The back-scratching game

Murray, Cameron; Frijters, Paul; Vorster, Melissa

doi:10.31219/osf.io/c8e6s

Cited by 5 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…Lierl (2017) focuses on political corruption; Peisakhin & Pinto, 2010 define corruption as access to service; Belot (2013) defines corruption as theft from students who volunteer to do a certain job. Murray (2017) considers corruption as back‐scratching (emergence of alliances between players). The study of Chen (2009) refers to private‐to‐private corruption.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Public sector reforms and their impact on the level of corruption: A systematic review

Mugellini

Bella

Colagrossi

et al. 2021

Campbell Systematic Reviews

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Background: In spite of the large number of anti-corruption reforms implemented in different countries, there has been little research that empirically and systematically assesses the impact of these efforts. Objectives:The main objective of this review is to identify what works in curbing corruption in the public sector, by meta-analyzing the findings of published and unpublished evaluations of different types of anti-corruption interventions in different countries. The focus of this review is administrative corruption, namely corrupt acts involving civil servants in their dealings with their superiors, during the implementation of public policies, or while interacting with the public for service delivery. Political corruption (in the adoption of laws, regulations, and policies), and private-to-private corruption (involving only private actors) are excluded from this review.Search methods: The literature search was conducted by querying three widely recognized electronic databases: RePEc, SSRN, and Web of Science. These databases are considered the most comprehensive in the socio-economic field of research. The main grey literature repositories were also queried. Both published and unpublished studies were searched on the basis of specific combinations of keywords. The terms used to define queries were based on the "types of corruption", "types of interventions/policies/reforms" and "study design" search strings. Specific conventions were used to "explode" or "truncate" keywords as appropriate. Screening of the references (i.e., snowballing) of the identified studies was also performed, and a reverse snowballing approach on Google Scholar was used. In order to ensure replicability, all searches were stored into Covidence, an online software developed by the Cochrane community for screening studies and extracting data for systematic reviews.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In Belot (2013) corruption was expressed as theft from students who volunteer to do a certain job. In Murray (2017) corruption was proxied by the emergence of alliances between players. We did not evaluate back-scratching as an eligible type form of corruption for our review.…”

Section: Included Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Public sector reforms and their impact on the level of corruption: A systematic review

Mugellini

Bella

Colagrossi

et al. 2021

Campbell Systematic Reviews

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Advances in technology and world wars, flourishing societies and genocides, our greatest achievements and our worst atrocities all require large-scale cooperation (Axelrod & Hamilton, 1981;. From a cultural evolutionary perspective, corruption is also a cooperative act (Murray et al, 2017;Muthukrishna et al, 2017).…”

Section: Corruptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural evolutionary behavioural science in public policy

Schimmelpfennig

Muthukrishna

2023

Behav. Public Policy

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Interventions are to the social sciences what inventions are to the physical sciences – an application of science as technology. Behavioural science has emerged as a powerful toolkit for developing public policy interventions for changing behaviour. However, the translation from principles to practice is often moderated by contextual factors – such as culture – that thwart attempts to generalize past successes. Here, we discuss cultural evolution as a framework for addressing this contextual gap. We describe the history of behavioural science and the role that cultural evolution plays as a natural next step. We review research that may be considered cultural evolutionary behavioural science in public policy, and the promise and challenges to designing cultural evolution informed interventions. Finally, we discuss the value of applied research as a crucial test of basic science: if theories, laboratory and field experiments do not work in the real world, they do not work at all.

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“…Encouraging deal-making in urban governance is a growing ‘revolving door’ between the public, private and consultancy sectors among a ‘club-like’ strata of elite experts (Carré and Demange, 2017; McPhilemy, 2013; Murray and Frijters, 2017). In the Australian context, this revolving door is observed within and across government and private urban development and infrastructure sectors.…”

Section: Urban Governance As Deal-makingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deal-making, elite networks and public–private hybridisation: More-than-neoliberal urban governance

2022

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In this commentary, we argue that augmented concepts and research methods are needed to comprehend hybrid urban governance reconfigurations that benefit market actors but eschew competition in favour of deal-making between elite state and private actors. Fuelled by financialisation and in response to planning conflict are regulatory reforms that legitimise opaque alliances in service of infrastructure and urban development projects. From a specific city (Sydney, Australia) we draw upon one such reform – Unsolicited Proposals – to point to a broader landscape of hybrid urban governance, its reconfigurations of power and potential effect on cities. Whereas neoliberal governance promotes competition and views the state and private sectors as distinct, hybrid urban governance leverages state monopoly power and abjures market competition, instead endorsing high-level public–private coordination, technical and financial expertise and confidential deal-making over major urban projects. We scrutinise how Unsolicited Proposals normalise this approach. Commercial-in-confidence protection and absent tender processes authorise a narrow constellation of influential private and public actors to preconfigure outcomes without oversight. Such reforms, we argue, consolidate elite socio-spatial power, jeopardise city function and amplify corruption vulnerabilities. To theorise hybrid urban governance at the intersection of neoliberalism and Asia-Pacific state-capitalism, we offer the concepts of coercive monopoly (where market entry is closed, without opportunity to compete) and de jure collusion (where regulation reforms codify informal alliances among elites connected across government and corporate and consultancy worlds). We call for urban scholarship to pay closer attention to public–private hybridisation in governance, scrutinising regulatory mechanisms that consecrate deal-making and undermine the public interest.

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The back-scratching game

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

Public sector reforms and their impact on the level of corruption: A systematic review

Public sector reforms and their impact on the level of corruption: A systematic review

Cultural evolutionary behavioural science in public policy

Deal-making, elite networks and public–private hybridisation: More-than-neoliberal urban governance

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