys 1965: 215). This rather ad hoc analysis of corruption should not, however, disguise the fact that, as Peters and Welch noted, “corruption has been an ever-present part of American political life” (Peters & Welch 1978: 974). Indeed, it has been an ever-present part of life everywhere. The great nineteenth-century thinker Alexis de Tocqueville’s analysis of democracy in America is a good place to start when looking for evidence of this in the US

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  Political Corruption

  In Beyond the Nation State

  • Robert Harris(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)
• where, when instances of corruption emerge, the miscreant is disciplined or prosecuted, an inquiry is held and system glitches rectified. In other words, the system self-corrects and returns to a functioning state.
We begin, first, by revisiting the three limbs of our definition in the light of the contents of the book. Second, we consider anti-corruption strategies, focusing in particular on the Hong Kong experience which, though in some respects tangential to Political Corruption, nonetheless offers some clues to good practice. Third, we review recent political events in Africa, which, if we are in an optimistic frame of mind, might point the way to a future framework for the reduction of corruption in those states not entirely given over to criminal enterprise.

Political Corruption as an extension of normal political activity

instructing his aides on how to ‘stonewall’ a grand jury without committing perjury; planning how, with his White House counsel, to ‘screw’ his political enemies using the FBI and the IRS; developing public relations ‘scenarios’ to explain possibly illegal actions with the constant and only question being ‘will it play?’
(Silverstein 1988: 22 on Nixon during Watergate)
The first limb of the theory, that Political Corruption is an extension of recognizable political behaviour, is open to criticism from a number of angles. Moralists might criticize the idea that Political Corruption is an outcrop of political behaviour for abdicating concepts such as honour and decency, and, by implication, for condemning individual politicians who they know or believe to be committed, selfless and honest. Others might point to the excesses, violent as well as pecuniary, of corrupt (and probably crazy) presidents such as Duvalier and Bokassa, and reject as absurd and offensive any idea that their behaviour is indistinguishable from normal political conduct. Others again might pose the problem that to make such a claim is to surrender the right to pass judgement on any one regime or president, or even to compare one political system with another. Obviously innumerable objections along these lines might be raised.