In broad terms, political corruption is the misuse by government officials of their governmental powers for illegitimate private gain. Misuse of government power for other purposes, like repression of political opponents and general police brutality, is not considered political corruption. Illegal acts by private persons or corporations not directly involved with the government is not considered political corruption either.
All forms of government are susceptible to political corruption. Forms of corruption vary, but include bribery, extortion, cronyism, nepotism, patronage, graft, and embezzlement. While corruption may facilitate criminal enterprise such as drug trafficking, money laundering, and trafficking, it is not restricted to these organized crime activities. In some nations corruption is so common that it is expected when ordinary businesses or citizens interact with government officials. The end-point of political corruption is a kleptocracy, literally "rule by thieves".
What constitutes illegal corruption differs depending on the country or jurisdiction. Certain political funding practices that are legal in one place may be illegal in another. In some countries, government officials have broad or not well defined powers, and the line between what is legal and illegal can be difficult to draw.
Bribery around the world is estimated at about $1 trillion (£494bn) and the burden of corruption falls disproportionately on the bottom billion people living in extreme poverty.[1]
Effects
Effects on politics, administration, and institutions
Corruption poses a serious development challenge. In the political realm, it undermines democracy and good governance by flouting or even subverting formal processes. Corruption in elections and in legislative bodies reduces accountability and distorts representation in policymaking; corruption in the judiciary compromises the rule of law; and corruption in public administration results in the unfair provision of services. More generally, corruption erodes the institutional capacity of government as procedures are disregarded, resources are siphoned off, and public offices are bought and sold. At the same time, corruption undermines the legitimacy of government and such democratic values as trust and tolerance.
Economic effects
Corruption also undermines economic development by generating considerable distortions and inefficiency. In the private sector, corruption increases the cost of business through the price of illicit payments themselves, the management cost of negotiating with officials, and the risk of breached agreements or detection. Although some claim corruption reduces costs by cutting red tape, the availability of bribes can also induce officials to contrive new rules and delays. Openly removing costly and lengthy regulations are better than covertly allowing them to be bypassed by using bribes. Where corruption inflates the cost of business, it also distorts the playing field, shielding firms with connections from competition and thereby sustaining inefficient firms.
Corruption also generates economic distortions in the public sector by diverting public investment into capital projects where bribes and kickbacks are more plentiful. Officials may increase the technical complexity of public sector projects to conceal or pave way for such dealings, thus further distorting investment. Corruption also lowers compliance with construction, environmental, or other regulations, reduces the quality of government services and infrastructure, and increases budgetary pressures on government.
Economists argue that one of the factors behind the differing economic development in Africa and Asia is that in the former, corruption has primarily taken the form of rent extraction with the resulting financial capital moved overseas rather invested at home (hence the stereotypical, but sadly often accurate, image of African dictators having Swiss bank accounts). University of Massachusetts researchers estimated that from 1970 to 1996, capital flight from 30 sub-Saharan countries totaled $187bn, exceeding those nations' external debts. [3] (The results, expressed in retarded or suppressed development, have been modeled in theory by economist Mancur Olson.) In the case of Africa, one of the factors for this behavior was political instability, and the fact that new governments often confiscated previous government's corruptly-obtained assets. This encouraged officials to stash their wealth abroad, out of reach of any future expropriation. In contrast, corrupt administrations in Asia like Suharto's have often taken a cut on everything (requiring bribes), but otherwise provided more of the conditions for development, through infrastructure investment, law and order, etc.
Types of abuse
Bribery
Bribery requires two participants: one to give the bribe, and one to take it. In some countries the culture of corruption extends to every aspect of public life, making it extremely difficult for individuals to stay in business without resorting to bribes. Bribes may be demanded in order for an official to do something he is already paid to do. They may also be demanded in order to bypass laws and regulations. In some developing nations up to half of the population have paid bribes during the past 12 months. [2]
Graft
While bribery includes an intent to influence or be influenced by another for personal gain, which is often difficult to prove, graft only requires that the official gains something of value, not part of his official pay, when doing his work. Large "gifts" qualify as graft, and most countries have laws against it. (For example, any gift over $200 value made to the President of the United States is considered to be a gift to the Office of the Presidency and not to the President himself. The outgoing President must buy it if he wants to take it with him.) Another example of graft is a politician using his knowledge of zoning to purchase land which he knows is planned for development, before this is publicly known, and then selling it at a significant profit. This is comparable to insider trading in business.
Extortion and robbery
While bribes may be demanded in order to do something, payment may also be demanded by corrupt officials who otherwise threaten to make illegitimate use of state force in order to inflict harm. This is similar to extortion by organized crime groups. Illegitimate use of state force can also be used for outright armed robbery. This mostly occurs in unstable states which lack proper control of the military and the police. Less open forms of corruption is preferred in more stable states.
Patronage
Patronage refers to favoring supporters, for example with government employment. This may be legitimate, as when a newly elected government changes the top officials in the administration in order to effectively implement its policy. It can be seen as corruption if this means that incompetent persons, as a payment for supporting the regime, are selected before more able ones. In nondemocracies many government officials are often selected for loyalty rather than ability. They may be almost exclusively selected from a particular group (for example, Sunni Arabs in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the nomenklatura in the Soviet Union, or the Junkers in Imperial Germany) that support the regime in return for such favors.
Nepotism and Cronyism
Favoring relatives (nepotism) or personal friends (cronyism). This may be combined with bribery, for example demanding that a business should employ a relative of an official controlling regulations affecting the business. The most extreme example is when the entire state is inherited, as in North Korea or Syria.
Embezzlement
Embezzlement is outright theft of entrusted funds. It is a misappropriation of property.
Kickbacks
A kickback is an official's share of misappropriated funds allocated from his or her organization to an organization involved in corrupt bidding. For example, suppose that a politician is in charge of choosing how to spend some public funds. He can give a contract to a company that isn't the best bidder, or allocate more than they deserve. In this case, the company benefits, and in exchange for betraying the public, the official receives a kickback payment, which is a portion of the sum the company received. This sum itself may be all or a portion of the difference between the actual (inflated) payment to the company and the (lower) market-based price that would have been paid had the bidding been competitive. Kickbacks are not limited to government officials; any situation in which people are entrusted to spend funds that do not belong to them is susceptible to this kind of corruption. Related: Bid rigging, Bidding, Anti-competitive practices
Unholy Alliance
An unholy alliance is a coalition among seemingly antagonistic groups, especially if one is religious, for ad hoc or hidden gain. Like patronage, unholy alliances are not necessarily illegal, but unlike patronage, by its deceptive nature and often great financial resources, an unholy alliance can be much more dangerous to the public interest. An early, well-known use of the term was by Theodore Roosevelt.
After the breakup of Standard Oil, TR lost the election, and the unholy alliance he had identified, oligopolies of a few big commodities corporations and their political allies, continued otherwise undeterred by the mutually beneficial indifference of both major political parties. In 1935, retired Marine Major General Smedley Butler described how this unholy alliance influenced U.S. foreign policy and how his job abroad had been to be a "muscle man for big business." In 1944, conservative journalist John T. Flynn described how this unholy alliance uses religion to sell its agenda abroad to the American public:
"The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and
barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by
the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells.[5]
Conditions favorable for corruption
Some argue that the following conditions are favorable for corruption:
Information deficits
- Lacking freedom of information legislation. The Indian Right to Information Act 2005 has "already engendered mass movements in the country that is bringing the lethargic, often corrupt bureaucracy to its knees and changing power equations completely." [4]
- Contempt for or negligence of exercising freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
Weak accounting practices, including lack of timely financial management.
- Lack of measurement of corruption. For example, using regular surveys of households and businesses in order to quantify the degree of perception of corruption in different parts of a nation or in different government institutions may increase awareness of corruption and create pressure to combat it. This will also enable an evaluation of the officials who are fighting corruption and the methods used.
- Tax havens which tax their own citizens and companies but not those from other nations and refuse to disclose information necessary for foreign taxation. This enables large scale political corruption in the foreign nations.[7]
Lacking control over and accountability of the government.
- Democracy absent or dysfunctional. See illiberal democracy.
- Lacking civic society and non-governmental organizations which monitor the government.
- An individual voter may have a rational ignorance regarding politics, especially in nationwide elections, since each vote has little weight.
- Weak rule of law.
- Weak legal profession.
- Weak judicial independence.
- Lacking protection of whistleblowers.
- Lack of benchmarking, that is continual detailed evaluation of procedures and comparison to others who do similar things, in the same government or others, in particular comparison to those who do the best work. The Peruvian organization Ciudadanos al Dia has started to measure and compare transparency, costs, and efficiency in different government departments in Peru. It annually awards the best practices which has received widespread media attention. This has created competition among government agencies in order to improve. [5]
Opportunities and incentives
- Large, unsupervised public investments, combined with complex or arbitrary regulations and a lack of oversight.
- Sale of state-owned property and privatization.
- Poorly-paid government officials.
- Long-time work in the same position may create relationships inside and outside the government which encourage and help conceal corruption and favoritism. Rotating government officials to different positions and geographic areas may help prevent this.
- Costly political campaigns, with expenses exceeding normal sources of political funding.
- Less interaction with officials reduces the opportunities for corruption. For example, using the Internet for sending in required information, like applications and tax forms, and then processing this with automated computer systems. This may also speed up the processing and reduce unintentional human errors. See e-Government.
- A windfall from exporting abundant natural resources may encourage corruption. See the resource curse. [6]
Social conditions
- Self-interested closed cliques and "old boy networks".
- Family-, and clan-centered social structure, with a tradition of nepotism being acceptable.
- A gift economy, such as the Chinese guanxi or the Soviet blat system, emerges in a Communist centrally planned economy.
- In societies where personal integrity is rated as less important than other characteristics (by contrast, in societies such as 18th and 19th Century England, 20th Century Japan and post-war western Germany, where society showed almost obsessive regard for "honor" and personal integrity, corruption was less frequently seen)
- Lacking literacy and education among the population.
Size of public sector
It is a controversial issue whether the size of the public sector per se results in corruption. Extensive and diverse public spending is, in itself, inherently at risk of cronyism, kickbacks and embezzlement. Complicated regulations and arbitrary, unsupervised official conduct exacerbate the problem. This is one argument for privatization and deregulation. Opponents of privatization see the argument as ideological. The argument that corruption necessarily follows from the opportunity is weakened by the existence of countries with low to non-existent corruption but large public sectors, like the Nordic countries. However, these countries score high on the Ease of Doing Business Index, due to good and often simple regulations, and have rule of law firmly established. Therefore, due to their lack of corruption in the first place, they can run large public sectors without inducing political corruption.
Privatization, as in the sale of government-owned property, is particularly at the risk of cronyism. Privatizations in Russia and Latin America were accompanied by large scale corruption during the sale of the state owned companies. Those with political connections unfairly gained large wealth, which has discredited privatization in these regions. While media have reported widely the grand corruption that accompanied the sales, studies have argued that in addition to increased operating efficiency, daily petty corruption is, or would be, larger without privatization, and that corruption is more prevalent in non-privatized sectors. Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that extralegal and unofficial activities are more prevalent in countries that privatized less.[8]
Governmental corruption
If the highest echelons of the governments also take advantage from corruption or embezzlement from the state's treasury, it is sometimes referred with the neologism "Kleptocracy". Members of the government can take advantage of the natural resources (e.g. diamonds and oil in a few prominent cases) or state-owned productive industries. A number of corrupt governments have enriched themselves via foreign aid, which is often spent on showy buildings and armaments.
A corrupt dictatorship typically results in many years of general hardship and suffering for the vast majority of citizens as civil society and the rule of law disintegrate. In addition, corrupt dictators routinely ignore economic and social problems in their quest to amass ever more wealth and power.
The classic case of a corrupt, exploitive dictator often given is the regime of Marshal Mobutu Sese Seko, who ruled the Democratic Republic of the Congo (which he renamed Zaire) from 1965 to 1997. It is said that usage of the term kleptocracy gained popularity largely in response to a need to accurately describe Mobutu's regime. Another classic case is Nigeria, espeicially under the rule of General Sani Abacha who was de facto president of Nigeria from 1993 until his death in 1998. he is reputed to have stolen some US$3-4 billion. He and his relatives are often mentioned in Nigerian 419 letter scams claiming to offer vast fortunes for 'help' in laundering his stolen 'fortunes', which in reality turn out not to exist.[9]
More recently, articles in various financial periodicals, most notably Forbes magazine, have pointed to Fidel Castro, ruler of the Republic of Cuba since 1959, of amassing a personal fortune worth US$900 million. [7] Opponents of his regime claim that he has used money amassed through weapons sales, narcotics, international loans and confiscation of private property to enrich himself and his political cronies who hold his dictatorship together, and that the $900 million published by Forbes is merely a portion of his assets, although that needs to be proven. [8]
Campaign contributions
In the political arena, it is difficult to prove corruption, but impossible to prove its absence. For this reason, there are often unproved rumors about many politicians, sometimes part of a smear campaign.
Politicians are placed in apparently compromising positions because of their need to solicit financial contributions for their campaign finance. If they then appear to be acting in the interests of those parties that funded them, this gives rise to talk of political corruption. Supporters may argue that this is coincidental. Cynics wonder why these organizations fund politicians at all, if they get nothing for their money.
Laws regulating campaign finance in the United States require that all contributions and their use should be publicly disclosed. Many companies, especially larger ones, fund both the Democratic and Republican parties. Certain countries, such as France, ban altogether the corporate funding of political parties. Because of the possible circumvention of this ban with respect to the funding of political campaigns, France also imposes maximum spending caps on campaigning; candidates that have exceeded those limits, or that have handed misleading accounting reports, risk having their candidacy ruled invalid, or even be prevented from running in future elections. In addition, the government funds political parties according to their successes in elections. In some countries, political parties are run solely off subscriptions (membership fees).
Even legal measures such as these have been argued to be legalized corruption, in that they often favor the political status quo. Minor parties and independents often argue that efforts to rein in the influence of contributions do little more than protect the major parties with guaranteed public funding while constraining the possibility of private funding by outsiders. In these instances, officials are legally taking money from the public coffers for their election campaigns to guarantee that they will continue to hold their influential and often well-paid positions.
Measuring corruption
Measuring corruption - in the statistical sense - is naturally not a straight-forward matter, since the participants are generally not forthcoming about it. Transparency International, a leading anti-corruption NGO, provides three measures, updated annually: a Corruption Perceptions Index (based on experts' opinions of how corrupt different countries are); a Global Corruption Barometer (based on a survey of general public attitudes toward and experience of corruption); and a Bribe Payers Survey, looking at the willingness of foreign firms to pay bribes. The World Bank collects a range of data on corruption, including a set of Governance Indicators.
The ten countries perceived to be least corrupt, according to the 2006 Corruption Perceptions Index, are Finland, Iceland, New Zealand, Denmark, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, Australia, and The Netherlands.
According to the same survey, the nine countries perceived to be most corrupt are Haiti, Indonesia, Myanmar, Iraq, Guinea, Sudan, DR Congo, Chad, and Bangladesh.
In the US, based on public corruption convictions, Mississippi, North Dakota and Louisiana were the three most corrupt states. Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oregon, and Iowa had the least amount of corruption. The most populous states, California and Texas, are ranked in the middle, California ranking 25th and Texas in 29th. [9]
See also
Forms or aspects of corruption
Crony capitalism
Good governance
Electoral fraud
Good governance
Rule of law
Transparency (humanities)
Accountability
Comitology
Due diligence
Worldwide Governance Indicators
Theoretical aspects
Principal-agent problem
Rent seeking
Conflict of interest
Anti-corruption authorities and measures
Independent Commission Against Corruption
United Nations Convention against Corruption
Inter-American Convention against Corruption
GEMAP
Examples of corruption
Political scandals of the United States
Hired Truck Program
Illegal Logging
Tangentopoli
Sponsorship scandal
PMU 18 scandal
Oil for Food
Political Sleaze (UK Politics)
Corruption in Ghana
Fakellaki (Medical corruption in Greece)
Corruption in fiction
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
Henry Adams's novel Democracy (1880)
Carl Hiaasen's novel Sick Puppy (1999)
Much of the Batman comic book series
The Ghost in the Shell Anime films and series
External links
News
IPS Inter Press Service - News on corruption from around the world
Development Gateway
International organizations and research
- Anti-Corruption Resource Centre (U4) - Online research reports and extensive resources on anti-corruption in a development context.
- Corruption and Emergency Relief (ODI) - Online research reports and extensive resources on corruption risks in a humanitarian context from the Overseas Development Institute.
- C2 Principles - a framework developed by researchers of Wharton School to reduce global corruption.
- United Nations Convention against Corruption at Law-Ref.org - fully indexed and crosslinked with other documents
- World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators Worldwide ratings of country performances on six governance dimensions from 1996 to present.
- Corruption Literature Review World Bank Literature Review.
- UN Office on Drugs and Crime - Has sub-section dealing with corruption worldwide.
- UNICORN: A Global Trade Union Anti-corruption Network, based at Cardiff University
Internet Center For Corruption Research
- Global Integrity Report - Extensive analysis of openness and accountability of governments by Global Integrity, which grew out of the Center for Public Integrity.
- Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center - an academic research center devoted to studying transnational crime and corruption
- BRIBEline - report bribe demands securely and anonymously
- TRACE - a non-profit membership organization providing anti-bribery compliance tools
- Business Anti-Corruption Portal Country and sectorspecific information on corruption
Anti-corruption Gateway
Regional and national organizations and research
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