Political Corruption Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This example Political Corruption Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

Most definitions of corruption emphasize the abuse of public power or resources for private benefit. Many basic terms of that definition, however, are themselves contested: Legal standards, public opinion or social values, or the public good may judge abuse. Terms such as public, private, power, and benefit may also be matters of dispute. Variations on the theme emphasize public office dimensions (duties, powers and their limits, process issues, accountability), market processes (using public power to extract rents, or allocating public goods on the basis of demand rather than need), and the public interest, among other factors, as defining characteristics. A continuing debate has to do with the role, if any, that cultural differences should play in defining corruption. Thus, there is no universally agreed upon definition of corruption.

As a concept, corruption has a long lineage. In classical times, it referred to a collective state of being. In this state, leaders forfeit, by their conduct, their claims to virtue and thus their right to lead; citizens or followers fail to play their roles in society; and the overall political order loses its moral structure and justifications. Modern conceptions of corruption originate not only in the works of thinkers like French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau but also out of political contention over accountability and the limits of power. These conceptions tend to treat corruption as a property of a particular action or actor. An official might take bribes, for example, without corrupting the overall political order. While the modern conception dominates, classical ideas are still relevant. For example, citizens of many democracies perceive fundamental corruption in the process of financing campaigns, even where funds are raised and spent in legal, publicly disclosed ways. Corruption in that sense has less to do with rule breaking than with leaders and a political order made unresponsive and unaccountable—and citizen choices made meaningless—by factors such as money and favoritism. Whether or not analysts agree with such perceptions, they can pose a real problem for the vitality and credibility of democratic politics.

Modern Views Of Corruption

Corruption was a significant issue among scholars and agencies concerned with development during the 1960s and 1970s, but received less attention between the mid-1970s and late 1980s.The reasons for that hiatus are unclear, but among them might be the reluctance of analysts to appear to blame developing countries for their own problems; resistance on the part of Western governments, international organizations, and businesses to the idea that their own activities might contain or encourage corruption; and the inability of analysts to devise effective reforms. Academic analysis during those early periods often relativized the issue—treating corruption and its consequences as matters of opinion, or as so diverse as to resist comparisons across societies—and focused on the functionality question—whether corruption might do more good than harm in developing societies despite its illegitimate status. Corrupt dealings occurring or originating within advanced societies often received insufficient attention. A related cultural critique held that corruption was a Western concept; and that some varieties, in developing societies, were extensions of longstanding acceptable social practices; and that corruption should not be viewed in negative terms.

The end of the cold war and economic globalization, however, brought corruption back to the fore. Governments and international lenders sought better results from aid and assistance, and corporations, faced with intensifying international competition, began to see corruption not as an overhead cost of doing business but as a deadweight loss. Research beginning during the 1990s led to new kinds of data, including a number of attempts to measure and compare levels of corruption internationally (usually based on perception surveys), and to much improved theory. As corruption is generally a clandestine phenomenon, however, any sort of measure will be imperfect. In his 2007 article, “What Have We Learned about the Causes of Corruption from Ten Years of Cross-National Empirical Research?” Daniel Treisman reviewed the literature regarding studies of corruption. He concluded that mature liberal democracies and market-oriented societies are regarded as less corrupt, while fuel-exporting countries and those with intrusive regulation and unpredictable inflation tend to be seen as more corrupt. While higher development does cause lower perceived corruption, when income is taken into account many predictors of perceptions are only weakly related to individuals’ reported experiences with corruption. Strong evidence that corruption delays, diverts, and distorts economic and political development superseded functionality arguments—that corruption is not “grease for the wheels,” but rather “sand in the gears.” To a striking extent, this line of research places relatively little emphasis on definitions.

Reform Solutions

The past generation’s policy recommendations and reforms have often been broadly consistent with the Washington consensus view, and neoliberal outlooks that revived the debate. The worldview that emerged, first of all, sees corruption primarily as bribery, and thus as a transaction that is quid pro quo and amenable to economic modeling. It holds that smaller governments, by reducing interference in the marketplace, will produce less corruption as well as more growth; that democratic politics is another, parallel sort of market; and that the state’s proper functions, often termed good governance, should be primarily technical and administrative—in effect, a referee role in liberalized societies. Much theory and data support such views, particularly to the extent that we conceptualize corruption in terms of rent-seeking, regard public institutions more as obstructions to market processes than as foundations for them, and idealize the ways markets and governments would work in the absence of corruption. Indeed, evidence does suggest that where corruption is apparently more common, inspections, delays, and red tape are more extensive, and economic processes less vibrant, than in societies where it is less extensive, and that corruption is a major factor keeping poor people poor.

More recent research, while accepting the basic view of corruption as broadly harmful, has reemphasized the value of politics and public institutions. It suggests that the consensus view—and international corruption indices—overlook variations among and within societies and in the kinds of corruption problems they experience. Cultural variables resurfaced too, less as definitions than as clues to the origins of certain forms, and clues to the social significance, of corruption. Mediating cultural institutions such as guanxi in Chinese societies and middlemen in India, have major implications at those levels. Such arguments remind us that active markets and democratic politics require social and institutional foundations, rather than just liberalized processes, and that we have no way of knowing how real economies and governments would function without corruption.

In the United States, reform has been a long-running research and policy concern shaped by both the abolitionist movement and the struggle against machine bosses like William M. Tweed of New York’s Tammany Hall. Both that struggle, and the Progressive Era more generally, gave rise to administrative and civil service reforms that undercut many corrupt practices; New Deal social services likewise weakened the power of machine politicians’ petty favors and gifts. Critics see these reforms, however, as introducing fragmentation, rigidity, and new costs into government.

Contemporary research issues associated with corruption include the further elaboration of Principal-Agent Client (P-A-C) models, and other conceptions of incentives and constraints often drawing upon economics theories; improved measurement, including assessing corruption indirectly using indicators of government performance; and the analysis of reforms. Most democratic societies have instituted political finance rules and, less commonly, subsidies; many are also scrutinizing corporate governance, accounting standards, and the transparency of markets with renewed vigor. On the international front, organizations such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Organization for American States, and the United Nations have ratified anticorruption treaties and conventions, usually backed up by ambitious intergovernmental scrutiny and assistance schemes. At all levels, major themes in reform include accountability, transparency, and the responsibilities and strength of civil society.

Bibliography:

Anechiarico, Frank, and James B. Jacobs. The Pursuit of Absolute Integrity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Bardhan, Pranab. “Corruption and Development: A Review of Issues.” Journal of Economic Literature 35 (1997): 1320–1346.
Bayley, David. “The Effects of Corruption in a Developing Nation.” Western Political Quarterly 19 (1966): 719–732.
Heidenheimer, Arnold J., and Michael Johnston. Political Corruption: Concepts and Contexts. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2002.
Johnston, Michael. Syndromes of Corruption: Wealth, Power, and Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Klitgaard, Robert. Controlling Corruption. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
Mbaku, John Mukum. Corruption in Africa: Causes, Consequences, and Cleanups. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2007.
Nye, Joseph. “Corruption and Political Development: A Cost-Benefit Analysis.” American Political Science Review 61 (June 1967): 417–427.
Quah, Jon S.T. Curbing Corruption in Asia: A Comparative Study of Six Countries. Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 2003.
Rose-Ackerman, Susan. Corruption and Government: Causes, Consequences, and Reform. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Sampford, Charles, Arthur Shacklock, Carmel Connors, and Fredrik Galtung, eds. Measuring Corruption. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006.
Scott, James C. Comparative Political Corruption. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Treisman, Daniel. “What Have We Learned about the Causes of Corruption from Ten Years of Cross-National Empirical Research?” Annual Review of Political Science 10 (2007): 211–244.