The surprising case of police bribery reduction in South Africa

Abstract

The paper examines why there was a reduction of almost 15% in police bribery in Limpopo province, South Africa between 2011 and 2015, compared to only a 4% reduction the country overall. Drawing on statistical analysis and in-depth qualitative fieldwork, the research shows that the reduction occurred during an unprecedented anticorruption intervention in the province that did not directly tackle police bribery. Despite this, the intervention's high visibility, along with uncertainty among the police of its mandate, was likely to have made police less willing to engage in bribery during this period. While police sector-specific characteristics (high degree of discretion, peer solidarity and contact with criminals) make fighting entrenched corruption particularly difficult, the research shows how a disruptive event can counteract these factors and how this can happen more quickly than previously anticipated. For long-term impact, however, disruption strategies likely need to be driven by strong leadership and structural changes that will continually disrupt corruption patterns.

Searching for success: A mixed methods approach to identifying and examining positive outliers in development outcomes

“…As this paper focuses on the methodology's utility in identifying positive outliers, we do not describe the specific assessments in our application of the methodology of how bribery reduced in each country sector. These examinations are described at length in our case study papers (Peiffer, Marquette, Armytage and Budhram 2018;. However, a brief note is made of them here because they help explain why it is that the cases we identified may have eluded previous detection.…”

Thinking politically about corruption as problem‐solving: A reply to Persson, Rothstein, and Teorell

“…Indeed, we could lose sight of the move toward more targeted anticorruption interventions because of the confusion between corruption as a concept and corruption as manifested in specific problems. The same is as true for our research on functionality as anyone else's which is why, for example, we have recently looked at what the functionality lens brings to our empirical research on Uganda's health sector as a “hidden” positive outlier on bribery (Peiffer et al, ), but why we were open to using a different theoretical lens—a “sector characteristics” lens (Batley & Mcloughlin, )—to help explain a very different case in South Africa's police (Peiffer, Marquette, Armytage, & Budhram, ).…”

Understanding police exposure to corruption

“…The results show the existence of a reproduction number, a measure of the number of new corrupt pe officers that will result through interactions with a single corrupt officer. Police corruption in various nations is a pandemic that authorities vehemently battle with, and its complexity hinges on the fact that it is not an isolated anomaly or singly incidental, such that it cannot be readily controlled by some despotic temporary means (see [3,8,9,10]). Effective and non-effective techniques in combating police corruption were extensively discussed in [11].…”