Democracy And Corruption Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Democracies operate in concert with economic institutions. In a private-market economy, the wealthy can purchase more and better-quality services than other consumers. Yet, when it comes to politics, each person has a single vote, and legal “persons” such as corporations have no votes at all. Market purchases are individualized quid pro quo deals. The level and type of government services are determined by a collective process that requires cooperative effort. These fundamental differences between the state and the market create pressures for one sphere to invade the other. Wealthy individuals or firms, which can purchase anything they want in the market, may not see why the same should not be true in politics.

Democracies are not isolated from the money economy. Elections cost money, and the more competitive or “democratic” they are, the more they cost, as candidates battle for voters’ support. Furthermore, government services, regulations, and taxes provide benefits and impose costs. On the one hand, politicians demand funds to support election campaigns, and, on the other, wealthy private interests may supply funds in return for benefits. Going one step farther, voters themselves may realize that their votes are valuable and sell them to politicians for private gifts of money or in-kind benefits, such as public sector jobs. Payoffs by the wealthy to incumbent politicians can be used to buy the acquiescence of ordinary voters.

All democracies must police the line between illegal corruption of the political process and the acceptable use of money to influence politics. Politics and economics do not exist in completely separate spheres. Hence, if neutrality with respect to individual wealth is a political ideal, as Susan Rose Ackerman’s work argues, political economic research can help isolate the social structures and constitutional institutions that are more or less open to the influence of private wealth. One must consider both which constitutional structures are more likely to be influenced by private wealth, and for any given structure, how to draw the line between corruption and legal efforts to attract political support.

Historical and country-level case studies of corrupt elections provide background material. Quantitative work focuses on the impact of corruption on government performance and on patronage politics and the politics of reform. Cross-country research links the level of corruption to the constitutional structure of government.

Country Studies

Historical studies of American urban machine politics by James Scott and Rebecca Menes should give pause to those who assume that election fraud is somehow inconsistent with American democracy. Research by Donatella della Porta and Alberto Vannucci, Byeong-Seog Park, and Steven R. Reed on Italy, Korea, and Japan, respectively, illustrates the global pervasiveness of quid pro quo politics. Reform presents a puzzle. How can a system reform when corrupt officials benefit from its preservation? Barbara Geddes explores this question in Latin American democracies and concludes that reform is most likely under a grand coalition that can share both the gains and the losses. Ronald Johnson and Gary Libecap study the roll-call votes that led to the passage of the U.S. civil service act in 1883 and show that supporters tended to come from districts with customs offices or major post offices, whose constituents would benefit most from reform. Economic interests supplemented progressive calls for change. Case study research in the United States in a book edited by Bruce Stave also shows how economic interests collaborated with ideological reformers to effect political change in machine-dominated cities.

Cross-Country Research

Cross-country research on the association between corruption and constitutional structure misses the nuance and detail of the more fine-grained and case-oriented research, but it compensates for this in its ability to capture broad regularities. Thus, Jana Kunicová and Susan Rose-Acker man find that presidential systems that elect their legislatures through proportional representation (PR) tend to be the more corrupt than other democracies. PR, especially closed-list PR, tends to produce strong parties whose leaders can make credible corrupt bargains with the president. The multiple parties typically produced by PR limit the incentives for opposition party candidates to police the corruption of incumbents. Parties may hope to get a free ride on the anticorruption efforts of others so that no one takes the trouble to push reform. Furthermore, politicians may be reluctant to criticize incumbents if they may be future coalition partners. Finally, with a party list, representatives are subject to little monitoring by voters.

Kunicová and Rose-Ackerman and Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini both argue that first-past-the-post electoral systems are superior to PR as checks on corruption. This contradicts both Arend Lijphart’s claim that consensual democracies are less corrupt than others and Roger Myerson’s theoretical model suggesting that the larger district magnitude in PR systems should reduce corruption. Kunicová and Rose-Ackerman then part company with Persson and Tabellini over the corrupting impact of presidential systems. Persson and Tabellini believe that presidential systems should be less corrupt than parliamentary ones due to checks and balances. Kunicová and Rose-Ackerman, however, find more corruption in presidential systems and argue that this stems from the president’s ability to create rents in the executive in spite of the greater difficulty of passing statutes. Because of checks and balances—not in spite of them—rents that the president allocates corruptly will have staying power. The legislature will not easily be able to override corrupt bargains.

Public Power And Private Interests

Work on constitutional structure assumes that ordinary voters lose from corruption and will punish corrupt incumbents if they learn of their malfeasance and are given honest alternatives. As the historical and case study literature suggests, this is not always so. In such cases, as Michael Johnston argues, constitutional structure may be relatively unimportant because powerful public and private interests collude to maintain control of valuable rents, limit opposition, and buy off voters with nominal private benefits. As Jong-Sung You and Sanjeev Khagram show empirically, corruption can help cement an oligarchic structure in spite of underlying democratic forms and periodic elections. Democracy needs to reach a basic level of electoral competitiveness before constitutional structure and voting rules can affect corruption levels.

Bibliography:

della Porta, Donatella, and Vannucci, Alberto. Corrupt Exchanges: Actors, Resources, and Mechanisms of Political Corruption. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1999.
Geddes, Barbara. Politician’s Dilemma: Building State Capacity in Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Johnson, Ronald, and Libecap, Gary. “Patronage to Merit and Control of the Federal Labor Force.” Explorations in Economic History 31 (1994): 91–119.
Johnston, Michael. Syndromes of Corruption:Wealth, Power, and Democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Kunicová, Jana, and Rose-Ackerman, Susan. “Electoral Rules and Constitutional Structures as Constraints on Corruption.” British Journal of Political Science 35, no. 4 (2005): 573–606.
Lijphart, Arend. Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries. New Haven:Yale University Press, 1999.
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You, Jong-Sung, and Sanjeev Khagram. “A Comparative Study of Inequality and Corruption.” American Sociological Review 70 (2005): 136–157.