Corruption: Diagnosis and Treatment

Abstract

Political corruption poses a serious threat to democracy and its consolidation. Many anticorruption initiatives fail because they are nonpolitical in nature, while most of the corruption in developing and postcommunist countries is inherently political. Successfully fighting this kind of corruption requires far more than instituting best practices from advanced democracies. Electoral revolutions can lead to consolidated democracies only if they are followed by revolutions against particularism. Nothing short of such a revolution will succeed in curbing corruption in countries where particularism prevails.

The Political Economy of State Capture in Central Europe

“…Why? Because, as Mungiu (, p. 87) has pointed out, where public goods are distributed on a particularistic basis that mirrors the distribution of economic power within these societies, any anti‐corruption strategies that these elites care to take on are typically adopted and implemented in co‐operation ‘with the very predators who control the government and, in some cases, the anticorruption instruments themselves’. In this light, the chronically high rates of voter volatility in these cases – between 20 and 60 per cent in each election between 1990 and 2010, where west European party systems are hitting a ‘spike’ if volatility exceeds 20 per cent (Dassonneville and Hooghe, , pp.…”

“…But far from such optimistic trajectories playing out in these cases, their flat‐lining performance suggests that the early institutionalization of corporate state capture pre‐empted the constructive relationship anticipated between political systems, deepening electoral cleavages and civil organization. The competitive element in what Mungiu (, p. 94) calls ‘competitive particularism’ remained motivated by access to state assets.…”

Need or Greed? Conditions for Collective Action against Corruption

“…This explains why it may be very difficult to find the highly "principled principals" that would engage in anticorruption efforts in contexts where corruption is deeply entrenched and citizens would expect most other citizens (including institutions such as the media, ombudsmen, and the judicial system) to also be involved in corruption. This in turn can explain the difficulties of implementing anticorruption reforms in deeply corrupt contexts (Collier 2000;Karklins 2005;Medina 2007;Miller 2006;Mungiu-Pippidi 2006), as there will simply be no one around who is willing to implement them (Persson, Rothstein, and Teorell 2013). This in turn can explain the difficulties of implementing anticorruption reforms in deeply corrupt contexts (Collier 2000;Karklins 2005;Medina 2007;Miller 2006;Mungiu-Pippidi 2006), as there will simply be no one around who is willing to implement them (Persson, Rothstein, and Teorell 2013).…”

“…In other words, a noncorrupt system could be expected to treat citizens "impartially" (Rothstein and Teorell 2008) or according to principles of "universalism" (Mungiu-Pippidi 2006). Those involved in need corruption may be considerably more likely to be conditional cooperators, willing to engage if fellow citizens do so as well, than are those involved in greed corruption.…”

Accounting for diverging paths in most similar cases: corruption in Baltics and Caucasus

“…Moreover, there are some indications that the certain members of 4 According to CRRC [15] governing elite of post-Maidan Ukraine are willing to change the corrupt system but they have been failing so far due to surviving power of oligarchs and lack of elite homogeneity [21,22]. In cases of Estonia and Georgia we are looking at the transition away from particularistic regimes that is defined as ' a mode of social organization characterized by the regular distribution of public goods on a nonuniversalistic basis that mirrors the vicious distribution of power within such societies' ( [23], p.87). This condition of affairs is referred as 'patrimonialism' by Weber [24], 'limited access order' by NWW (2009) and 'extractive institutions' by Acemoglu et al [25].…”