The Conundrum of Corruption: Reform for Social Justice 2020035212, 2020035213, 9780367224523, 9780367224547, 9780367224554

Table of contents :
Cover
Endorsement Page
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
Part 1: After thirty years … what?
Chapter 1: A Conundrum, a Dominant Paradigm, and the Need for New Thinking
I Fighting the good fight
Conundrum? What conundrum?
II Launching the struggle against corruption
From movement to industry
A powerful, but limiting, consensus
III Useful disagreements
IV Conclusion
References
Chapter 2: Fighting corruption today
I Going around in circles
II Who’s in today’s anti-corruption industry?
Practitioners: “Just tell us what works...”
Academicians: “However…”
Shared dilemmas
III The big six: What reformers typically do
Crime prevention
Incentives
Civil society strategies
Liberalization
International treaties and conventions
IV Conclusion
References
Part 2: Misreadings and misunderstandings
Chapter 3: Misreading the nature of corruption: Corruption in monochrome
I Getting corruption in focus
II Seeing in monochrome
Catch-all corruption: “Everything bad”?
Corruption as deviance
Oversimplifying the problem
Corruption as a national trait
Corruption as backwardness
Dichotomous corruption: one step forward, two steps back?
III From descriptions to causes
References
Chapter 4: Misreading the corruption cure: Interventions as silver bullets
I Monocausal theories of change
Understanding social and political change
II Three silver bullets, revisited
Crime and punishment: Anti-corruption agencies
Origins
Interventional logic – and its flaws
Results and consequences
Liberalization: Privatization and decentralization
Origins
Interventional logic and its application: Privatization
Interventional logic and its application: Decentralization
III Fewer assumptions, better questions
References
Chapter 5: Misreading the Sources and Nature of Change: Development, backwardness, and the chimera of “political will”
I Getting realistic about change
II “Magical narratives” about the sources of change
Change from the top: the hero-reformer
Change from external pressure
Change from below, mark 1: Civil society and reform
Change from below, mark 2: Mass campaigns and “people power”
III “Magical narratives” about the nature of change
Change as linear and engineered
Corruption control as a byproduct of modernization
Arriving at “modernity”
Getting history backwards… and upside down
IV Conclusion: Misplaced lesson drawing
References
Part 3: Reform with the future in mind
Chapter 6: Who Does, and Who Should, Benefit from Reform?: The anti-corruption industry and its limitations
I Reform in service to…itself?
II Who guides the anti-corruption industry?
If your only tool is a hammer…
III Who benefits?
IV Who should benefit?
Why have we not pursued that approach?
V Conclusion: Toward reform 2.0
References
Chapter 7: Reform, Power, and Justice
I A different starting point
II Beyond monochrome and silver bullets: Better theories of change
Descriptive diversity and syndromes
Beyond “just tell us what works”
Context and causal complexity
III Beyond “good governance”: Getting to… what?
What is the opposite of corruption?
The crown, the barons, and an angry parliament: Asserting new interests
A new day in the Caucasus? From political space to reform activism
IV Recalibrating the anti-corruption machine: Strategic issues
Underestimating the challenges
References
Chapter 8: So… What Should We Do?
I Aren’t we doing anything right?
II More than sound processes
Long and indirect paths
Caution is in order…
Policy matters
But, don’t we do these things already…?
III Corruption and reform, 2050
Civic virtue triumphant?
Data to the rescue?
The privatization of everything?
The piratization of everything?
Populists ascendant?
Something like…justice?
IV Conclusion: The conundrum of corruption
References
Index

Citation preview

“Corruption has been part of human behaviour since the beginning. It is widely abhorred, yet we are unsure about what works and what does not in combatting corruption. This book by two very distinguished scholars tells us not to see corruption in monochrome and shows that there are no silver bullets. It does, however, demonstrate how corruption can be brought within limits, and through some great scenarios, provides means of analysing situations and problems, and acting on them.” —Adam Graycar, Professor of Public Policy, University of Adelaide, Australia “A superb political economy analysis, as well as a convincing plea for treating corruption as a matter of political development, to be solved only by the political empowerment of citizens. Insightful and historically mindful, this book should feature in every syllabus on democracy and civic education curricula.” —Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, Professor of Policy Analysis and Democracy at Hertie School, The Governance University in Berlin

THE CONUNDRUM OF CORRUPTION

This book argues that it is time to step back and reassess the anti-corruption movement, which despite its many opportunities and great resources has ended up with a track record that is indifferent at best. Drawing on many years of experience and research, the authors critique many of the major strategies and tactics employed by anti-corruption actors, arguing that they have made the mistake of holding on to problematical assumptions, ideas, and strategies, rather than addressing the power imbalances that enable and sustain corruption. The book argues that progress against corruption is still possible but requires a focus on justice and fairness, considerable tolerance for political contention, and a willingness to stick with the reform cause over a very long process of thoroughgoing, sometimes discontinuous political change. Ultimately, the purpose of the book is not to tell people that they are doing things all wrong. Instead, the authors present new ways of thinking about familiar dilemmas of corruption, politics, contention, and reform. These valuable insights from two of the top thinkers in the field will be useful for policymakers, reform groups, grant-awarding bodies, academic researchers, NGO officers, and students.

Michael Johnston is Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Colgate University, USA, and has been a consultant and lecturer for numerous government agencies and international organizations. He now lives in Austin, Texas. Scott A. Fritzen is Dean of the College of International Studies, and William J. Crowe Jr. Chair in Geopolitics at the University of Oklahoma, USA.

Routledge Corruption and Anti-Corruption Studies The series features innovative and original research on the subject of corruption from scholars around the world. As well as documenting and analysing corruption, the series aims to discuss anti-corruption initiatives and endeavours, in an attempt to demonstrate ways forward for countries and institutions where the problem is widespread. The series particularly promotes comparative and interdisciplinary research targeted at a global readership. In terms of theory and method, rather than basing itself on any one orthodoxy, the series draws broadly on the tool kit of the social sciences in general, emphasizing comparison, the analysis of the structure and processes, and the application of qualitative and quantitative methods. Anti-Corruption in International Development Ingrida Kerusauskaite Corruption Scandals and their Global Impacts Edited by Omar E. Hawthorne and Stephen Magu Public Probity and Corruption in Chile Patricio Silva Corruption in Argentina Towards an Institutional Approach Natalia A.Volosin Corruption in a Global Context Restoring Public Trust, Integrity, and Accountability Edited by Melchior Powell, Dina Wafa, and Tim A. Mau Corruption and Informal Practices in the Middle East and North Africa Edited by Ina Kubbe and Aiysha Varraich Corruption and the Lava Jato Scandal in Latin America Edited by Paul Lagunes and Jan Svejnar The Conundrum of Corruption Reform for Social Justice Michael Johnston and Scott A. Fritzen For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Corruption-and-Anti-Corruption-Studies/book-series/ RCACS

THE CONUNDRUM OF CORRUPTION Reform for Social Justice

Michael Johnston and Scott A. Fritzen

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Michael Johnston and Scott A. Fritzen The right of Michael Johnston and Scott A. Fritzen to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Johnston, Michael, 1949- author. | Fritzen, Scott, 1969- author. Title: The conundrum of corruption : reform for social justice / Michael Johnston and Scott A. Fritzen. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Routledge corruption and anti-corruption studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020035212 (print) | LCCN 2020035213 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367224523 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367224547 (paperback) | ISBN 9780367224554 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Political corruption--Prevention. | Social justice. Classification: LCC JF1081 .J54 2021 (print) | LCC JF1081 (ebook) | DDC 364.4--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035212 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035213 ISBN: 978-0-367-22452-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-22454-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-22455-4 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by SPi Global, India

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Frederick Douglass, 1857

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements List of abbreviations

xi xiii

PART 1

After thirty years … what?

1

1 A conundrum, a dominant paradigm, and the need for new thinking

3

2 Fighting corruption today

25

PART 2

Misreadings and misunderstandings

47

3 Misreading the nature of corruption: corruption in monochrome

49

4 Misreading the corruption cure: interventions as silver bullets

67

x  Contents

5 Misreading the sources and nature of change: development, backwardness, and the chimera of “political will”

92

PART 3

Reform with the future in mind

115

6 Who does, and who should, benefit from reform?: the anti-corruption industry and its limitations

117

7 Reform, power, and justice

130

8 So… What should we do?

153

Index

175

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

From Michael Johnston As we note at the beginning of Chapter 1, there was a time not long ago when corruption did not qualify as a serious academic or policy concern, and when few of us were publishing any work on the subject. Now, a great many courageous, hard-working people and organizations are trying to analyze and contain corruption – at times, at considerable personal risk – and the issue has a prominent place on the international agenda.That is very good news indeed – and yet, why has success proven so elusive? For me, this book had its origins in 2017, when I was invited to present a paper at a conference held by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and when the questions above were causing me more than my usual quota of confusion. The immediate result was an article1 entitled “Reforming Reform”, which helped some of the basic ideas of this book take shape; but the event’s lasting impact came from the perceptive and useful comments offered by others around the table. As this book offers a wide-ranging critique of the current international anti-corruption industry, I hope I am doing my fellow participants a favor by not naming them here. I do, however, extend special thanks to Robert Rotberg and his staff for the invitation to take part in the AAAS event, and for the arrangements that made it so memorable. In addition, Phyllis Bendell took the lead in

xii  Acknowledgements

turning my initial drafts into downright readable and comprehensible academic prose, an accomplishment for which she too deserves major thanks. Jennifer Kartner also offered insightful thoughts and suggestions on several early versions of that manuscript. Later on, emboldened perhaps by the fact that that first effort at a published critique of the reform industry had not brought any bricks crashing through my study window, I approached Routledge with the outline of this book. At that point, two good things happened: the response from referees was generally positive, and extremely helpful; and Scott Fritzen, whose classes I had visited in virtual online form on several occasions, expressed an interest in joining the project. In that way the current team took shape. At Routledge I extend sincere thanks to Helena Hurd, Editor of Development Studies, Matthew Shobbrook, Editorial Assistant, and all others who will have helped and made improvements along the way. The biggest thanks of all, however, go to Betsy Johnston, my wife and best critic, who has endured more conversations about corruption than anyone should ever have to face, particularly during this irredeemably weird year of 2020. For that, and for all else, my gratitude and love… Michael Johnston Austin, Texas From Scott Fritzen It is a special privilege to read and greatly admire someone’s work for many years before not just meeting, but collaborating in depth with them – and so I am greatly indebted to my co-author for the opportunity to join forces on this project and for his patience as I transitioned to a new job and part of the country. I am also deeply grateful for colleagues who have shaped my views on corruption over the years: Robert Klitgaard, Adam Graycar, Emil Bolongaita, Jr., Shreya Basu, and Tan Tay Keong, among many others.

Note 1 “Reforming Reform: Revising the Anticorruption Playbook” Daedalus 147:3 (Summer 2018), pp. 50–62.

ABBREVIATIONS

ACAs CPI

Anti-Corruption Agencies Transparency International Corruption Perception Index CPIB Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau, Singapore EDSA Epiphanio de los Santos Avenue, major thoroughfare in Manila EITI Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative ERCAS European Research Center for Anti-Corruption FATF Financial Action Task Force FCPA United States Foreign Corrupt Practices Act ICAC Independent Commission Against Corruption, Hong Kong IMF International Monetary Fund IPI ERCAS Index of Public Integrity ISO International Organization for Standardization KPK Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi (Corruption Eradication Commission), Indonesia NGOs Non-Governmental Organizations OECD Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development OGP Open Government Partnership P-A Principal-Agent

xiv  abbreviations

P-A-C Principal-Agent-Client SOE State-Owned Enterprise TI Transparency International UNCAC United Nations Convention Against Corruption UNESCAP United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific WGI World Bank Institute World Governance Indicators

PART 1

After thirty years … what?

1 A CONUNDRUM, A DOMINANT PARADIGM, AND THE NEED FOR NEW THINKING

Dear Prof. Johnston: Thank you for proposing a research panel for my section of the upcoming American Political Science Association annual meeting. Unfortunately, we will only be including papers and panels that raise important theoretical and methodological questions. As corruption is not that sort of issue, we cannot include your proposed panel in the program. Sincerely, (Received by one of the authors in early 1987).1

I Fighting the good fight There was a time when most academic discussions of corruption began with a ritual acknowledgment to the effect that “not much research has been done on political and administrative corruption.” No one says that anymore. Over the past 30 years, corruption and reform – the latter also known, more recently, as “good governance” or “compliance” – has vaulted from obscurity to a place near the top of the international policy agenda. What was once the concern of a handful of scholars and activists has acquired a supporting structure of institutions – indeed, an anti-corruption industry – comprised of academic programs, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), laws and treaties, development aid programs, and the inevitable series of high-flown

4  After thirty years … what?

international conferences, frequently concluding with some sort of grand declaration. Those developments drew much of their early energy from global political events (for a comprehensive history of anti-corruption efforts, see Kroeze et al., 2017). In 1986, for example, millions of Pinoys and Pinays took to the streets of Metro Manila to protest the electoral abuses, thievery, and outright violence of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. That “People Power” movement succeeded in ousting the president – a scenario repeated in 2001 with the resignation of Joseph Estrada and, in its own way, during Georgia’s “Rose Revolution” of 2003.The collapse of communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe both highlighted corruption as a systemic problem and seemed to make a compelling case for political and economic liberalization as a general prescription for human wellbeing. That outlook was congenial to powerful political and economic interests in the global North and West but became more debatable as the aftermath of democratic transitions proved problematical in many societies, and as those western societies began to look to their own corruption difficulties. The launching of Transparency International (TI) in 1993 gave anticorruption work visibility, common focus, and an international presence it had never had before. Before long it was joined by a number of other initiatives mounted by new or existing organizations. In the mid-1990s the Bretton Woods institutions joined the fight, as World Bank President James Wolfensohn launched an ambitious research and policy effort that continues to this day. Public and journalistic awareness was further heightened, beginning in 1995, by TI’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI), and in 1996 by the World Bank’s World Governance Indicators (WGI), which included an ambitious measure of control of corruption. Both of those early attempts to assess of the scope of corruption quickly drew criticism, but they have been joined by a wide range of other indicators. Whatever their strengths or shortcomings, the intensity of the debates over the scores countries received said much about the burgeoning interest in corruption and reform. At century’s end the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) hammered out its Anti-Bribery Convention, which entered into force in 1999. It was joined by other global and regional pacts, including the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC) of 2005 that has been ratified by 140 signatories. National legislation regulating the international bribery activities of corporations began with the United States Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), enacted in 1977

The need for new thinking  5

and subsequently amended to conform with the OECD Convention, but it was not until 2010 that the United Kingdom enacted its farreaching Bribery Act. In 2017 France enacted legislation of its own, known as Sapin II (GAN Integrity (Business Anti-Corruption Portal), 2019; Georgetown University Law School, 2019).

Conundrum? What conundrum? No one concerned with checking corruption assumed the job would be easy. But for a time, post-Cold War optimism, new support for reform from businesses and international organizations, innovative data and theories, and rapidly growing recognition of the harm corruption can do all suggested that significant accomplishments lay just over the horizon. Unfortunately, most such hopes have not materialized; while we still lack any precise data on the amounts or gravity of corruption in any country, much less around the world, few would argue we have decisively turned the tide. It is not as though we have failed across the board. Just rescuing corruption issues from obscurity and making them prominent public concerns is a major accomplishment.There are societies, public institutions, and businesses that are well governed and well managed by any estimation, and some countries (e.g., Estonia, Georgia, Uruguay, Chile, Taiwan, Costa Rica) have made significant if uneven progress (MungiuPippidi and Johnston, 2017). We know far more about the issue than we did 30 years ago, and we have a network of policies, organizations, and researchers on a scale, and level of sophistication, few could have imagined in those earlier days (indeed, ambitious and promising ideas for future corruption research can be found in Mungiu-Pippidi and Heywood, 2020). Still, most reform efforts have met stiff headwinds (for evidence suggesting that most countries have made little or no progress against corruption over the past 20 years, see GFI (Global Financial Integrity), 2020). If anything, concern is mounting over surreptitious and offshore economic dealings, growing economic inequalities and their consequences for politics and government, “legal corruption” through which abuses of wealth and power enjoy the protection of the law, and the unsettling political impact of various “populist” politicians and parties. Many of the improving countries noted above are small and fairly homogenous societies; several have gone through deep crises that, while difficult in their own right, gave reformers special urgency and

6  After thirty years … what?

room to maneuver. Larger and more diverse societies, by contrast, have often proved resistant to reform. As TI says regarding its own 2018 CPI, It reveals that the continued failure of most countries to significantly control corruption is contributing to a crisis in democracy around the world. While there are exceptions, the data show that despite some progress, most countries are failing to make serious inroads against corruption. (Transparency International, 2018, emphasis in original) Precisely what any given CPI score means is unclear. It is at best an estimate of favorable and unfavorable perceptions of a society’s corruption situation.TI’s pessimistic overall assessment, however, is unlikely to draw any serious challenges. Thus we arrive at the “conundrum” in our title. It comes in three pieces: • Many societies have attempted major, dedicated anti-corruption efforts, guided by a dominant paradigm of reform that has taken shape and become institutionalized internationally over the past 30 years. But the results– with few exceptions – have been unimpressive, or even downright counterproductive. And yet… • A longer look at history shows that some societies have made significant progress against corruption, often indirectly and over the middle to long term, in the course of contention over fundamental questions of who is to rule whom, by what right, by what means, and within what limits. Still… • As the anti-corruption movement of the 1990s has solidified into today’s anti-corruption industry (on such changes generally see Bukovansky, 2006), we have kept doing many of the same things, guided by the same assumptions about corruption, despite our indifferent-or-worse results. Why is that? Who benefits from those same-old-same-old approaches, and whose needs are ignored? If powerful forces and dedicated people are committed to fighting corruption, if it so clearly skews and undermines economic and democratic change, and if its costs and damage disproportionately harm the world’s have-not people and societies, why are we seemingly mired in such an unsatisfying state of affairs? What can be done to break out of the status quo? We have

The need for new thinking  7

many committed – indeed, courageous – participants and supporters. We do not believe that the reform industry is secretly hostile to poor people and societies (but for an “anti-imperialist critique” of contemporary international anti-corruption efforts, see Davis, 2019; Baumann, 2019). The knowledge and research base we have amassed is genuinely impressive. So what is wrong with this picture? Our argument – one we know will not be universally accepted – is that contemporary anti-corruption efforts still reflect the ideas, interests, and circumstances that put the issue onto the global agenda during the late 1980s and early 1990s.Those influences were powerful enough not only to launch a broad-based movement, but they also framed our challenges in ways that reflected vested interests and entrenched ways of thinking, and thus fell back on several of what we will term “magical narratives.” In part because they conceived of reform and good government in apolitical, technocratic terms, and in part because of restrictions upon interventions in the domestic affairs of sovereign states, they have seldom challenged the century-long belief that politics is not an essential lever of reform but rather a prime cause of the corruption dilemma itself. As a result, the reform industry overlooks the entrenched, often stark imbalances of power that enable the few to exploit the many. It is ill-suited to confront those centers of power because in critical respects it is dependent upon them for critical support, resources, and legitimacy. Corruption control thus generally lacks theories of change other than the gradual accretion of laws, penalties, and “best practices.” Historical examples of limiting corruption, by contrast, emphasize long, often contentious, and indirect processes of change that allow and encourage citizens to mobilize around their own grievances and resist elite abuses of power. That does not mean simply trying to organize grassroots anti-corruption organizations; as we will emphasize, such efforts all too often fall victim to collective action problems or, worse, to repression from above. Instead, we endorse Daniel Kaufmann’s (2012) notion that “We can no longer fight corruption by simply fighting corruption alone.” In his analysis, broader and interlinked issues of governance having to do with poverty, resource management, and others along with corruption pose comprehensive challenges of justice and fairness that far transcend the significance of specific corrupt practices. Reformers, we believe, must think in more explicitly political terms, engage in strategies and tactics that will often be long-term and indirect, have a greater tolerance for contention and clashing interests, and harness popular interests and grievances as

8  After thirty years … what?

critical sources of anti-corruption energy (Johnston, 2014: Ch. 1–3). We do not propose any new set of anti-corruption tactics or to-do lists, but rather emphasize the need to look at the big picture over the long view, and to give the best of our familiar anti-corruption measures new power and focus by building strong foundations of sustained popular political demand under them. Progress by that route will be difficult, and it will be hard for any reformers – particularly the sponsors of externally designed and externally funded anti-corruption projects – to claim credit for success if it should come. Indeed, progress may at times come disguised as bad news, to the extent that undermining corrupt power systems produces controversy and contention. But it is essential that we pursue the one goal that makes corruption control a compelling concern in the first place: justice. These are not just academic points. They call for new ways of thinking about corruption control – admittedly, a difficult argument to make in the face of frequent demands to “just tell us what works.” But in fact they have much to do with “what works” – and with what does not; what we mean when we say something is “working”; and the ways in which we might make progress more likely. They not only challenge us to reconsider a variety of historical issues but can also help us understand contemporary dilemmas such as how to foster effective political change, and how to think about civil society’s role in it; why Anti-Corruption Agencies (ACAs) – even though they have been effective in Singapore, Hong Kong, and New South Wales – have failed in many other places; the deceptively serious corruption problems that exist in the United States and other affluent democracies, and the role of those apparently well-governed societies in propagating corruption elsewhere. Those issues and others require us to rethink the dominant paradigm that has shaped the contemporary anti-corruption industry. But what is that dominant paradigm?

II Launching the struggle against corruption Today’s anti-corruption industry took shape beginning in the late 1980s. It was not created by any one person, group, or event. Contributing causes were numerous: notably, the “third wave” (Huntington, 1991) of democratization, along with newly aggressive policies of economic and political liberalization in many regions, encouraged hopes for a new era of market-driven, democratically governed systemic renewal – the more so, because of the toppling of several extensively corrupt regimes.

The need for new thinking  9

But such optimism proved premature. Despite the wave of “color revolutions” and regime transitions, many countries became “hung” between success and failure, plagued by uncertainties that if anything opened the way to new abuses and abusers. Others threatened to lapse into renewed authoritarianism and stagnation. For western governments, the end of the Cold War did away with long-standing geopolitical excuses for ignoring corruption among client elites (“Colonel X may be a crook, but he’s our crook”) and intensified pressure upon aid agencies to get better results out of smaller budgets. Slowly at first, but with increasing urgency by the mid-1990s, aid agencies became concerned about corruption that persisted despite their best-designed development efforts, and – perhaps less quickly – about corruption within or flowing from their programs. Awareness of wealthy democracies’ own corruption problems has grown as well, even though – as we shall discuss – reformers are still much more likely to see those countries as sources of “best practices” to be applied in struggling societies. Meanwhile the advent of TI and the active interest of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and western businesses and governments brought unprecedented resources and institutional clout to the emerging effort. At the advent of the 2020s, anti-corruption efforts have attained a size, diversity, and global scope that few could have envisioned in the 1980s. It commands extensive human, economic, and analytical resources. Research, teaching institutions, and training programs have sprung up in many parts of the world, treaties and mutual monitoring processes have been created, and data are readily available from a wide range of sources. Corruption is entrenched as a mainstream concern for international organizations, and as a frequent focus for journalists. In academe, where corruption was once seen as a marginal and unserious concern, no one is likely to receive the sort of response reported in the anecdote that leads off this chapter.

From movement to industry But growth has brought changes that have not always been helpful. As control efforts have proliferated, they have often become more institutionalized and formalized, more closely allied with western governments and the international organizations they underwrite, more dependent upon major sources of funding, and more standardized in their intellectual and conceptual repertoire. Laws, deterrence, and transparency have been top priorities from the start, but a diffuse initial

10  After thirty years … what?

willingness to seek significant political and economic change quickly gave way to an emphasis on technocratic, process-oriented “good governance.” That worldview has more recently been joined and even supplanted – to a degree – by a “compliance” mindset, aimed at implementing predetermined rules and “best practices” within public and private organizations. Stronger institutionalization and a working consensus on important issues may help sustain reform over time. Still, what had been a diverse and protean movement has given way to a more hegemonic anti-corruption industry: Anti-corruption activities have now institutionalized themselves into what some scholars would call an ‘anti-corruption regime’. The resources, rhetoric and organizational interests of the anticorruption regime now lead an existence independent of the actual phenomenon of corruption itself. Anti-corruptionism now projects itself onto the global landscape as a series of policies, regulations, initiatives, conventions, training courses, monitoring activities and programmes to enhance integrity and improve public administration. In short, anti-corruption has become an ‘industry’. (Sampson, 2010: 262; for a similar view see Wedel, 2015) The distinction between a movement – loosely speaking, a broad coalition of partially overlapping interests sharing, among other principles and values, the goal of checking corruption and the harm it does to citizens and societies – and an industry – less diverse, less innovative, and seeking (as industries do) dominance within a domain of activity – is not merely one of terminology. Nor is it simply an acknowledgment of the much-increased scale of anti-corruption efforts. It highlights, instead, a gradual but critical shift away from being a force in itself, challenging established ways of ruling, and misruling, political and economic systems, toward becoming a force for itself, more concerned with amassing and protecting its own resources and legitimacy. Today’s reform industry advances a dominant strategic, political, and economic outlook, rather than seeking fundamental change on behalf of – and with – those who suffer most from corruption. It has become larger, better-financed, and more prominent on the international policy agenda, but in the process has drawn closer to what amounts to a development establishment, its values, its strong but limiting consensus, and

The need for new thinking  11

thus has emerged with a standard repertoire of analytical concepts and reform tactics. In some respects, those developments are good news: reformers would have little impact if they remained weak and scattered, deprived of resources, disconnected from major institutions and networks, and marginal with respect to contemporary political debates. But what has been lost is a focus, not just on how governments and businesses do things, but on the question of whose interests they ought to serve, and on fundamental change in the ways societies are governed. Serious corruption thrives on fundamentally unjust systems of power, not just on flawed official procedures and incentives. Thus, for all its scope and visibility, the contemporary anti-corruption industry has had relatively little effect on corruption itself.

A powerful, but limiting, consensus A working consensus over the origins of corruption and what to do about it took shape with surprising speed. While scarcely featuring unanimity on any issue, much less across the board, it embodies a worldview shaped by the affluent market democracies that see their models of politics and administration as the best ways forward for the developing world. Support from those countries’ governments, major international organizations, and some segments of western and international business quickly elevated that consensus into a dominant model of reform. Corruption issues and other problems in emerging societies were frequently understood more in terms of what those countries seemed to lack by comparison to advanced democracies than by the processes and social forces actually at work there. The worst corruption situations were seen as occurring mostly “out there,” in the developing world, while those in affluent societies, and those countries’ contributions to corruption elsewhere, were initially accorded much less importance. Local causes, mechanisms, and consequences were often overlooked; indeed, the corruption indices that continue to inform so much of the global conversation, by collapsing all variations onto a single dimension, suggest that corruption is essentially the same thing everywhere, varying only in terms of extent. For a variety of reasons, the reform consensus is strikingly apolitical and technocratic. One was the basic assumption that affluent market democracies had brought corruption under control – at least, the worst of it – and that their ways of doing business and politics were the main reasons why. For struggling societies, it seemed to follow, the answers

12  After thirty years … what?

were out there; the main challenge was to make them work. Moreover, key international aid, trade, and lending organizations are generally barred by their charters from interfering in the domestic politics of sovereign states. That in many respects is a good and necessary limitation; international organizations are made up of sovereign states, after all, and as a practical matter history has left developing societies understandably wary of wealthy countries’ intentions and initiatives, even (or perhaps particularly) when they are garbed in the ostensibly neutral symbolism of good government. Affluent nations’ international aid bodies generally face similar restrictions, at least in a formal sense, but tend not surprisingly to serve the foreign policy goals of their home governments. International businesses, while more cognizant than in earlier days of the harm done by corruption, have narrower agendas focused on their own balance sheets. None of that meant that those organizations and firms never affected local politics and economies – far from it. Neoliberal aid and “structural adjustment” strategies aimed at shrinking public sector functions powerfully affected recipient countries’ internal affairs (for Ghana, see Konadu-Agyemang, 2000). While it would be wrong to conclude that all international anti-corruption efforts were exercises in cynicism or sub rosa control, most have been embedded in a liberal western technocratic worldview. Thus many anti-corruption efforts – barred from, or reluctant for various reasons to get involved in, overtly political approaches to reform – have been described as pursuing “good governance.” A United Nations document (UN-ESCAP, n.d.)2 argues that “good governance” has eight characteristics: “It is participatory, consensus oriented, accountable, transparent, responsive, effective and efficient, equitable and inclusive and follows the rule of law” (see also Fukuyama, 2013; Agnafors, 2013; Rothstein, 2011). On its face that approach is hard to dispute, and for better or worse would strike most as being essentially “non-political.” Moreover, it dovetails with long-standing reform traditions in the United States and elsewhere that saw their core challenge as preventing politics from intruding on government (a classic statement can be found in White, 1890). “Good governance” took on a technocratic valence, emphasizing improved administrative processes and outcomes, enhanced “state capacity,” and more effective institutions. The implied view of government as a neutral referee in the process of market-based economic development fits in well with the neoliberal ethos of the 1980s and early 1990s, and with the interests of many of the public- and

The need for new thinking  13

private-sector forces backing reform. Emulating apparently successful institutions and practices in affluent countries became a cornerstone of the good-governance consensus. But the view of good governance sketched out here is not as neutral and apolitical as it may seem and is certainly not a one-size-fits-all prescription for reform. All eight of the characteristics of good government noted above are open to dispute regarding their meaning in various contexts, and as to the weight each should be given in designing a governing framework. All are more accommodating to people and groups possessing economic resources, analytical expertise, and political access than to those without. They make relatively little room, by contrast, for anyone seeking major change in basic authority arrangements. They embody a particular set of preferences regarding wealth, power, and how each should (and should not) be used. Andrews (2008: 382), in his critical review of what he calls “the good governance agenda”, sums up that outlook as follows: An effective government is small and limited in its engagement, formalized in mission and process. High-quality personnel devise and implement needed programs and deliver efficient and effective services via participatory processes and disciplined, efficient financial management. Responsiveness to the citizenry’s changing needs is high and effected through transparent, decentralized and politically neutral structures; consistently, even during political instability, without impeding (indeed supporting) the private sector. One might challenge Andrews on several details of that characterizations, but he shows there is nothing neutral or non-political about these values.They embody definite preferences regarding government’s purposes, relationships between politics and administration, the role of citizens, and the proper balance between public and private sectors. Many might find those values perfectly congenial and see them as workable within a given social setting – but others might not. Among other problems, the good governance agenda lacks a persuasive theory of change; indeed it seems to outline an end point of civic progress. Because those values are taken to be in the best interest of all, just how a society might move toward and sustain them, how popular consent and support might be won, and how present conflicts are to fit into that process are left unexplained.

14  After thirty years … what?

What the “good governance” approach tends to gloss over is that in many societies, basic political questions – who is to govern whom, by what right, using what means, and within what limits – are still in dispute. Those in fact tend to be among the societies that appear to have the worst corruption problems, and that need our help the most – or so we assume. Significant political contention and challenges to the status quo effectively surface in good government narratives as impediments to progress, or at best as reflections of weak state capacity – rather than as sources of political energy for greater justice and much-needed political change. Moreover, as we will argue in chapters to come, external assistance for “good governance” often reflects major misunderstandings of corruption itself and of how, in earlier times, it has been brought within reasonable limits. As a practical matter it all too often ignores the imbalances of power underlying, and protecting, much corruption today.

But… “dominant paradigm”? Says who? The contemporary international anti-corruption industry has been led and supported by good people and worthy organizations, working in the face of difficult and sometimes dangerous circumstances. And it is not as though we lack ideas for checking corruption, as Paul Heywood (2018: 83) has noted: …the World Bank has recommended “six strategies to fight corruption,” designed to complement a prior “two-pronged strategy,” in addition to “10 ways to fight corruption”; Transparency International identified “5 key ingredients” to stop corruption; while the World Economic Forum has published “5 ways to beat global corruption,” as well as “3 key steps to end corruption.” Yet to a distressing extent, anti-corruption strategies and tactics seem to overlook context, to be based on a one-size-fits-all approach, and to be frozen in time. Crime-prevention approaches, incentive-based reforms, and Principal-Agent (P-A) models, for example, have not evolved, or even been rigorously challenged. We tend to assume that “civil society” will more or less automatically line up in active support of reform, even though social support for our remedies has often proven difficult to sustain. Too often we expect controls to work on short timelines. Only recently have we realized that many activities

The need for new thinking  15

that strike most citizens as corrupt, or at least as broadly unfair, are not deviance at all, but rather enjoy the protection of laws and major institutions. A number of widely deployed ideas such as “political will,” and the dichotomy between “petty” and “grand” corruption, have acquired authority mostly through repetition, but upon close examination turn out to be empty slogans. Distilling the arguments and assumptions of anything as sprawling and complex as the contemporary anti-corruption industry into a list of essential points is an audacious – some might say foolish – enterprise. That is all the more so when the point is to develop a critique of the best efforts of dedicated people guided by the best thinking, and intentions, of the time. The gaps and flaws of those guiding ideas are hardly the fault of most who are trying to make them work; more often they reflect interests and outlooks that are so familiar and well institutionalized that we take them as given. For those reasons there is little to be gained here by singling out specific advocates, users, or applications of those ideas for criticism. Instead, our focus is on the ideas themselves and the conventional wisdom they embody. The discussion to follow will thus be presented in a somewhat unusual fashion. The “dominant paradigm” of corruption control sketched out here is our distillation of many years’ research, debates, conference discussions, project designs, and organizational reports, as well as of our own involvements in anti-corruption efforts. It is unlikely to describe any person’s or group’s thinking with complete accuracy, and there will be numerous exceptions to nearly every claim we make. Still, we believe we offer a fair critique of the broader industry’s core ideas, tools, and applications. A similar approach was used by Andrews (2008: 382) to identify the core points of the “good governance agenda” as discussed above; his account draws in turn upon inventories of mainstream approaches such as that offered by Brinkerhoff and Goldsmith (2005: 203). What, then, does that dominant paradigm consist of? In brief, it regards corruption as a form of deviance – even where it is the dayto-day norm – from formal laws, rules, and the principles of good governance. Most corruption, in this view, occurs in just a few common forms; most often it is modeled as bribery. The main variation among societies occurs in terms of amounts or “levels” of corruption; that notion, in the absence of a settled definition and valid, reliable measures of what is frequently a clandestine phenomenon, may be estimated in various fashions but usually goes undefined. It is often said to occur in

16  After thirty years … what?

grand and petty varieties – supposedly distinct types recognizable by the magnitude of stakes involved, or by the levels of government or officialdom involved. But beyond those categories, and apart from growing interest in “need” versus “greed” corruption (Bauhr, 2017), little effort is made to identify, account for, and explore the consequences of qualitative variations. Partaking of corruption is normally seen as a discrete individual choice shaped by opportunities, incentives, and risks in the immediate environment, judged in more or less rational fashion; longer-term influences, shared interests and expectations, collective behavior, asymmetries and scarcities of information, and the implications of repeated occurrences are generally given little emphasis (see, on several of these points, Persson et al., 2013; Mungiu-Pippidi, 2013). The most common unit of comparative analysis is the nation-state (on this point and the problems it raises see Heywood, 2017). Corrupt activities may be the actions of individuals, officials, agencies, and firms, and those processes may be cross-border as well as domestic dealings, but they are somehow assumed to embody homogeneous national characteristics. Corruption control is seen primarily as a crime- or deviance-prevention project, and punitive measures are deployed to increase the risks of engaging in corruption. Poorly designed or poorly enforced controls, however, may do more to increase uncertainty than to enhance risk, and uncertainty often allows corruption to flourish. There is little reason to doubt that corruption controls can benefit from sustained political backing, but often that fact is reduced to slogans about “political will,” presumably from the top. How we verify the existence of political will, other than after the fact, is generally not explained. Indeed, many poorly governed societies have no shortage of high-level political will but see it exercised in unjust and harmful ways; how we restrain the bad and replace it with the better is a political question and thus usually not addressed. Because popular support is often taken for granted, the public’s contribution to “political will,” and to rewarding it, is not widely acknowledged, even though it could well be pivotal. Closely allied to that issue is a generalized belief in transparency: revealing corruption, or related situations and practices, to the public, the press, and law-enforcement bodies is assumed to serve as a deterrent or call forth an effective response. But merely making information available may be insufficient; many people might lack the resources or bureaucratic skills to obtain and interpret it, and in any even a strong response requires an organizational base (Cain, 2014) that may be absent. In addition, some may see even a difficult status quo as

The need for new thinking  17

less risky than seriously challenging the existing order. Others may see themselves as benefiting from corruption in some way – protection, crumbs of patronage, or various symbolic rewards – or at least think they stand to do so in the future. When and why people will, or will not, challenge revealed corruption is a complex question. Such social support for reform is often seen as the province of “civil society,” which in practice usually means formally organized anti-corruption groups. The value and uses of broader social capital and networks are given relatively little consideration, as is the importance of linking corruption control to citizens’ own interests and grievances. Instead, corruption control is frequently portrayed as a public good – better government for all, and all will benefit – with serious collective action problems the frequent result. In developing societies, the civil society part of control efforts tends to consist of externally aided groups in and around national capitals charged with carrying out projects originating elsewhere. At times such groups are more in the business of attracting funding than of building grassroots support for fundamental change. Partly as a result of this omnibus focus on whole countries and control tactics developed elsewhere, many anti-corruption strategies are collections of “best practices” that seem to check corruption in generally well-governed societies. To search for and emulate “what works” is understandable, but we should not assume that corruption problems are essentially the same wherever they occur. Moreover – a more subtle point, but important – the “best practices” outlook embodies a significant misreading of history. Tempting as it may be to impute causality to the forces and institutions holding corruption in check in bettergoverned countries today – the rule of law, a strong civil society, a free press, and independent judiciaries – they are not necessarily what limited abuses of power there in the first place. In fact they are more likely to be the results of deeper political conflicts over power, its limits, and accountability. Expecting struggling societies today to begin the process, in effect, at the far end – to check corruption by instituting “best” institutions and practices while ignoring the political contention that created them and gave them a measure of legitimacy – is to confuse cause with effect. A third major problem – all the more confounding in light of the first two – is how we decide which practices are “best” to begin with, absent valid and reliable measures of corruption itself. From all of those reasons, we frequently arrive at strikingly similar reform strategies, even when they are applied to quite different

18  After thirty years … what?

problems and situations, devised and implemented from above and without. Often they are delegated to a dedicated, independent ACA: after all, it worked in Hong Kong, so it must be a good idea in X.There will be a definite role – or at least, verbal recognition – for transparency, rule of law, the press, civil society, and improved administrative processes. But what are the goals of reform – less corruption, technocratic “good governance,” faster economic development, national reconciliation – and how do we know we are having any impact? “No corruption” is not on the cards; if the goal is less corruption, we run into problems of measurement. At times the idea is to build a “culture of integrity,” even though integrity itself is usually only loosely defined. Most reform scenarios envision the gradual accretion of process-oriented measures aimed at specific corrupt practices, rather than discontinuous change, or any fundamental reworking of power relationships. Underlying all of that is another difficulty: a lack of situationally appropriate theories of change. If we implement “best practices,” “get civil society involved,” and are backed by sufficient “political will,” the argument runs, progress will be made. But how and why? Who will have a compelling interest in making those things happen? Who will demand that laws be enforced? Who will confront the powerful, and what will sustain reform in the face of difficulties ranging from apathy to violence? Are controversy and disorder a sign that reform is failing – or do they tell us that citizens are challenging fundamental imbalances of power? Without sound theories of change, it will be difficult to assess, and understand, the effects of our reforms, and to identify further changes we must make.

III Useful disagreements Describing anything as a “dominant narrative” is inherently risky.There are significant disagreements within the industry, and numerous exceptions to the generalizations offered above. There is more debate among scholars than practitioners, in part because the former often begin from their own theoretical premises and are asking their own questions. Practitioners, by contrast, are often more constrained by funding institutions, programing considerations, and an often-wise sensitivity to domestic and international political practicalities. Indeed, if analysis and action coexist in a state of tension, that can be a good thing. One such point of disagreement within the industry has to do with the basic nature of corruption problems. One widely held outlook

The need for new thinking  19

holds that corruption is best understood as a P-A (see, for example, Groenendijk, 1997) or Principal-Agent-Client (P-A-C) problem (see, on the latter, Klitgaard, 1988). Corruption control, in this view, is the responsibility of Principals (those ultimately responsible for a service or governmental function), who recruit and define the duties of their Agents (staff and line personnel who carry out that function or support those who do). In some versions of the argument Clients play a role too as they interact with Agents and provide feedback to Principals. P-A or P-A-C schemes can be quite useful in modeling both good and poor administration in bureaucratic organizations that provide a routine service, but from a reform standpoint critics point out that the sorts of Principals they envision may not exist (Persson et al., 2013; see also Heywood, 2017). Indeed, Principals can be actively involved in corruption, perhaps by forcing subordinates to buy their jobs and/ or divert revenues to their superiors’ pockets. P-A and P-A-C thinkers often propose measures such as improved recruitment and training of Agents, increased pay, vigilance by diligent Principals – solid ideas, but steps requiring support that may not be available. Collective Action models, by contrast, see critical impetus for corruption control as coming from society: if no one will pay a bribe or give in to extortion, for example, then corruption will be sharply reduced. Advocates recognize significant impediments to collective action, such as classic free-rider problems (Lichbach, 1996; Olson, 1965), low levels of mutual trust, unstable political or economic situations, and perceptions that success is unlikely. They then sometimes propose anti-corruption pacts and trust-building efforts – collective action challenges in their own right. Still others (Marquette and Peiffer, 2018; Stephenson, 2015) contend that corruption is both sorts of problems – P-A and Collective Action – requiring the synthesis and application of both theories. A more general debate is whether corruption controls should come primarily from the top down – proponents often cite examples such as Hong Kong and Singapore (Quah, 2018) – or from the bottom up, in the form of action by civil society or via broad-based “people power” movements (Beyerle, 2014; Chenoweth and Stephan, 2011). Perhaps for reasons noted earlier – prohibitions against intervention in domestic politics, adoption of western political and law-enforcement models, reliance upon international aid, business, and lending institutions for support – the industry has increasingly emphasized top-down strategies, with civil society cast as a supporting player. A final major point

20  After thirty years … what?

of difference among reform thinkers is whether corruption control should emphasize rules and compliance, or rely more on imparting, reiterating, and rewarding important values (Ferrell et al., 2017). Both approaches frequently emphasize incentives as well. The rules versus values debate is extremely important, but it does not directly challenge the dominant paradigm as outlined above. When it comes to implementation, these contrasts tend to blur somewhat. Most reform strategies envision elements of both P-A/PA-C and collective action thinking, often adding some bottom-up impetus to mostly top-down strategies. At times we resort to “kitchen sink” approaches, bombarding corruption problems with whatever seemingly good ideas fall to hand, without much regard to sequencing, contradictions and tradeoffs, theories of change, or ways of assessing their impact. The hope is usually that reform can encourage and institutionalize anti-corruption values or a “culture of integrity.” Just who will have a stake in the success of such approaches, particularly in the face of setbacks and over the middle to long term, is left unspecified.

IV Conclusion The scope, strengths, weaknesses, and blind spots of the contemporary anti-corruption industry bear the imprint of its origins in many ways. In the chapters to come, we will offer a number of arguments about that industry and where it is heading – many of them quite critical. But when we write that “we” have made mistakes and need to rethink key assumptions, we very much include ourselves. It is worth reiterating, moreover, that anti-corruption analysts, practitioners, and organized groups have turned a neglected family of issues into a pressing global concern. In so doing they have offered hope to many oppressed and exploited citizens, in some cases opening up safe and valued political space (Johnston, 2014) for their aspirations and grievances. We can hardly claim to know all the answers and how to implement them, but we can say, you are not alone. For that we owe a great deal to imaginative and courageous people – not all of them full-time activists by any means – who have been willing to get out front, challenge the powerful, and demand that their rights and wellbeing be protected. One can scarcely call that a failure. Over the remaining chapters, we offer thoughts and criticisms that are meant to be constructive and that will always be open to challenges and revision. We offer no inventories of “best practices” or

The need for new thinking  21

anti-­corruption “toolkits” – indeed, we are critical of such notions; no flashy technological innovations; and no game-changing combinations of carrots and sticks. We will argue that we have misunderstood a number of key aspects of corruption and reform and contend that the most critical challenge of corruption control – evening out the political power imbalances that enable some people to abuse power and exploit others – is the one that reformers have been most reluctant to confront. None of that is to suggest that specific, well-designed, and well-targeted controls are not key parts of the picture, but rather to say that even the best such schemes require durable social and political foundations if they are to succeed. Lasting corruption control is likely to require a long and contentious struggle marked at times by reversals, and by discontinuous change, rather than gradually accumulating “best practices.”  We will also note that many of the apparently well-governed affluent democracies leading the reform charge have significant corruption of their own, not just domestic but also reflecting their global economic reach – corruption that may well enjoy the protection of laws and powerful institutions. We conclude, not with shiny new ideas so much as with better ways to understand what we do already – and perhaps to decide what not to do, at least until more fundamental changes have occurred. Part 1 consists of two chapters: this Chapter 1 has offered a view of the how we got to the current conundrum, and Chapter 2 takes a more detailed look at the industry today, and at the ideas, incentives, and constraints that have given it its current shape. Chapter 2 will also take up the main families of anti-corruption activity – their assumptions, underlying theories, advantages, and shortcomings. Part 2 begins with Chapter 3 on “Mis-reading the Nature of Corruption,” arguing for a more varied, contextual, and multi-dimensional understanding of the problem itself, rather than “monochrome” views that often map the experiences of developing societies directly onto those of affluent western democracies. That makes an excellent bridge to Chapter 4, focusing on the ways we have misread the nature of reform. Often those remedies reflect unchallenged assumptions or wishful thinking that reforms will do what we intend them to do, quickly and with broad-based support. Chapter 5 amplifies those arguments. The search for “silver bullets” would not be so tempting if we devised sound theories of change in place of “magical narratives” such as the chimera of “political will.” We need to have a critical sense of how we will proceed from A to B, what the key risks and opportunities

22  After thirty years … what?

will be, which measures are most urgent and which should be deferred until later – or not taken at all. So what stands in the way of those essential developments? That is the central question in Part 3. Chapter 6 offers a discussion of how the current anti-corruption movement became an industry in and, in important respects, for itself. We develop a critical self-analysis of reform, and of the forces and vested interests that have produced a large but poorly adaptive anti-corruption coalition. Chapter 7 is a prolog of sorts to better theories of change, arguing for the importance of understanding qualitative contrasts among corruption problems, their origins, significance, and consequences. The emphasis in this chapter is upon multiple paths forward: after all, societies embark upon reform from a great many starting points. Chapter 8 concludes the book with positive suggestions and notes some exemplary efforts underway now. If corruption control does not just mean “emulate affluent democracies,” what else might it mean? After all, western style reform, with its emphasis upon creating laws, institutions, enforcement, and a robust political system, can place great stress upon institutions and societies all by itself. Should we even directly confront corrupt activities in every case, or rather help clear the way for citizens to do so later on, when they have opportunities and the means to assert themselves politically? At times those opportunities can arise in sudden and surprising ways; former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel had a point when said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Overall goals, and ways to assess whether we are moving toward them, are a central issue too: asking “What works?” makes no sense if we are not clear regarding what we seek. Not only with that ambitious agenda in mind, but also with a sense of realism and humility about how much must change and the difficulty that entails, let us turn to a closer look at today’s anti-corruption industry.

Notes 1 About a generation later, the author of that letter published a paper on… corruption. 2 UN-ESCAP, n.d.

References Agnafors, Marcus. 2013. “Quality of Government: Toward a More Complex Definition.” American Political Science Review 107:3 (August), pp. 1–13.

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Andrews, Matt. 2008. “The Good Governance Agenda: Beyond Indicators without Theory”, Oxford Development Studies 36:4, p. 382. Bauhr, Monika. 2017. “Need or Greed? Conditions for Collective Action against Corruption.” Governance 30:4 (October), pp. 561–581. Baumann, Hannes. 2019. “The Corruption Perception Index and the Political Economy of Governing at a Distance.” International Relations (December). doi:10.1177/0047117819897312. Beyerle, Shaazka. 2014. Curtailing Corruption: People Power for Accountability and Justice. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Brinkerhoff, Derick D., and Arthur A. Goldsmith. 2005. “Institutional Dualism and International Development: A Revisionist Interpretation of Good Governance.” Administration and Society 37:2 (May), pp. 199–224. Bukovansky, Mlada. 2006. “The Hollowness of Anti-Corruption Discourse.” Review of International Political Economy 13:2 (May, 2006), pp. 181–209. Cain, Bruce E. 2014. Democracy More or Less: America’s Political Reform Quandary. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Chenoweth, Erica, and Maria J. Stephan. 2011. Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. New York: Columbia University Press. Davis, Kevin E. 2019. Between Impunity and Imperialism: The Regulation of Transnational Bribery. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Ferrell, O. C., John Fraedrich, and Linda Ferrell. 2017. Business Ethics: Ethical Decision Making and Cases (Eleventh ed.). Boston, MA: Cengage Learning. Fukuyama, Francis. 2013. “What is Governance?” Governance 26: 3 (July), pp. 347–368. GAN Integrity (Business Anti-Corruption Portal). 2019. “Anti-Corruption Legislation.” Online at https://www.ganintegrity.com/portal/anti-corruption-legislation/ (Viewed 13 July 2020). Georgetown University Law School. 2019. “International Anti-Corruption Law Research Guide.” Online at https://guides.ll.georgetown.edu/c.php?g= 363494andp=2455875 (Viewed 13 July 2020). GFI (Global Financial Integrity). 2020. “The Global Crisis of Corruption.” (July 13). Online at https://gfintegrity.org/global-crisis-of-corruption/ (Viewed 13 July 2020). Groenendijk, Nico. 1997. “A Principal-Agent Model of Corruption.” Crime, Law and Social Change 27: 3–4, pp. 207–229. Heywood, Paul M. 2017. “Rethinking Corruption: Hocus-Pocus, Locus and Focus.” Slavonic and East European Review 95:1 (January), pp. 21–48. Heywood, Paul M. 2018. “Combating Corruption in the Twenty-First Century: New Approaches” Daedalus 147:3 (Summer), pp. 83–97. Huntington, Samuel P. 1991. The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Johnston, Michael. 2014. Corruption, Contention, and Reform: The Power of Deep Democratization. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Kaufmann, Daniel. 2012. “Rethinking the Fight against Corruption.” Brookings Op-Ed (November 29). Online at https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/ rethinking-the-fight-against-corruption/ (Viewed 28 July 2020).

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Klitgaard, Robert. 1988. Controlling Corruption. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Konadu-Agyemang, Kwadwo. 2000. “The Best of   Times and the Worst of Times: Structural Adjustment Programs and Uneven Development in Africa: The Case of Ghana.” Professional Geographer 52:3 (August), pp. 469–483. Kroeze, Ronald, André Vitória, and Guy Geltner (eds.). 2017. Anti-Corruption in History: From Antiquity to the Modern Era. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Lichbach, Mark I. 1996. The Cooperator’s Dilemma. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Marquette, Heather, and Caryn Peiffer. 2018. “Grappling with the ‘Real Politics’ of Systemic Corruption: Theoretical Debates versus ‘Real-World’ Functions.” Governance 31:3 (July), pp. 499–514. Mungiu-Pippidi, Alina. 2013. “Controlling Corruption through Collective Action.” Journal of Democracy 24:1 (January), 101–115. Mungiu-Pippidi, Alina, and Paul M. Heywood. 2020. A Research Agenda for Studies of Corruption. Cheltenham, UK, and Northampton MA, USA: Edward Elgar. Mungiu-Pippidi,Alina, and Michael Johnston. 2017. Transitions to Good Governance: Creating Virtuous Circles of Anti-Corruption. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Olson, Mancur. 1965. The Logic of Collective Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Persson, Anna, Bo Rothstein, and Jan Teorell. 2013. “Why Anticorruption Reforms Fail—Systemic Corruption as a Collective Action Problem.” Governance 26:3 (July): 449–471. Quah, Jon S. T. 2018. “Combating Corruption in Asian Countries: Learning from Success and Failure.” Daedalus 147:3 (Summer), pp. 202–215. Rothstein, Bo. 2011. The Quality of Government: The Political Economy of Corruption, Social Trust and Inequality in an International Comparative Perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sampson, Steven L. 2010. The Anti-Corruption Industry: From Movement to Institution. Global Crime 11:2 (April), pp. 261–278. Stephenson,   Matthew. 2015. “Corruption is BOTH a ‘Principal-Agent Problem’ AND a ‘Collective Action Problem’.” GAB: The Global Anticorruption Blog. 9 April. Online at https://globalanticorruptionblog. com/2015/04/09/corruption-is-both-a-principal-agent-problem-and-acollective-action-problem/ (Viewed 13 July 2020). Transparency International. 2018. “What is Corruption?” Online at https:// www.transparency.org/what-is-corruption (Viewed 13 July 2020). UN-ESCAP (United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific). n.d.“What is Good Governance?” Bangkok: UN-ESCAP. Online at https://www.gdrc.org/u-gov/escap-governance.htm (Viewed 24 April 2020). Wedel, Janine R. 2015. “High Priests and the Gospel of Anti-Corruption.” Challenge 58:1 (March), pp. 4–22. White, Andrew D. 1890. “The Government of American Cities.” The Forum X:(December), pp. 357–372.

2 FIGHTING CORRUPTION TODAY

I Going around in circles We have considered the origins of the modern anti-corruption industry and the ways in which its core forces, outlooks, and interests have both enabled and constrained the renewed fight for reform. Here in Chapter 2, the emphasis is upon current anti-corruption activity and thinking. As with the previous discussion, we paint our picture with a broad brush, knowing that there are exceptions on virtually all points. Still, we identify strengths, weaknesses, divisions, and trends that can help us understand the contemporary influence and frustrations of reform. Innovative approaches have emerged for dealing with some specific corrupt activities, particularly where the rule of law, accountability, and key institutions are fundamentally strong. Even there, however, the industry has shied away from confronting the political core of the problem: the imbalances of power that enable the few – in both public and private sectors – to exploit the many. Broad-based, sustained political demand that exploitation and misrule cease, that citizens’ wellbeing be respected, and that standards of justice and fairness be consistently upheld is essential – and too often, lacking. The reasons for that omission reflect both the origins and contemporary sources of support for the reform industry. Misunderstandings of history and misconceptions about relationships between politics and good government have

26  After thirty years … what?

also been problems, and of course we confront pervasive and growing inequalities in societies of all sorts. The result is a conception of corruption and the challenges of reform that rests on debatable assumptions. Among them: •

The assumption that corruption is, and should be treated as, deviance – a departure from accepted universalistic norms. But where did those standards come from? Were they actually established in every case we deal with and, if not, why not? If such standards were so strong, when and why did they deteriorate? Is corruption really the bad deeds of bad people, or is it built into our political and economic systems in more enduring ways? • A focus on specific corrupt acts, understood as crimes shaped by incentives and opportunities that are more or less rationally assessed and acted upon by individuals and small groups. We rightly describe corruption as an “embedded” problem but generally do not address the broader power imbalances that make it so difficult to change. • Notwithstanding – and partially contradicting – that focus on discrete corrupt acts, an equally persistent notion that corruption is a whole-country trait reflecting national-level causes, not one that varies within societies and institutions and can originate in very small institutional and social niches. Related to that is the general view that corruption varies among those countries primarily in amount – more versus less – rather than in qualitative ways, and thus is essentially the same problem wherever it occurs. These ideas have remarkable tenacity despite – or, perhaps, because of – the lack of a settled definition of the concept and of ways to measure it directly with validity and reliability. • The broad assumption that corruption is rampant and rapidly getting worse.While that belief is certainly consistent with deterioration scenarios, the truth is that particularly at the level of whole countries we have no way of knowing how much corruption there was at any time in the past, how much there is now, or what current trends might be. What appears to be a surge in cases may be the result of improved controls and detection, less citizen or official tolerance of abuses, an outbreak of intra-elite conflict, or the fact that the bar has been raised in terms of what constitutes acceptable conduct. Arguing that the problem is raging unabated may help build short-term support for reform but holding to that

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stance invites the conclusion that little or nothing can be done to help. • The notions that (a) corruption is worst “out there” in struggling societies, (b) is the most urgent problem they face, (c) if not controlled soon it will bring about systemic collapse, and (d) once corruption has been “tackled” most other problems will be much easier to solve. There is little doubt that corruption does great harm in developing societies – as it does in affluent democracies too. But in some places more fundamental challenges – maintaining safety and security, building basic state institutions, fighting famine and disease, contending with domestic divisions – must take top priority, even though they may be exacerbated by corruption and vice versa. Launching reforms on an emergency basis may amount to confronting the powerful from a position of great weakness. At best, premature reforms generally fail, wasting scarce opportunities and support; at worst they can culminate in tragedy. If we do recruit an anti-corruption army, there is no point in marching it over a cliff. • Another problematical assumption is that corruption originates in the places where specific deeds or transactions take place and not elsewhere and that therefore those societies need to emulate our superior ways of doing business and governing. In fact an unknown share of the corruption that surfaces in the developing world originates in the global North and West, mediated by legitimate businesses and organizations as well as more shadowy actors. A large share of the benefits flows back to those more fortunate areas. After all, some business and government figures in the developing world are thoroughly corrupt, but most are adept at finding safe havens. Struggling societies pay a price in the corruption rankings for dealings that are perceived as taking place on their territory yet are devised, and benefit interests, in far wealthier countries. One driving factor behind the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Anti-Bribery Convention was wealthy countries that not only allowed “home” corporations to pay bribes abroad, but also to deduct such payments from their tax bills, providing a first-world subsidy for what was chalked up to third-world abuses. • A final common assumption is that developing countries should emulate their fortunate counterparts if they want to control corruption.That notion, which underlies many lists of “best practices,”

28  After thirty years … what?

is problematic in several ways.The wealthy countries may not be as well-governed and corruption-free as they claim to be, the kinds of corruption problems they have likely differ from those elsewhere (Thompson, 2018; Johnston, 2014; Lessig, 2013; Johnston, 2005), and as noted rich-country corruption has a way of spreading out through the global economy into poorer societies – where it can have devastating effects. Each of these generalizations has its limits and exceptions. Still, they collectively outline many of the main themes of contemporary reform thinking, even though they neither provide a complete and consistent account of corruption anywhere, nor encompass the wide variations to be seen everywhere. What makes these ideas so tenacious? One answer has to do with the industry’s composition and driving interests.

II Who’s in today’s anti-corruption industry? One way to map the reform world is to think in terms of practitioners and activists – people and organizations dealing primarily with actual corruption problems or controls – and academicians, whose contributions are more analytical.Those categories are far from sharply delineated: Transparency International (TI), The World Bank, Global Integrity1, and TRACE2, a research and policy group helping international businesses follow ethical and United States legal standards, for example, operate in both the analytical and the applied world. Some academicians, for their part, put their ideas to the test in field projects, and many more consult with practitioners and evaluate projects. Still, the industry has a kind of “two cultures”3 divide – one that at times has inspired, and at other times has inhibited, innovation and novel applications.There is less apparent consensus on the academic side than among practitioners, but both sides can become overly invested in a few core ideas and methods. Each needs to become more receptive to the other: as Immanuel Kant may or may not have put it, “Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.”4 Without sound theory and assessment techniques, we have no way of knowing whether we are making progress. At the same time, the formidable fund of experience amassed by practitioners has become a major resource deserving far more attention than academicians typically give it.

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Practitioners: “Just tell us what works...” Practitioners need to make things happen. To justify the resources and organizational legitimacy invested in their work, they must attack specific targets and produce observable results. As a result, many adopt a tightly targeted, process-oriented approach to reform, implicitly treating corruption as a discrete problem to be “fixed” over relatively short periods of time, even though describing the problem as “embedded” is de rigueur. Institutional backing can provide essential support, but those institutions have agendas of their own, are usually parts of the policy mainstream, and retain an interest in working within a stable and predictable environment. The Bretton Woods institutions and others in the aid-and-development sector typically face quite appropriate limitations upon where and how they may legitimately intervene. Academic institutions can be just as strongly influenced by the views of donors and, in the public sector, elected officials. Few western universities would discourage scholars from focusing on corruption, but official apathy regarding the issue has been common. Particularly in the case of the American political science discipline (and Public Administration as its cognate), which drew early impetus from the fight against municipal corruption (Ricci, 1984), such influences helped steer anti-corruption thinking toward what we would now call “good governance.” Later on, the behavioral revolution, the rise of quantitative analysis, and narrow conceptions of what constitutes worthwhile topics and theory pushed corruption well down the list of professional concerns, in the process hastening the discipline’s long retreat from public relevance (Rothstein, 2014). Corruption has drawn significant interest in both the practitioners’ and academicians’ worlds, but both groups unfortunately have often diagnosed the problems of developing countries in terms of what they seem to lack by comparison to affluent democracies, rather than developing a detailed analysis of what underlies their specific – and often, contrasting – problems. Wealthy countries’ own corruption and their contribution to such difficulties elsewhere are typically seen as secondary. In the United States reform traditions originating in the 19th century held that politics and administration should be kept separate from each other, further reducing the range of issues reform might address. Economically advanced countries, which after all often resemble each other more than they do the developing world, offer narratives of anticorruption success that are readily available, even if not necessarily

30  After thirty years … what?

accurate – much less, applicable elsewhere. Extensive theoretical debate and careful definitions are frequently viewed as unnecessary and, given the short timelines of funding and the push for specific results, as an unaffordable luxury. Supporting institutions, be they policy-oriented or academic, have interests of their own. They compete for space on the global agenda, prestige, and often for funding, and are reluctant to be seen as failing – or even, at times, to share the credit for success. The result is often small-bore, process-oriented, short-term projects based on conventional notions of good governance. TI – founded in those heady days of the early 1990s, and to which anyone concerned about corruption owes a considerable debt – provided reformers with legitimacy and visibility they had never enjoyed before. But over time it too became closely tied to its own set of remedies and metrics, producing anticorruption strategies that varied little among cases while resisting the notion of qualitatively different corruption problems. In some ways, TI paid a price for its own success: so thoroughly did it dominate public and official consciousness of corruption that it overshadowed other groups and ideas while resisting suggestions to rethink its own approaches. Much the same is true of its most visible analytical initiative, the Corruption Perception Index (CPI). While it has been of tremendous value in drawing attention to corruption issues, and to regimes that would be happier if we looked elsewhere, it is no more and no less than a comparison of how corrupt some people think various countries are. TI has been frank about problems with the Index, made improvements in it, and rightly urged caution in interpreting the results, but its instant popularity and utility for (over)simplifying complex issues has distorted policy and research for years (Cobham, 2013; Andersson and Heywood, 2008). Twenty years or so after TI’s founding, therefore, when it was becoming apparent that reformers generally were producing only indifferent results,TI rightly or wrongly took much of the criticism. A final set of influences upon practitioners’ work, one that provides not only resources but also imposes constraints, reflects the outlooks and policies of the western countries that dominated the resurgence of reform. Particularly during the 1980s governments in those countries, like many international organizations, pushed for liberalized markets and politics. Privatization, deregulation, and shrinking the public sector were hot topics for many reasons, but a particularly prominent goal was to eliminate the leverage of venal officials. Many businesses, not only

Fighting corruption today  31

welcoming liberalization and deregulation but also seeing corruption as a direct loss, and as giving advantages to unscrupulous competitors, supported such arguments. Some academicians too got on board, contributing to a neoliberal consensus that strongly influenced reform thinking in a critical phase of its emergence. Enthusiasm for liberalization as a check on corruption was waning by the late 1990s as the cases of Russia (Goldman, 2003; Freeland, 2000) and Argentina (Guillan Montero, 2011; Manzetti, 2009) showed that privatization could be a source of corruption in its own right. The practitioner universe has diversified too since those days, but it still tends to emphasize compliance with procedures, laws and enforcement, along with improvements to administrative processes drawing heavily upon “best practices” originating almost exclusively in western countries.

Academicians: “However…” A few academicians, particularly economists, have also played prominent roles in the anti-corruption industry, but for many, their status has been advisory or peripheral (Rothstein, 2014). Among political scientists that may reflect a disinclination to take clear normative stances (other than, perhaps, to be pro-democracy); lamentable prejudices against “applied” scholarship; and a tendency to view rigorous methodology (usually quantitative) as an end in itself. Academic researchers operate on longer time scales than most practitioners and – in part because many are not well funded – are generally under less pressure to take action and produce results. They devote more time and effort to raising questions for their own sake and are often willing to do their work well-removed from the action. For example, practitioners have largely moved beyond the endless debate over defining corruption, reasoning that we know it when we see it and that clear-cut examples abound. By contrast, ask ten social scientists to define “corruption” and you will get 15 answers drawing upon a debate that continues today (see Chapter 3). Among academicians, there is less consensus as to the nature, origins, and significance of corruption, and those who focus on finding remedies often go off in divergent directions. Academic approaches can constrain reform in other ways too.There is a welcome emphasis upon theory, but from the standpoint of what to do about the problem, such theories are at times overly general (we may decide that a country is “neo-patrimonial,” but then what?) or driven by ideology. Empirical research abounds, but much of it is as

32  After thirty years … what?

constrained by methodology as enabled by it. Measuring something is a good thing, but is a given numerical index necessarily a good measure of anything? A quarter-century after its appearance we continue to see papers rolling out new statistical variations on dicing and splicing the CPI. Our continuing focus on such work parallels the apocryphal (we hope) story of the drunk searching under a streetlight for his lost keys: when asked why he is looking there, he responds that that is where the light is better (Johnston, 2016). A different difficulty in the academic conversation is a fixation on “culture,” whatever that highly charged and often casually abused term is taken to mean.That culture and corruption issues are linked in some way seems likely, if only because both can raise questions of right and wrong. But what are the most important connections, and what is their significance? When culture is taken to be some monolithic and abiding aggregate – “Chinese culture,” for instance – it is imperative not just to question the construct itself, but also to ask whether it is really appropriate to use it to “explain” a contemporary phenomenon as varied and rapidly changing as corruption. Do we risk making circular arguments: people do what they do in part for cultural reasons, but we infer the nature of their cultures by observing what they do…? Do we invoke culture to facilitate analysis, or to preempt it: as one of the authors has been told more than once, “we can’t compare countries X and Y because they have different cultures.” But comparisons can highlight differences, not just similarities, and can be developed not to disparage a culture but to urge caution and precision. Similarly, a blanket mention of “culture” can become a stand-in for long and complex histories shaped by social divisions, external influences, and prominent personalities. Another variation on cultural themes has it that the idea of corruption itself is a western construct and therefore not applicable elsewhere. Or, “maybe there is a country somewhere where bribery is acceptable” –? Fine: where? Noonan (1984) searched at length for such a case and could not find one. In that connection, it is worth remembering that cultures have proscriptive as well as permissive elements.

Shared dilemmas Just as the academicians’ and practitioners’ worlds can overlap, so do some of their problems and their opportunities to make positive changes. Both groups would do well to pay more systematic attention to history. Where did our basic conceptions of corruption, and the

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corruption controls of today’s apparently successful countries, come from? We have some good ideas about what sustains their relatively good governance today (although that issue seems to be more debated by the day), but what developments and conflicts brought them to their present states (Frisk Jensen, 2014; Rothstein, 2011; Roberts, 1966)? Both practitioners and academicians need better theories of change. If we think that X will produce result Y, why do we think that, how confident are we, and how can we understand the ways things actually turn out? What sort of timeline should we expect for such changes? Similarly, much effort has focused on measurement and assessment. How do we know our reforms are having good effects, bad, or indeed any effects at all? Can we improve upon perception-based indices and whole-country rankings? If we lack valid and reliable ways to assess trends in corruption – much less, to measure absolute levels – how can we build better theories of change? If Klitgaard (1988) is correct in arguing that at some point the costs of further reform exceed the benefits – and very likely he is – are we there yet? A final shared dilemma – one to which we return in our closing chapters – has to do with goals. We agree that we are opposed to corruption, but what are we for? If, as seems all but certain, a state of zero corruption is impossible, what would success look like? What are the key values driving our efforts, and what sorts of strategies and tactics are – and are not – acceptable in order to pursue them? How should carefully reasoned choices about goals affect what we do today, tomorrow, and next year? Neither practitioners nor academicians have reached satisfying answers.

III The big six: What reformers typically do There is no master plan for corruption control. Our diversity of approaches, though, has less to do with distinctions among types of corruption, or with successive waves of reform innovation, and more to do with the long-standing specializations of analysts and organizations. Most reform strategies and tactics fall into a set of familiar categories we might call the “big six”: •

Crime prevention: techniques borrowed from the detection and punishment of traditional forms of crime, reflecting the conception of corruption as a form of deviance. This approach includes detection, punishment and, sometimes, efforts at prevention.

34  After thirty years … what?

•

•

•

•

•

A frequent recommendation is to establish a dedicated, independent Anti-corruption Agency (ACA), at times with extraordinary powers and jurisdiction across many parts of government. Incentives: higher pay and intangible rewards for good performance, often deployed in conjunction with penalties as above. In other instances, such reforms might scrutinize official processes for corruption-creating or -inhibiting incentives and opportunities; for example, in the first instance, giving an individual responsibility for both handling an agency’s cash flow and keeping its books, and in the second, bounties or bonuses for reporting rule violations. Civil Society action: mobilizing public demand for reform, and enlisting citizens to report corruption and monitor government performance, be it as individuals or through formal organizations. Transparency: the principle that information about, and used by, major institutions, administrators, and actors in both the public and (in somewhat different ways) private sectors should be widely available, in the belief that the public both has a right to know such information and can use it to hold the powerful accountable. Liberalization: deregulation, privatization, or reduced government presence in the economy, generally aimed at reducing the leverage held by venal officials and/or the range of discretion that might be exploited by officials and clients alike. International treaties and conventions: controls based on international coordination, mutual assessments and data sharing, and treaty commitments or compacts.

The boundaries among those paradigms are not always clear, and rarely do we see reliance on only one approach. Some common control tactics may serve more than one approach – transparency, for example, may factor into both crime prevention and civil society actions. None of these controls is likely to succeed on its own; all require strong institutional, political, and social foundations, significant resources, and a working level of consensus and trust. Indeed, effective application of these strategies is more an outcome of long-term institution- and trustbuilding, and of mobilizing public support, than a starting point in its own right – a reason to be skeptical of simply collecting “best practices” from elsewhere. Massive anti-corruption campaigns often run out of steam, and can elicit powerful reactions from entrenched corrupt interests; high-level declarations producing few results may only

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convince citizens that reform is futile. Premature efforts and sudden influxes of aid may severely stress already-weak institutions and social networks. Finally, all of these strategies can be abused, creating anticorruption “campaigns” that facilitate further abuses.

Crime prevention Detection, punishment, and deterrence are generally the go-to recommendation for corruption control, but they are dependent upon other capabilities that cannot always be taken for granted. Corruption is not just another variety of crime: as we will discuss in greater detail, a significant share of what many people see as corrupt, or corrupting, such as the role of money in election campaigns, is legal activity (or at least not clearly illegal). At times such activities enjoy legal or constitutional protection as well as backing from powerful interests. Unlike many forms of crime, corruption often lacks immediate victims who will file reports; indeed, all who know of a corrupt action may have an interest in keeping it secret. The investigative capabilities of many mainline law enforcement agencies are ill-suited to detecting and analyzing corrupt activities. Deterrence will be more effective where there are legitimate alternatives to doing things corruptly, but particularly in poor societies where the private sector is weak, corrupt figures can exercise monopoly pressures with impunity. Punishments require an honest and expeditious court system; crime prevention approaches assume that law enforcement agencies and personnel themselves are not corrupt. Too often, neither condition holds. All of the above assumes that the rule of law is firmly established. Where that is the case, formal penalties are often backed up by social sanctions – significant popular expressions of disapproval (on Weber’s and others’ treatments of that notion, see Detel, 2008) – and by rules and sanctions applied by business, professional, and trade organizations. Such punishments are more modest than those of the legal system but can still impose significant financial and status costs, and be applied quickly and flexibly. But while many of the countries facing the most serious corruption challenges already have a great many laws on the books, enforcement is weak and arbitrary, and the rule of law may be merely a slogan. The response may be to enact more laws, raise fines, increase surveillance, and the like. But they will be ineffective at best if citizens, not trusting officials and institutions, withhold evidence and help each other evade detection. Indeed, proliferating laws may just

36  After thirty years … what?

become ways to extract payments from the targets of enforcement – or tools of repression. Dedicated ACAs also require a credible regime. In some instances – for example Hong Kong – ACAs work extensively with citizens and business on prevention and reporting schemes; in others, such as Singapore, the agency relies more exclusively on detection and punishment. But an ACA is unlikely to be much more effective and credible than the overall governing regime that creates it and, as numerous societies have learned, the agency itself must be monitored for corruption in its own right. The ACA model is popular, but successful examples are few and far between, an issue to which we return in Chapter 4. An analogous approach to corruption control emerging in recent years comes from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Its ISO 37001 series of Anti-Bribery Management Standards – issued in 2016 as part of a larger 37000 series on Guidance for the Governance of Organizations – lays down detailed practices for detecting and responding to bribery (Brescia, 2017; ISO, 2016). An organization that does not follow ISO standards cannot be certified as being in compliance.The hope is that corrupt operators will find it difficult to do business with those in compliance, and that non-compliant organizations will be avoided by others. A burgeoning compliance industry has emerged alongside the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention, the United States Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), and similar legislation in the United Kingdom, France, and elsewhere. The scope and detail of the ISO standards are remarkable, and their potential impact will be worth careful study. One concern, however, is that by treating business and government organizations as isolated yet isomorphic, ignoring the systemic causes of corruption and impediments to reform, and restricting the view of corruption problems to a finite (even if numerous) set of rules and infractions, they will reduce integrity and justice to a self-protective box-checking exercise. Airbus SE, for example, claims adherence to a long and extensive set of compliance standards (Airbus, 2020); indeed, in 2012 the firm “commissioned a private company to review its compliance program and was awarded an “anti-corruption certificate.” Still, in early 2020 Airbus agreed to pay nearly US$4 billion in a settlement with United States, United Kingdom, and French anti-corruption authorities in order to avoid prosecution for bribery (Katz, 2020; Shearman and Sterling, 2020). The 2012 review, of course, did not apply ISO’s 2016 standards, which to be fair are aimed only at bribery rather than at the full spectrum of corruption. But Airbus

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illustrates the problems with reducing exceedingly complex and evolving corruption risks to a finite list of compliance standards.5

Incentives Officials who are chronically un- or under-paid will likely be tempted by illicit sources of income, if only to put bread on their families’ tables. If corruption were simply individual or small-group deviance shaped by incentives and opportunities, then higher pay, greater public esteem, positive publicity, promotions, and the like might be potent reforms. But while low or no pay may well make for corruption, higher salaries will not always reduce it, if only because many such abuses are motivated by greed rather than by need (Bauhr, 2017). Few people, particularly after long periods of deprivations, are likely to think “I have enough money now, so I don’t want any more.” Depending upon the climate of perceived risks, an official may conclude that while an adequate official salary is nice, illicit bonuses make things even nicer. Some officials will disdain corrupt gains on grounds of personal ethics, professional norms, and their own reputations; thus, “incentives” is not just a synonym for money. The status and personal satisfaction that might accompany public service must also be considered. Recognition, awards, promotions, or travel might be low-cost ways to reward excellent service and boost morale. Such intangible rewards from public service are a critical consideration everywhere; even where civil service protections are strong and salaries generous, both legitimate and illicit private-sector enterprises may easily outbid official compensation. Helping those who want to avoid corruption support each other might also build resistance. Other intangible incentives are negative: recall Klitgaard’s well-known example of the Bureau of Internal Revenue in the Philippines (Klitgaard, 1988: Ch. 1). For a time in the 1970s the Bureau’s Director Justice Plana published the names and pictures of corrupt functionaries in the newspapers.That, in a society where one’s family and its good name are paramount concerns, was a major disgrace. He backed up that policy by changing evaluation and promotion criteria to increase the “spread” between the ways more and less meritorious service were rewarded. Plana’s approach was quite successful for a time, but after he left the Bureau, the bad old ways reasserted themselves. Restructuring incentives can be effective, but the process must be credible, visibly fair, and continuously renewed.We cannot expect to simply pay our way to better government.

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As a practical matter, poorer societies will find it difficult to improve compensation. Even in more affluent places, higher pay for public functionaries can be politically unpopular, and elected officials will often see more advantages in keeping pay low. Additional funds may become patronage for favored factions or political clients, be siphoned off by higher-ups or distributed arbitrarily, or may be used to hire more political clients, adding to the ranks of under-paid officialdom. Organized crime and traffickers may have little difficulty buying off officials, and then keeping them in line with threats of violence.

Civil society strategies Most reforms will be more effective if there is solid social demand that rules and controls be credible and well-enforced. In non-democratic settings, making such demands may be risky, but even there, citizen pressure can play an important role. Popular pressure in mid-1970s Hong Kong after a corrupt police official escaped from prison led to the formation of the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), which placed major emphasis on building popular support and cooperation. “People power” episodes in the Philippines, China, and several former Soviet satellites have made powerful anti-corruption statements, albeit with widely varying results. Isham, Kaufmann, and Pritchett (1997) found that some measure of civil liberties, even if far short of actual democracy, facilitated more effective use of international aid funds by allowing citizens to demand better administration. Thus civil society tactics rank near the top of many reform agendas. Some such efforts emphasize formal anti-corruption organizations, citizen watch groups for various government functions, and mobilization from above. But while organized citizen groups may seem a natural approach, evidence for their effectiveness is scant. Many such groups lack entrée to political and governmental processes, while others are coopted by them; still others maintain autonomy but lack any clear sense of what to do. Collective action problems can be acute: after all, reform can be difficult, time-consuming, and even dangerous, and there will often be some citizens who have a stake in the corrupt status quo or think they stand to gain in the future. Particularly where poverty, insecurity, and violence are common, maintaining reform momentum will be difficult, and many citizens may think – with good reason – that “change” might only make matters worse. Externally aided organizations may simply add corruption control to their portfolios of other grant-attracting causes, while having little grassroots presence in most

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parts of society and no special expertise for reform. It might also be difficult to distinguish genuine reform groups from GONGOs, or “Government-Organized Non-Governmental Organizations” (Naïm, 2007). Attention to corruption may peak in times of scandal, but translating anger into effective political action is difficult (de Sousa and Moriconi, 2013; Johnston, 2013). Other issues come along, and many people have seen reform appeals amount to little. Organizations and coalitions that take care to offer people a range of incentives may be more successful (Johnston, 2014: Ch. 8; Johnston and Kpundeh, 2002), but they will need to adapt their appeals over time and will inevitably face tricky strategic questions of whether and how to engage with existing regimes without being absorbed by them. Is civil society irrelevant, then, for reform? Hardly: most countries that deal with corruption effectively also seem to have strong civil societies, although that can be overstated (for the United States see Putnam, 2000). But the connections are complex: does today’s strong civil society check corruption, or is it a product of past developments such as effective education (Uslaner, 2017) that facilitated both reform and civil society’s emergence? The real strength of civil society is likely to come, not in the form of dedicated organizations, but in the longerterm development of strong social networks and social trust, and the diffusion of organizational and political skills. Attempts to mobilize sustained popular opposition to corruption, by themselves, are likely to fail; Hong Kong’s ICAC example shows that at the very least, mobilization must be supported by vigorous efforts at public education, and by a range of activities and appeals that can make dedicated reform activities more attractive. Social networks can be considerably more durable and versatile than formal groups; for that reason, the term “social capital” is exactly right. But they can also, depending upon the variety of social capital involved (Putnam, 2000), reinforce social divisions instead of unifying. Promoting reform as a public good – “better government for all” – may simply invite collective action problems; issues more directly affecting the quality of life, such as poor police or utility services, may work better, but will still need networks that are diverse in their uses and have deep social roots.

Liberalization Privatization, deregulation, public-private partnerships, and the like seemingly have potential as ways to deprive officials of leverage over the private sector. But much depends on context: those strategies

40  After thirty years … what?

require strong legal and economic institutions, sound property rights and, precisely because they confer significant resources and opportunities upon specific individuals and groups, high levels of trust. Whatever one thought of Margaret Thatcher’s aggressive privatizations on policy grounds, at least those assets could be sold off within strong, wellregulated market institutions. Where such foundations are lacking, as in Russia in the 1990s (Goldman, 2003; Freeland, 2000), liberalization may simply put major assets up for grabs. In deeply divided societies, privatization can intensify tensions because of the appearance – or reality – that once-public assets are being diverted to the benefit of particular segments of the population or favored factions. Liberalization may also set off intra-elite conflict to the extent that it looks likely to undermine elite rents, networks, and followings – a climate of insecurity that can lead to “hand-over-fist” corruption (Scott, 1972: 80–84) as officials take as much as they can, as fast as they can take it. Alternatively, liberalization without appropriate institutional safeguards can raise fragile societies’ risks of predation from without. While faith in liberalized markets may not be as all-encompassing today as it was in the 1980s, we can still lose sight of the fact that markets require a supporting framework of regulations, institutions, and guarantors. They will not police or balance themselves. As Rothstein (2011: 209) has argued, “you can have a market for anything as long as you do not have a market for everything.”

International treaties and conventions It is a cliché to observe that corruption knows no boundaries, but that fact should still be kept at center stage. Liberalization and the integration of economies since the 1970s have accelerated the trade in money, goods, and data – and more discouraging, movements of arms, drugs, and human beings – on a global scale.The end of the Cold War brought new regimes, institutions, and businesses into the world economy, some of them seeking to play by their own rules. The digital revolution and the rise of various offshore markets – some of them very much onshore but operating in the gray areas of established economies – created new financial vehicles for individuals and groups seeking to play fast and loose with wealth. The earliest response to these dilemmas came in the form of the United States FCPA of 19776, enacted following revelations of American firms’ bribe payments in Japan. The FCPA is a set of accounting and

Fighting corruption today  41

public disclosure standards applying to firms from any country that are listed on American equity markets, aimed at preventing their paying bribes abroad. It was applied sparingly in its first decades; not until about 2004, when the legislation began to be viewed as having antiterror/anti-money laundering applications, did prosecutions become significantly more numerous. Since that time the United States has been criticized for applying FCPA more aggressively to foreign corporations than to their United States counterparts. Protests from American businesses contending that the law made them less competitive globally led the United States to push for similar requirements for other countries’ corporations. Partly as a result, the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention, United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC), other global and regional pacts, and legislation by Britain, France, and other countries eventually followed, as noted in Chapter 1. The need for cooperative international efforts is clear: no country can control global corruption on its own, and no country is free from its threats and influence. Sharing data, resources, techniques, and institutional capacity is essential. So is the need for guarantors against international collective action problems: there will always be a temptation for governments to soft-pedal enforcement in the name of creating or keeping jobs. Indeed, several of OECD’s most influential member countries have come in for sharp criticism on those grounds. The United Kingdom’s lax oversight of British Aerospace as it sought arms contracts from Saudi Arabia, and Germany’s ineffective controls of bribery by Siemens, are prominent examples (PBS, 2009). More recently, populist political leaders have demanded that governments resist internationally negotiated limits on locally based firms. A further difficulty is the sheer pace of technical and financial innovation; simply put, it is difficult for anti-corruption forces to keep up with developments in the global economy, particularly if they must act through a patchwork of agencies, jurisdictions, and countries with widely varying anti-corruption resources and commitment. The collective breadth of UNCAC and the economic clout of OECD economies are impressive efforts toward greater coordination, but they still may only be as effective as their weakest signatories allow them to be. Drug cartels, illicit arms traders, and offshore economic operators are likely to be far more nimble than most state agencies. Often it can be difficult to determine who really owns financial assets, real estate, and the like; even when “beneficial ownership” can be determined, taking action against bad actors can be difficult. Much the same is true of assets

42  After thirty years … what?

stolen by corrupt political figures; even after the thieves have been ousted, repatriating their loot is far from easy. Post-conflict societies present challenges all their own: states with an uncertain hold on their own territories do not make promising corruption control partners.

IV Conclusion It is not as though we lack good ideas for corruption control, or that effort has always been misplaced or insufficient. Each of the “big six” anti-corruption strategies can be valuable in its own way. Each, however, also has drawbacks and can be manipulated and abused by unscrupulous leaders. For that reason, simply enumerating structures and “best practices” without developing detailed knowledge of how controls actually are, and are not, applied in specific cases can become an exercise in collective delusion. Further, we have typically applied as many control measures as possible without an overriding theory of change: how controls are expected to interrelate, which should be implemented first, which later, and which ones not at all, and how we can validly assess the impacts (if any) they produce.We have not chosen strategies in response to the ways corrupt processes vary in kind within and among societies. We need to know more about how corruption might evolve over time. Most of all, we need fresh thinking about the best ways to building strong, lasting social and political foundations for reform – effective political demands that abuses and abusers of power be confronted and limited in lasting ways. Without such demands and support, even our best ideas may have little effect. Part 2 of this book takes a step back, in effect, to consider major questions we must face if we hope to deal more effectively with corruption in the future. We do not pretend to answer these questions once and for all – far from it. Rather, we highlight them as issues all too often misunderstood or overlooked, and on which active disagreement might be a healthy development. They are, collectively, an alternative to the problematical consensus that has marked the industry’s first 30 years. We begin with perhaps the most difficult questions of all: just what do we mean by “corruption,” and how should we understand its origins, dynamics, and consequences?

Notes 1 https://www.globalintegrity.org/ (Viewed 13 July 2020). 2 https://www.traceinternational.org/ (Viewed 13 July 2020).

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3 The term is borrowed from Snow, 2012 ed., and used here only as a rough analogy. 4 Often attributed to Kant but in dispute; perhaps a summary phrase for some of his other statements. 5 A more promising approach is that of TRACE International, a compliance and risk assessment firm based in Annapolis, Maryland, USA. In addition to providing compliance advice, the organization offers assessments, based on sophisticated data analysis, of the bribery risks and demands a firm is likely to face in various countries. 6 15 U.S.C. §§ 78dd-1, et seq. (1977).

References Airbus SE. 2020. “Ethics and Compliance: How We Live Our Principles.” Online at https://www.airbus.com/company/ethics-compliance.html (Viewed 13 July 2020). Andersson, Staffan, and Paul M. Heywood. 2008. “The Politics of Perception: Use and Abuse of Transparency International’s Approach to Measuring Corruption.” Political Studies 57:4, pp. 746–767. Bauhr, Monika. 2017. “Need or Greed? Conditions for Collective Action against Corruption.” Governance 30:4 (October), pp. 561–581. Brescia, Valerio. 2017. “Corruption and ISO 37001: A New Instrument to Prevent It in International Entrepreneurship.” World Journal of Accounting, Finance and Engineering 1: 1, pp. 1–14. Cobham, A. 2013. “Corrupting Perceptions: Why Transparency International’s Flagship Corruption Index Falls Short.” Foreign Policy 22 (July 22). Online at https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/22/corruptingperceptions/ (Viewed 13 July 2020). Detel, Wolfgang. 2008. “On the Concept of Basic Social Norms.” Analyse und Kritik 30, pp. 469–482. Freeland, Chrystia. 2000. Sale of the Century: Russia’s Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism. New York: Crown Business; London: Little, Brown. Frisk Jensen, Mette. 2014.“The Question of How Denmark Got to Be Denmark: Establishing Rule of Law and Fighting Corruption in the State of Denmark 1660–1900.” QoG Working Paper Series, 6. Gothenburg, Sweden: Quality of Government Institute. Online at https://www.qog.pol.gu.se/digitalAssets/1551/1551603_2014_06_frisk-jensen.pdf (Viewed 13 July 2020). Goldman, Marshall I. 2003. The Piratization of Russia: Russian Reform Goes Awry. New York: Routledge. Guillan Montero, Aranzazu. 2011. “As If: The Fiction of Executive Accountability and the Persistence of Corruption Networks in Weakly Institutionalized Presidential Systems, Argentina (1989–2007).” Ph.D. ­Thesis, Georgetown University, Washington, DC. Isham, Jonathan, Daniel Kaufmann, and Lant Pritchett. 1997. “Civil Liberties, Democracy, and the Performance of Government Projects.” World Bank Economic Review 11: 2 (May), pp. 219–242.

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ISO (International Organization for Standardization). 2016. “ISO 37001: 2016 Anti-bribery Management Systems—Requirements with Guidance for Use.” Online at https://www.iso.org/standard/65034.html (Viewed 13 July 2020). Johnston, Michael. 2005. Syndromes of Corruption: Wealth, Power, and Democracy. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Johnston, Michael. 2013. “How Do I Vote the Scoundrels Out? Why Voters Might Not Punish Corrupt Politicians at the Polls.” Crime, Law and Social Change 60: 5 (December), pp. 503–514. Johnston, Michael. 2014. Corruption, Contention, and Reform: The Power of Deep Democratization. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Johnston, Michael. 2016.“Breaking out of the Methodological Cage.” Corruption in Fragile States Blog. Medford, MA: Henry J. Leir Institute, Tufts University. (September 13). Online at https://sites.tufts.edu/ihs/breaking-out-of-themethodological-cage/ (Viewed 13 July 2020). Johnston, Michael, and Sahr J. Kpundeh. 2002. “Building a Clean Machine: Anti-Corruption Coalitions and Sustainable Reforms.” World Bank Institute Working Paper number 37208 (December). Katz, Benjamin. 2020. “Airbus Faces Nearly $4 Billion in Penalties from Corruption Probes.” Wall Street Journal (January 28). Online at https:// www.wsj.com/articles/airbus-reaches-international-deal-over-corruption-probe-11580195579 (Viewed 13 July 2020). Klitgaard, Robert. 1988. Controlling Corruption. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Lessig, Lawrence. 2013. “‘Institutional Corruption’ Defined.” Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics 41:3 (Fall), pp. 2–4. Manzetti, Luigi. 2009. Neoliberalism, Accountability, and Reform Failures in Emerging Markets: Eastern Europe, Russia, Argentina, and Chile in Comparative Perspective. University Park, PA.: Pennsylvania State University Press. Naïm, Moisés. 2007. “What is a GONGO?” Foreign Policy 160 (May–June), pp. 96, 95. Noonan, John T. Jr. 1984. Bribes: The Intellectual History of a Moral Idea. New York: Macmilllan. PBS (Public Broadcasting Service). 2009. “Black Money.” Frontline (Season 27, episode 7). April 7. Online at https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/ blackmoney/ (Viewed 13 July 2020). Putnam, Robert D. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster. Ricci, David M. 1984. The Tragedy of Political Science: Politics, Scholarship, and Democracy. New Haven and London:Yale University Press. Roberts, Clayton. 1966. The Growth of Responsible Government in Stuart England. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Rothstein, Bo. 2011. “Anti-Corruption: The Indirect ‘Big Bang’ Approach.” Review of International Political Economy 18:2 (May), pp. 228–250. Rothstein, Bo. 2014. “Human Well-being and the Lost Relevance of Political Science.” Florence: European University Institute, Max Weber Lecture No.

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2014/03 (16 April). Online at https://cadmus.eui.eu/handle/1814/31262 (Viewed 13 July 2020). Scott, James C. 1972. Comparative Political Corruption. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. Shearman and Sterling. 2020. “Airbus Agrees Record-Breaking €3.6 Billion Settlement to Avoid Prosecution” (February 11). Online at https://www. shearman.com/perspectives/2020/02/airbus-agrees-record-breaking-settlement-to-avoid-prosecution (Viewed 13 July 2020). de Sousa, Luis, and Marcelo Moriconi. 2013. “Why Voters Do Not Throw the Rascals Out? A Conceptual Framework for Analyzing Electoral Punishment of Corruption.” Crime, Law, and Social Change 60:5 (December), pp. 471–502. Thompson, Dennis F. 2018. “Theories of Institutional Corruption.” Annual Review of Political Science 21 (February), pp. 495–513. https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-polisci-120117-110316 (Viewed 13 July 2019). Uslaner, Eric M. 2017. The Historical Roots of Corruption: Mass Education, Economic Inequality, and State Capacity. Cambridge and NewYork: Cambridge University Press.

PART 2

Misreadings and misunderstandings

3 MISREADING THE NATURE OF CORRUPTION Corruption in monochrome

I Getting corruption in focus Much like democracy, human rights, or development, corruption has proven to be difficult to define and analyze. It is telling that despite much early discussion of definitions, no consensus has emerged. Lately it has become common to sidestep the issue altogether, or to offer a general working definition and then get on with the work. The most frequently employed definition of corruption comes from Joseph Nye (1967: 419): Corruption is behavior which deviates from the formal duties of a public role because of private-regarding (personal, close family, private clique) pecuniary or status gains; or violates rules against the exercise of certain types of private-regarding influence. Nye captures critical aspects of the issue, but the emphasis upon formal duties and rules, and the implication that public–private distinctions are relatively precise and unchanging, yield a narrow conception of the issue – one that does not fit well with some of the most serious cases where basic rules, roles, and boundaries are in flux. A more recent formulation is TI’s “abuse of entrusted power for private gain” (Transparency International, 2018), a definition that neatly captures principal-agent dynamics but applies less well where power has been

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seized, stolen, bought, or inherited, rather than having been entrusted by anyone. Other conceptions are as specific as quid pro quo bribery – indeed, “corruption” and “bribery” are all too often used as though they were synonyms – or as broad as “anything that keeps me from engaging in the formulation or reform of official action that materially affects my circumstances or life chances” (Andersson and Anechiarico, 2019: 31; emphasis in original). That argument aligns well with Warren (2004: 329): “corruption is always a form of duplicitous and harmful exclusion of those who have a claim to inclusion in collective decisions and actions. Corruption involves a specific kind of unjustifiable disempowerment.” Most definitions, by contrast, attempt to isolate a finite category of actions as corrupt – an understandable temptation, but an approach that can overlook the ways corruption might be a collective state of being (Dobel, 1978). Other issues, such as the implications of corruption for the nature and legitimacy of a political order, and the ways in which contested notions of corruption can illuminate contention over the acceptable sources and uses of power, arise much less frequently when definitions are debated. While we might wish for a single settled definition of corruption, the proliferation of concepts and approaches underlines the inherent importance and complexity of the concept. Over the past thirty years, in particular, a broad range of analysts, actors, and organizations have stepped up to take it on, producing an immense literature and other resources. After all of that effort, however, the results still generally fall into one or more of five unidimensional conceptualizations that have done as much to limit the debate as to open up possibilities for action. We call these “monochrome” visions of corruption because, while they admit of variation, it is often only along the continuum of a constrained palette, excluding worlds of relevant and colorful variation (an early exploration on a similar theme appears in Heidenheimer, 2004).

II Seeing in monochrome Five ways of “framing” corruption, like all framing mechanisms, highlight some (often highly relevant) aspects of the problem while excluding others from consideration.

Catch-all corruption: “Everything bad”? Debates about corruption are hardly new. Greek and Roman accounts are replete with references to moral corruption and degeneracy

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infecting the body politic as a whole, a metaphor that gained in importance over time (Buchan and Hill, 2014). Similar perspectives are found in non-Western ancient societies (Brioschi, 2017) as well. This dynamic reflects a broader tendency to see corruption as moral decay; the broad scope of such perspectives is valuable, but the risk is associating it with virtually anything that might be considered negative. While such views resonate with propositions regarding so-called “governance corruption” – to which we will turn later in this chapter – they lead us to ask whether we are really dealing with a single phenomenon. When views are so broad, comparative analysis of causes and solutions becomes difficult. Fast forward to 1995, and the launch of Transparency International’s (TI) Corruption Perception Index (CPI). As noted, it quickly became central to the anti-corruption industry. It is easy to see why: nothing is easier to comprehend than a ranking, and nothing is easier to plug into a quantitative analysis or a news story than supposedly comparable index scores. Regardless of whatever complexity may underlie – or be flattened out by – such scores, countries end up neatly ranked from least to most “corrupt.” The CPI methodology has evolved over the years; it originally incorporated public opinion surveys broadly, but now “aggregates data from a number of different sources that provide perceptions by business people and country experts of the level of corruption in the public sector” (Transparency International, 2019; emphasis added). As rankings are published annually, a tempting inference – regardless of discontinuities and qualitative contrasts in the underlying data, diversity among countries and their corruption situations, and TI’s own words of caution – is that we can discover whether countries are advancing or retreating in terms of perceived corruption. It is hard to overstate the importance of the CPI. Widely reported in the media worldwide, it helped crystalize public discontent in many countries over the quality of government. Moreover, it drew longoverdue international attention to the issue, and to regimes where corruption seemed most serious. Yet it also garnered its fair share of criticism. 1 Important as perceptions are, their connection to underlying realities is open to dispute. What if countries with similar scores actually experience dramatically different kinds of corruption? And what if commonly held elite biases for or against certain countries affect the scores? As influential as such indices became, and despite methodological improvements introduced over the years, doubts remained that they met the two critical criteria for any comparative measure (Hamilton and Hammer, 2018: 3): validity (is it measuring a well-defined construct

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of corruption?) and reliability (does it do so consistently in ways that facilitate cross-national or longitudinal comparisons?). Does the Index help us understand qualitative variations in corruption from one time and place to another, or does it obscure them? These examples of measurement schemes – and there are others – underscore one way that corruption can end up being “framed” in monochrome: “more” versus “less” in whole countries, as subjectively judged from a distance. Ironically, it is not by being overly narrow, but by being so broad in what one is capturing – a heady mix of perceptions, experiences, and underlying specific indicators, amalgamated into various indices ranking countries along one reductive continuum – that such indices frame corruption problems for us in ways that are likely to be seriously misleading (Charron, 2016). Indeed, the Global Integrity Index, developed by Global Integrity as a way to measure “the opposite of corruption” for a smaller number of countries beginning in 2007, raised enough similar questions that its parent organization ended the project in 2011 (Global Integrity, 2011). A different sort of effort by the European Research Center for Anti-Corruption (ERCAS), the Index of Public Integrity (IPI), takes a better approach, incorporating six dimensions of policy affecting corruption control with an emphasis on indicators that are concrete and actionable. IPI results now exist for 2015, 2017, and 2019 for 117 states (ERCAS, 2019). Any index, however, faces the question of what (if anything) is being measured (Thomas, 2009), and a number of difficulties in merging disparate data into composite statistics (Arndt, 2008). Overly broad conceptions and measurement frameworks for corruption have several consequences. One is that that it becomes extremely difficult to distinguish among qualitatively different types, their varying causes, and their consequences. The schemes also generally fail to elucidate the interconnections between actual behavior and perceptions of the same. It becomes difficult to identify actions that are needed and any consequences that those responses might have: even if we implement a given control and see improving index scores, they are likely to tell us little about just what is “working,” and why. Quantitative indices can create a sense of misplaced concreteness: scores that move in one direction or another may be construed as evidence that something fundamental is happening, while the actual drivers and significance of such movements may be far from clear. Catch-all indices have raised awareness of corruption as a public issue, but have they outlived their usefulness?

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Corruption as deviance We now move from the broadest to a narrower conceptualization – that of corruption as deviance, be it rule-breaking or a marked deterioration from some more desirable state of affairs. There are several ways in which such framing appears – and again, several consequences derive from it. One is to emphasize corruption as law breaking. In this conception, corruption is most often equated with bribery. We see examples throughout the field: a United Nations document from 1999 (Langseth, 1999: 6), while allowing that corrupt activities arise in many situations (tax collection, customs, land titling, and so forth), nevertheless equates them with bribery and extortion, adding that “it is unlikely that a detailed attempt to achieve a global or even regional typology would serve a useful purpose because of the number of variables involved.” A tome of magisterial scope on the history of corruption is simply entitled “Bribes” (Noonan, 1984). Meanwhile, the United States Supreme Court has had a busy decade issuing decisions2 that – by contrast with Buckley v. Valeo (1976)3 which held that both corruption and the appearance of corruption justified federal campaign finance regulations – effectively restrict the concept to explicit quid pro quo bribes (Burns, Crites, and Hunt, 2018; Murphy, 2017). Taken to an extreme, framing corruption as deviance raises the question of whether all corruption must, perforce, be illegal; by extension, it becomes difficult to address the notion of corruption that is legal. The limitations of such a perspective are clear: since societies vary in terms of the their legal frameworks and the underlying values they reflect; since those legal frameworks can be changeable, vague, and contradictory; and since wealthy and well-connected people can often influence what laws say and how they are applied, what appears to be a precise standard in fact creates much ambiguity. We might pretend to reduce systemic corruption by doing nothing less than legalizing, or privatizing, behavior judged corrupt, but none of the social and political consequences that trouble us now would be alleviated. Indeed, they would likely become worse. Possibilities for meaningful action would be foreclosed because of the political difficulty of legislating against powerful entrenched interests. Moreover, in the United States at least some of the practices in question currently enjoy Constitutional protection. A deviance perspective, if not set in its wider context, also runs the risk of framing high-quality government as synonymous with not breaking the law.

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Other narrow conceptualizations stem from similar conceptual premises. Much of the analytical literature of the past three decades has been written from an economics perspective and with Principal-Agent (P-A) or Principal-Agent-Client (P-A-C) modeling (see Chapter Two) at its core. From this perspective, corruption is a form of deviation by an Agent from a Principal’s intentions and desires. The deviation is enabled by any number of conditions present in the institutional field, such as asymmetrical or limited information available to the Principal about the actions taken by the Agent, or problems with enforcement. Principals might be seen as government leaders who are hapless to address corruption occurring at lower levels of the system, but that scenario assumes that they themselves are not engaged in corruption. Alternatively, the ultimate Principal could be taken more figuratively to be citizens of a democracy, in which case the democratic intentions and best interests of the people are thwarted by both Principals and Agents throughout the chain of command. This second viewpoint poses practical challenges, since “the people” are obviously not homogenous or disinterested parties and are not ordinarily empowered to take direct, authoritative decisions and actions. To its credit, the P-A model has proven to be adaptable and has led to many core insights that have shaped anti-corruption practice. Klitgaard (1988; see also Klitgaard et al. 2000) led the way with five clusters of strategies based on P-A-C models: selecting more honest agents; setting rewards and penalties more rationally to guide behavior; improving information and monitoring systems; restructuring P-A relations to reduce monopoly, limit discretion, and improve accountability; and raising the moral costs of corruption. These are powerful ideas that are eminently practical in many settings. But if the P-A dynamics are adopted too narrowly or literally, the recommendations they suggest can become another monochromatic view. They are vulnerable to being reduced to technical rule changes and “compliance” in the sense of following pre-set procedural standards that are presumed to be widely applicable, and to collectively address the core dynamics of corruption itself. There is no doubt that compliance, as far as it goes, is a highly important concern. As laws and international treaties become more complex and ambitious in scope, and as the activities they seek to regulate proliferate, accelerate, and employ technology in new ways, even the most scrupulous people and organizations will benefit from expert guidance on reducing their vulnerabilities to both legal entanglements

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and corrupt demands. But reducing corruption control to compliance alone raises major problems, for no one can anticipate all possible scenarios and make appropriate rules in advance, while flawed rules and procedures can produce undesirable outcomes. We need to take account of the broader forces encouraging and inhibiting corruption, the diverse agendas of the actors in question, and the wide variations in organizational structures and functions. Perhaps as a result of those complexities, however, we risk overlooking contrasts in corruption (often falling back upon a bribery focus), the problem of corrupt Principals, and the differences between rule-following and the broader values of integrity. If we see reform as complete once compliance is in place, we may create the situation Lowi (1968) saw as culminating a century’s reforms in New York City: a city that was well-managed in the sense that rules and procedures were upheld, but poorly governed, as inward-looking agencies lost sight of fundamental values of accountable democratic government.

Oversimplifying the problem Any approach to analysis or reform requires us to make some simplifying assumptions. We cannot study, or seek to control, every aspect of every single corrupt event, so we must decide what is the essence of the problem: the key causes and consequences, and the kinds of activity most cases have in common that can be targeted for control. But it is easy to carry simplification too far. Overly narrow framing of corruption may emerge, for example, from methodological premises themselves constrained by theoretical approaches. The past twenty years have seen a proliferation of attempts to measure corruption using very specific indicators. In contrast with the broad corruption perceptions approach, proxies for firm-level bribery, for opportunities for corruption (strikingly variable or “negotiable” tax assessments), or for its consequences (unusually high or low prices paid by governments for common commodities) are developed for comparison across jurisdictions, administrative sectors, or countries. Considerable ingenuity has also gone into what might be called “forensic” approaches to assessing the state of corruption; roads might be dug up to assess the percentage of concrete that has been pilfered in the construction process (Olken, 2007), or financial accounts analyzed to identify vulnerabilities that have been exploited (Gueorguiev and Malesky, 2012). Attempts to use macroeconomic modeling to infer the size of the black-market

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economy (correlated, presumably, with corrupt activity) have also been fruitful (Schneider and Buehn, 2017).The problem in these cases is not necessarily with the specific measures developed, but with reification: viewing corruption as that which is being measured. Such proxy measures may skew our analysis by overemphasizing “macro” political or economic influences, or by reducing our field of vision to measurable flaws in specific administrative processes, distorting the inferences and policy implications we draw from the measure or case at hand. The major consequence of framing corruption solely as bribery, or as any specific artifact of a methodology or conceptual framework, is to obscure important qualitative differences. Nepotism, official theft, graft, conflicts of interest, and various forms of money-laundering are just some varieties – and those are merely examples of practices that are clearly illegal. Legal or “institutional” corruption (Lessig, 2013; Thompson, 2018), including the distorting effects of some fully legal political contributions, as well as rents and privileges written into law (Stiglitz, 2012), trigger many citizens’ perceptions that their legitimate interests have been crowded out by the influence of money (Sandel, 2012; Warren, 2004). Still other important contrasts reside not just at the level of corrupt techniques, but also reflect deeper conditions shaping the ways wealth and power are pursued, used, and exchanged (Johnston, 2005, 2014). Thus, in some societies, corruption functions as a kind of alternative to violence (Huntington, 1968) while elsewhere – Mexico, for example, with the plata o plomo dilemmas (Contreras, 2014) forced by drug cartels – corruption and violence are closely paired. Some corruption is a free-for-all, undermining public order and disrupting markets, while elsewhere it is monopolized by top figures and doled out as patronage – a means of control (for a classic analysis see Waterbury, 1973). In still others, corrupt collusion helps unify elites in the face of rising political and economic competition, sustaining a de facto predictability that can enable corruption to coexist – for a time, at least – with sustained economic growth. Most corruption is linked to power or authority in a particular place, but some can spread into the global system (Johnston, 2005, 2014). Such contrasts have major implications for both the consequences of, and cures for, corruption but are seldom reflected in rankings, specific measurements, or scenarios for reform.

Corruption as a national trait Another sort of monochrome vision is to see corruption primarily as a national phenomenon – varying significantly among, but not within,

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whole countries, its causes reflecting national characteristics and calling for national-level remedies. Indeed, we often treat the nation-state as our most meaningful unit of analysis.This perspective is so embedded in the general discourse that it is easily taken as given.TI, for example, not only reports results on the CPI for whole but also shows them in color on familiar global maps. Those maps dramatically illustrate perceived contrasts in corruption and fit well with impressionistic views of the quality of governments around the world. And after all, no one would argue that national-level factors are irrelevant as influences on corruption problems. But because maps and index scores of this sort tell us nothing about variations within countries, it is all too easy – and seriously misleading – to conclude that corruption results from national laws and enforcement, national cultures (a much-abused concept), national histories, national political dynamics, and so forth. Equally important, straightforward national comparisons ignore cross-border influences originating in regional and global dynamics. Maps and scores for whole countries invite the assumption that changes in corruption must come in the form of national trends – trends which the indices themselves do not reliably measure – rather than in specific locales, economic sectors, or parts of government. Worst of all, qualitative changes cannot be reflected in such schemes at all, leaving us to assume that Russian corruption in 2020 is qualitatively the same thing as it was in 1995, for example, or that Donald Trump’s creative variations on conflictsof-interest are not a significant development in American governance. Stated thus, such claims would not be taken seriously by anyone, and yet our insistence on seeing corruption as a one-dimensional national trait backs us right into those sorts of analytical corners. Several other indices noted earlier in the chapter, along with the notion of essentially identical National Integrity Systems4 (e.g., see Transparency International, 2012), reflect this outlook as well. Not all indices yield straightforward rankings of countries, and the methodology behind them can be nuanced and sensitive to different underlying contrasts. National Integrity reports reflect a variety of methods too, and are the subject of growing interest; generally, they do not result in simple rankings but rather offer analyses in some depth (Brown and Heinrich, 2017). The monochrome issue here is the assumption that national, and usually legal/institutional, factors are most important in influencing corruption and, by extension, that national, top-down remedies should take first priority. Much is missed in the process. As in all cases of framing explored in this chapter, qualitative differences – not only across sectors such as

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health, construction, and elections, but also in terms of sub-national regions, segments of divided societies, and highly specific (even face-to-face) relationships among people – tend to be flattened out. In summary CPI reports it is whole countries that are characterized as “improvers,” “decliners,” or “countries to watch” (Transparency International, 2019), even though such assessments are only the opinions of various survey respondents. Even if such groupings are accurate in some overall sense, they are aggregations of extraordinarily complex and diverse bundles of strengths, weaknesses, and trends. Such a lack of nuance can be problematic even for middle-sized and smaller countries, and downright misleading for cases that are particularly large, rapidly changing, or internally diverse (Charron, 2010; Libman and Kozlov, 2013). Good case studies at the nation-state level can offer nuanced analyses of all manner of local variations. The problem is that they are too unsystematic and fail to link up to broader comparative analyses, thus neglecting a critical question: “what is this case a case of  ?”5 Equally serious, as noted, is the way transnational elements in corruption are typically excluded from this frame. Transnational actors, processes, and networks are deemphasized, as is the positioning of countries in the global political economy. Such influences can have serious repercussions for the types and levels of corruption in a country, and for the opportunities and challenges facing reformers (Heywood, 2017; Shelley, 2018).

Corruption as backwardness For decades, corruption has often been seen as a problem “over there,” often in warmer climates and among poorer peoples. This goes handin-hand with conceiving of corruption as deviance and moral decay, the only difference being that in this case, the problem is with people and places elsewhere, not in our own societies. Characterizations of particular nations or sub-groups as lacking the values and institutions necessary for good government as understood in the North and West have a long pedigree. Such arguments were not only offered in various ways by Wraith and Simpkins (1963) in the early 1960s, but also resurface in a more recent analysis interpreting diplomats’ unpaid Manhattan parking tickets as a proxy for cultures of corruption in their home countries (Fisman and Miguel, 2007: 1021). But do blanket references to culture reflect genuine insights into contrasting

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societies, convenient and self-serving stereotypes, or attempts to cover up cracks and gaps in analysis with a seemingly insightful but contentfree term – in effect, the analytical equivalent of spackle6? Indeed, do they amount to blaming corruption on its victims? We are all too well accustomed to ways in which our own identities and experiences can skew our analyses of “the other”; moreover, “culture” and any causal influences we might attribute to it are exceedingly complicated issues in their own right. Similarly, while there are good reasons to believe corruption harms economic development, we should not see poverty as proof one society is corrupt, nor wealth as evidence of another’s integrity. Ethnocentric analyses are a form of monochrome thinking because they frame corruption as an inherent characteristic of whole peoples or entire places (Torsello and Venard, 2016), in effect leaping from highly detailed contexts to national levels of analysis without identifying specific factors that might connect the two. Thus, caution is in order regarding any scheme that sets up corruption as deviance from supposedly universal norms. Comparative analysis of corruption will more or less inevitably point to normative contrasts; after all, the core concept of corruption is inherently value-laden. But we must rest such comparisons on specific observable aspects of politics and governance, not on alleged collective shortcomings of whole peoples or on whole-country characteristics that embody inferential leaps, without strong connective evidence, from aggregate statistics. In a series of nuanced pieces, Mungiu-Pippidi (2015, 2016) develops a continuum of governance regimes that begins – after the emergence of governance as a solution to a Hobbesian state of nature – with “limited access orders,” characterized first by raw “patrimonialism” and then evolving to “competitive particularism.” There follows, after a “borderline” category, an “open access order” (Mungiu-Pippidi, 2015: table 2.1) that is: individualistic, with political equality, high personal autonomy, and high civic participation. The state is autonomous from private interest, and allocation and policy formulation are achieved on the basis of ethical universalism and transparency. There is very little contradiction between formal and informal institutions, and corruption, when it occurs, is indeed a deviation from the norm of ethical universalism and public impartiality. That state of affairs is seen as normatively desirable, but hardly as an established universal standard or any sort of convergent end point of

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development. It reflects a variety of historical and political influences (as noted earlier, the associated IPI rests upon six specific dimensions of the quality of government), rather than some collective social shortcoming. The results are complex questions of systemic development in specific places – “How Denmark became Denmark” (Frisk Jensen 2014; Mungiu-Pippidi 2013, 2015) is one frequent trope in the literature – that challenge us to think carefully about long-term processes of change, rather than allege backwardness or poor ethical development on the part of whole peoples. Another example in this vein is found in Andersson and Anechiarico’s Corruption and Corruption Control: Democracy in the Balance (2019). The authors draw a distinction between “exchange corruption” – quintessentially bribery – and “governance corruption,” which is equated with any “bad and abusive official behavior … when it is intentionally used to exclude individuals or groups from taking part in decisions that critically affect them” (Ibid.: 2, a similar argument is found in Warren, 2004). This argument situates citizen participation and effective democracy as core attributes of good governance, which in turn is considered the opposite of corruption (Andersson and Anechiarico, 2019). Here too the analysis has a strong normative component, but the gradations of poorly to better governed societies reflect opportunities for effective political participation, not presumed shortcomings of nations or peoples. The essential risk to avoid is repeating the shortcomings of corruption indices by positing any one continuum or process of development distinguishing apparently more serious corruption problems from less serious ones. While such schemes are not necessarily ethnocentric, they do impose a particular framing of corruption that poses creates several limitations. First, the possibility of multiple, distinct constellations of values underpinning development – what “better” government might mean, or different versions of what it means to be “modern” – is often neglected. If corruption has one meaning and if “development,” or any other single notion of the opposite of corruption, is one specific destination, then it becomes easy to equate corruption with the absence of these virtues – a continuum that almost cannot help but be monochrome. Second, our analytical schemes tend to downplay the interconnections among countries, both in the past and at present. If country X is closer to some developmental ideal because of a historical trajectory

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that depended – or even continues to depend – in part on exclusionary practices and marginalization in country Y (mediated perhaps via multinational corporations or the international political economy writ large), then the analysis of norms in country X alone may overlook such connections. A final problem with the unidimensional view is that it is likely to be least generative of insights for the countries at either end of the continuum. If the question is “how Denmark became Denmark,” conceptually speaking, then there will be little notion of where Denmark might be heading next, or of what the gaps in achievement might still exist. Instead, there is a temptation to rummage through Denmark’s history in search of whatever seems to fit one’s notions of development post hoc. And for those countries at the less fortunate end of the scale, what course of action does the analysis suggest other than trying, somehow, to become another Denmark? In all of these ways, the corruption-as-backwardness trope can be seriously uninformative.

Dichotomous corruption: one step forward, two steps back? Comparative schemes are hardly unknown in the literature on corruption. But many comparative schemes are dichotomous, arguing in effect that there are two basic modes. Such schemes are in one sense a departure from monochromatic approaches. In another, though, they show distinct limitations of their own. One such distinction is that between “episodic,” “ordinary,” or “normal” corruption versus “systemic” corruption. The former typically involves isolated occurrences within a broader setting of sound institutions; no matter how serious those cases may be in isolation, one can generally expect the system to right itself. The usual solution from a policy perspective would be to continuously monitor vulnerabilities to corrupt behavior, in large measure by applying the P-A modeling mentioned earlier. In cases of systemic corruption, by contrast, corruption is not a problem in the system but rather the systemic norm. The underlying institutions governing social, political, and economic life have become: … so thoroughly corrupted, there may be little, if any political will to reform them. Calling for better agents, improved incentives, better information, more competition, less official discretion, and higher economic and social costs is well and good. But

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who is going to listen? Who is going to act? The usual anticorruption remedies may not work. Now what? (Klitgaard, 2000: 3) When such situations arise, effective action cannot take place through established institutions. Rather, those institutions must themselves be substantially changed. Solutions in this case tend toward the empowerment of civil society actors, or transparency and aggressive law enforcement efforts modeled on the fight against organized crime. Barring the intervention of some extraordinary “reform champion,” progress will require some form of collective action. We consider some of these interventions in the next chapter. But when Klitgaard’s characterization is applied in imprecise ways, complications arise. Are countries or systems clearly in one camp or the other? What if the same system shows signs of both normal and systemic or episodic corruption, perhaps in different sectors or according to different criteria? In some countries beset by some forms of systemic corruption one may at most times, in most places, nevertheless obtain a passport or other routine government services without great difficulty (Alam, 1995). But that does not mean that the system itself does not have other sectors or processes that are prone to serious vulnerabilities. Moreover, dichotomous schemes may not help us understand changes between the two states, even though most countries – showing both normal and systemic vulnerabilities – may be in some form of transition in ways that invite elucidation. One common tactic for dealing with the problems of the normal versus system dichotomy is to resort to another – in this case, the well-worn distinction between petty versus grand corruption. That notion has intuitive appeal: massive fraud in the course of building a dam and small extortion payments handed over to the police by merchants are not the same thing. But the essential differences between them, how and why they matter, and what, we gain from the grand versus petty distinction – particularly if it is invoked to minimize the importance of the latter or to justify an emphasis on big-ticket cases – has never been made clear. Indeed, it may obscure more than it reveals: “petty” corruption helps keep poor people poor, and the powerless, vulnerable to officials and others who exploit them. And are we sure we know the difference? The size and institutional level of corrupt dealings are worth thinking about carefully, but we need to fit such aspects of scale into a broader and more diverse comparative framework.

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III From descriptions to causes This chapter has examined several ways in which the complex nuances and processes of change associated with corruption tend to be flattened out or reduced to “monochrome.” The result has been the convenient but misleading assumption that corruption is essentially the same thing wherever it occurs – frequently, taking the form of bribery – or that it is a straightforward result of the absence or weakness of “modern” institutions, or of other desirable national attributes. Few would state such ideas as positive propositions; still, from the persistent focus on one-dimensional, whole-country corruption rankings, to notions of development that are themselves one-dimensional and at times strikingly static, to reform recommendations that vary remarkably little across time and space, we have not given sufficient thought to the many possible qualitative variations growing out of contrasting histories and circumstances, or to the wide variety of causal influences they can reflect. Our views of corruption can also become artifacts of our measurement scheme, particularly when we fall back upon rankings based on perceptions. They are often inappropriately based on whole-country claims, ignoring both transnational and subnational variations that can be profoundly important. And many of the schemes employed miss out on relevant sources and drivers of variation, reflecting and perpetuating an international pecking order that fails to account for differences in qualitative and historical trajectories, or for the underlying values reflected in different governance arrangements (a theme explored further in Chapter Five). But first, Chapter Four examines a related version of ‘monochrome’ – the tendency in the anti-corruption industry to focus on “silver bullet” interventions.

Notes 1 To be fair, TI itself has been frank about many of the CPI’s shortcomings and has urged caution regarding the ways the data should be interpreted. Many of the most egregious misuses of the data have been the doing of third-party academicians, practitioners, and journalists. 2 See, for example, McDonnell vs. United States, 579 U.S. ___; 136 S. Ct. 2355; 195 L. Ed. 2d 639 (2016). 3 424 U.S. 1 (1976). 4 The NIS concept is far from useless: among other things it directs our attention to institutional weaknesses and quite rightly emphasizes that corruption control must be a broadly-shared responsibility. Over the years,

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however, the NIS idea has become formalized and rigid, and its associated assessments have tended to devolve into a box-checking exercise unreflective of important variations among and within countries – particularly, historical and cultural – and largely uninformed by the political complexities of coordination and enforcement. For views of the NIS concept from differing, but critical, perspectives see Doig (2018), and Heywood and Johnson (2017). 5 Thanks to Timothy A. Byrnes for his numerous comments on this point. 6 Or, polyfilla – take your pick.

References Alam, M. Shahid. 1995. “A Theory of Limits on Corruption and Some Applications.” Kyklos 48:3 (August), pp. 419–435. Andersson, Staffan, and Frank Anechiarico. 2019. Corruption and Corruption Control: Democracy in the Balance. London: Routledge. Arndt, Christiane. 2008. “The Politics of Governance Ratings.” International Public Management Journal 11:3 (July), pp. 275–297. Brown, A. J., and F. Heinrich. 2017. “National Integrity Systems–An Evolving Approach to Anti-Corruption Policy Evaluation.” Crime, Law and Social Change 68:3 (October), pp. 283–292. Buchan, Bruce, and Lisa Hill. 2014. An Intellectual History of Political Corruption. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Burns, J., D. M. Crites, and W. Hunt. 2018. “Muddied Waters: When Does a Stream of Benefits Become a River of Bribes.” Ohio Lawyer 32:3 (May– June), pp. 8–11. Charron, Nicholas. 2010. “The Correlates of Corruption in India: Analysis and Evidence from the States.” Asian Journal of Political Science 18:2, pp. 177–194. Charron, Nicholas. 2016. “Do Corruption Measures Have a Perception Problem? Assessing the Relationship between Experiences and Perceptions of Corruption among Citizens and Experts.” European Political Science Review 8:1 (February), pp. 147–171. Contreras, Raoul Lowery. 2014. “‘Plata o Plomo,’ Silver or Lead.” The Hill (September 4). Online at http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/ immigration/216598-plata-o-plomo-silver-or-lead (Viewed 13 July 2020). Dobel, J. Patrick. 1978. “The Corruption of a State.” American Political Science Review 72:3, pp. 958–973. Doig, Alan. 2018. “How to Fix TI’s National Integrity System Country Assessments.” GAB: The Global Anticorruption Blog (July 19). Online at https://globalanticorruptionblog.com/2018/07/19/guest-post-how-to-fixtis-national-integrity-system-country-assessments/ (Viewed 13 July 2020). ERCAS (European Research Center for Anti-Corruption). 2019.“Index of Public Integrity.” Online at https://integrity-index.org/ (Viewed 13 July 2020). Fisman, Raymond, and Edward Miguel. 2007. “Corruption, Norms, and Legal Enforcement: Evidence from Diplomatic Parking Tickets.” Journal of Political Economy 115:6 (December), pp. 1020–1048.

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Frisk Jensen, Mette. 2014. “The Question of How Denmark Got to Be Denmark: Establishing Rule of Law and Fighting Corruption in the State of Denmark 1660–1900.” QoG Working Paper Series, 6. Gothenburg, Sweden: Quality of Government Institute. Online at https://www.qog.pol. gu.se/digitalAssets/1551/1551603_2014_06_frisk-jensen.pdf (Viewed 13 July 2020). Global Integrity. 2011. “Why We Killed the Global Integrity Index.” Online at https://www.globalintegrity.org/2011/05/04/post-792/ (Viewed 13 July 2020). Gueorguiev, D., and E. Malesky. 2012. “Foreign Investment and Bribery: A Firm-Level Analysis of Corruption in Vietnam.” Journal of Asian Economics 23:2 (April), pp. 111–129. Hamilton, Alexander, and Craig Hammer. 2018. Can We Measure the Power of the Grabbing Hand? A Comparative Analysis of Different Indicators of Corruption. Washington, DC: The World Bank. Online at http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/113281515516828746/pdf/WPS8299.pdf (Viewed 13 July 2020). Heidenheimer, Arnold J. 2004. “Disjunctions between Corruption and Democracy? A Qualitative Exploration.” Crime, Law and Social Change 42:1 (August), pp. 99–109. Heywood, Paul M. 2017. “Rethinking Corruption: Hocus-Pocus, Locus and Focus.” Slavonic and East European Review 95:1 (January), pp. 21–48. Heywood, Paul M., and Elizabeth Johnson. 2017. “Cultural Specificity versus Institutional Universalism:A Critique of the National Integrity System (NIS) Methodology.” Crime, Law, and Social Change 68:3 (September), pp. 309–324. Huntington, Samuel P. 1968. Political Order in Changing Societies. New Haven: Yale University Press. Johnston, Michael. 2005. Syndromes of Corruption: Wealth, Power, and Democracy. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Johnston, Michael. 2014. Corruption, Contention, and Reform: The Power of Deep Democratization. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Klitgaard, Robert. 1988. Controlling Corruption. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Klitgaard, Robert. 2000.“Subverting Corruption.” Finance and Development 37:2 (June). Online at http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2000/06/ klitgaar.htm (Viewed 13 July 2020). Langseth, Petter. 1999. Prevention: An Effective Tool to Reduce Corruption.Vienna: United Nations, Global Programme against Corruption. Lessig, Lawrence. 2013. “‘Institutional Corruption’ Defined.” Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics 41:3 (Fall), pp. 2–4. Libman, Alexander, and Vladimir Kozlov. 2013. “Sub-national Variation of Corruption in Russia: What Do We Know about It?” REGION: Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia 2:2, pp. 153–180. Lowi, Theodore J. 1968. “Gosnell's Chicago Revisited  Via Lindsay’s New York.” Foreword to Harold F. Gosnell, Machine Politics: Chicago Model (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Mungiu-Pippidi, Alina. 2013. “Controlling Corruption through Collective Action.” Journal of Democracy 24:1 (January), pp. 101–115. Mungiu-Pippidi, Alina. 2015. The Quest for Good Governance: How Societies Develop Control of Corruption. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Mungiu-Pippidi, Alina (ed.). 2016. “Special Issue: Measuring Corruption in Europe and Beyond.” European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research 22:3 (September). Noonan, John T. Jr. 1984. Bribes: The Intellectual History of a Moral Idea. New York: Macmilllan. Nye, Joseph S. 1967. “Corruption and Political Development: A Cost-Benefit Analysis.” American Political Science Review 61:2 (June), pp. 417–427. Olken, Benjamin A. 2007. “Monitoring Corruption: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia.” Journal of Political Economy, 115(2), pp. 200–249. Sandel, Michael J. 2012. What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. Schneider, F., and A. Buehn. 2017. “Estimating a Shadow Economy: Results, Methods, Problems, and Open Questions.” Open Economics 1:1 (March), pp. 1–29. Shelley, Louise I. 2018. Dark Commerce: How a New Illicit Economy is Threatening Our Future. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stiglitz, Joseph E. 2012. The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future. New York: W.W. Norton. Thomas, Melissa A. 2009. “What Do the Worldwide Governance Indicators Measure?” European Journal of Development Research (July). Online at http:// ssrn.com/abstract=1007527 (Viewed 13 July 2020). Thompson, Dennis F. 2018. “Theories of Institutional Corruption.” Annual Review of Political Science 21 (February), pp. 495–513. https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-polisci-120117-110316 (Viewed 13 July 2019). Torsello, Davide, and Bertrand Venard. 2016. “The Anthropology of Corruption.” Journal of Management Inquiry 25:1 (April), pp. 34–54. Transparency International. 2012. “NIS Assessment Toolkit.” Online at https:// www.transparency.org/files/content/nis/NIS_AssessmentToolkit_EN.pdf (Viewed 13 July 2020). Transparency International. 2018. “What is Corruption?” Online at https:// www.transparency.org/what-is-corruption (Viewed 13 July 2020). Transparency International. 2019. “Corruption Perceptions Index 2018: Short Methodology Note.” https://www.transparency.org/cpi2018 (Viewed August 28, 2019). Warren, Mark E. 2004. “What Does Corruption Mean in a Democracy?” American Journal of Political Science 48:2 (April), pp. 328–343. Waterbury, John. 1973. “Endemic and Planned Corruption in a Monarchical Regime.” World Politics 25:4 (July), pp. 533–555. Wraith, Ronald, and Edgar Simpkins. 1963. Corruption in Developing Countries. London: George Allen and Unwin.

4 MISREADING THE CORRUPTION CURE Interventions as silver bullets

I Monocausal theories of change A recent book on corruption published by a major university press, after surveying a number of historical cases and contemporary policies, concludes with a short chapter on the question of “what works.” The chapter contains a series of points describing a sequence of actions contributing to an effective reform program, beginning with installing a “transformative” leader. In the final point that leader brings the nation into conformity with international agreements. In between, the interventions – public finance reforms and transparency provisions, anti-corruption agencies (ACAs), and more – accurately sum up mainstream anticorruption wisdom. In this and the next chapter, we suggest that that wisdom is symptomatic of two broad problems with the mainstream anti-corruption consensus. Both problems center on what may be called a faulty “theory of change.” Chapter Five – the next chapter – explores the lack of political and historical groundedness – a failure to develop an appropriate theory of the real processes driving, or obstructing, change on the ground. The focus here in Chapter Four is on a different problem: one ­arising when individual interventions are presented without reference to the broader policies and institutions necessary for them to succeed. This “monocausality” problem fosters a linear theory of change

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presumed to flow from our interventions of the moment, one downplaying the complementary institutions and policies reform interventions need in order to work as intended.The result is that interventions end up being portrayed as “silver bullets” expected to lead directly to desired changes, regardless of the complexities of the places or times in question. To explore that problem, this chapter addresses three of the major reform strategies sketched out in Chapter Two for corruption control that the literature has developed to date – law enforcement, liberalization, and transparency. We begin with some basic issues involved in building theories of change.

Understanding social and political change All policy reforms are predicated, explicitly or implicitly, on a “theory of change.” The term, derived from the policy evaluation literature, refers to the set of assumptions linking the resources on which the policy draws, the immediate results the policy has in the world, and its long-term impacts on alleviating the underlying problem. A policy’s theory of change is basically a prediction: if we pull lever X, this will set off some chain of causation that eventually brings about a specific change in Y.1 A sophisticated theory of change will not only lay out the sequence linking the “inputs” or “resources” a policy draws on to its “outputs” and ultimately “impacts” on the ground. It will also develop a nuanced narrative about how this process plays out in the specific environment in question. In fact, what may separate strong from weak theories of change is a full account of how the political, social, economic, and bureaucratic environments in which a policy is implemented are expected to affect policy success or failure. In one formulation (Pawson and Tilley, 1997), this is summarized schematically as: Context ⇓ Intervention → Outcome Anticorruption reforms formulated as “silver bullets” have theories of change that are too simplistic, “monocausal” in their assumptions about lever X causing outcome Y, and unmediated by salient elements of the context – most important of which is the contention and political wrangling borne of human agency that always complicate the best

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laid plans of reformers. (The enduring popularity of “political will” arguments stems in large part because they seem to offer us a way to skip over such difficult intermediate steps and connections.) Silver bullet reforms fail to address two key questions. First, what critical assumptions are being made about the impact on policy success of other institutions in the environment, and of political and social contention? Second (and related), what level of control over that environment, including the implementation chain, is assumed? We believe that many anticorruption reform approaches have a tendency toward unrealistic, monocausal, apolitical theories of change with the result that desired outcomes are undermined by knotty – but quite predictable – elements in the environment that cannot be properly understood, much less overcome, within the logic of the reforms themselves. By focusing on specific reforms without sufficient regard to the broader environments in which they must be implemented, advocates set their chosen interventions up for failure. We make no attempt to spell out a master theory of change; indeed, properly understood the concept shows that such is impossible. There are a great many corruption situations with differing causes, dynamics, and constraints, as well as contrasting goals for reform. Instead, we emphasize the need to think in careful and theoretically sound ways about what changes we seek in specific settings, what we should (and should not) attempt to do, and how we expect our remedies to succeed. As in the earlier chapters, none of our criticisms apply to all parts of the anticorruption industry; they do, however, point toward a number of ideas, slogans, and shibboleths that allow or encourage us to misinterpret the evidence and experience we have already amassed.

II Three silver bullets, revisited To explore this possibility, we return to three of the “big six” anticorruption reform strategies identified in Chapter Two – our focus on crime and punishment; liberalization; and transparency. We select specific manifestations of these strategies, examine the theories of change on which the specific interventions are conceptually grounded, and show how they make unfounded assumptions or ignore important aspects of the societies for which they are typically intended. Our intention is to be illustrative rather than exhaustive in surveying such reforms. We do not claim that the approaches surveyed are inherently flawed or unworthy of consideration, let alone doomed to failure in all

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cases. Instead, we assert that a failure to incorporate broader contextual factors into a richer, more nuanced “theory of change” is bound to lead to disappointment in specific reform environments. For each reform approach, we examine the core logic before examining flaws in the underlying reasoning, including the implications of monocausal thinking.

Crime and punishment: Anti-corruption agencies The most intuitive and widely adopted policy response to corruption is, quite simply, to criminalize and punish it. As broad as this approach is, one intervention has particularly captured the attention of the anticorruption industry. That is the creation of ACAs – specialized bodies set up with the express objective of detecting, preventing (through public education and/or diagnostic work across public sector agencies), and prosecuting (either under its own authority or by referring cases to public prosecutors) corrupt activities (a useful mapping and overview of the world’s current ACAs is offered in AFA, 2020).

Origins Fascination with ACAs grew out of the much-lauded experiences of Singapore and Hong Kong. In Singapore, the key development was the adoption in 1960 of the Prevention of Corruption Act, which dramatically strengthened the powers of the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau (CPIB) established in 1952 (Quah, 2017). Based in part on careful study of the Singapore experience, Hong Kong launched its Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) in 1974. Both agencies were separated from the police forces, which had previously had primary anti-corruption responsibility, so as to act as a check on the potential for police corruption2 (Lethbridge, 1985), and both gave their officers powers to arrest suspects and deploy investigative methods such as wiretapping and monitoring bank transactions. Notwithstanding some differences in approach (the ICAC has invested much more heavily in a public information and outreach campaigns, for instance), the two agencies became renowned for the effectiveness of their sustained enforcement actions, including against senior officials in government (Rotberg, 2019). Both Singapore and Hong Kong experienced transformative and sustained changes in the predictability and integrity of basic public services, as well as periods of rapid and sustained economic growth

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(Lee and Haque, 2006), beginning not long after the establishment of these ACAs. In both cases, a number of strategies contributed to the transformation, including an early focus on reducing opportunities and incentives underlying corrupt practices, the selection and training of public officials, and on civil service reforms to improve pay and performance measurement (Manion, 2004). But because of the highly visible nature of the prosecutions and (especially in the case of the ICAC) public education campaigns they led, these ACAs became emblematic of the anti-corruption effort. By the 1990s and the wave of anti-corruption initiatives they brought, many countries and international donor agencies had concluded that ACAs were an essential tool in the playbook – that putting an ACA in place would in practice lead to all sorts of good things. A whole cottage industry of publications and technical manuals on ACAs followed (UNDP, 2011). Clearly, against the backdrop of anticorruption’s rapid rise in international public opinion, governments also found they had much to gain by being on the right side of history. ACAs were seen as relatively easy to set up and an effective way to signal their (ostensible or real) commitment to decisive initiatives (de Sousa, 2010). The political branding associated with an ACA – an easy, visible, “feel-good” initiative, both for leaders and donors – was obvious. It was as if one could create an institution that had “political will” stamped on its forehead, with one of the ironies being that an ACA could also be a great place to staff with corrupt allies of the powerful. The result of this confluence of incentives – of both donors and governments – was a rapid diffusion of ACAs over the 1990s. As of 2020, over 50 countries have dedicated ACS – in some federal states, several – and if we add to the list various Inspectors General and internal auditing agencies in large government and international organizations we see an impressive array of institutions and officials charged with detecting, controlling, and punishing corrupt activities. That period of initial expansion was capped off by a strong emphasis on ACAs in United Nations Convention Against Corruption – particularly in articles 6 and 363 – adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2003 and signed by 186 parties as of 2018.

Interventional logic – and its flaws “Who, then, guards the guardians?” This famous phrase, originally appearing in the Roman poet Juvenal’s Satires, lays out the fundamental rationale for an ACA. If law enforcement and the judicial apparatus are

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easily corrupted – as is so obviously the case in countries affected by different types of systemic corruption – then the answer just might be, the ACA guards (or indeed replaces) the guardians. The fundamental formula – the theory of change – represented by ACAs is thus fairly simply to outline. Societies plagued by corruption in the judiciary and police would establish an “island of integrity” and effective law enforcement that would allow anti-corruption reforms and enforcement to get off the ground, without the arduous, seemingly impossible task of cleaning up the primary “guardians.” The key is to establish an end to the culture and reality of impunity – thus fundamentally affecting the cost-benefit calculations so vital to the incentives-based “economist’s approach to the problem of corruption” (Bardhan, 2006). Having established this beachhead based on law enforcement, the theory of change can extend to building public confidence, enlisting citizens in the process of reporting abuses, and promoting changes in social values that can further support preventive measures (Klitgaard, Maclean-Abaroa, and Parris, 2000). On its face the idea of unifying and definitively delegating anticorruption powers and duties in a powerful independent organization – one, critically, that is distinct from routine law-enforcement bodies such as the police – has great appeal. And, despite their nearly unique situations, Singapore’s CPIB and Hong Kong’s ICAC, together with their home societies’ rapid development in recent decades, seem to provide compelling examples (Quah, 2010, 2015, 2016, 2018). But the ACA strategy poses major challenges too, quite apart from the often-exaggerated hopes its advocates have invested in their institutional creations (Batory, 2012; Doig and Norris, 2012; Gault, Hernández Galicia, and Lepore, 2015; Gregory, 2015; Krambia-Kapardis, 2019). Specifically, a sustainably effective ACA requires four basic preconditions.The first is that the ACA must have, at least theoretically, powers – a combination of the mandate, investigative powers, and resources – sufficient in theory to enable it to effect change over time. ACAs set up primarily for symbolic or signaling purposes are unlikely to enjoy such powers, be they de jure or de facto. This does not imply that one ACA design fits all; indeed, several different patterns in ACA design have been identified, with some focusing by design on prevention and public outreach, and others oriented solely toward enforcement (a useful survey appears in Stušek and Klemenčič, 2013). Most combine several functions. But there are clearly some threshold levels of legal authority

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and resources without which there can be no realistic hope of effecting significant systemic change through the intervention. The second precondition is perhaps the most basic and most difficult: in a systemically corrupt setting, it is essential to achieve the “island of integrity” status that would allow any ACA a fighting chance of effectiveness. The internal capacity requirements for this are formidable yet dwarfed by the challenge of achieving operational independence from political interference. Moreover, the ACA would need to maintain a threshold level of effectiveness long enough to get something meaningful accomplished – to earn a measure of credibility (particularly where prior reform efforts have failed), and to effectively change incentives and counter a culture of impunity on the ground. There is a wellestablished literature noting and attempting to explain the existence of “pockets of effectiveness” (Roll, 2014), or of “divergent cultures” of high agency achievement in otherwise systemically underperforming contexts (Grindle, 2007a).Yet it is arguable that for ACAs the challenge is steeper than for most agencies, since they face Machiavelli’s “perilous” challenge of “taking the lead in the introduction of a new order of things,” a dilemma in which the innovator has die-hard opponents who all benefit from the status quo (Bass and Avolio, 1993). Reports from the ever-growing case study literature – from the Philippines (Quah, 2018), Kenya (Ishikawa, 2019), and Mexico (Fonseca, 2019), just to name a few recent examples – are strewn with examples in which the lack of political room for maneuver condemned an ACA to failure. The third condition is that ACAs need to be systematic enough in their approach – and sufficiently integrated with other parts of the criminal justice system – to make a dent in the risk-reward calculus faced by key actors in a given sector or site of corruption. That task is fraught with uncertainty for any risk-reward calculation is shot through with unknowns, risks, uncertainties, and subjective perceptions – to the extent that officials and their clients consciously engage in such thinking at all. Those sorts of uncertainty often enable corruption to begin with. ACAs are themselves often understaffed and overloaded with cases. Even where they overcome internal weaknesses, ACA effectiveness has often been subject to a “weakest link in the criminal justice chain” type of vulnerability, in which parallel institutions such as the courts, if anti-corruption courts are not independently established alongside the ACA, or prosecutorial authorities may

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be thoroughly corrupted. In such cases, however impressive the ACA “island of integrity” may be, it has no realistic chance of having an independent effect. Similar problems arise when the ACA depends on the police force for its investigations. The fourth pre-condition is that ACAs will eventually (if not initially) need to reach sufficient scale to adequately address the most debilitating types of corruption facing the society.There is considerable debate over whether ACAs should attack “the worst, first,” or begin by picking relatively low-hanging fruit, with the idea of building credibility and a reputation for effectiveness.Yet after some initial period, it would be implausible to exclude entire sectors, levels of government or important types of corruption from the equation and still claim success. In practice, it has proven difficult to achieve scale due to resource limitations and the ACAs’ limited geographical reach, particularly in large countries. In many cases, entire types of corruption are effectively offlimits for an agency to investigate, whether due to formal restrictions on the scope of the ACA or to informal “out-of-bounds markers.” Consider, for instance, military-related corruption in Indonesia, which was explicitly excluded from the purview of its otherwise lauded ACA, or the categorical inability to pursue corruption investigations of the top political executive in a country, as is almost certainly the case in China. Often the creation of an ACA involves a kind of tunnel vision in which the agency is envisioned exclusively – or nearly so – in terms of better-coordinated, more tightly-focused law enforcement, ignoring the fact that successful ACAs, such as that in Hong Kong, do much else. Thus a final, and challenging, precondition for ACAs to function effectively is that they must work in combination with more preventive, structural approaches, such as civil service or public procurement reforms, and with efforts to shift public norms, to ensure their longer-term sustainability. Perhaps because of the inherent complexity involved in developing truly comprehensive ACAs – public education and outreach requires fairly large staffing levels, and reworking bureaucratic rules and procedures can be unglamorous, technical work behind the scenes – these strategic capacities have generally been underdeveloped (Fritzen and Basu, 2011). The challenge is that this is a different set of capacities than most ACAs typically develop, and there may be no broader civil service or structural reforms in the offing with which such incipient functions of the ACA can engage. And in countries where safe spaces to engage in anti-corruption activism or discourse

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do not exist, it is unlikely that an ACA can shift bureaucratic practices, let alone public norms.

Results and consequences It is at this point in our story that reviews begin to diverge. Advocates of the ACA approach bring in a several narratives of success, including the early innovators – Singapore and Hong Kong. Also mentioned are a few societies that created active ACAs in recent decades, such as South Korea and New South Wales. The latter is well known for taking a more systematic approach as a provider of technical assistance for preventive bureaucratic reforms. Finally, advocates can point to a few promising but still emerging examples from developing or transitional countries, such as Indonesia’s Corruption Eradication Commission (Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi or KPK in the Bahasa acronym). Over its initial five years, the KPK racked up considerable success going after high-level corruption from across the political spectrum – including over one hundred senior officials, and without losing a single case brought before its anti-corruption court (or on appeal) – and survived some efforts by the political establishment to defang its powers (Bolongaita, 2010: 9; Suwana, 2019). The story has never been one of complete success, however. The KPK has failed to extend its influence systematically to the local level where, arguably, most governing now takes place in Indonesia (Umam et al., 2020). Nor has the KPK been immune from political “near death” experiences (Suwana, 2019) and from legislative attempts – including passage of a law in 2019 that prompted widespread protests – to reduce its statutory independence (Buehler, 2019). Other examples from developing countries are decidedly more nascent, and it is unclear what their staying power or longer-term impact might be. Indeed, a number of cases, beginning with Singapore after its ejection from the Malaya Federation; Rwanda in the aftermath of the genocide; Georgia after the 2003 Rose Revolution, and Indonesia after the collapse of the Suharto regime – suggest that an ACA or other kind of anti-corruption initiative may have a better chance of effectiveness if it is preceded by a severe systemic crisis calling the survival of the society into question. In almost all other places, the assessment is that few ACAs have managed to thrive. MungiuPippidi et al. (2011) examined cross-sectional data on over a hundred countries with ACAs, using various measures of corruption, and found

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little or no evidence of any effect or benefit. Depressing though this reading is, it is perhaps the more useful for reformers if it encourages reformers to directly address the interventional logic of ACAs within their social and political contexts, rather than assuming they will prove transformative. What, then, are the impacts of monocausal thinking in this area on theorizing and combatting corruption? A reliance on ACAs as a panacea for – or as practically synonymous with – corruption control can lead to wasted opportunities and resources, the dissipation of public confidence, and increased cynicism. Clearly a more nuanced understanding of the possibilities inherent in ACAs in particular settings is required. This is true most obviously in the case of ACAs that are fatally flawed from the beginning, fueling the cynicism of public and experts alike. But even where political circumstances create a gap between the public’s expectations of rapid progress and the system’s inability to transform itself quickly, the result may be discontent and even political instability; Indonesia is a pertinent example. Another example might be India, where a whole social movement, calling itself “India Against Corruption,” coalesced around demands for what is effectively a stronger ACA (lokpal). Much of the energy behind this initially promising strategy dissipated once adoption of the strong form of the lokpal advocated by its leaders proved impossible to pull off politically (Sengupta, 2014). Another result of approaching ACAs as a panacea may be to misjudge where we should look for signs of success. It is important to see the potential effectiveness of ACAs in a broad, systemic perspective. In many ways, the metrics of ACA success (prosecutions, convictions secured, etc.) are ambiguous; does a small number of cases mean that corruption is being eradicated, or that the agency is dysfunctional? Do many and frequent prosecutions indicate an effective watchdog or an agency full of partisan hacks? Such metrics fail to give a sense of the trajectories of institutionalization, or of sustained political change, that could point to real progress. Finally, monocausal thinking can lead to a failure to view anticorruption strategies in their broader governance context. An important example of this may be China.The Chinese state has impressive capacities to project its power into many areas of society – what Mann (1984) refers to as “infrastructural power” — but is resting an anti-corruption strategy targeting both “tigers and flies” on the notion that one hand of the Communist Party can and will police the other, all in a context of

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increasing political centralization under Xi Jinping. Such a campaign might effectively target specific practices such as wasteful spending on banquets, but it is definitionally impossible that it could address corruption understood as the abuse of centralized, unaccountable power. In summary,ACAs, while emblematic of a law enforcement approach to corruption control, may require the state to do something that it is fundamentally incapable of doing: restraining itself. Particularly where corruption is already entrenched, this may go a long way to explaining the poor performance to date. ACAs also pose critical questions about the primacy, and sufficiency, of law enforcement strategies themselves.

Liberalization: Privatization and decentralization As another example of interventions prone to monocausal thinking, consider the broad category of liberalization reforms, a grouping that includes deregulation, privatization, reduced government presence in the economy, and generally aims to reduce the leverage held by venal officials and/or the range of discretion that might be exploited by officials and clients alike. We focus here on two distinct but related strategies under this general umbrella – privatization and decentralization. The theme that unites them is the attempt to reduce the power of an overbearing state, or of individual and small groups of officials, to engage in corrupt acts. Privatization seeks to shrink the state’s size and involvement in the economy; decentralization is intended to move authority and resources to lower levels of government where they might in theory be better monitored by the people.

Origins For both approaches the impetus goes far beyond corruption control to broader ideologies of governance. Privatization reflects the basic belief that assets under public sector control are, due to deficiencies in the incentives faced by actors, likely to be utilized inefficiently, and will create anti-competitive tendencies harming the entire economy. Public enterprises, it is argued, create opportunities for corruption as they are subject to political and bureaucratic influences, as opposed to market discipline. In that context of limited accountability, privatization advocates fear that officials and agencies, all else being equal, will tend to expand their powers and budgets without regard to results or to accountability. Pushed to its extreme, this outlook holds that moving

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assets out of the public sector into virtually any private actor’s hands would perforce be better than keeping them public. It was not always so argued, to be sure. The aftermath of World War II saw the emergence of an impressive degree of faith in variations on the intersection of centralization and state influence, if not necessarily outright control, over the economy. Beginning in 1970s, however, a wave of privatizations gathered force in different parts of the world, due in part to economic stagnation and inflation, the perceived underperformance of centrally planned economies, a debt crisis stimulated in part by tight oil supplies and rising prices, and increasingly aggressive advocacy by business-oriented interest groups. A powerful alliance of ideologues, western governments, and global aid and financial institutions embarked on aggressive “structural adjustment” reforms in the developing world, with privatization as a key element. Support for privatization was translated into tangible action; in the 1990s alone, privatization proceeds amounted to nearly one trillion US dollars (OECD, 2003: 7). Decentralization reforms gained significant support at around the same time. Decentralization has always been motivated by a somewhat broader range of factors than was the case for privatization. The first, hand-in-glove with privatization, advocates pushed decentralization as a response to the inefficiencies of what they saw as an overly large, inefficient, and corruption-prone public sector. “Bloat” has always been in the eye of the beholder, but from a liberalization perspective, it leads to corruption in several ways: overblown agencies might well be slow to function, increasing the incentives for “speed money”; they might be accountability-impaired; or they might offer abundant niches in which to hide corrupt schemes and connections. Other decentralization advocates highlighted the need for community participation and the democratization of development. The notion was that government could be brought “closer to the people” and made subject to community-level control – or at least meaningful popular participation in decision-making (Fritzen 2007; Grindle, 2007b; Hart, 1972). A third decentralization argument, positioned in a sense in between the “state shrinking” and “democracy” camps, has been that specific decentralization reforms can enhance sector outcomes. “[T]he key question,” asserted a World Bank publication, “is no longer whether to decentralize. It is how best to design intergovernmental structures and manage the implementation process to achieve optimum results”

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(White and Smoke, 2005: 1). Indeed, by the turn of the millennium, Manor (1999: vii) suggested that “nearly all” countries were “experimenting” with decentralization, although practice on the ground (as opposed to policy rhetoric) has always varied substantially.

Interventional logic and its application: Privatization At the core of the logic of liberalization lies a dark view of state power and authority in its real-world applications, accompanied by a view of market discipline whose optimism is open to debate. The more centralized the power of the state and its actors, the argument runs, and the less subject to effective forms of accountability, the greater will be the inherent danger of corruption and abuses of power. This is captured in the well-known C=M+D–A formula for thinking about corruption risks proposed by Robert Klitgaard (1988), suggesting that the greater the degree of monopoly power and discretion vested in a public official – in the absence of effective accountability arrangements – the greater the corruption risks will tend to be. For privatization the logic is straightforward: direct monopoly power by the state will be eliminated as state-owned enterprises or functions are moved into the private sector. Discretion – for example, which of the many objectives that I am asked, as a manager of an SOE, to pursue, will I actually pursue, or which company should be awarded a contract subject to price and qualitative criteria? – will be subject to the accountability check of market discipline. This view is particularly appealing to the extent that proponents approach corruption definitionally as the abuse of public office; remove the public office element, and the potential for corruption recedes from view (though other problems may admittedly remain). But what problems might we encounter with those scenarios, and what might be their consequences? For privatization as a reform, the essential problem has been the assumption that the state will be willing and able to implement that process – which, among other things, can involve shifting major public assets into the hands of small numbers of private beneficiaries. Nelson’s “orthodox paradox” (Nelson, 1993) shows that it takes strong state capacities to successfully privatize (see also Rothstein, 2011). Indeed, in light of privatizers’ complaints about bloated and inefficient public institutions, we might suggest that it is precisely in those places in which the rationale for privatization is strongest that we are least likely to encounter the state capacities

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needed for successful privatization. Liberal reforms such as privatization are silver bullet propositions to the extent that they exclude from their “theory of change” serious consideration of the wider context – the need for essential institutions, administrative functions, and wellregulated private entities. Privatization may promise that great things will flow from cutting back the state, but it needs sound property rights, well-regulated banking institutions and stock markets, and strong judicial institutions for settling disputes and enforcing contracts if it is to succeed. Without such critical support, privatization can descend into a disorderly property grab by powerful private figures. Moreover, the alleged anti-corruption powers of privatization are often justified in terms of an oversimplified view of the problem. Not all corruption problems reduce to demands by venal officials that parties pay bribes; instead, collusion may be the order of the day, and once-official partners in such schemes might just move into the private sector, or continue to operate in both. Still others can be made worse by privatization as the corrupt winners of the process continue to exploit their resources and connections to subvert their competitors via dealings that have become even further removed from public scrutiny. Without strong state policy-making and regulatory capacities, it is doubtful that the basic workings of the marketplace can effectively discipline privatized actors. That is also the core assumption at the heart of the “embedded autonomy” argument analyzing how successful East Asian economies such as South Korea and Taiwan industrialized: organs of state power were mobilized in support of, yet sufficiently arms-length from, both public and private enterprises that fostered innovation (Evans, 1995). That would prove to be a delicate balance, however, as what one might call strategic regulatory distance, whether of the privatization or embedded autonomy variety, was difficult to maintain in practice. Where embedded autonomy or regulatory distance fail, we see either of two contrasting, yet equally damaging, outcomes: state capture, in which private interests effectively dominate public policy decision-making and resource allocation (Hellman, Jones, and Kaufmann, 2003) or patrimonialism, in which there are no effective limits to what powerful leaders control and “own” in a country (see Rothstein and Varraich, 2017; on patrimonialism as a concept see Pitcher, Moran, and Johnston, 2009). Indeed, in an alarming number of countries, the unfolding story of the 1990s – which in many ways marked the height of privatization as an ideology and practice – was

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of the wholesale capture by private or corrupt public interests of the privatization process itself, belying the hopes for a reformed political economy overseen by a streamlined, strategic public sector. Russia (Goldman, 2003) and Argentina (Guillan Montero, 2011; Manzetti, 2009) serve as useful examples. In Russia and other CIS states, rapid privatization unfolded in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and with the support of a slew of Western advisers and institutions. The process was anything but smooth. To some extent, Soviet-era patronage had been “kept in check by party discipline, anti-bribery laws, and the rigidity of the overall system,” but in the new conditions, the Soviet managerial class and emerging oligarchs were perfectly positioned to manipulate both process and result to secure fabulous resources (Kaufmann and Siegelbaum, 1997: 423).The emerging economic elites colluded with political elites in a self-reinforcing circle: “as state assets were transferred below their actual value, oligarchs in return financed the political campaign of the Kremlin” (Reinsberg et al., 2020: 4). As Michael McFaul (later United States Ambassador to Russia in the Obama administration) summarized as early as 1995, “the particular set of institutions constituting the Russian state was not capable of realizing the originally defined objectives of privatization” (McFaul and Perlmutter, 1995: 210). Argentina was another aggressive privatizer in the 1990s, in ways that have both strongly shaped and reflected its development path and governance arrangements. Between 1990 and 1994, the country had privatized over 110 enterprises, with the resulting revenue windfall to the public sector accounting for fully 26% of worldwide proceeds from privatization (Estache and Trujillo, 2008: 136–7). Yet the privatization process took place within the context of poor transparency, unchecked power in the executive, entrenched political networks revolving around state governors, and a weak legal framework, factors that “opened windows of opportunities for corrupt behavior and collusive practices involving high ranking government officials and private corporations” (Saba and Manzetti, 1996: 353). Few if any observers claim that Argentine privatization checked corruption; indeed, thanks to weak institutions incapable of restraining elite collusion, corruption continued apace early in the 21st century when a new government sought to re-establish the economic role of the state. In short, the “silver bullet” of privatization can in many cases enable the private capture of state assets and/or the hijacking of public missions (one thinks of other non-market-based areas of privatization such

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as applied to prisons, the military, education, the organization of the financial sector or campaign financing; see Satz, 2013) in ways that feed into new and different kinds of inefficiency and corruption that it was supposedly designed to resolve. In the process, as in Russia and Argentina, the strategy often ignores power structures, and state and regulatory capture possibilities. An underlying question may thus be, when – and under what circumstances – can we trust the private sector to protect and advance public interests? To answer this question would mean to delineate and test levels of openness, state capacity (a concept more readily assessed by the consequences of its absence, rather than by any clear-cut measures of its scope and functions) and market discipline, rather than assuming such pre-conditions exist and benefits will naturally occur.

Interventional logic and its application: Decentralization For decentralization reforms, the anti-corruption logic is similar; in fact, some categorizations of decentralization include privatization as a form of “market decentralization” (Turner, Hulme, and McCourt, 2015: 211). Strengthening the powers and resources available to lower levels of government can, in theory, inhibit corruption in three ways. First, it fragments the power of the central state (World Bank, 2000) and, presumably, removes some activities and transactions from its jurisdiction. Second, it lowers the transaction costs for citizens to monitor how local leaders execute their powers, particularly in the case of democratic decentralization (Manor, 1999). To “bring the state closer to the people” through decentralization (World Bank, 1997) is presumed to subject local authorities to more direct accountability to the public (as opposed to administrative oversight), whether through political decentralization in creating elected local governments, or through client feedback and accountability (e.g., to the users of services whose fees account for a greater share of revenue). Third – if all else fails – decentralization allows in theory for greater comparability of local government performance, with the implication that dissatisfied residents and firms in one locality may exercise an exit option (Hirschman, 1980) of moving to a different, and better governed, locality.4 In this way, the promise of decentralization in combating corrupt practices rests on its purported ability to dilute monopoly power and improve accountability, both key elements of Klitgaard’s C=M+D-A

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equation. One problem, however, is that powerful upper-level monopolies may merely be divided into a series of uncoordinated local monopolies (on monopolies and corruption see Benson and Baden, 1985), making the disruptive effects of corruption worse. Moreover, decentralization faces an even starker “orthodox paradox” test than does privatization. Local capacities to effectively employ decentralized institutions – be they primarily bureaucratic, social, or political in nature – vary dramatically, particularly in large, heterogenous countries; and as in the case of privatization, they are likely to be weakest in exactly those localities that are in greatest need of them. Finally, the capacity of higher political or administrative levels to support and to monitor the performance of subnational levels is often greater in theory than practice. The example of Indonesia can help illustrate this pitfall and is resonant with the case of ACA intervention from earlier in this chapter. There are few comparisons in Southeast Asia for Indonesia’s giddy decentralization experience over the past twenty years. No place has experienced the combination of comprehensive devolution and democratization, both carried out, as it were, at the stroke of a legislative pen. Indonesia during its “New Order” period (1966–1998) was highly centralized, leaving the country completely unprepared for the burst of rapid institutional and political change that followed the resignation of Suharto under “People Power”-style pressure in 1998. A tumultuous transition to multiparty democracy followed, while sporadic inter-religious violence coupled with breakaway movements in Aceh, Papua (formerly Irian Jaya), and (more violently) in East Timor. Declining FDI and endemic corruption added to the upheavals during the first decade of decentralization. Decentralization in Indonesia in the 2000s was indeed a big-bang process, encompassing political, administrative, and fiscal aspects. Along with simultaneous provisions for elections at every level of government under the democratization law, Law 22 (passed in 1999) transferred all governmental functions to local governments except specified ones reserved for the central level (such as national defense). Along with these responsibilities, local governments were granted important fiscal powers and responsibilities. Decentralization legislation was rushed through the legislature in the first year following the collapse of a highly authoritarian system. This reflected a simple political calculus centered on pent-up resentments in the regions and the distrust of the former opposition parties regarding centralized authority. The drafting

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of decentralization legislation has been characterized by many analysts as hasty, inconsistent, radical, generally non-transparent (produced largely by a team in the Home Affairs ministry), and driven largely by internal Indonesian drafters rather than by demands imposed from the outside. As a result, decentralization suffered from many gaps and omissions that continue to dominate debate on administrative and political reform to this day (Blunt, Turner, and Lindroth, 2012). Decentralization has affected the pattern of corruption in Indonesia several ways. In the aftermath the fall of the authoritarian and highly centralized Suharto regime, local elites reconstituted themselves as gatekeepers for the massively devolved resources that Indonesian district (kabupaten) governments now enjoyed (Fritzen, 2007), creating new opportunities for reconstituted elements of the old oligarchic elite that have persisted into third decade (Robison and Hidayaturrahman et al., 2020; Mietzner, 2020; Hadiz, 2017). Indonesia’s democratic transition, in turn, has been anything but linear, and recently has seen “a new phase of deepening illiberalism” driven by “the further mainstreaming of conservative Islamic morality and reactionary hyper-nationalism in Indonesian political discourse and practice” (Hadiz, 2017: 261). The persistence of “money politics,” widespread political violence, intimidation of the media, rampant corruption—these all reflect a huge gap separating the realities of post-New Order Indonesia from the theories of governance that inspired decentralization as a pivotal reform there. Moreover, central regulatory capacity and minimum standards of service delivery across critical areas such as birth registration and environmental protection have not kept pace with the decentralization process itself.This is evident across a range of sectors, including forestry and mining (Ribot, Agrawal, and Larson, 2006), in which an uneven mix of pro forma decentralized responsibilities co-exists with a pronounced capture of regulatory capacity. The landscape is hardly completely bleak. One can chart a range of local governance innovations interacting with different phases of decentralization reforms, including in primary health care (Leisher and Nachuk, 2006; Miharti, Holzhacker, and Wittek, 2016); judicial independence (Crouch, 2019; Rinaldi, Purnomo, and Damayanti, 2007); and some evidence of declining regional disparities (Talitha et al., 2019). But the purported gains of decentralization, its unanticipated consequences, and the messy politics underlying the process hardly fit in with the standard “theory of change” offered by decentralization advocates.

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III Fewer assumptions, better questions A misplaced emphasis on “silver bullet” interventions such as ACAs and liberalization reforms (among others) can easily lead to two key consequences. We might describe both sets of consequences as forms of  “corruption displacement.” In one form, corruption can migrate to new and potentially more pernicious forms – forms that then go unaddressed or misdiagnosed. In the case of privatization, for example, we see continued abuses, but now buried in a private sector that is likely to be even less accountable and responsive than the status quo ante in the public sector. For decentralization, local corruption in a fragmented governance landscape may be even less transparent or subject to policy intervention than it was at higher levels of the governance system. In the other variation of displacement, a polarized and ideological debate driving liberalization reforms makes reform success dependent on elaborate, and often ungrounded, assumptions, while diverting attention from questions we should be asking. Rather than assuming that an ACA will serve as the “island of integrity” that bends a corrupt system to its will, we should be focusing on the intersection of the broader criminal justice system, bureaucratic reforms and social norms, and political demands that have a fighting chance of creating “virtuous circles of anti-corruption” (Mungiu-Pippidi and Johnston, 2017). Rather than seeing decentralization as a one-way street, and assuming it is “here to stay,” with the only remaining question being “how to achieve optimum results” (White and Smoke, 2005: 1), we might better assume the balance between center and periphery is constantly shifting, in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. The gap looms large between reform rhetoric and ideology, on the one hand, and results on the ground. In that setting, trusting “silver bullets” makes it difficult to take a nuanced approach to the most critical question of all: what works where, when, how, and why? Can we assess the reform effects of privatization and decentralization, for example, with any confidence that we are not confounding them with other effects? How far should those reforms be taken, and how strong a dose of this medicine (with short- and longer-term risks) would be too much? When we build theories of change around “silver bullet” interventions, questions such as these fall by the wayside, impeding our ability to put forward context-sensitive advice to those seeking to change complex systems.

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Achieving better theories of change for particular interventions requires better theories about change – about the complex social and political dynamics that might enable any intervention to take root and succeed over time. That is the subject of the next chapter, to which we now turn.

Notes 1 Accessible overviews of the “theory of change” concept can be found in Sullivan and Stewart, 2006; Gugerty and Karlan, 2018; and W.K. Kellogg Foundation, 2004. Theories of change are distinct “logic models,” which specify more proximate, linear pathways between interventional inputs and outputs, effects, and impacts. Theories of change typically incorporate a broader set of processes that underlie expected outcomes. In Chapters Four and Five, in effect, we argue that the mainstream literature tends to adopt narrow logic models that fail to add up to coherent theories of change. For a quite useful discussion see Brown (2016). 2 In Hong Kong that separation was made all the more essential by the events that gave rise to the ICAC’s founding. In 1973 Peter Godber, Chief Superintendent of the Royal Hong Kong Police, was under investigation for bribery and substantial unexplained accumulated wealth. He fled to England, a move that led to massive public demands in Hong Kong for better corruption control and law enforcement. The ICAC was established as a response in 1974. As a practical matter the agency had to capture Godber in order to win a measure of public credibility.When it did – returning him to Hong Kong for trial and, after his conviction, to prison – the door was opened for an effective anti-corruption and public education effort that continues today. 3 The Convention to “ensure the existence of a body or bodies or persons… that prevent corruption” (Article 6) or that are “specialized in combating corruption through law enforcement” (Article 36). 4 This notion directly appears in early formulations of the World Bank’s strategy for public sector reform in the 1990s – just as it was beginning to directly acknowledge corruption as a central problem inhibiting development – in what is referred to as a “vertical check” by subnational governments on central executive authority.

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Gregory, R. 2015. “Political Independence, Operational Impartiality, and the Effectiveness of Anti-Corruption Agencies.” Asian Education and Development Studies 4:1 (January), pp. 125–142. Grindle, Merilee S. 2007a. “‘Good Enough Governance’ Revisited.” Development Policy Review 25:5, pp. 533–574. Grindle, Merilee S. 2007b. Going Local: Decentralization, Democratization, and the Promise of Good Governance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Guillan Montero, Aranzazu. 2011. “As If: The Fiction of Executive Accountability and the Persistence of Corruption Networks in Weakly Institutionalized Presidential Systems,  Argentina (1989–2007).” Ph.D. thesis, Georgetown University, Washington, DC. Hadiz,Vedi R. 2017. “Indonesia’s Year of Democratic Setbacks: Towards a New Phase of Deepening Illiberalism?” Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, 53:3, pp. 261–278. Hart, David K. 1972. “Theories of Government Related to Decentralization and Citizen Participation.” Public Administration Review 32 (October), pp. 603–621. Hellman, Joel S., Geraint Jones, and Daniel Kaufmann. 2003. “Seize the State, Seize the Day: State Capture and Influence in Transition Economies.” Journal of Comparative Economics 31:4 (December), pp. 751–773. Hidayaturrahman, Mohammed, Bonaventura Ngarawula, and Kridawati Sadhana. 2020. “Political Investors: Political Elite Oligarchy and Mastery of Regional Resources in Indonesia.” Asian Journal of Comparative Politics. (April 19). Online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/ full/10.1177/2057891120917213 (Viewed 13 July 2020). Hirschman, Albert O. 1980. “‘Exit,Voice, and Loyalty’: Further Reflections and a Survey of Recent Contributions.” The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly: Health and Society 58:3 (Summer), pp. 430–453. Ishikawa, Yusuke. 2019. “A Critical Analysis of Why Anti-Corruption Reforms in Kenya So Often Fail.” Doctoral dissertation, University of Sussex. Kaufmann, Daniel, and Paul Siegelbaum. 1997. “Privatization and Corruption in Transition Economies.” Journal of International Affairs 50:2 (Winter), pp. 419–458. Klitgaard, Robert. 1988. Controlling Corruption. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Klitgaard, Robert, Ronald Maclean-Abaroa, and H. Lindsay Parris. 2000. Corrupt Cities: A Practical Guide to Cure and Prevention. Oakland, CA, and Washington, DC: Institute for Contemporary Studies and The World Bank. Krambia-Kapardis, Maria. 2019. “Disentangling Anti-Corruption Agencies and Accounting for Their Ineffectiveness.” Journal of Financial Crime 26:1 (January), pp. 22–35. Lee, Eliza W.Y., and M. Shamsul Haque. 2006. “The New Public Management Reform and Governance in Asian NICs: A Comparison of Hong Kong and Singapore.” Governance 19:4 (October), pp. 605–626.

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Leisher, Susannah Hopkins, and Stefan Nachuk. 2006. “Making Services Work for the Poor:A Synthesis of Nine Case Studies from Indonesia.” Government Innovators Network, Harvard University. Online at http://www.innovations.harvard.edu/cache/documents/11247.pdf (Viewed 13 July 2020). Lethbridge, H. J. 1985. Hard Graft in Hong Kong: Scandal, Corruption, and the ICAC. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Manion, Melanie. 2004. Corruption by Design: Building Clean Government in Mainland China and Hong Kong. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mann, Michael. 1984. “The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms and Results.” European Journal of Sociology 25:2 (November), pp. 185–213. Manor, James. 1999. The Political Economy of Democratic Decentralization. Washington, DC: The World Bank. Manzetti, Luigi. 2009. Neoliberalism, Accountability, and Reform Failures in Emerging Markets: Eastern Europe, Russia, Argentina, and Chile in Comparative Perspective. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. McFaul, Michael, and Tova Perlmutter. 1995. Privatization, Conversion and Enterprise Reform in Russia. Boulder, CO: Westview. Mietzner, Marcus. 2020. “Stateness and State Capacity in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia: Securing Democracy’s Survival, Entrenching its Low Quality.” pp. 179–203 in Aurel Croissant and Olli Hellmann (eds.) Stateness and Democracy in East Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miharti, Suwatin, Ronald L. Holzhacker and Rafael Wittek. 2016. “Decentralization and Primary Health Care Innovations in Indonesia.” Ch. 3, pp. 53–78 in Ronald L. Holzhacker, Rafael Wittek, and Johan Woltjer (eds.), Decentralization and Governance in Indonesia. New York: Springer. Mungiu-Pippidi, Alina, et al. 2011. Contextual Choices in Fighting Corruption: Lessons Learned. Oslo: Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD). Mungiu-Pippidi, Alina, and Michael Johnston.  2017. Transitions to Good Gov­ ernance: Creating Virtuous Circles of Anti-Corruption. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Nelson, Joan M. 1993. “The Politics of Economic Transformation: Is Third World Experience Relevant in Eastern Europe?” World Politics 45:3 (April), pp. 433–463. OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development). 2003. Privatising State-Owned Enterprises–An Overview of Policies and Practices in OECD Countries. Paris: OECD. Pawson, Ray, and Nick Tilley. 1997. Realistic Evaluation. London: Sage. Pitcher, M. Anne, Mary Moran, and Michael Johnston. 2009. “Rethinking Patrimonialism and Neopatrimonialism in Africa.” African Studies Review 52:1 (April), pp. 125–156. Quah, J. 2010.“Defying Institutional Failure: Learning from the Experiences of Anti-Corruption Agencies in Four Asian Countries.” Crime, Law and Social Change 53:1 (February), pp. 23–54.

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Suwana, Fiona. 2019. “What Motivates Digital Activism? The Case of the Save KPK Movement in Indonesia.” Information, Communication and Society, doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2018.1563205 (Viewed 13 July 2020). Talitha, Tessa, Tommy Firman, and Delik Hudalah. 2019. “Welcoming Two Decades of Decentralization in Indonesia: A Regional Development Perspective.” Territory, Politics, Governance 7 (April), pp. 1–19. Online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21622671.2019.1601595 (Viewed 13 July 2020). Turner, Mark, David Hulme, and Willie McCourt. 2015. Governance, Management and Development: Making the State Work. London: Red Globe Press. Umam, Ahmad K., Gillian Whitehouse, Brian Head, and Mohammad Adil Khan. 2020. “Addressing Corruption in Post-Soeharto Indonesia:The Role of the Corruption Eradication Commission.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 50:1 (March), pp. 125–143. UNDP (United Nations Development Program). 2011. Practitioners’ Guide: Capacity Assessment of Anti-Corruption Agencies. New York: UNDP. White, Roland, and Paul Smoke. 2005. “East Asia Decentralizes.” Ch. 1, pp. 1–24 in East Asia Decentralizes: Making Local Government Work. Washington, DC: The World Bank. World Bank. 2000. Reforming Public Institutions and Strengthening Governance: A World Bank Strategy. Washington, DC: The World Bank.

5 MISREADING THE SOURCES AND NATURE OF CHANGE Development, backwardness, and the chimera of “political will”

I Getting realistic about change Despite all our efforts to fight corruption, and despite the immense fund of experience accumulated in settings around the globe, the anticorruption movement seems committed to counterproductive assumptions and expectations. Reformers may not fully deserve Talleyrand’s famous assessment of the Bourbons after Napoleon’s abdication – that they “had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” Still, the assumption often seems to be that good ideas will elicit broad-based social support because they are aimed at widely beneficial goals; that those ideas will produce desirable change in a gradual fashion as they are added to each other in incremental fashion; and that the sequencing and mutual interaction of reforms will not cause serious problems so long as our ideas are good ones. But how likely are those outcomes in practice? After three decades of research, activism, and efforts to change policies and institutions, it remains striking not only that most country-level reform efforts have met with indifferent success, but also that mainstream anti-corruption thinking has evolved as little as it has. In Chapter 2, we examined that problem in the context of what is commonly assumed about reform, and of the sources of reform thinking and activity. Chapter 3 offered a critical look at the ways corruption itself is mis-perceived. Chapter 4 took up common reform

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interventions, and what we often expect from and misunderstand about them. In that chapter, we examined the concept of a theory of change, and how misguided theories can resemble “magical narratives” – ideas incorporating misconceptions and wishful thinking, or lacking clear connections, involving cause and effect. A magical narrative outlines, in widely varying degrees of detail, the problems we face and the results we intend to produce. But it is neither complete nor realistic. It does not spell out convincing causal connections or, at times, even show why particular changes are desirable, much less possible within the scope of a given reform strategy. It does not provide a reliable guide as to what to do, what actions to defer, and what not to do at all in various situations. Nonetheless, perhaps because they echo the conventional wisdom, and because they frequently suggest that effects of our actions will be more or less what we expect and hope they will be, such magical narratives have a way of becoming institutionalized in the reform debate, acquiring a spurious sort of authority via repetition. In this chapter we examine a core concern for any movement aiming at reform: our assumptions about how change comes about. What are the drivers of, and impediments to, systemic change? One way of thinking about corruption control is that it necessarily involves the destabilization of a corrupt system – the dislodging of an equilibrium in which actors fundamentally know how they are to behave, and in which constituent elements of the system serve to reinforce this behavior. To destabilize a corrupt system implies that such an equilibrium must be, in Klitgaard”s terminology (2000), “subverted.” But that requires prodigious energy, and – as with most complex phenomena – a process that unfolds over time and brings with it numerous risks. In this chapter we ask, what do conventional theories of corruption control have to say about where this energy comes from and what this process looks like? We look at magical narratives surrounding the sources and nature of change in turn.

II “Magical narratives” about the sources of change There are three sources from which we might derive the energy to destabilize a corrupt system: from outside the system, from the top of the system, and from the bottom. We explore each of these in this section. In doing so, we must first return to a familiar proviso. It is not our claim that looking in any of these directions is itself the problem; indeed, it is difficult to envision a change process that does not include

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energy from one – or more likely more than one – of these directions. Our focus here is on the sometimes heroic, simplistic, or exclusionary assumptions frequently made about each of these categories.

Change from the top: the hero-reformer A particularly common magical narrative revolves around “political will.” If only a society had the political will to combat corruption, we are told – if only strong leaders would come to the fore and give corruption control sustained, effective support – progress might well be made. Few would dispute the notion that reforms have a better chance of success when they enjoy strong political support and that top-level support can be particularly effective. But particularly in large and diverse societies, sustaining that support is only rarely a matter of having prominent officials make up their minds to back reform. More often it involves coalition-building, mobilizing public support, building consensus, anticipating and countering opposition (and apathy), and mobilizing a range of political interests, actors, and segments of society. That is complex political work and cannot be reduced to the sheer exercise of “will” (Fritzen, 2005). After all, how would we know whether genuine political will even exists (Brinkerhoff, 2000)? “Will” of any sort is a matter of intentions and dispositions and, as such, is fundamentally unknowable until after the fact – that is, after we see whether talk is converted into action, an outcome shaped by many factors above, beyond, and often contrary to the wishes of top officials. In a small society like Singapore, Lee Kwan Yew could be a figure of decisive importance, particularly as his reforms began to transform the local economy (Quah, 2013), but elsewhere political will might produce little: proposed reforms may be inappropriate, for example, and opponents to those reforms may exercise a strong will of their own. Indeed, in extensively corrupt societies, there is often no shortage of political will: numerous coups d”etat – looked at one way, one ultimate expression of political will – have been launched on pretexts of wiping out corruption, only to perpetuate cycles of exploitation. At other times (including in Singapore), political will garbed in the symbolism of reform has produced jail terms for leaders of opposition and civil society groups.The greater need in such cases may be countervailing political will, but that just recalls our broader points about the importance of contention, and of evening out imbalances of power.

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Even if reform can rest upon the will of an anti-corruption champion, what will keep it going after that person has left the stage? What happens if the willful should decide that self- enrichment and deals with cronies are preferable to seeking good government? Political will narratives can invite a process of blaming the victim: we gave country X the right tools and ideas, but they just did not have the will to see them through. They further assume that the institutional and political linkages through which leaders make things happen are in place, allow for basic accountability, and are in good working order. Where that is not the case – that is, in virtually any society with serious corruption problems – mighty exertions of will behind the wrong ideas, or working through faulty and compromised institutions, may do considerable harm. If the real challenge of reform is justice – addressing imbalances of power – relying on political will from the top, even if it has some anti-corruption benefits, might undermine emerging forces that could eventually check the powerful. In the end the political will that matters most may well come in the form of strong, even disruptive, demands from the bottom up, sustained by citizens’ own lasting interests.

Change from external pressure The fundamental question any reform narrative must address is, where will the energy necessary to subvert a corrupt system actually come from? That can also be seen as an alternative formulation of the classic “who, then, guards the guardians?” question.The “change from the top” narrative explored above suggests that the answer is: the leader with strong “political will” sitting astride the system will guard the guardians. In this section, we explore a different answer, one positing that pressure will be applied from outside the corrupt system itself.This pressure may come in the form of a bilateral, transnational, or multilateral actor, together with any legal standards or norms that are effectively rooted in an international order. It is worth noting that the “hero-reformer” and “international pressure” narratives are often deployed jointly, with the international community finding national “reform champions” to support strengthening the internal reform leaders (Rotberg, 2019: Ch. 11). There are five key categories of external pressures that are often posited, singly or jointly. 1. Multinational treaties and conventions. This category is itself diverse. The most obvious example is the United Nations

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Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC), signed by all but a handful of countries and billed by the United Nation Office on Drugs and Crime bills as the world’s “only legally binding universal anti-corruption instrument” (UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime), 2020). Other examples include, for some 43 countries, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Anti-Bribery Convention (Jensen et al., 2018) and, for a yet smaller grouping, the European Union Convention against Corruption Involving Officials (Skinner, 2016). 2. Multinational commitments and networks. A legally weaker form of international commitment involves countries that voluntarily join networks endorsing specific commitments or standards of conduct. Examples include the Financial Action Task Force (FATF; see Alexander, 2001), Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI; see Papyrakis et al., 2017), and the Open Government Partnership (OGP; see Fraundorfer, 2017). While these initiatives theoretically have the power to expel members, direct enforcement action almost never occurs; whatever influence the initiatives enjoy derives from their implicit ability to call out countries departing from agreed protocols – naming and shaming, so to speak. 3 . Aid donors. For developing countries, much discussion has centered on the presumed external pressure that international donors – both multilateral institutions such as the World Bank, and bilateral aid agencies – can bring to bear in pushing for the adoption of anti-corruption practices. Reforms that broadly fall into the category of promoting good governance in recipient countries, such as privatization and decentralization as mentioned in Chapter 4, have always been part of the donor agenda, at times creating significant controversy (Girod, 2018; Crawford and Kacarska, 2019). But beginning prominently with the World Bank in 1996, donors began to push explicitly for anti-corruption measures in their own aid programs and projects, and in terms of policy reform (Kolstad et al., 2008; Ferry et al., 2020). 4. National legal instruments. In a few cases – notably the 1977 United States Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and the 2010 United Kingdom Bribery Act – national legislation prohibited corrupt practices by domestic firms operating internationally. Such legislation has been seen not only as an attempt to reduce corruption, but also to promote a level playing field for all countries’ multinational corporations (Urofsky et al., 2012; Koehler, 2019).

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5. Transnational NGOs. Finally, a number of transnational NGOs – most prominently Transparency International – have established a presence in multiple countries, and an international profile sufficient to inspire hope of effectively pressuring governments to change. Typically, effort is channeled through one of three mechanisms. One is establishing strong connections to local civil society organizations, which themselves would develop locally appropriate strategies (Chalmers and Setiyono, 2012). Another is through “naming and shaming” governments by publicizing good and poor performers on various indices, such as TI’s Corruption Perception Index (Hansen 2012). A third is to provide broadly applicable advice on corruption control – a classic example being TI’s “national integrity system” approaches. These, then, are among the most commonly identified mechanisms for applying external pressure on governments to prevent or address corruption. Few would argue that such pressure is never effective; indeed, it would be impossible to imagine a coherent anti-corruption strategy in which such networks and actors play no role. Our focus instead is on the “magical narrative” elements embedded in many such efforts, and the ways they contribute to hopes for major, even transformative, benefits. Such expectations have one or more of the following characteristics in practice. First, they tend to underestimate the gap between “paper” and real commitments. There is almost always a tangible benefit for states, donors, and economic interests to be seen as being on the “right side” of the corruption issue. But when we look past the window dressing, we can see that things are clearly different when it comes to implementing those commitments. Some of the national leaders allowing commitments to international covenants or networks to proceed are themselves likely to be embedded, or even be active participants, in corrupt systems. To the extent that they are thus embedded, their incentives to ratchet up real pressure on corrupt systems are obviously negative. “Policy entrepreneurs” advocating anti-corruption initiatives within a country may succeed in obtaining formal commitments, only to find they have no traction when attempting to actually change institutional behavior. UNCAC itself is an excellent example of this tendency. Its historic scope as the first worldwide anti-corruption treaty notwithstanding, UNCAC contains many clauses that affirm and safeguard state

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sovereignty, reflecting national governments’ concern not to allow it to grow too strong (Hechler et al., 2011). Moreover, its review mechanisms have not proven to be particularly useful (Weilert, 2016). The UNCAC undoubtedly strengthens the general notion of best practices, and in doing so, reinforces the global anti-corruption industry. But it may also amplify the “silver bullet” and “magical narrative” phenomena by proposing institutions and standards in a generally context-free manner. The United States Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) points to another difficulty in applying external pressure: the problem of incentives affecting would-be enforcers. Ever since its adoption, FCPA has been plagued by domestic political arguments that it may make United States-based multinationals less competitive (a line taken most recently by the Trump administration). Due in no small part to such concerns, FCPA enforcement has been dramatically uneven under different United States administrations (Brewster, 2017). If we cannot be particularly optimistic about “paper” commitments of key actors to combat corruption, then it all falls back to external pressure. This leads us to the second characteristic of “magical narratives”: that they tend to overestimate the degree of leverage enjoyed by external actors. Leverage may be particularly overestimated when it comes to aid donors. The World Bank is a prime example of the maximum feasible leverage with respect to aid-dependent low-income countries. The Bank was lauded for leading the charge on tightening anti-corruption standards in its own projects, and for drawing attention to the dysfunctionalities of poor governance and corruption, in the mid-1990s (Marquette, 2001). But anti-corruption work within its own portfolio runs up against the hard reality that the Bank needs its borrowers as much as they need it. Incentives for program managers to focus on disbursement rates have proven difficult to change (Fritzen, 2007). Analytical work and some high-profile steps like delisting certain firms from procurement are relatively easy. But changing the culture internally within the Bank – let alone skillfully using external leverage to positive effect – has proven hard. European Union anti-corruption commitments and conditionalities in its expansion countries in Eastern Europe similarly illustrate both the potential and the limitations of external leverage. In Romania, for instance, a country-wide anti-corruption movement galvanized some change, bolstered to some degree by an at-times aggressive and independent anti-corruption agency. But as a succession of recalcitrant

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governments have dug in, and various rounds of European Union sanctions under the so-called Article 7 process have been threatened or imposed, the result to date has been an uneasy stalemate (Lacatus and Sedelmeier, 2020). The strong conditionality deriving from European Union membership goes well beyond anything the international community is likely to be able to muster in all but unusual cases; despite that, however, results have been modest. The category of the transnational membership organizations – the FATF, EITI, and the OGP – is also intriguing. National membership in these groups does not automatically equate to anti-corruption “political will,” nor is it likely that external pressure from these groups will be strong enough to change institutional practices on the ground. What is possible, as been noted by some observers (Alexander, 2001; Jensen et al., 2018), is that in combination with local actors and reform agendas such networks, articulating as they do broadly applicable standards, can shift the reform debates and, possibly, incentives of member states over time. Third, external change narratives that tend toward the “magical” fail to engage realistically with local politics, and with the turbulent and contentious nature of change. Legal commitments and formal anti-corruption policies may mean little in countries with serious governance deficiencies. Addressing corruption through standards at the international level presupposes consistency with national standards and the effective implementation that actually drives outcomes (Ferry et al., 2020). And while they engage in formal ways with countries on international commitments or on national anti-corruption policies or laws, the emphasis of interventions is typically upon international actors rather than those on the ground. Rarely do such processes engage with key country-based actors who must “own” (and take the political heat for) implementation or monitoring of said laws and regulations. Consider two further examples. Too often countries make a formal commitment to some anti-corruption standard, but the key ministries that need to be involved in implementation are only marginally on board. As a second example, consider the general failure of any of these external interventions to deal effectively with “state capture” (see Chapter 4, and Hechler et al., 2011). Where fundamental regulatory or decision-making processes are captured by private interests (as in the privatization example explored in Chapter 4), pressure from external sources is unlikely to override the reluctance or opposition of powerful local stakeholders to change institutional facts on the ground. In these examples, the center of attention is consistently upon the

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external agents, rather than upon local actors engaged in contentious local politics. What would make a difference? We devote Chapters 7 and 8 to this critical question. In essence, we propose not to jettison attempts to develop international standards or secure commitments – they can be essential elements in any comprehensive approach – but to turn away from the assumption that those steps will on their own be likely to shift anything substantial on the ground. Instead, we suggest an approach that takes local politics seriously, and that – where conditions are receptive – attempts in a patient and strategic manner to strengthen local constituencies with a stake in fair, higher-quality government and political processes.

Change from below, mark 1: Civil society and reform Reformers often seem to assume that because better government and reductions in corruption are likely to benefit virtually everyone, citizens will actively back reform as a matter of course. But that is not inevitable. In most societies, most people are likely to express support for corruption control most of the time, and yet active and sustained involvement can be difficult to launch and even harder to sustain. Fighting corruption can be disruptive, time-consuming, and at times dangerous work, and there are always people and interests that will have a stake in – or hope to benefit from – the corrupt status quo, be it in small material ways or through useful personal relationships. Particularly for poorer people, the prospect of forgoing any such current or anticipated benefits in exchange for promises of widely shared benefits in the future may seem a bad bet. Many have heard glowing anti-corruption promises before but have seen them fail, and particularly where political and social trust are weak, appeals based on the common good may be unconvincing. Too often, efforts to “get civil society involved” in fighting corruption focus on formal reform-oriented organizations, many of them donor-funded, operating in and around national capitals. Such groups usually pursue agendas shaped by international development agendas and donors’ own interests. The real strength of civil society, by contrast, often exists in informal networks and activities that may have little or nothing to do with public purposes, but that still help build leadership, cooperation, and trust, and can be put to use dealing with problems at the grassroots.

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The essentially private purposes such activities serve can nevertheless overlap in useful ways. In our possibly over-optimistic (Putnam, 2000) scenarios about civil society in the United States, for example, community residents who want to clean up a park do not usually set up a formal organization for that sole purpose. Instead, neighbors, members of churches and fraternal groups, outdoor enthusiasts, and others draw upon their networks to pool resources and get the job done. Various side benefits such as free beer and a barbecue at the end of the day add personal incentives to the mix. The post-Franco democratic transition in Spain was aided by a civil society just strong enough to help avoid the post-authoritarian disorder seen later on in places like Ceausescu’s Romania. But at the time of Franco’s death Spain had few autonomous social organizations (Torcal and Montero, 1999).What it did have were long-standing and unusually dense patterns of informal social activity in local communities (Johnston, 2009: 11) – arguably a workable substitute for formal organizations. Reformers seeking to build up civil society, particularly in post-conflict and post-authoritarian settings, might do well to encourage the formation of non-political women’s, students’, and farmers’ organizations, social clubs and music societies, labor unions and neighborhood mutual-aid schemes that serve citizens’ felt needs and wishes, and that help build trust. Few if any such groups will have dedicated anti-corruption agendas, particularly at the outset, but some might take action against related grievances; down the road, all might contribute to networks of communication and trust useful for challenging official exploitation.

Change from below, mark 2: Mass campaigns and “people power” Similar hopes and problems emerge again in connection with mass morality or redemption campaigns. Such efforts frequently launch with a big splash but prove difficult to sustain. At times they are actually exercises in political discipline, emphasizing the popularity (or fear) of a leader or demonstrating the ability of a regime to crack down on whatever, and whomever, it does not like. Rarely are they based upon any comprehensive analysis of corruption, of the nature of better government, or of factors other than punishment and citizen denunciations that might suppress wrongdoing. This is not to say that sustained high-visibility campaigns can never check corruption; anecdotal evidence such as falling demand for high-end imported consumer goods

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(Lee, 2018) suggests that the Xi government’s recent campaigns in China have gained some traction. Whether that sort of progress can be parlayed into better government in the longer term is another question, however. It is also striking that Xi”s campaign is considerably more focused on improving state and Party functions, and less dependent upon mass ideological exhortations, than China’s “Three Cleans,” “Three Antis,” and other mass-line campaigns from times past (Zhang et al., 2010). A variation on such campaigns that retains considerable popular appeal is “people power” (Beyerle, 2014), so named after the mass demonstrations in the Philippines that precipitated the ousters of Ferdinand Marcos in 1986 and Joseph Estrada in 2001. The scale of the marches was truly epic – an estimated two million people gathered along the 15-mile length of Metro Manila’s EDSA (Epiphanio de los Santos Avenue). But the strategy bears major risks; consider Tiananmen Square in 1989 in Beijing. Indeed, Filipino soldiers might well have opened fire directly into the column of anti-Marcos marchers had Lt. General (and future President) Fidel V. Ramos not intervened to head off the violence. Moreover, while people-power campaigns can visibly manifest strong sentiments, their lasting effects are open to question. Marcos fled the country, but Corazon Aquino, his successor, inherited an extremely difficult situation and was generally seen as ineffective. Despite being the embodiment of corrupt excess, Marcos’s wife Imelda eventually returned to Philippine politics; from 2010 through 2019, she was a member of the House of Representatives. Former President Estrada too returned to politics, serving as Mayor of the City of Manila after having been convicted of “plunder.” Before Rodrigo Duterte”s violent and controversial presidency (2016-), it might have been said that people-power movements enabled eventual reforms, but even given the moderately successful presidency (2010-2016) of Benigno “Noy” Aquino III, it is difficult to argue that they produced lasting progress against corruption. In the end, many civil society-based anti-corruption strategies are optimistic and driven by good intentions, yet short-lived as a result of collective action problems and finite resources. Indeed, a critic might see them in even less favorable terms: compared to contention and disruptions that have challenged the power and privileges of dominant actors and interests, many of today’s civil society initiatives might be more oriented toward containing social resentments of the misuse of power rather than mobilizing them for regime-challenging purposes.1

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Today’s reformers understandably want to be the initiators of visible change and to take credit for it, but they are also expected to protect donor resources and reputations (Johnston and Johnsøn, 2014). It is also true that we do not want to expose citizens to harm as we mobilize civil society; thus, as we emphasize in Chapter 7, before we encourage vigorous civil society action, we must help build a safe political space in which it can occur. If we are serious about justice and altering the imbalances of political power found in many societies, we must realistically reappraise the scope and pace of change that will require, along with our own roles in the contemporary political and economic order, and be prepared to play a long-term game.

III “Magical narratives” about the nature of change The previous section explored several ideas about the sources of change that might destabilize or subvert corrupt systems. These sources take on “magical narrative” qualities when they fail to realistically grapple with the contentious politics of reform and real change over time. In this section, we examine more fundamental misconceptions about the nature of change itself. We cover two extremes, one that highlights linear “policy engineered” change, and another that takes explicit policy engineering out of the picture altogether, instead viewing change in corruption outcomes as a byproduct of other institutional developments and of “modernization.”

Change as linear and engineered Just how organized, linear, and predictable is the change, the reform that we seek and expect? How coherent and unified are the actors who will pursue such systematic change? The first common misconception about change draws on images of change as directed and intentional, yet misconstrues the nature of systemic change when it unfolds in real societies. This viewpoint can be described as a kind of default orientation within the “consensus,” one that reflects the need for better theory about the nature of societal change. One surefire way of identifying the magical narrative of engineered change is when one sees a “checklist” of reforms that purportedly add up to a transformative agenda, if only they are implemented correctly. “If only” levers x, y, and z are pulled, anti-corruption reforms will succeed, serving as a post hoc demonstration that “political will” existed

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after all.This is a sufficiency argument; the reforms on the checklist are sufficient to bring about the desired change. The alternative would be to begin with the assumption that phenomena as complex as corrupt systems can be understood – and changed – only as involving complex causation in which “multiple causes interact with each other to produce effects” (Braumoeller, 2003: 2010). The attempt to assign sufficiency to any particular cause – the checklist approach – in the absence of the consideration of other environmental conditions is likely to be misleading.2 Another sign of an insufficiently developed theory about change is when analysts fail to sufficiently disaggregate actors behind corrupt systems and their reform. In short, they fall victim to the fallacy of seeing systems, or their reform, as the products of rational, unified actors, typically personified by senior leaders. Whenever one sees discussion of an anti-corruption program – “Xi Jinping’s hunt for tigers, flies and spiders,” for example (Goh, 2017) – framed largely in terms of one leader’s calculations, the narrative is likely to shortchange the underlying complexity of reform in at least two ways. First, it is likely to overestimate the singular power of the key actor to implement its intentions in practice – or at times, to have a coherent and stable preference function at all. Underneath the complexity of a single action – the European Union’s warnings to the Romanian government over its hobbling of an anti-corruption agency, for instance, as noted earlier (Paun, 2019) – lie a plethora of different entities bargaining over the action in question. Even in authoritarian settings, leaders’ political decisions usually require the backing, or acquiescence, of a number of subordinate actors and entities. The outcome is usually not just the result of a single “will” but also the outcome of bargains struck, threats made (and at times carried out), and of political coalitions or factions that must be placated and rewarded in ways that have profound implications for subsequent implementation (Allison and Zelikow, 1999). Second, the narrative is likely to overestimate the power of the actor in question and the coherence of the policy design implied. Anti-corruption schemes have an element of what James Scott has called “high modernism,” best conceived as a “strong, one might even say muscle-bound” (Scott, 1998:4) confidence in the ability of the administrative state to use its tools of comprehensive planning and the invocation of state authority to remake society in its intended image. Such high modernist pretensions are arguably most fragile

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in high-corruption settings because they lack precisely the capacity that James Madison famously argued as fundamental to good government, namely the capacity of the state to “control itself ” (Bingham and O’Leary, 2011).

Corruption control as a byproduct of modernization The next category of unproductive notions of change reduces the control of corruption to a derivative of some broader historical process, whether political, social, or economic in nature. In so doing, the category is quite different – almost diametrically so – from the “high modernist” views just explored. As such, it is not properly seen as part of the mainstream consensus view, certainly not of practitioners; after all, the implication of the modernization views is that it is either not possible or not worthwhile to steer anti-corruption reforms, since progress will only materialize once a process of modernization, driven by some other mechanism, is in place (see also Chapter 3). Despite this, these theoretical viewpoints have influenced the anti-corruption debate in a number of ways, not least of which has been to offer a ready (if reductionist) alternative explanation for the lack of progress. As such, they warrant at least brief examination here. Modernization, broadly speaking, posits that societies develop or “evolve” in some well-specified process and can be characterized on a spectrum from less to more “modern” (Bernstein, 1971). The relationship between corruption and the stresses and contradictions of modernization has been explored by researchers going back to at least Samuel Huntington’s well-known essay on the topic (Huntington, 2002 ed.). Corruption in pre-modern societies, by contrast, could be treated as a non-issue because the societies in question are idealized (Theobald, 1989), a notion with deep ideological roots in Rousseau’s conception of the “noble savage” (Cro, 1990). More worrisome, however, is any view holding that pre-modern societies are substantively “corrupt” without being awareness of that fact, because the value and normative judgments on which the recognition rests are in some sense undeveloped. Huntington (1968), by contrast, argued that modernization itself may lead to an awareness of the disjunction between private and public interests and roles, and hence to an outcry over corruption. Huntington held that modernization may also, in its intense early phase driven by rapid industrialization, stimulate certain forms of corruption itself by facilitating the expansion of

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state authority and generating new forms of wealth and inequality. In this view, while awareness of corruption may increase during that period of early modernization that is ultimately a good thing, as it is a sign that a society is on its way to making it to the other side of the modernization divide where there is “less” corruption overall. Modernization theory has offered a broad tent for different notions of what forces propel the “evolution” of societies. The theory in its early iterations was driven by sociologists, who stressed value changes and professional roles (Bernstein, 1971); Huntington (1968) himself put great stock in “political institutionalization”; and economists such as Mushtaq Khan have identified rapid economic development as the driver of, rather than precondition for, good governance outcomes (Khan, 2006). It is not necessary to argue against the importance of all of these factors to see how misunderstanding the underlying assumptions embedded in this approach may distort strategic thinking about corruption control. Specifically, reliance on modernization assumptions can have three unfortunate effects in this context. The first is, of course, complacency. If progress on corruption control must wait until certain structural or societal pre-conditions – often themselves of a transformative nature – are achieved, then one is more likely to accept, even excuse, systemic corruption in the present as inevitable. Second, and by contrast, such thinking can result in overly optimistic assumptions. As explored throughout this book, seeing the adoption of formal political or bureaucratic institutions like anti-corruption commissions, free elections, or transparency provisions as necessary and sufficient conditions for corruption control is weak argumentation. It fails to account for formally democratic settings that can be deeply corrupt in their own ways (see the discussion of “syndromes” of corruption in Chapter 7). And it fails to account for the possibility, demonstrated in practice by such cases as Singapore, for significant anti-corruption progress to be made in the absence of certain formal democratic institutions such as robust multi-party competition. The most significant problem with the modernization approach is that it posits a singular, unidirectional, evolutionary process of social change. That way of thinking tends to reduce corruption to a monochrome scale (in which there is “more” before and “less” after modernization, though the process may be bumpy), and it precludes a notion of different value trade-offs posed by different systems, something explored at length in Bell’s (2000) East Meets West. If there is really only one way to be “modern” with respect to corruption outcomes,

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and if modernization (however we understand it) leads to “less corruption” (however we understand that notion), numerous contemporary examples raise fundamental doubts about that theory. Moreover – as noted above – at least some variations on that argument would suggest that when it comes to fighting corruption, there is little for us to do but wait for modernization to work its wonders.

Arriving at “modernity” To examine the dysfunctions of modernization, consider its supposed endpoint. How confident are we that affluent market democracies really are as successful at corruption control as perceptions might suggest? It may be clear that corruption harms economic development, but it does not follow that affluence is proof that honesty and accountability rule. On international indices, wealthy societies tend to receive very favorable scores, but they can house activities that many would see as corrupt and yet are fully legal – or, at least, not clearly illegal. Thompson (2018) and Lessig (2015; Lessig, 2013), as we have seen, have developed sophisticated analyses of “institutional corruption,” and Johnston (2014; Johnston, 2005) has proposed an Influence Markets syndrome of corruption characteristic of many affluent democracies. In both scenarios wealthy and influential people advance their own interests in ways that, as Warren (2004) has put it, exclude others from having a say in decisions that affect their lives. Often such influence is exercised through legal political contributions, or by possessing or renting special expertise – consider chemical companies that finance favorable research and testimony about their products (Lessig, 2011: 22-26). Citizens challenging those deeply-rooted advantages must do so on legal and political turf already shaped by wealth and privilege. The political system ticks over, most of the time, in an orderly fashion without huge scandals; after all, why would the wealthy pay outright bribes when they already hold privileged influence? The economy, on the whole, may well prosper as such groups get their way – but many others will be left behind. The relative absence of outright scandal helps affluent democracies attract investments and maintain high rankings on international indices, even as their governments and “home” corporations export dubious schemes to developing regions – in the process, lowering their index scores. Meanwhile, shady offshore operators can do business more or less as they please. Year after year, most corruption indices

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highlight contrasts that fit well with broader trends of development, yet tell us little about actual trends in corruption or the effects of reform, and nothing at all about qualitative contrasts. They may indicate that things are out of joint in some places, but give little or no guidance as to what to do (and not do) in response.

Getting history backwards… and upside down While modernization theory has its dysfunctions in the realm of corruption control, it still offers some important insights. One real risk that modernization theory might help us avoid is that of getting history backwards: that is, assuming that what keeps corruption within bounds in a society today is what originally brought it under control, and therefore is where contemporary reform should begin. Thus, struggling societies are frequently advised to implement the rule of law; an independent judiciary; a free press; a strong civil society; free, fair, and competitive elections; and transparency. But in most of today’s well-governed societies, those assets were nowhere in sight, or were only beginning to emerge, during the era when corruption began to be checked. Those attributes and institutions are major undertakings in their own right, and corruption makes it harder to put them into place. In many cases they emerged in the course of contention over the sources and limits of political power. As such they were outcomes of the struggles that brought sustained opposition to corruption into being, not the foundations of political modernity. Similarly, we often turn history upside down by assuming that where corruption control has been relatively effective the impetus has necessarily come from above, or from without, in the form of a concerted reform effort. Again, that is one mistake most modernization theorists, with their emphasis on transformative processes within society as a whole, are unlikely to make. As noted in our earlier discussion of political will, there is little doubt that effective top-level leadership can be a major asset, but in most instances, real force and staying power require demands from the bottom upwards. Those demands do not necessarily require anything like a fully functioning democracy, but they do depend upon aroused people and groups seeking to protect themselves, their property, and their security. Such essentially political activity, frequently assumed as part of magic narratives about civil society, all too frequently succumbs to apathy, cynicism, or collective action problems – or is suppressed from above.

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IV Conclusion: Misplaced lesson drawing The effect of simplistic assumptions about anti-corruption reform as linear and engineered, or of anti-corruption progress as a derivative of other societal changes, is a familiar refrain found throughout this chapter. One misses a realistic notion of the contentious politics that would underpin any real change process. Having made such heroic assumptions, we are left with no other explanation – when change does not then materialize as expected – that there must have been an insufficiency of “political will,” or of the underlying conditions that actually drive real change. Such explanations are either circular or reductionist. They certainly do not help us to visualize a more nuanced and contingent view of change, a point we elaborate in the next two chapters.

Notes 1 A recent report on civil society initiatives by a major international body, for example, highlights the goals of enhancing civil society’s contributions to the governance agendas of global financial institutions, and contributing to international organizations’ development efforts. 2 This tendency may be reinforced by the growing academic literature that analyzes the determinants of corruption and corruption control using quantitative methods, often econometric modeling. The modeling typically seeks to identify the marginal effect of a variable – say, of economic development – on an outcome of interest (e.g., corruption perceptions), holding all other factors we think might make a difference constant (at their average levels). Of course, in reality one rarely if ever sees other factors “held constant”, and it is difficult to incorporate more than a few interactive effects between variables into the mix in any systematic way.

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Bingham, Lisa Blomgren, and O’Leary, Rosemary. 2011. “Federalist No. 51: Is the Past Relevant to Today’s Collaborative Public Management?” Public Administration Review 71:1 (November), pp. 78–82. Braumoeller, Bear F. 2003. “Causal Complexity and the Study of Politics.” Political Analysis 11:3 (Summer), pp. 209–233. Brewster, Rachel. 2017. “Enforcing the FCPA: International Resonance and Domestic Strategy.” Virginia Law Review, 103 pp. 1611–1682. Brinkerhoff, Derick W. 2000. “Assessing Political Will for Anti-Corruption Efforts: An Analytic Framework.” Public Administration and Development: The International Journal of Management Research and Practice 20:3 (August), pp. 239–252. Chalmers, Ian, and Budi Setiyono. 2012. “The Struggle against Corruption During the Democratic Transition: Theorizing the Emergent Role of CSOs.” Development and Society 41:1 (June), 77. Crawford, Gordon, and Simonida Kacarska. 2019. “Aid Sanctions and Political Conditionality: Continuity and Change.” Journal of International Relations and Development 22:1 (March), pp. 184–214. Cro, Stelio. 1990. The Noble Savage: Allegory of Freedom. Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Ferry, Lauren L., Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, and Christina J. Schneider. 2020. “Catch Me If You Care: International Development Organizations and National Corruption.” The Review of International Organizations 20, pp. 1-26. Fraundorfer, Markus. 2017. “The Open Government Partnership: Mere Smokescreen or New Paradigm?” Globalizations 14:4 (October), pp. 611–626. Fritzen, Scott A. 2005. “Beyond ‘Political Will’: How Institutional Context Shapes the Implementation of Anti-Corruption Policies.” Policy and Society 24:3 (March), pp. 79–96. Fritzen, Scott A. 2007. “Crafting Performance Measurement Systems to Reduce Corruption Risks in Complex Organizations: The Case of the World Bank.” Measuring Business Excellence 11:4 (November), 23–32. Girod, Desha. 2018. “The Political Economy of Aid Conditionality.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics (February). Online at https://oxfordre.com/ politics/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.001.0001/acrefore9,780,190,228,637-e-597?rskey=Wd2KDL&result=1 (Viewed 27 July 2020). Goh Sui Noi. 2017. “No Let-Up in Xi Jinping’s Hunt for ‘Tigers, Flies and Spiders’”. Straits Times, October 13. Online at https://www.straitstimes. com/asia/east-asia/no-let-up-in-xi-jinpings-hunt-for-tigers-flies-and-spiders (Viewed 27 July 2020). Hansen, Hans Krause. 2012. “The Power of Performance Indices in the Global Politics of Anti-corruption.” Journal of International Relations and Development 15:4 (October), pp. 506–531. Hechler, Hannes, et al. 2011. “Can UNCAC Address Grand Corruption?” U4 Report, 2011: 2 (October). Online at https://www.cmi.no/publications/ 4226-can-uncac-address-grand-corruption#pdf (Viewed 27 July 2020).

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Huntington, Samuel P. 2002. “Modernization and Corruption.” In Arnold J. Heidenheimer and Michael Johnston (eds). Political Corruption: Concepts and Contexts (Third ed.), pp. 253-263. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Jensen, Nathan M., and Edmund J. Malesky. 2018. “Nonstate Actors and Compliance with International Agreements: An Empirical Analysis of the OECD Anti-bribery Convention.” International Organization 72:1 (Winter), pp. 33–69. Johnston, Michael. 2005. Syndromes of Corruption: Wealth, Power, and Democracy. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Johnston, Michael. 2009. “Social Capital and Democratic Development in Spain: Six Hypotheses in Search of a Concept.” Paper presented at a US Government agency conference on Measuring Social Capital, Arlington, VA. (March). Johnston, Michael. 2014. Corruption, Contention, and Reform: The Power of Deep Democratization. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Johnston, Michael, and Jesper Johnsøn, with research assistance by Olivia T. Gamble. 2014. “Doing the Wrong Things for the Right Reasons? ‘Do No Harm’ as a Principle of Reform.” Bergen, Norway: U4 Resource Center, Christian Michelsen Institute: U4 Brief 2014:13 (December). Online at http://www.u4.no/publications/doing-the-wrong-things-for-the-rightreasons-dono-harm-as-a-principle-of-reform/downloadasset/3696 (Viewed 27 July 2020). Khan, Mushtaq. 2006. “Governance and Anti-Corruption Reforms in Developing Countries: Policies, Evidence and Ways Forward.” UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development), G-24 Discussion Paper Series Number 42 (November). Online at https://unctad.org/en/ docs/gdsmdpbg2420064_en.pdf (Viewed 27 July 2020). Klitgaard, Robert. 2000.“Subverting Corruption.” Finance and Development 37:2 (June), n.p. Online at http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2000/ 06/klitgaar.htm (Viewed 27 July 2020). Koehler, Mike. 2019. “Has the FCPA Been Successful in Achieving Its Objectives?” University of Illinois Law Review 2019:4, pp. 1267-1320. Kolstad, Ivar, Verena Fritz, and Tam O’Neil. 2008. “Corruption, AntiCorruption Efforts and Aid: Do Donors Have the Right Approach?” Research project (RP-05-GG) of the Advisory Board for Irish Aid. Online at https://www.odi.org/sites/odi.org.uk/files/odi-assets/publications-opini on-files/2267.pdf (Viewed 27 July 2020). Lacatus, Corina, and Ulrich Sedelmeier. 2020. “Does Monitoring Without Enforcement Make a Difference? The European Union and AntiCorruption Policies in Bulgaria and Romania After Accession.” Journal of European Public Policy 27:8 (June), 1–20. Lee,Tony C. 2018. “Pernicious Custom? Corruption, Culture, and the Efficacy of Anti-Corruption Campaigning in China.” Crime, Law and Social Change 70:3 (October), 349–361.

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Lessig, Lawrence. 2015. Republic, Lost: Version 2.0. New York: Grand Central Publishing. Lessig, Lawrence. 2013. “‘Institutional Corruption’ Defined.” The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 41:3 (Fall), pp. 2–4. Marquette, Heather. 2001. “Corruption, Democracy and the World Bank.” Crime, Law and Social Change 36:4 (December), 395–407. Papyrakis, Elisseios., Matthias Rieger, and Emma Gilberthorpe. 2017. “Corruption and the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative.” Journal of Development Studies 53:2 (April), 295–309. Paun, Carmen. 2019.“EU to End Corruption Monitoring Scheme in Bulgaria, but not Romania.” Politico (October 22). Online at https://www.politico. eu/article/eu-to-end-corruption-monitoring-scheme-in-bulgaria-butnot-romania/ (Viewed 27 July 2020). Putnam, Robert D. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster. Quah, Jon S. T. 2013. “Curbing Corruption in Singapore: The Importance of Political Will, Expertise, Enforcement, and Context.” In Jon S.T. Quah (ed.), Different Paths to Curbing Corruption. Somerville, MA: Emerald, pp. 219-255. Rotberg, Robert I. 2019. The Corruption Cure: How Citizens and Leaders Can Combat Graft. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Skinner, Richard. 2016. “Influence Abroad: The Transnational Anti-bribery Regime.” Sunlight Foundation (November 15). Online at https://sunlightfoundation.com/2016/11/15/influence-abroad-the-transnational-antibribery-regime/ (Viewed 27 July 2020). Theobald, Robin. 1989. Corruption, Development and Underdevelopment. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. Thompson, Dennis F. 2018. “Theories of Institutional Corruption.” Annual Review of Political Science 21 (February), pp. 495–513. https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-polisci-120,117-110,316 (Viewed 27 July 2020). Torcal, Mariano, and Jose Ramon Montero. 1999. “Facets of Social Capital in New Democracies: The Formation and Consequences of Social Capital in Spain.” Ch 8 (pp. 167–191) in Jan W. van Deth et al. (eds.), Social Capital and European Democracy. London and New York: Routledge. UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime). 2020. “United Nations Convention against Corruption.” Online at https://www.unodc. org/unodc/en/treaties/CAC/ (Viewed 27 July 2020). Urofsky, Philip., Hee Won Moon, and Jennifer Rimm. 2012. “How Should We Measure the Effectiveness of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act: Do Not Break What Isn’t Broken-the Fallacies of Reform.” Ohio State Law Journal 73:5, pp. 1145–1179. Warren, Mark E. 2004. “What Does Corruption Mean in a Democracy?” American Journal of Political Science 48:2 (April), pp. 328–343.

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Weilert, A. Katarina. 2016. “United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC)–After Ten Years of Being in Force.” Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law Online 19:1 (May), pp. 216–240. Online at https://brill. com/view/journals/mpyo/19/1/article-p216_8.xml?lang=en (Viewed 27 July 2020). Zhang, Everett, Arthur Kleinman, and Tu Weiming (eds.). 2010. Governance of Life in Chinese Moral Experience: The Quest for an Adequate Life. Abingdon, UK: Taylor and Francis.

PART 3

Reform with the future in mind

6 WHO DOES, AND WHO SHOULD, BENEFIT FROM REFORM? The anti-corruption industry and its limitations

I Reform in service to…itself? As we argued in Chapter 1, the transition from anti-corruption movement to anti-corruption industry reflects, in its own way, the gains reformers have made over the past three decades, including the scale and visibility, legitimacy, and symbolic clout that anti-corruption efforts have acquired. But that transition also emphasizes the ways in which reformers have become a force not only in, but for, themselves – in the process, we argue, undermining their potential as a force for change and, therefore, their own efforts to check corruption. That happens in a number of ways. One is a general emphasis on top-down efforts that may reflect strategies and interests common across the international reform front, but draws much less upon the energy – and the interests – of local citizens and businesspeople victimized by abuses of power. Efforts to enlist them and their grievances do occur, but are organized in ways that are vulnerable to collective action problems and reflect an idealized image of what civil society is and does in affluent liberal democracies. Talk of “targeted strategies,” and of the importance of local conditions, abounds – but control efforts tend to vary little from one setting to the next. Perhaps inevitably, organizations active in the industry are protective of their own sources of funding, their “brands,” and the competence and ideas they develop. Cooperative efforts and genuine coalition-building among reformers

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are therefore given little emphasis. Reformers tend to describe and promote their own projects in positive, even glowing, terms: annual reports or conference presentations entitled “How We Failed in Country X” are few and far between.Yet once on the ground in struggling societies, reform groups tend to administer their projects in ways aimed more at organizational self-preservation than at political and social change, as we will discuss below. Major international gatherings are more likely to culminate in high-flown “Declarations” than with any public acknowledgment that our results have often been discouraging at best. To be fair, progress has been made in some specific places, organizations, and agency functions, and against some sorts of abuses. Moreover, there is no way of knowing how much worse things might have become without the efforts of the past three decades. Lately there has been a significant amount of soul-searching among reform advocates, and within their organizations, as evidence of indifferent results has become more compelling. Moreover, reformers are people too: pessimism and discouragement make it hard to sustain any effort as difficult and risky as fighting corruption. And it would make little sense to return to donors and government budget officials with a message like “we know we are not making much progress, but please give us more resources anyway, and somehow we’ll figure it out.” At the same time, if one is even partially persuaded by our argument that lasting corruption control entails confronting and changing the imbalances of power that enable the few to exploit the many, it becomes clear that a movement grown cautious, ossified, protective of its image and its mainstream status, and inward-looking in its priorities, is not likely to go to great lengths, or take on significant risks, in pursuit of that sort of change.

II Who guides the anti-corruption industry? The above critique does not apply equally to all levels of anti-corruption activity. At the lower levels we still find people and groups working to build grassroots resistance to corruption, and many more engaged in educational and anti-poverty work that could well help check corruption indirectly over the longer term, even though the links between such efforts and anti-corruption reform can and should be made much stronger (an important theme, to which we will return in our concluding chapters). But at the top levels the institutionalization – some might say ossification – of the industry has rarely been more clearly on view than in London in May of 2016, when then-Prime Minister

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David Cameron hosted an international “Anti-Corruption Summit.” He was joined by high-level personages from 46 countries – an assemblage that included an unspecified number of what Cameron himself, in an off-the-cuff remark to Queen Elizabeth II, had days before termed “leaders of some fantastically corrupt countries” (Asthana and Grierson 2016). After a day of high-flown speeches the delegates issued what they called “the first ever global declaration against corruption” – hardly the first, actually, but why let the facts get in the way of a self-serving story – and likely repaired to some of London’s finer clubs and restaurants to congratulate themselves on a job well done. At the event’s end, Cameron claimed to detect “far more political will – not just from words but from actions – that will make a difference” (Ibid.). Perhaps so: leaving aside the question of whether what the delegates promised to do would actually be productive, a 2020 assessment by Transparency International found that about 31% of the Summit’s commitments had been met over the intervening years, and that another 43% were either “underway” or “ongoing” – likely somewhat better than par for the course as such international pledges go (Transparency International 2020). But the pledges themselves were familiar stuff, by and large – improvements to procurement processes, transparency measures, some steps toward whistleblower protection and international data-sharing, and the like: all worthy ideas, but none likely to have the transformational effects Cameron claimed to anticipate. Here too, the fault lay less with wrong-headed individuals or ill-conceived agendas; instead, at what was proclaimed a top-level, game-changing event, the global reform industry emerged from its own echo chamber with essentially the same proposals it had been offering for many years. That not-very-surprising example illustrates a basic truth: however visible and broad-based the current anti-corruption industry, and however high-flown and ringing its periodic manifestos and declarations, its prime movers and sustaining institutions are overwhelmingly integrated into the status quo – not advocates of fundamental political change. That does not mean they want to change nothing at all, but rather that when it comes to the role of states, businesses, and citizens, and to the institutional arenas within which they act, those interests and advocates do not aim to upset the overall dynamics of power. Rather, be their countries struggling, or settled and affluent, they are the beneficiaries of that power system and, apart from modest tweaks to administrative and economic processes, aim to sustain it. As the notions of “good governance” and “compliance” suggest, they would

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preserve today’s power relationships and governing arrangements – or something very much like them – seeking, primarily, to keep doing the same things, only better. As far as it goes, that approach is laudable. We need not think very long or hard to come up with examples of how public- and privatesector institutions have wasted resources and scarce opportunities, have been compromised and poorly managed, and have pursued policies that turn out badly yet are left in place with few if any changes. If corruption were primarily a result of flaws in processes – poor administration, lax law enforcement, inefficiencies and slipshod monitoring of people and their work, and gaps in rules and procedures – the current anti-corruption industry might well produce significant benefits. But if we view corruption fundamentally as one manifestation of the power and ability of the few to exploit the many, to avoid or defy laws and institutions that supposedly maintain fairness and justice, and even – in the case of institutional or influence-market corruption – to carry out their schemes within the law and with the protection of major institutions, then bigger changes are needed. Those changes are needed – indeed, in many respects, must begin – not just in the developing world but in affluent market democracies too. They would significantly rework the balance of power within and among societies, restraining the wealthy, powerful, and well-connected while affording citizens more of a voice in the decisions that affect their lives, and enabling them to make their voices effective. As noted in Chapters 7 and 8, where we discuss them in more detail, those sorts of changes may well entail considerable contention and, at times, political disruption; thus they are unlikely to be high on the agenda of the mainstays of the anti-corruption industry. Still, a genuinely effective anti-corruption industry must make it a central goal to enable citizens to defend themselves and their own interests in political ways that cannot be ignored.

If your only tool is a hammer… There are, of course, many reasons to be skeptical about that sort of scenario. One is that, as noted above, the institutions, interests, and leaders that drive, guide, and fund the industry are parts of the status quo, accumulate their resources and legitimacy within it, and benefit from it in many ways. As noted, they do not resist all changes but try to keep them incremental, within bounds, and under control. That is not altogether a bad thing: politics, channels of communication, and

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economic processes generally work better when their activities are moderated by gatekeepers and guarantors. Still, the conventional wisdom can harden into a suffocating consensus over time, particularly when reinforced by the intangible but gratifying sense that one’s organization opposes wrongdoing and serves the greater good. Another reason – obvious when stated plainly, but often overlooked – is that however much they may embrace the appeals and symbolism of ethics and rectitude, the industry’s leaders and key institutions inevitably have interests and goals of their own and are well positioned to pursue and defend them. Popular participation is seen in positive terms, but – once we move beyond grand strategy to specific questions of priorities and tactics – primarily as backing agendas set from above. “Civil society” is virtually always a part of the reform playbook, but usually takes the form of dedicated organizations formed to pursue the dominant anticorruption paradigm sketched out in Chapter 1, rather than grassroots agitation or political action. The industry presumes to possess or have access to the most important knowledge and skills, and that they are best used in top-down fashion to help transitional and struggling societies. The corruption problems of affluent democracies are not completely dismissed but are generally seen as anomalies or as less harmful that those experienced elsewhere. The role of affluent democracies in exporting corruption to less fortunate regions was addressed starting in 1999, when the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention entered into force, but the main emphasis remains the problems of poor and developing countries, with the causes presumed to lie within those societies too. That overall analysis is not intended – and, is unlikely to produce – significant realignments of power. This critique differs from others we frequently hear and may strike some readers as unduly mild. The argument here is not that the United States or the Bretton Woods institutions or western businesses are motivated primarily by racism, want to keep poor people poor, or seek to re-colonize developing societies. Many individuals in the upper levels of the anti-corruption industry are genuinely concerned with the plight of struggling societies and seek positive change. But the driving institutions and values of the movement primarily reflect the experiences of affluent market democracies and a highly selective – indeed, as we argued in Chapter 1, a misleading – view of history. Overwhelmingly they are oriented toward improving administration rather than empowering exploited peoples to challenge abusive authorities, much less reinvent their own governance.1 That approach

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may check corruption in some respects: particularly when judged over the long arc of history, it is wrong to think that today’s successful societies are somehow drowning in corruption. But it creates and reflects political and economic regimes that corrupt and corrupting people and groups can and do find quite congenial, and that all too often enable them to pursue their goals in legal ways. The emphasis, overall, is more upon producing gradual improvements for struggling societies and their citizens than upon changes produced by those societies, driven by citizens’ own needs and interests – even though historically it was contention, driven by the political assertion of many of those needs and interests, that helped many of today’s affluent societies bring their own corruption within limits. Top-down, incremental initiatives become a default option because that is how prominent organizations and leaders do things in general. As an aphorism of uncertain origin puts it: if your only tool is a hammer, your problems all tend to look like nails.2

III Who benefits? Who, then, has been served by the reform industry? Certainly people and places suffering from corruption have received valuable encouragement, public attention, and at times a measure of protection (Givant 1994). Even the message that “you are not alone” can be a valuable first step. Corrupt politicians and their clients have been put on notice that they are being watched, and that they can no longer justify their thievery on geopolitical grounds or with an argument that venality greases the wheels of development. So far, so good. Governments themselves – even, as we have seen in the London example above, some that are thoroughly corrupt and ineffective – receive favorable publicity (not to be discounted in an age when a diffuse anti-corruption stance has become a kind of global default) and, often, a significant flow of aid and technical assistance, although the effectiveness of their use can vary widely. Global aid, trade, and lending organizations – some of which, it must be said, have brought significant resources to the table, and have underwritten major research and policy experimentation – have likewise attracted favorable publicity and, in some cases, have given added impetus to controlling corruption in their own operations and sponsored projects. Private-sector corporations have at times accumulated good will by supporting anti-corruption groups with funds and expertise. If

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such support has actually discouraged corruption, those corporations have stood to benefit from reduced pressures from unscrupulous competitors and officials and, at least in years past, from reformers’ support for deregulation and privatization. The civil society sector embraces a wide diversity of groups and activists, not all of which necessarily see the mainstream anti-corruption industry as an ally, but particularly in developing societies many such people and groups have received funding and enhanced stature. While some such groups are committed to major change and undertake difficult and risky tasks, others are led by people who might best be described as anti-corruption entrepreneurs who fold the issue into a diverse portfolio of projects whose common denominator is that outside donors provide funding. Finally, a variety of think tanks, consultants, and academicians (including the co-authors of this book), most of them based in the global North and West, have benefited from funding, publication outlets, access to data, and a proliferating range of conferences and workshops.

IV Who should benefit? In Chapters 7 and 8, we take up the question of what better anti-corruption strategies might look like. To anticipate that discussion, however: we possess no more silver-bullet remedies than anyone else. Many of the ideas we will suggest will be quite familiar. But the reasons for undertaking particular strategies or tactics; our views as to how, why, and over how long a time they should produce results; and how they relate to the opportunities, risks, and opposition to be found in specific settings, deserve careful thought. Instead of asking “what should we do about corrupt practice X,” perhaps we should ask how we might help pursue justice and build lasting constituencies for reform in a particular kind of setting. What, specifically, do we hope to accomplish beyond “less corruption” or various process-oriented improvements? What reasons have we got to believe that our proposals will help attain those goals – that is, what is our theory of change? Can we encourage, protect, and nurture citizen initiative with respect to corruption and other difficulties in their experiences and communities? What sorts of power relationships enable, or restrain, corrupt activities and exploitation, and can citizens push them toward justice in the middle to long term? Expectations are critical too: what is a reasonable timeline for the effectiveness of a control – months, a few years, or a generation and more? – and what indications of success or failure should we search for? How

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can we measure or assess the effects, if any, that reform is producing? Support and constraints need close attention too: who will support or oppose our efforts, how, and why? What sorts of institutional, economic, and historic/cultural factors are likely to make favorable change more, or less, likely? Instead of listing “best practices” – often selected more because they are found in generally successful societies than for specific reasons why they should work in a given setting – should we ask why past reforms have faded or failed? Even a brief consideration of those sorts of factors makes it clear that the realities of one situation may be irrelevant or downright misleading elsewhere. In our view a major emphasis should be upon enabling citizens, businesses, and other organizations to resist corruption by political means (a more complete discussion appears in Chapter 8, and in Johnston 2014). “By political means” does not assume or require liberal democracy, competitive elections, and the like; indeed, those sorts of political systems can create distinctive corruption risks of its own (Johnston 2014: Chapter 7; Johnston 2005: Chapter 4). In authoritarian situations, for example, the effort might initially avoid directly confronting corruption and challenging entrenched interests, aiming instead at opening up opportunities for citizen autonomy: gradually enabling social constituencies (women, farmers, students, small business owners, etc.) to develop awareness and leadership of their own, and to advocate their own lasting interests within a safe and valued political space. At the grassroots that might mean that literacy programs for women and young girls could be a good early initiative, as might encouraging the formation of mutual-aid groups, rural cooperatives, and the like. Formation anticorruption groups might not be able or inclined to venture into such projects themselves, but they can certainly broaden any anti-­corruption coalition by supporting those that do. Further, rather than moving directly to the formation of dedicated anti-corruption groups – or directing scarce resources to those who promise to do so – we should support the development of civil society in all shapes and forms. Social networks and organizations, local problem-solving, and ethnic associations and religious groups are just a few examples. Networks of that sort might have no overt political or anti-corruption agenda at all, but they can create local leadership, build and diffuse organizational skills, and deepen mutual trust, thus augmenting citizens’ ability and inclination to deal with a wide range of problems. Directly attacking corruption from the start, by contrast, raises collective action problems and can put hitherto unorganized citizens into

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risky situations. For reasons of avoiding the wrath of the regime and of keeping citizens’ own interests front and center, early initiatives might say nothing about corruption at all, but instead emphasize better government services and facilities and push for greater fairness in their financing and provision. Initially, the anti-corruption movement can help most by putting citizens in a position to become politically effective when issues of their own choosing are raised. The need to protect those citizens, as well as whistleblowers, from retaliation should be a high priority and a consideration in supporting grassroots action. Those issues, their sequencing, and the pace and paths of change might be far from what we might wish for in some anti-corruption master plan, but assisting and training locally legitimate leaders might help guide such popular reactions in positive directions.

Why have we not pursued that approach? For a variety of reasons, ideas and efforts of the sort sketched out above have had little influence. Indeed, that sort of thinking will strike some in the anti-corruption industry as naïve, irrelevant, or even offensive. That is so for several reasons. A top-down, crime-prevention and punishment/deterrence paradigm has dominated anti-corruption thinking from the beginning, and those approaches and the thinking behind them generally do not vary greatly from one case to the next, require institutions to develop new missions or forms of competence, or seek to build resistance to corruption among the citizenry as a whole. The temptation to attack specific corrupt practices is understandable, particularly as their harmful social consequences become more widely understood. But such practices and their immediate causes are often symptoms of deeper causes embedded in societies, their development, their institutions, their predominant conceptions of right and wrong and, above all, in their distributions and forms of political power. Embeddedness is widely acknowledged, yet not given the kind of scrutiny it requires; no more is the fact that its mechanisms and implications can differ considerably from one time and place to the next. In some cases, for example, state-owned enterprises can instigate and benefit from corrupt activities in, say, customs services; elsewhere, private businesses enjoying extensive autonomy from the state may carry out many of the same sorts of corrupting activities. And in both models, organized collusion among public and private figures might be common – or unusual. Whatever the

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particulars of a given situation, no single set of anti-corruption tactics, and no master toolkit, will be appropriate everywhere. Another likely objection to the scenarios we propose is that if they are to be effective it will be over long periods of time, and by quite indirect causal paths. Short-term success will be elusive; indeed, bringing new issues and constituencies into the political conversation may elicit strong counter-reactions. In any event it will be difficult for anyone – analysts, activists, and particularly international donors – to claim credit for that sort of success, and therefore they may well decline to join the effort. (In Chapter 8, we will discuss measurement and assessment techniques that might help give credit where it is due, but these problems remain formidable.) That will be all the more likely to the extent that anti-corruption efforts mean supporting challengers to repressive regimes. International and intergovernmental organizations such as the Bretton Woods institutions are usually barred by charter and general outlook from intervening in politics elsewhere – for some very good reasons – and, consistent with a long reform tradition holding that good government must be insulated from politics, are disinclined to analyze and act against corruption in political ways, a constraint that is unlikely to change. That does not mean the northern and western countries or major international organizations never intervene in domestic affairs – far from it – but when they do, it will likely be in pursuit of their own geopolitical interests rather than to pursue a fairer balance of power within aided societies. Given all the unknowns involved in seeking change in rapidly changing contexts and the multitude of indirect and interactive consequences of the embeddedness of corruption, a certain amount of caution on the part of reformers is certainly justified (Johnston 2010). But that sort of caution can at times cause us to lose sight of fundamental goals. That can be particularly true in the case of the on-site operations of aid organizations. A 2014 survey (Johnston and Johnsøn 2014) asked officials of such organizations in developing countries how they understood the principle of “first, do no harm,” and what its implications were for their programs and implementation. The basic notion was familiar to the survey subjects, but their responses suggested that in practice “doing no harm” meant, first and foremost, protecting their organizations’ resources, reputations, and interests – and only secondarily, the notion of doing no harm to host societies. That those goals would be important is neither surprising nor inappropriate, but that they should be so dominant should be a matter of concern. Once again,

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efforts to make fundamental political changes over time are likely to lose out to more cautious agendas. Exacerbating all of this is our lack of valid and reliable metrics – not just of corruption, where measurement problems are numerous and familiar, but also for more general reform goals such as justice, integrity, trust, inclusion, and a sense that one’s views and interests matter in governing society. Finally, if there are in fact qualitatively different kinds of corruption reflecting different origins and manifested as contrasting processes and outcomes, what might a reduction in one kind imply for trends in another? Would progress against the more damaging varieties, but not against all, be an acceptable outcome?

V Conclusion: Toward reform 2.0 If the arguments in this chapter are even partially correct, and if we seek to reorient the path(s) of reform, it helps to understand how we got where we are. As we have suggested, the reform movement-becomeindustry embarked on its risky and difficult mission, and took on its present form, for familiar historical reasons. High-level concern about corruption rose rapidly after the end of the Cold War when its geopolitical justifications lost most of their relevance, pressures mounted for more effective uses of dwindling international-aid resources, and businesses came to recognize the many ways corruption impeded orderly development and fair competition. In the heady days of Huntington’s (1991) “Third Wave,” it seemed that there were huge opportunities – not just economic, but also in terms of freedom and human dignity – to be realized (and, perhaps, chaos to be averted) in transitional regions. But people had to play by predictable rules – and what seemed the “best practices” arguably would serve the already-affluent firms and countries quite well. At that time too, corruption became more clearly understood as a threat to the open and orderly markets and political systems that seemed about to take shape in many regions, and as undermining the West’s “victory” in the grand geopolitical struggle. Leaders of the international businesses that were becoming more active in transitional regions came to view corruption not as the overhead costs of doing business in those settings but rather as a process protecting unscrupulous competitors. Perhaps the push for reform also had to do with seeking an orderly international system governed by technocratic and market principles; certainly Clinton-era American foreign policy can be viewed in that context.

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To be fair, many people and groups were motivated by genuine concern for the wellbeing of struggling societies and citizens, and by the obvious waste of scarce resources and opportunities in places where corruption seemed worst. That reformers fell back upon familiar modes of governance and found it more useful to work with powerful economic interests than to stand in their way was both prudent and inevitable. The resulting anti-corruption coalition has in no way been an utter failure. Still, the movement’s indifferent results and missed opportunities suggest that, after thirty years, key ideas, tactics, and strategies need a fresh look. That is the goal of the third, and concluding, section of this book. One part of that reassessment is changing some of our intellectual and conceptual approaches, and that is the focus of Chapter 7. The other part is re-examining what we do, why, and with what expectations. That discussion appears in Chapter 8. We offer an argument as to why and how the anti-corruption industry can change in productive ways and how, over a longer timespan, and with greater tolerance for political contention and indirect strategies and tactics, the industry – and its local partners, not clients – can yet make credible and sustained progress. It is an argument that will strike many as naïve, impractical, and unlikely to please those who award the grants and write the checks. But in the interests of people everywhere who suffer from corruption and its consequences, we believe it is an argument worth making.

Notes 1 The history of urban renewal and redevelopment in the United States tells a similar story of highly confident high-level professionals who, convinced of their superior expertise and insight, pursued policies that excluded many residents of “blighted” areas from any real influence over decisions that profoundly changed their neighborhoods and economic situations. In city after city such resentments eventually boiled over into major controversy, leading to changes in federal and state policy requiring more citizen participation. Whether those new models could have improved outcomes is hard to say, if only because at about the same time they were implemented, funding from federal and state sources began to dry up. For a fascinating account focusing on two cities and a major American state see Cohen, 2019. 2 That quotation or idea has been frequently, if erroneously, attributed to Mark Twain, but the closest original usage appears to have been by psychologist Abraham Maslow; see Quote Investigator at https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/05/08/hammer-nail/ (Viewed 22 January 2020).

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References Asthana,Anushka, and Jamie Grierson. 2016.“Afghanistan and Nigeria ‘Possibly Most Corrupt Countries’, Cameron Lets Slip.” The Guardian (10 May). Online at https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/may/10/davidcameron-afghanistan-nigeria-possibly-most-corrupt-countries (Viewed 13 July 2020). Givant, Norman. 1994. “The Sword That Shields.” China Business Review 21: 3 (May-June), pp. 29–31. Huntington, Samuel P. 1991. The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Johnston, Michael. 2005. Syndromes of Corruption: Wealth, Power, and Democracy. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Johnston, Michael. 2010. “First, Do No Harm—Then, Build Trust: AntiCorruption Strategies in Fragile Situations.” Background Paper for the 2011 World Development Report. Washington, D.C.: The World Bank. Johnston, Michael. 2014. Corruption, Contention, and Reform: The Power of Deep Democratization. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Johnston, Michael, and Jesper Johnsøn, with research assistance by Olivia T. Gamble. 2014. “Doing the Wrong Things for the Right Reasons? ‘Do No Harm’ as a Principle of Reform.” Bergen, Norway: U4 Resource Center, Christian Michelsen Institute: U4 Brief 2014:13 (December). Online at http://www.u4.no/publications/doing-the-wrong-things-for-the-rightreasons-dono-harm-as-a-principle-of-reform/downloadasset/3696 (Viewed 13 July 2020). Transparency International. 2020. “Anti-Corruption Pledge Tracker 2020.” Online at https://www.anticorruptionpledgetracker.com/ (Viewed 13 July 2020).

7 REFORM, POWER, AND JUSTICE

I A different starting point Part 2 of this book lays out our critique of dominant approaches to corruption control. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 explored three broad ways in which what might be called the “analytics” underpinning such approaches can lead us in counter-productive directions. Chapter 6 examined some of the dysfunctionalities flowing from the transition of the international anti-corruption “movement” into an industry with its own complex interests. Our final two chapters do not propose a full-fledged alternative theory to stand up against the dominant paradigm. That is a deliberate choice: we do not believe the constituent elements of mainstream reforms are necessarily problematic in their own right. What is problematic, we argue, is the tendency to treat particular concepts of corruption and reform as unidimensional and largely exempt from their social and political context. Rather than attempting to answer the question of what new anti-corruption strategies are needed to attain success, we instead propose a different starting point: principles and assumptions more likely to guide efforts in productive directions. We aim to identify analytical building blocks for more effective and context-specific corruption controls, and for understanding and promoting systemic change.

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The next section focuses on approaches that attempt to improve our understanding of the importance of understanding diverse contexts. Section three proposes more realistic views of the drivers – and ­politics – of systemic change. We close by re-examining the anti-­ corruption “industry” and its difficulties with formulating embedded theories of political contention and change.

II Beyond monochrome and silver bullets: Better theories of change Chapter 3 sketched out several ways in which “seeing in monochrome” – allowing a particular concept of corruption, however relevant in its own sphere, to exclude highly significant variations from consideration.We described in particular how seeing corruption as deviance, or as a general state of governance “backwardness,” as measured through perception polls at the national level essentially posits corruption as varying only in terms of “more” or “less” – even in quite different environments – and misses the interconnections both trans- and subnationally among qualitatively different elements of a corrupt system. An essential first step in overcoming monochromatic outlooks is to appreciate a fuller diversity of drivers and manifestations of corruption. That task, in turn, entails more nuanced typologies. In what follows, we point to three promising examples of analytical work that attempts to provide just that. The three approaches target different levels of a corrupt system, from specific practices on the ground through national governance-level characteristics.

Descriptive diversity and syndromes The first is the straightforward attempt to enrich our understanding of the diversity of corrupt practices “on the ground” by developing empirical categories enabling more nuanced analysis. One example of this is the Types, Actors, Sectors, and Problems (TASP) approach (Graycar and Prenzler 2013; Graycar 2015) – that highlights varying “dispositions” underlying corruption. The scheme does not make expansive claims of explanatory power but begins with the sensible notion that several dimensions of corruption must first be adequately understood before diagnosis and action may be undertaken. Once those descriptive building blocks are available, one can explore the relationships among them, identifying potential contrasts among various categories and what they

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imply for action. Similarly, Bauhr’s (Bauhr 2017) distinction between “need” and “greed” corruption emphasizes important qualitative contrasts in the underlying causes of corruption, and in its implications for the societies in which it occurs. Other useful descriptive frameworks highlighting important contrasts can be found in some of the best sector-level analysis of corruption. In Savedoff and Hussmann’s review of health sector corruption (Savedoff and Hussmann 2006: 7), for instance, several typical manifestations are linked to specific categories of actors, ranging from government regulators to suppliers, providers, and patients, and to relationships among them. Rich descriptive sectoral typologies also focus on the electricity sector (Gulati and Rao 2007), natural resource management (Klitgaard, Kolstad and Søreide 2009), and elections (Birch 2011). In the best of this work, meaningful connections among elements can be introduced based on empirical data rather than theoretical presumptions. The third approach, developed by one of the authors, targets the broadest governance characteristics of countries in order to differentiate among qualitatively different patterns or “syndromes” of corruption. Johnston (2005, 2014) proposes four broad syndromes of corruption defined by patterns and trends in economic and political participation (the openness, fairness, and degree of order in the economic and political arenas), and in the quality and strength of political, economic, and social institutions. The scheme was devised in part via quantitative analysis and in part through case studies. There are four resulting syndromes (Johnston 2014; 16–17): •

•

Influence Markets: in a setting of established markets and democratic politics, private interests buy or rent influence over specific processes and decisions, less via bribery than by election contributions and other exchanges channeled through political figures who put their access out for rent. The United States, Japan, and Germany are examples. Ironically, strong institutions help make influence marketable as decisions, once made, are likely to be implemented. It is tempting to regard Influence Markets as relatively benign corruption, but such dealings – often legal – are difficult to control and can have global implications. Elite Cartels: here elites – political, bureaucratic, business, military – maintain collusive networks sharing corrupt benefits, and stave off political and economic competitors in a situation of

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•

•

only moderately strong institutions. Examples include Italy, South Korea, and Botswana. Often, as in Argentina (Guillan Montero 2011), those networks are among the strongest political institutions; elsewhere, for example, in South Korea, they contribute to a kind of predictability congenial to significant growth. That does not make Elite Cartels “good corruption,” however, as in times of stress those elite alignments may not bend, but rather break. Oligarchs and Clans: a small number of contentious elites and their followings contend over wealth and power in a climate of very weak institutions, rapidly expanding opportunities, and pervasive insecurity, using bribes where they can and violence where they must. Opponents of corruption face major risks and uncertainties. Distinctions between public and private sectors, and between personal and official loyalties and agendas, can be meaningless; implications for democratization and growth can be devastating. Cases include Afghanistan, 1990s Russia, the Philippines, and Mexico. Official Moguls: powerful individuals and juntas, dominating undemocratic regimes or enjoying the protection of those who do, abuse state and personal power – often, a distinction of little importance – with impunity. Primary loyalties and sources of power are personal, not official; formal institutions are very weak. Anti-corruption forces, like opposition to the regime generally, are similarly weak. Cases of this sort may superficially resemble Oligarchs-and-Clans situations but unlike those societies, where it may not be clear that anyone is in charge, Official Moguls situations leave little doubt who runs the show. In this final group we find, for example, Kenya, Suharto’s Indonesia, China (in somewhat localized forms), Egypt, and Uganda.

The syndromes scheme is just one possible way to sort out qualitative contrasts. Among other things, more thought is needed regarding the ways various syndromes might co-exist in differing sectors, or at various levels, of a society. Their value, at this point, lies in challenging narratives that tell us, in effect, that corruption is the same thing everywhere it occurs, varying only in terms of amount. It may be objected that the syndromes scheme, by emphasizing the balance between wealth and power and the strength of institutions, merely returns our focus to national characteristics as determinants of corruption. But the argument is different: syndrome-shaping

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influences are deeply rooted, more akin to underlying factors identified by process-tracing than to those measured by recent national indicators, and they are not presumed to directly determine amounts of corruption (unknowable in any event). Instead, they help define opportunities, incentives, and constraints people encounter in myriad ways as they pursue, use, and exchange wealth and power, and the contrasts they point toward are qualitative and multi-dimensional. The focus is on human agency in contrasting settings. Causal influences are more permissive than deterministic, and the conduct and gains of corrupt participants within their arenas may vary in many ways.While the four syndromes do not constitute any sort of developmental sequence, countries may shift from one category to another over time; Mexico, an Oligarchs-and-Clans case in recent years, was an Elite Cartels case in the early 1980s, while Russia – Oligarchs-and-Clans in the 1990s and early 2000s, has moved sharply toward Official Moguls. While the four syndromes do not readily mix or blend, a country – particularly if it is large or internally diverse – may experience contrasting syndromes in different regions, sectors, or governmental levels.The United States, for example, is overwhelmingly an Influence Markets case, but in Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma, we may spot Elite Cartels. The syndromes scheme also points toward theories of change based on the enabling conditions for particular kinds of corruption problems. Key variables – the openness of markets and political processes, the strength of institutions, and their connections with corruption problems – and the dynamic relationships among them can suggest ways of addressing underlying conditions and pursuing positive outcomes. It may help us diagnose the kinds of corruption problems in a society or sector while avoiding reforms that are premature, irrelevant, or downright harmful. The main point of this discussion is the importance of theorizing change, rather than assuming our controls will have their desired effects.

Beyond “just tell us what works” Ultimately, the alternative to a “silver bullet”-oriented theory of change is not to point to an alternative set of interventions, but to take causal complexity seriously as a guide to changing our strategies. After all, reforms can lack political support or essential resources or may be fundamentally misconceived. They will often arouse strong opposition. They may have unintended consequences in addition to, or in place of,

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what we anticipate. They may be based on an inaccurate understanding of the problem and its causes. They may assume similarities among cases that do not exist. Reform advocates should definitely think big and maintain a cautious optimism, but they should still ask themselves several questions. Among them: •

If we implement an anti-corruption measure, what specific effects do we expect it to have – and, how would we recognize them? • Why, and via what causal chains, do we expect those effects to happen? • Whose support do we assume our reforms will enjoy, and why? Whose opposition will they draw, and for what reasons? • What behavior – that of individuals, organizations, institutional processes, external actors, market and political participants – do we expect our reform will change, and how? If reforms promise to substantially alter established institutions and patterns of behavior, what new patterns do we expect to emerge? Will they be better than what preceded them, and what will sustain them? • Are there past examples of similar desired change, or are there verified theories and data that allow us to test our analysis and assumptions? Are there useful “failure stories” we need to study? • In keeping with the Law of Unintended Consequences, and with Murphy’s Law too, what can go wrong with our reforms, with what likely consequences? Unfortunately, some in the reform movement have little interest in, or patience with, theories. “Just tell us what works” is a common refrain. But sound theory is essential if we are to understand the failures, frustrations, and (yes) the occasional successes of contemporary reforms. It is all the more important if corruption control is intended to work in indirect ways, with success emerging as a byproduct of political contention, of crises, or of deeper historical changes. Finally, because we can do significant harm while trying to do good things, we need good roadmaps of what we hope to accomplish, how we intend to get there, what we should do first, next, and maybe never, and why we expect those choices to produce desired results. Clearly, a sound theory of change involves considerably more statements of intent. It might incorporate process-tracing analysis (e.g., see the cases in Mungiu-Pippidi and Johnston 2017) explicitly aimed at taking temporal effects – the causes of causes, for example, and the

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implications of repeated processes – into account. It should survey as many possible restraints on corruption as possible; consider who benefits from the status quo and how it came into being; and ask what the alternatives to corruption might be and who might come to have a stake in them. Such theories may be devised at a variety of levels – the behavior of individuals, international trade partners, the workings of markets of political institutions, or trends in large segments of civil society, just as examples. Such a theory might be deductive, or probabilistic, or based upon historical parallels, but it must provide a persuasive answer to a classic question: “If we do X, what will happen as a result?” A good theory begins with a hypothesis, or diagnosis: what needs to change, and in what ways? It needs to identify the major actors, incentives, and mechanisms that shape the status quo, offer sound propositions about how they do so, and propose new ones – along with reasons why we think they would produce outcomes that are more desirable. A sound theory of change should point to likely reactions and follow-on effects that can alter the impact of reforms. And it should develop all of these ideas at a level of detail that makes the theory and its components testable, able to point to specific actions we should (or should not) undertake, and open to detailed reassessment based on the results we obtain. There is no way to know “what works” without a theory, and action-oriented reformers when asked to justify their strategies and expectations often find themselves proposing theories (whether they intend to do so or not!).

Context and causal complexity Several elements are needed to build more grounded theories of change. The first and most important is a better appreciation of the way in which context affects the theory at hand. The great majority of anti-corruption measures are applied in a broad range of settings, creating a critical need for theory that can take account of the ways contrasting cultural, political, and socioeconomic environments will affect the proposed intervention. Second – and building on the first – the general approach should take “causal complexity”1 as its starting point (Ragin 2000; Braumoeller 2003). This is the notion that for most social phenomena it is useless to search for single causes, or to judge the effect of a single intervention on a single result, in isolation of other factors. Most outcomes of interest, such as a reduction in systemic corruption, might be caused by

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a number of combinations of necessary and/or sufficient conditions. The explanation or prediction embedded in a theory of change should therefore be “configurational,” showing how different elements in a causal chain resonate with other institutions or factors in the environment to produce the outcome of interest. Conversely, this will also help to make explicit the assumptions on which the theory is based and where these might be tested in practice. Finally, “new and improved” theories of change should lead to recommendations that are contingent – that is, that generate propositions about what interventions may work best under what conditions, or in what sequence. These will not be mechanical – given conditions Y and Z, pull lever X to get a good outcome – but can highlight specific starting points or requisite conditions for specific reforms, and incompatibilities between those interventions and their contexts. As an illustration, we return to the Anti-Corruption Agency (ACA) intervention explored at length in Chapter 4. Figure 7.1 below sketches out a basic and easily recognizable logic model underpinning this “silver bullet” theory of change. The chain connects the technical and strategic inputs activating the ACA through to its key outputs (primarily in the criminal justice system) and its intended ultimate impacts on systemic corruption. So far, so magical. But what would a more contextually grounded – and therefore potentially realistic – theory of change look like in this case? It would view each step in the logic model as a site of contention, set against critical environmental influences, the outcome of which must play out over successive rounds to have any chance of achieving a l­asting

Proximate environmental inluences: • Strength of “Heat Shield” for ACA / ‘Staying power’ • Interface / integration with judicial and law enforcement regime

“Shadow side” possibilities: Corrupt ACA leadership

FIGURE 7.1 

What is not investigated?

Punishments undermined

Distal environmental inluences: • Political, social and economic stability • Institutional capacities • Policy environment • Social norms • Political and social mobilization around corruption

Backlash;displacement of corruption

Theory of change for an ACA intervention

Stoking further cynicism

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impact. It would also include potential unintended-but-foreseeable “shadow side” possibilities for each stage in the process. Thus, for a simple example on the “inputs” side, the leadership of the ACA may itself be corrupted from the start, presumably by political intention; in which case, it would be magical thinking indeed to hope that the institution would nevertheless progress in beneficial ways along the causal chain. What then determines whether the intended, or the “shadow,” possibilities prevail, and in what imperfect and messy combinations? Heavy emphasis in an improved theory of change would be placed on proximate and distal environmental influences. Proximate influences would include, for instance, assessing the mechanisms through which ACA authority and independence are established and then protected over time. Indeed, a critical aspect of the approach would be to put the theory of change into temporal motion, showing how the ACA either succeeds or fails in a dynamic trajectory of institutionalization. (see, for example, Bolongaita 2010). Taken together, a contextual and configurational approach would appear to set a very high bar for effective theorizing about anti-corruption strategies.Yet there have been a number of promising approaches that begin, at least implicitly, from this starting point, and that represent some good steps in this direction. Consider three examples: • Vinay Bhargava and Emil Bolongaita (2004: 56–72) review a comprehensive range of “anti-corruption instruments” in terms of their appropriateness for countries with weak, fair, or good initial conditions in terms of the quality of governance. This leads to the insight, for example, that “new public management” reforms enhancing bureaucratic autonomy and flexibility while strengthening monitoring of and accountability for specific outcomes are likely to backfire in countries with low administrative capacity (Painter, 2008, applies a similar analysis to Vietnam). • Alina Mungiu-Pippidi et al. (2011: 90–91) present a contextually nuanced analysis of the relationship among four variants of governance orders – those characterized by neo-patrimonialism, competitive particularism, borderline and open access order – to derive recommendations for system-challenging interventions, including those promoted by external agents. The framework helps distinguish between settings where technical assistance for new anti-corruption institutions is likely to be effective (in more

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•

institutionalized democracies) and situations in which more general support for groups challenging power monopolies is called for (i.e., in neo-patrimonialist polities).The framework also distinguishes among different levels of government participation likely to be needed for particular interventions. Johnston (2014) builds on the syndromes framework developed in earlier (2005) work to present the initial outlines of a contingency-based approach to “deep democratization” as an approach to checking corruption. The framework identifies four broad “tasks” needed for virtually any comprehensive strategy: increasing pluralism, opening safe political and economic space, reform activism, and maintaining accountability (Table 7.1). It then attempts to distinguish between situations in which these tasks are “primary” versus “secondary” depending on the prevailing corruption syndrome. In this way, the framework both proposes a broad sequence of responses to corruption and leads to important warnings, such as the argument that “[t]oo much emphasis on confronting [Official Mogul] regimes directly could well result in repression – or, could induce insecurity among elites and thus encourage rapacious hand-over-fist corruption in the here and now” (Johnston 2014: 49).

Thus, there are a number of promising approaches that demonstrate the need for contextually sensitive “mid-range theorizing” about corruption and anti-corruption strategies. They take us well away TABLE 7.1 The changing reform agenda: primary tasks of deep

democratization, by corruption syndrome Tasks/syndromes

Official Moguls

Oligarchs and Elite Clans Cartels

Primary

Secondary

Increasing pluralism Opening safe political and economic space Reform activism Maintaining accountability Emphasis on Task:

Influence markets

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from monochrome, unidimensional constructs of corruption and linear, uncontextualized Theories of change. Most important, they point toward a more realistic view of the politics of corruption control, to which we now turn.

III Beyond “good governance”: Getting to… what? Drawing a better road map for reform entails a clear notion of where we want to go. How would we recognize and understand progress if we were to see it? If, as we argued in Chapter 3, positive outcomes are in no way the endpoint of change and even our best results will likely contain the seeds of new problems, what values will sustain – or undermine – our controls in years to come?

What is the opposite of corruption? Any realistic observer will admit that zero corruption is not on the cards. Not only has there never been a corruption-free society that we know of; we are unlikely ever to see one, if only because the basic notion of corruption originates in disagreement over the legitimate sources, uses, and boundaries of power, and over its connections with wealth (Johnston 2014: Chapter 1). Not surprisingly, therefore, we do not even have a consensus definition of the phenomenon.The conflicts inherent in democratic governance – much less those arising when we challenge an entrenched corrupt political order – make it inevitable that ends and means will be matters of dispute, and rules will be tested and broken. Further, as Klitgaard (1988: 24–27) has famously explained, controlling corruption has real costs, and even where reform is going well there comes a point at which the marginal cost of more controls will exceed their marginal benefits. Finally, in real life, some unknown, but likely large, share of corrupt dealings never comes to light. Another problem is a lack of clarity in goals and purposes. What do we want, and what would progress look like? Zero corruption is not a possibility. If what we seek can be termed integrity, what does that mean in practice at both the individual and the societal levels? Honesty alone – difficult though that may be to attain – and not breaking the law will not suffice for most of us. The classical conception of integrity as wholeness, and of the internal purity it connotes (Cox et al. 2017), bears worthy implications for uniting values, intentions, and actions at the

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individual or small-group levels, but encounters problems if we scale up to the level of whole societies where citizens are seen as self-interested participants in a competitive social arena. Authoritarian regimes may be more firmly in charge, but a monopoly on power can be a prime cause of corruption in its own right. Even a reform-oriented authoritarian system is likely, in anything larger than a city-state, to suffer from a chronic lack of valid information about on-the-ground problems. Similarly, while there are many ways in which waste, inefficiency, delays, and incompetence can facilitate corruption, efficiency alone will not suffice (Philp 2002; Johnston 2010). A highly efficient government may implement policies that are unwise, ineffective, or utterly unjust. Much the same can be said for law-enforcement models, particularly if they serve the interests of those at the top and their clients. “Good governance” has intrinsic appeal, and few would argue in favor of institutions that are badly run. Moreover, as noted in Chapter 1, the “good governance” rubric opened the way for international organizations, barred from intervention into countries’ domestic politics, to attempt to improve the quality of government. To that extent it has understandably been a high priority for aid, trade, and lending organizations, as well as for some business groups. But reform must pursue more than just technocratic effectiveness: justice as citizens understand it in terms of their own lives, and enabling citizens to pursue those values, are critical too. That raises urgent questions reaching well beyond the realm of administrative processes: equity, inclusion, mutual tolerance, and fair play in both the public and private sectors are just a few examples. Such a list might be misunderstood as simply a call for western-style liberal democracy, but today’s affluent market democracies fall well short on many of those criteria too. Reform must thus aspire to more than preventing and punishing specific kinds of official misconduct, and the role of citizens and the private sector must be more than just “being good.” Striving for a good society and upholding its shared values are of the essence. At the same time, it is insufficient to conceive of corruption control solely as a public good – better government for the sake of all – because of the collective action problems we have noted at several points. If citizens are to confront abuses of power and alter the imbalances of power that facilitate them, they will need strong and lasting motivations of their own to take on the challenges and risks of doing so. Moving toward that sort of wholeness will be difficult and protracted – work that will never be finished – if only because it involves

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establishing a dynamic political balance among citizens, and between them and those who govern, rather than a particular array of laws and institutional “best practices.” No society will arrive some day at a terminal state of “good governance.” Durable, functional, credible, and visibly fair processes of politics as well as of administration, emphasizing justice, accountability, and inclusion rather than just compliance with rules, are more fundamental goals, and citizens will judge our success or failure in terms of impacts upon the quality of their own lives. We are speaking, therefore, of processes of change that are long, contentious, subject to many reversals, start from diverse beginnings, and may move toward differing ends. In light of the diversity of experiences those conditions highlight, one-dimensional conceptions of reform or change will tell us little. There will never be a sure-fire set of laws, institutions, management techniques, or best practices although, to be sure, bad ideas and worse practices abound. Sometimes we will address corruption only indirectly in the process of thrashing out the aforementioned questions of who will govern whom, by what right, using what means, and within what limits. At times, answers to those questions – even if just provisional settlements – will emerge out of deep social crises or frustrating stalemates. After all, corruption can provide a focus for contention, or a vocabulary with which a range of grievances can be aired, without requiring or creating any sort of master plan for good government.The essence of the process, rather, is political: redress imbalances of power that enable abuses and exploitation. While no two anti-corruption stories will follow the same paths, historical and contemporary examples suggest that progress is possible. Let us briefly consider two examples: one, a century-long struggle between Crown and Parliament in England; the other, the ways in which Georgia took important steps toward better government by not letting a systemic crisis go to waste.

The crown, the barons, and an angry parliament: Asserting new interests For centuries English monarchs enjoyed the presumption that “the King can do no wrong” (the following draws upon Orr 2002; Peck 1990, Roberts 1966), and they gave every indication of putting that doctrine to use. By the end of the 17th century, however, the monarchy was being reshaped in ways that anticipated today’s constitutional form of sovereignty vested in the Crown-in-Parliament and a Royal

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Prerogative that can be reduced but not expanded. How those changes occurred is a long and tangled story, but one driven by elites who demanded limits on royal power, in the process bringing new voices and interests into the process of governing. An early phase revolved around a running political battle between Plantagenet Kings (true Official Moguls) and Barons with regional power bases and significant grievances. In 1215 King John, preparing to fight yet another war for land in present-day France, was confronted by two dozen or so Barons who saw his demands for funds and soldiers as an abuse of royal power. In the course of the dispute they drew up a list of grievances that the King must meet, including inter alia restrictions on taxation, payments to the Crown, and seizures of property; limitations on indefinite imprisonment and a guarantee of prompt trials; and reaffirmation of the independent rights of the Catholic Church. Magna Carta (the Great Charter) was in no way a declaration of the rights of common people – it reflected the interests of the Barons – and it was even less any sort of plan for “good governance.” It did, however, establish the principle of limits around the Crown’s powers and a nascent kind of accountability – even if only to a few well-placed, politically powerful nobles. The King signed on, likely as a matter of necessity rather than out of conviction. Ensuring that his promises be honored was difficult: the Charter had to be reissued and reaffirmed several times, both in revised form and through parallel documents, with the immediate needs of monarchs serving as critical leverage. The Provisions of Oxford (1258), for example, were signed by John’s son Henry III, who desperately needed funds and backing in his struggle against Simon de Montfort. They placed further restrictions on the Crown, including the establishment of a Privy Council to oversee the operation of government and royal properties. Oversight of the Council was in turn vested in Parliament, which henceforth would meet three times each year. The Provisions were replaced the next year by a different document, voided in 1261 by Henry with papal assistance, and again in 1266. Over time, many of the basic guarantees and limits of the Charter and Provisions – notably, a body of Common Law applying to all – became widely accepted. Still, it was not until the end of the 13th century that the Charter was formally incorporated into the statutes of the land – and that only won the assent of another King, Edward I, in exchange for the power to levy a new tax. Charter provisions were reissued and refined over the next two centuries, and then

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in the 16th were reformulated under the Tudors to extend royal powers and claims upon subjects. Thus the limits of royal powers, while established in principle, were still contested in detail as the 17th century began, and the Stuart era that began in 1603 would see even more conflict and change. By that point Parliament had become a political rival to the Crown; while it differed greatly from today’s body, it did possess important powers of taxation, for example. For the Stuarts, frequently hard-pressed for funds, parliamentary consent was imperative, and they set out to obtain it via any means necessary. Royal patronage, the creation of new titles and sale of offices, and outright bribery were frequent tactics for influencing Members. Parliamentary leaders saw such enticements as corrupt, and responded by reviving 13th-century powers of impeachment. While the King remained formally free from that threat, those who advised him could be, and were, targeted. One such impeachment, launched in 1640, involved the Earl of Strafford. He was accused, with some justification, of a range of offenses, but the real issues were the independence of Parliament and Strafford’s support of the King, which made Strafford a tempting political target. In the course of his trial, a remarkable exchange occurred in which Strafford claimed that as a royal counselor he could not be restrained or tried by Parliament. Parliament responded that indeed he could be, since the two Houses collectively spoke for the nation. Strafford responded that if that were so, then he and Parliament were both answerable to the electors. Strafford was fighting for his life – conviction could mean death, and indeed he was executed in 1645 – and that broader notion of accountability was a club to swing in a political street fight, not a proposal for better government. Asserting such accountability did not make it a fact: a regicide, three civil wars and the Cromwellian republic, an eventual Restoration, and then the Glorious Revolution (again by Parliament, in part over the King’s religion) and the installation of William and Mary on the throne on terms laid down by Parliament, all had yet to occur. What is striking, however, is the way contention over the sources and limits of power, who could hold and use it, and within what limits, drove the evolution of responsible government. Important principles of accountability surfaced as byproducts of clashing political interests, not as prescriptions of “good governance”; they survived primarily because at least some of those interested parties had a stake in their success.

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A new day in the Caucasus? From political space to reform activism Soviet-era corruption in Georgia – from 1922 until 1991, just one of the USSR’s republics – was epic in variety and scale, often exemplifying the Oligarchs-and-Clans syndrome. Members and factions of the Moscow hierarchy often found Georgia a convenient place for trafficking in precious gems and similar goods, in the process turning non-convertible Rubles into real assets. Its small scale and peripheral location only increased the ease of carrying out, and concealing, lucrative schemes. Later, as the Soviet Union crumbled and conflict mounted in the Caucasus, trade in arms, drugs, and human beings could be routed through the area. Today’s Georgian republic was founded in 1991 (a brief earlier period of independence lasted only from 1917 through 1921) but struggled with economic problems, regional conflict, Russian attempts to reclaim hegemony, massive displacements of populations, and an extensively corrupt, ineffective domestic government. The “Rose Revolution” of 2003, sparked by elections in 2002 that were widely regarded as fraudulent, deposed the regime of Eduard Shevardnadze largely without violence. The viability of the republic, however, was far from a foregone conclusion. Georgia is often proposed as a comparatively successful case of corruption control, and with some justification (Kaputadze 2017). But its reform story is still in progress. Tbilisi still does not control all of what was once its territory, as the breakaway northwestern region of Abkhazia continues to claim status as a separate republic.The economy, despite some bright spots, continues to struggle, and development data do not yet point toward any sort of Caucasian Miracle. Corruption is perceived to have eased to a degree; Georgia’s CPI score was 56 in 2019 (best in its region and ranking 44th globally) after having bumped along between 49 and 52 for several years before (Transparency International 2020). To the debatable extent that perception measures reflect actual trends, they likely lag reality, so perhaps a positive trend has been in place for some time. The 2019 Index of Public Integrity (ERCAS 2019) ranks Georgia higher, at 35th out of 117 countries; its score of 7.44 on a scale of 10 reflects slow but steady improvement. The country has succeeded, with significant western encouragement and support, at tax simplification, upgrading customs functions, and increasing speed and transparency in a range of administrative processes. Crime rates and the influence of various “thieves-in-law” have

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declined, and “notoriously corrupt” university entrance examinations have given way to a credible, merit-based system (World Bank 2012: 80). Police departments have been reorganized and given a more professional image; an American visitor to Tbilisi might think the streets are patrolled by the New York Police Department because of new uniforms issued as a part of reforms. Political finance controls enacted in 2011 have checked some of the worst abuses flowing from election campaigns, but some officials still use state resources to aid favored parties, and transparency of party finances remains a work in progress. More recently, corruption in the judiciary has become a growing concern. Still, compared to the 1990s (let alone mention the Soviet era) today’s Georgia gives clear signs of becoming less corrupt and better governed (see Kaputadze 2017). Here too, reform has involved considerable contention. The most obvious example is the Rose Revolution which, in part because of the government’s modest scale, was able to depose the ancient régime and its ways of doing things with remarkable thoroughness. Most of the old guard was pensioned off and replaced by a new generation of politicians and officials. Even before Shevardnadze’s fall, Georgia had a small but impressive nucleus of young technocrats in some top agencies. After 2003 a steady flow of foreign-educated Georgians, many of them young and bearing expectations shaped in the west, returned to government and business.That same visitor to Georgia would be struck, in the course of interacting with government officials, by their youth and modernizing outlooks. They not only added expertise and energy to governing institutions; they constituted a significant political interest in themselves, pushing for a style of government that reflected positive values. Georgia’s renewal has been a product of struggle in other ways too. The Caucasus has long been contested territory, with Russian incursions into Georgia occurring as recently as 2008 and other border disputes being a continuing fact of life. National economic survival is a challenge, one that entails selecting and favoring some domestic interests over others. In diplomatic and policy terms, Georgia has thrown in its lot with the West, a decision made with regional rivalries and global stature in mind. The nation is an enthusiastic member of the Open Government Partnership, for example, and officials see that connection as critical if the country is not to fall behind, or be vulnerable to, its neighbors. At the same time that and similar choices come with significant risks attached, given the geopolitical realities of the region.

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In some respects, Georgia’s situation resembles that of Singapore after its expulsion from the Malaysian Federation in 1965. It is a small state struggling – as a matter of survival and fundamental state-building – to overcome a legacy of ineffective government. Improving the quality of government is not only a development priority but also, arguably, a matter of survival in a geopolitically unsettled region and a highly competitive world economy. While Georgia does not have a dominant figure analogous to Lew Kwan Yew, the rising generation of modernizing officials and businesspeople seeking to consolidate their positions made corruption control a dominant theme in domestic politics. The result was “an era of radical reform” (Kaputadze 2017) between 2004 and 2008 during which, as one official put it, “[w]e had no other choice… there was no budget… institutions were dysfunctional… we had to function somehow” (Ibid., p. 82; see also Engvall 2012). But Georgian reform remains very much a work in progress. Kaputadze (2017) argues that as the first wave gave way to more continuity beginning in 2008, that rising generation became, not just a strong political interest group in itself, but more of a political interest for itself. Low-level bribery and other abuses have become less common, but concern persists about the influence and actions of some political and business elites. Once again, corruption-control principles and good-government values made progress not just because they were good ideas, but because significant political groups had a stake in them, and were willing to confront others who stood in their way. But like any other example of political contention, myriad forces, changing circumstances, and the law of unintended consequences remain active parts of the picture. Georgia, in its own fashion and on its own scale, has made significant progress against corruption via political means, but concerns about electoral corruption, for example, make the future difficult to predict. The lesson here is not to call for – nor to wait for – revolution. In poorly governed states, such upheavals could well end up harming the weak and vulnerable. Reform, after all, places significant stress upon official and social institutions, and system-changing contention can be even more disruptive, in both positive and negative senses. Still, we may be able to build political resistance to corruption from within, over the middle to long term, by engaging the self-interest of citizens and improving the ways they are treated by government (and, in many contemporary societies, by businesses too).We will make more of those

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ideas in Chapter 8. But for now, what lessons might these two reform stories hold for today’s anti-corruption industry?

IV Recalibrating the anti-corruption machine: Strategic issues Much contemporary reform programming reacts to, and seeks to punish or prevent, specific sorts of corrupt activity, be it in direct remedial fashion or indirectly through various capacity-building efforts. Building social demand for better government is not absent from the agenda, but it generally relies upon civil society models overly dependent upon formal organizations and top-down models. Those efforts are often vulnerable to collective action problems, for reasons outlined in earlier chapters. As noted in our opening chapter, many of contemporary reform ideas are good ones. But they need strong and sustained social support.That includes not just demands for enforcement, but also political backing for leaders who take the lead – and take the heat. As argued in earlier chapters, the notion of “political will” from the top as a deus ex machina is often an empty slogan, verifiable (if at all) only after the fact and fraught with its own risks. If political will is to offer any lasting benefit it must come from, or at least be bolstered by, society at large.That argument is clearest in democracies, and possibly in democratizing societies too, but in other settings too, citizen demands for better government can have positive effects (Chenoweth and Stephan 2011; Beyerle 2014). But unless a system seems ripe for discontinuous change, opponents of corruption may need to focus on prior tasks such as bringing more voices and interests into public life, and opening up safe and valued political and economic space in which citizens can pursue their interests (Johnston 2014). Thus, the English and Georgian cases, while different in many respects, suggest that significant progress against corruption may come as a byproduct of deeper systemic change. Such fundamental change – sometimes rapid and discontinuous (Rothstein 2011a) and sometimes through long struggles – will almost inevitably involve challenging existing power relationships. After all, the top leadership of “extractive states” (Acemoglu and Robinson 2012) and other exploiters with a stake in their continued dominance will not give up easily. Half-way accommodations and useful stalemates, more often than striking democratic breakthroughs, may have to be the first steps toward workable limits around power.

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Underestimating the challenges Why has the anti-corruption industry not addressed the problem in those ways? Some of the answers have to do with the analytical problems discussed in Chapters Three, Four, and Five. But as argued in earlier chapters, others have to do with the ways contemporary anti-corruption efforts came into being, and with the interests, instincts, and limitations that shaped them. As noted, international and intergovernmental organizations, national governments, international NGOs, and the like are not supposed to intervene in the domestic politics of the countries, they seek to aid and, not surprisingly, do not welcome interference by each other. And again as noted, a long-standing (if debatable) reform tradition holds that good government means insulating policy and decision-making from politics. When northern and western interests do intervene elsewhere, it is primarily to serve their own interests, a proposition supported in years past by western governments’ tolerance of, or outright support for, corrupt leaders and regimes on geopolitical grounds.Today such interventions aim much more at retaining regional and global political influence, and maintaining regimes and markets friendly to those countries’ businesses, than at redressing power imbalances within societies. Indeed, the language and symbolism of reform can usefully mask self-serving interventions, just as internal coups can be mounted in the name of ending corruption – often to be followed by the continued abuse of power. Whatever the underlying reasons, genuine efforts to redress imbalances of power are few. Most of the leading countries in the reform industry are liberal democracies embodying political traditions in which the sources of power and structures of governance are largely settled issues.To be sure, major questions of fairness and justice remain, but they are addressed through incremental changes in processes and, less frequently, structures, rather than by directly confronting questions of who is to rule whom. As Fukuyama (2013) points out, good-governance thinking in such societies is typically concerned more with how existing powers can be limited institutionally than with how they should be used. But building lasting limits around power and those who use it will be difficult if we put too much emphasis on not disrupting the status quo, as significant corrupt or corrupting activities may well enjoy legal and institutional protection, as noted earlier. Many in the anti-corruption industry sincerely seek greater justice and better lives for citizens, but the nature of that industry, the strategies and tools it employs, and the

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worldview it embodies also work overwhelmingly to the benefit of the countries, and of the political and economic interests, that pushed corruption control back onto the global agenda. In some senses that is an inevitable state of affairs. Realistically, we can scarcely expect those major governments and interests to be actively involved in reform if they stand to gain nothing from it. It is also worth noting that these arguments are not the same as some critiques we hear – for example, that the United States/World Bank/International Monetary Fund/western businesses are out to keep poor people poor, want to re-colonize developing societies, and so forth. Today’s reform agendas, in our view, are not so much sinister as narrow, outdated, and incomplete. It is taken as given that emulating the ways things are done in affluent democracies should be the top priority for emerging and struggling societies.As a result, reformers are diverted from seeking many changes in power relationships that might actually check corruption. To be sure, there is nothing simple or straightforward about seeking those changes. Even in societies widely regarded as successes, the process more often than not was difficult, contentious, and marked by reversals. After all, they were thrashing out fundamental questions of power and justice, not just trying to prevent or punish various kinds of misconduct. On top of that, the reform industry lacks sound metrics and clear goals and is hemmed in by the sorts of monochromatic thinking outlined in Chapters 3, 4, and 5. So what should we be doing – now, later, and perhaps not at all – and how should we go about it? One way to answer that question is with another: while we have seen who does benefit from current efforts, who should be served by reform? That, and differing ways of choosing reform tactics, is the focus of our final chapter.

Note 1 Technically, a condition in which there is no single variable that is either necessary or sufficient for producing a given outcome, but rather where different combinations/configurations of explanatory factors represent distinctive causal pathways leading to the outcome of interest.

References Acemoglu, Daron, and James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail:The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Crown. Bhargava,Vinay, and Emil Bolongaita. 2004. Challenging Corruption in Asia: Case Studies and a Framework for Action. Washington, DC: The World Bank.

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Bauhr, Monika. 2017. “Need or Greed? Conditions for Collective Action against Corruption.” Governance 30:4 (October), pp. 561–581. Beyerle, Shaazka. 2014. Curtailing Corruption: People Power for Accountability and Justice. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Birch, Sarah. 2011. Electoral Malpractice. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Bolongaita, Emil. 2010. “An Exception to the Rule? Why Indonesia’s AntiCorruption Commission Succeeds Where Others Don’t – A Comparison with the Philippines’ Ombudsman.” U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre, August 2010 No. 4. Online at https://www.u4.no/publications/an-exception-to-the-rule-why-indonesia-s-anti-corruption-commission-succeedswhere-others-don-t-a-comparison-with-the-philippines-ombudsman.pdf. (viewed 14 July 2020). Braumoeller, B. F. 2003. “Causal Complexity and the Study of Politics.” Political Analysis 11: 3 (Summer), pp. 209–233. Chenoweth, Erica, and Maria J. Stephan. 2011. Why Civil Resistance Works:The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. New York: Columbia University Press. Cox, Damian, Marguerite La Caze, and Michael Levine. 2017. “Integrity.” In Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring). Online at https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/integrity/ (Viewed 14 July 2020). Engvall, Johan. 2012.“Against the Grain: How Georgia Fought Corruption and What It Means.” Washington, DC: Johns Hopkins-SAIS, Central Asia-Caucasus Institute and Silk Road Studies Program. Online at https://www.silkroadstudies.org/publications/silkroad-papers-and-monographs/item/13117against-the-grain-how-georgia-fought-corruption-and-what-it-means. html (Viewed 14 July 2020). ERCAS (European Research Center for Anti-Corruption). 2019.“Index of Public Integrity.” Online at https://integrity-index.org/ (Viewed 14 July 2020). Fukuyama, Francis. 2013. “What is Governance?” Governance 26:3 (July), pp. 347–368. Graycar, Adam. 2015. “Corruption: Classification and Analysis.” Policy and Society 34:2 (September), pp. 87–96. Graycar, Adam, and Tim Prenzler. 2013. Understanding and Preventing Corruption. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Guillan Montero, Aranzazu. 2011. “As If: The Fiction of Executive Accountability and the Persistence of Corruption Networks in Weakly Institutionalized Presidential Systems, Argentina (1989–2007).” Ph.D. thesis, Georgetown University,Washington, DC. Gulati, Mohinder and M.Y. Rao. 2007. “Corruption in the Electricity Sector: A Pervasive Scourge.” Ch. 4 (pp. 115–157) in J. Edgardo Campos and Sanjay Pradhan, The Many Faces of Corruption. Washington, DC: The World Bank. Johnston, Michael. 2005. Syndromes of Corruption: Wealth, Power, and Democracy. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Johnston, Michael. 2010. “Assessing Vulnerabilities to Corruption: Indicators and Benchmarks of Government Performance.” Public Integrity 12:2 (Spring), pp. 125–142.

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Johnston, Michael. 2014. Corruption, Contention, and Reform: The Power of Deep Democratization. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Kaputadze, Alexander. 2017. “Georgia: Breaking out of a vicious circle.” Ch. 4 (pp. 80–101) in Alina Mungiu-Pippidi and Michael Johnston (eds.), Transitions to Good Governance: Creating Virtuous Circles of Anti-Corruption. Cheltenham, UK, and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar. Klitgaard, Robert. 1988. Controlling Corruption. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Klitgaard, Robert, Ivar Kolstad, and Tina Søreide. 2009.“Corruption in Natural Resource Management: Implications for Policy Makers.” Resources Policy 34:4 (December), pp. 214–226. Mungiu-Pippidi,Alina, and Michael Johnston. 2017. Transitions to Good Governance: Creating Virtuous Circles of Anti-Corruption. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Mungiu-Pippidi, Alina, et al. 2011. Contextual Choices In Fighting Corruption: Lessons Learned. Oslo: Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD). Orr, D. Alan. 2002. Treason and the State: Law, Politics and Ideology in the English Civil War. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Painter, Martin. 2008. “From Command Economy to Hollow State? Decentralisation in Vietnam and China.” Australian Journal of Public Administration 67:1 (March), pp. 79–88. Peck, Linda Levy. 1990. Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Philp, Mark. 2002. “Conceptualizing Corruption.” Ch. 3 (pp. 41–57) in Arnold J. Heidenheimer and Michael Johnston (eds.). Political Corruption: Concepts and Contexts (Third Edition). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Ragin, C. C. 2000. Fuzzy-set Social Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Roberts, Clayton. 1966. The Growth of Responsible Government in Stuart England. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Rothstein, Bo. 2011a. “Anti-corruption: The Indirect ‘Big Bang’ Approach.” Review of International Political Economy 18:2 (May), pp. 228–250. Rothstein, Bo. 2011b. The Quality of Government: The Political Economy of Corruption, Social Trust and Inequality in an International Comparative Perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Savedoff, William D., and Karen Hussmann. 2006. “Why Are Health Systems Prone to Corruption?”. Pp. 4–13 in Transparency International (ed)., Global Corruption Report 2006: Special Focus on Corruption and Health. Berlin: Pluto Books. Transparency International. 2020. “Corruption Perceptions Index 2019.” Online at https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2019 (Viewed 14 July 2020). World Bank. 2012. “Fighting Corruption in Public Services: Chronicling Georgia’s Reforms.” Washington, DC: The World Bank. Online at http://documents. worldbank.org/curated/en/518301468256183463/pdf/664490PUB0EPI 0065774B09780821394755.pdf. (Viewed 14 July 2020).

8 SO… WHAT SHOULD WE DO?

I Aren’t we doing anything right? Spend more than about five minutes browsing today’s Internet and there is a good chance you will see a display advertisement with a friendly, encouraging headline – something like “Peeling an Orange/ Boiling an Egg/Loading Your Dishwasher:You’re Doing It All Wrong!” There usually follows a stream of unsolicited advice that makes you wonder whether the writers have actually done the activity they presume to teach you. There is a risk that this book will fall into a similar category. We – your co-authors – have amassed many years’ teaching, research, and reform work between us, but it should be clear by now that we offer no silver-bullet remedies. We have on-the-ground experience in numerous countries, but to our knowledge, none have erected statues honoring us as reform heroes – nor will they likely do so. We have devoted the first seven chapters of this book to what we see as chronic problems in the mainstream anti-corruption industry, many of which grow out of deep-seated worldviews and professional interests. We believe our critique is valid but do not intend our overall message to be anything like “Corruption Control – You’re Doing It All Wrong!” In fact we agree with and support many of the anti-corruption tactics reformers are trying to implement, but we raise questions about overall theories and strategies. Reforms have been uncoordinated,

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non-systematic, and disconnected from political realities. Many are too limited – focused on short-term responses to specific corrupt practices but ignoring underlying enabling conditions. We have implemented controls in unselective ways without careful sequencing, and without considering how they might interact – in effect, bombarding corruption with whatever seemingly good ideas fall to hand. Many have been launched without a solid base of social and political support or any realistic plan for developing one; the assumption seems to have been that because better government will eventually benefit nearly everyone, nearly everyone will actively support reform. We have not developed detailed theories of change appropriate to the contrasting situations we encounter. As noted at several points, we have conceived of corruption control as crime control, or as a gradual “non-political” process of improving administrative processes and building “cultures of integrity,” rather than as a struggle to reverse political imbalances that enable some people to abuse and exploit others. Perhaps the most serious problem is that corruption has implicitly been treated as though it were the same thing everywhere – usually, as variations on bribery – and not as a contingent dilemma deeply embedded in the histories, divisions, social characteristics, politics, and economics of complex societies. The result has too often been a one-size-fits-all approach, one congenial to dominant, top-down interests but disconnected from the realities of corruption as citizens live it.Three decades of dedicated efforts have all too often fallen prey to collective action problems, been thwarted by entrenched elite groups, and been subverted or coopted by mendacious or politically insecure leaders. In this concluding chapter, we do not propose new to-do lists of legislation, treaties, programs, or agencies. The focus is instead upon politics and justice – building demonstrably fair, open, and broadly beneficial systems of government for the long term – and upon enabling citizens to provide critical impetus and guidance. The means we propose rest on a fundamental premise that people should call government and each other to account, and defend their interests and wellbeing, by political means that cannot be ignored. Many of the tactics we might employ are familiar, but they must become parts of middle- and longterm, and politically explicit, efforts to build fairer politics, policies, markets, and private institutions. Strategies will often be indirect, playing a political “long game” rather than just targeting particular kinds of misconduct. Those changes will challenge most if not all parts of

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the anti-corruption industry to reconsider the reasons why they are involved in the first place, their ways of thinking about politics, and the extent of their commitments. We should not seek zero corruption – and few reformers explicitly do – for such is impossible, but we need goals much more specific than “less corruption,” if only because we cannot measure it and often disagree as to what it is. Instead, the overarching goal must be justice, and a key attitude on the part of citizens and lower-level officials: we refuse to be exploited.

II More than sound processes Looked at that way, lasting reform must come from within society, first and foremost, and be driven from below by political means. Politics has often been seen as separate from corruption control – indeed, as part of the problem to be solved. That in turn means that even the best anticorruption measures often lack strong social and political foundations and are vulnerable both to resistance from those with a stake in the status quo and to collective action problems among possible reform supporters. In some settings directly confronting corrupt elites and their enablers might be a top priority, but in more risky situations, other changes must happen first – notably, encouraging the proliferation of strong networks and active constituencies in society, and developing safe and valued political space wherein they can advocate their own interests. (Johnston 2014). Changes on that order will require careful coordination with – indeed, at times creating and nurturing – independent, legitimate, locally rooted groups and leadership, as well as the backing of broader and higher-level bodies. Efforts to improve the quality of governance institutions and processes should ordinarily proceed wherever possible, but it may be some time before direct anti-corruption activism will become possible, much less advisable. Finally, the job of opposing corruption is never finished: even in affluent, settled democracies – in some respects, particularly there – continued challenges to unjust privileges and the legal/political order that protects them will be of the essence. None of that will take place on a clean political slate, and reformers will encounter considerable resistance from others who feel threatened by basic political change. Without significant contention, however, we are entitled to ask whether anything fundamental is being changed.

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Long and indirect paths For all of those reasons we offer, not a dazzling list of new control techniques, but rather suggestions and caveats regarding ways to make familiar ones work. They include: •

•

•

•

We should not aim primarily at punishing corrupt practices, and we can do little to prevent them, until we change the political power imbalances that enable and protect them. At a practical level, that entails strong, well-enforced protection for whistleblowers – those who know about corrupt activities but might otherwise be intimidated into silence.Various sorts of whistleblower protections are on the books in most societies, but in many cases, they are easily circumvented and not credible. People reporting corruption must be protected not only against reprisals from employers, fellow workers, and government officials, but also from the citizen supporters of “populist” leaders who seem all too willing to engage in intimidation campaigns and, at times, violence. To that end, strategies should focus on the middle to long-term, not short-term projects; on politics as well as on administrative processes; and on sustaining our initiatives financially, politically, and legally by building anti-corruption resources and support within societies, rather than mounting a series of short-term projects financed – and guided – from without. We must be more selective about what to do and what not to do. In some countries, there have been so many externally funded good-governance projects that they dissipate political and administrative support and in effect step on each others’ toes. Our top priorities should be to engage citizens’ interests and energies via demonstrable, sustained improvements in basic public services and facilities, economic and political opportunities, and better treatment by officials and police. In that way we might show that reform is real, encouraging people to develop a lasting stake in it and to advocate continued improvements by political means. Better measurement and assessment methods should be an urgent priority. Reformers, their political and economic backers, and citizens at large need to know whether control tactics are having beneficial or harmful effects or, indeed, any effects at all. Those engaged in or contemplating corrupt activities must be made aware of how anti-corruption efforts are changing the environments in

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which they make choices – not only with respect to detection and punishment, but in terms of opportunities for corrupt gains, their likely returns, and popular tolerance, disapproval, and willingness to file reports. We should not seek more “headline numbers” regarding overall levels of corruption in whole countries – something that is surely unknowable with precision, and not even particularly useful for corruption control – but rather need tightly targeted information on specific government functions, political activities, and relationships among officials and between them and the private sector. Such data will not yield broad-brush impressions as presently provided by whole-country index scores; indeed, they may well reveal contrasting trends depending upon the realities of a different public functions (procurement, for example, versus regulatory inspections, versus contracting). Imaginative measurement techniques repeated over time, however, could provide finding that are actionable – that is, could not only tell us about some corruption situation but also point to effective responses. Those kinds of information, if linked to solid evidence on the quality and trends of government performance (Johnston 2010), can be used to show citizens that anti-corruption efforts are producing real benefits in daily life – potentially a powerful antidote to the collective action problems plaguing many current civil society approaches. • In that sense, reform groups that have long avoided political involvement might reconsider, viewing contention as the energy that enables citizens to check officials’ conduct and hold them accountable. The resulting processes of change will be complex, disorderly, and prone to reversals, for top figures and clients benefiting from corruption will not give up their advantages cheerfully. But as noted in Chapter 7, that sort of politicized reform process can more closely mirror the processes by which once-extensively corrupt societies have made progress in the past. • Sequencing of tactics and strategies – and therefore, well-reasoned theories of change – are critical. We do seek changes in the present, but how do we make them happen and where will they take us? What should we do early on, or later, or not until enabling goals have been accomplished? What should we refrain from doing at all? How do desirable changes facilitate, impede, or contradict each other? Early on we might not even mention corruption at all, but rather focus on inclusion, improving basic services,

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and encouraging the growth of informal social networks based on self-help, sociability, and stronger group ties – not, at least initially, on formally organized anti-corruption groups. The former sorts of networks, even if they do not have anti-corruption agendas, can build mutual trust, leadership, and organizational skills essential for dealing with a range of problems; the latter, by contrast, are often vulnerable to official reprisals, collective action problems, resource problems and are dependent upon resources and saddled with strategies originating elsewhere. Checking corruption from a standing start is a very high threshold to clear. In time, however, opening up safe political space and, later, direct challenges to corruption, can be more effective if strong social networks are in place. Events will rarely if ever map neatly onto such a theory of change, but it can still help us understand what is happening, what has gone wrong, and what principles and goals should guide the next steps. • Sometimes we should do familiar things for different reasons, with different expectations and metrics. For example, literacy and schooling for women and young girls may already be in our policy repertoires as economic development priorities (and if not, they should be), but they should also be seen as one way to build social capacity for self-interested advocacy. Similarly, supporting the formation of urban and rural cooperatives might be a way to enhance citizen autonomy and efficacy, and thus to reduce vulnerability to elite mistreatment. The effects of such efforts are unlikely to show up in corruption indices but might be estimated using measures of self-organized activities of all sorts within a community, or by measuring and benchmarking key aspects of government performance and community wellbeing.1 As much as possible, emphasis should be upon developing local ownership and leadership of these efforts, and credit for any success or positive trends should accrue locally and visibly. The anti-corruption industry became quite skilled, early on, at pointing out places where corruption appears to be serious, but it has been far less effective at highlighting successful leadership and signs of progress.

Caution is in order… Not surprisingly, these arguments come with several caveats. With respect to contention and citizens’ ability to assert their needs and

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interests by political means, for example, we are not advocating conflict for its own sake. Such an approach would likely harm the people most in need of better government. It is good to rally an anti-corruption army, but we cannot march it directly over a cliff. Even where citizen participation is massive and the grievances clear-cut, there can be danger ahead: but for the intervention of Fidel V. Ramos, the massive “people power” demonstrations that toppled Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos in Manila in 1986 might well have culminated in slaughter. Rather, we see contention as a continuing political process of challenging the fundamental balance of power in a society and demanding an improved quality of life. Such contention does not necessarily signal that a consensus-driven push for reform has failed, but rather might show that pressure is being brought to bear in the right places. Contention among reformers – citizens will inevitably differ in their circumstances, priorities, and levels of mutual trust – might well be discouraging, but it could also be the sort of ferment that generates useful new ideas and energy. Other complex questions surround the role of international institutions, many of which are barred from intervening in the domestic politics of the societies they seek to help. The distinction between aid and technical assistance concerns, on the one hand, and domestic politics can be decidedly porous, but the principle of limits on political interventions is not likely to change – nor should it. Still, those institutions and aid efforts can emphasize enhancing grassroots autonomy, human agency and basic rights, and citizens’ abilities to become their own advocates, without choosing the targets and tactics of such activity. International bodies could also play a critical role in discouraging reprisals by local leaders against citizens who are challenging the status quo more aggressively. More indirect roles for aid agencies might also usefully discourage assumptions that struggling societies must rely upon western models to pursue justice, or that such goals can best be pursued by externally designed short-term projects. A different sort of risk is that, particularly when mobilized by antisystem and demagogic leaders, popular resentment of corruption can curdle into illiberal anti-democratic populism of the sort recently seen in several democracies. That is another reason why anti-corruption advocacy and citizens’ own interests and grievances must be linked, not to a blanket resentment of elites, immigrants, or other citizens, nor to vague promises of future benefits for all, but rather to demonstrable improvements in the quality and fairness of services, official treatment,

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and the daily life of local communities. To that end, socially rooted leadership and strong, diverse social networks will be essential. So will the sorts of measurements and data mentioned above, published frequently in accurate and readily understood fashion (Johnston 2013; Camerer, 2006). If anti-corruption mobilization deteriorates into anti-liberal populism, citizens will only have traded one form of elite exploitation for another. Similarly, while social networks and grassroots organizations can be forces for reform, they can also capitalize upon and reinforce divisions and conflicts within society: Putnam’s (2000) distinction between “bridging” and “bonding” social capital is directly on-point here. A detailed and subtle understanding of social identities, divisions, and patterns of trust and distrust will be essential before efforts at citizen mobilization can begin. So will ideas for channeling assistance to leaders and groups with “bridging” agendas – more reasons why anti-corruption strategies must vary in response to local social situations and problems, rather than following some catalog of “best practices.” A different, less-widely recognized reform problem has to do with the difference between risk and uncertainty. The two concepts, for our purposes at least, are quite different: a potential participant in corruption might be able to make a useful estimate of the risks of being caught and punished, and of a corrupt deal’s failure, versus the probabilities of gains. But too often uncertainty reigns: Will I get caught? Will the law be enforced? Can I trust the people I’m dealing with? Will the police and courts function honestly, corruptly, or at all? Will the officials in a government office treat me fairly? For that matter, will that middleman hanging around outside that office, offering his help – for a price – be any more useful, or is he just another scammer? Reforms intended to change the costs and benefits of corrupt dealings rest on assumptions about those kinds of calculation, but in practice they are far from simple. To the extent that such risks can be guessed at – and, assuming that would-be bad actors actually do engage in such rational thinking – such reforms might be useful. But uncertainties arising from faulty or poorly enforced controls, dysfunctional courts, poor access to information, wider economic or political changes, or a great many other causes can create excellent opportunities for favoritism, deception, intimidation, and the dubious sorts of predictability that might seem to be available for a price. Often we justify new controls by claiming to make corruption more risky, but poorly drafted laws and

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uncertain enforcement will only heighten uncertainty. There may be a Gresham’s Law of reform: too many bad reforms drive out the good. Perhaps the most important caveat is to avoid treating corruption as though it were the same thing everywhere. We have already dwelt on the problems of “monochromatic” whole-country corruption rankings, views of corruption and reform, and the like. The risk is overlooking critically important variables: the strength or weakness of state, political, and social institutions; relationships between corruption and violence, inequality, and social divisions; the kinds of benefits or punishments at stake; whether corruption drives wedges among elites and factions, or creates incentives strengthening hegemonic networks; the number of sources for corrupt benefits and relationships among them, the sorts of intermediaries encouraging and feeding upon corruption (Oldenburg 1987; Khanna and Johnston 2007), and the numbers and types of clients seeking benefits; whether corrupt processes are repeated and continuous, or one-off episodes; the extent to which what we see as corrupt is legal or illegal, contrary to core institutions or protected by them; and so forth. All will create contrasts in the kinds of corrupt activities we see, their consequences, and the sorts of controls and remedies required. As noted in Chapter 3, the common grand-versus-petty distinction does a poor job of capturing such potentially important contrasts; “need” versus “greed” corruption (Bauhr 2017) is a more suggestive distinction but others must be kept in mind too. An awareness of qualitative variations directs our attention to the ways corruption is embedded in a society, but treating it as a generic problem encourages us to think of it as some sort of departure from a previous norm that can be “tackled” through crime prevention and be embracing best practices. Such a view can also distract us from understanding the political and economic interests with a stake in seeing it continue. Similarly, while affluent market democracies tend to receive the most favorable ratings on governance indices, an understanding of the types and origins of their corruption problems should dispel any notion that liberal democracy has unique corruption-suppressing qualities, and that therefore reform can be reduced to “governing like us” (for a powerful critique of that notion see Thomas 2015). Democracies experience corruption too – viz. the “populist” discontents seen in many democratic systems, as well as our earlier discussions of institutional or influence market corruption – and often find it embedded in legitimate institutions and processes. By contrast, a few undemocratic regimes – often in smaller societies and those emerging from national

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crises – have had success in checking corruption: consider Chile under Pinochet, Singapore under Lee Kwan Yew, or more recently Rwanda under Kagame (several process-tracing histories appear in MungiuPippidi and Johnston 2017). There is no reform magic in authoritarian crackdowns, as the sad outcomes of numerous anti-corruption coups can demonstrate. A firm hand and enlightened tactics at the top might suppress corruption for a time, but because such regimes generally rarely build or accommodate countervailing political forces or strong civil societies, they may check corruption for a time through the sheer fear of punishment yet do little or nothing to encourage real accountability to society at large. Indeed, they may well encounter succession crises when the reform leader leaves the building. Authoritarian anticorruption successes can prove short-lived, particularly if a leadership transition gives way to a surge of pent-up but poorly institutionalized opposition and other political activity.

Policy matters Quite apart from responses to corrupt dealings, ordinary government activities can powerfully influence popular expectations and behavior. All else being equal – which it never is – where offers and demands for bribes are routine, where favoritism and nepotism are common, and where public policies most often reflect the wishes of the wealthy and well connected, people will pay up, play the game, and rely on personal connections and particularistic loyalties (Mungiu-Pippidi 2015) while taking an understandably skeptical view of appeals for reform. But can we demonstrate that there are better alternatives? Showing, clearly and in sustained ways, that government can provide even mundane services, carry out regulatory functions, collect taxes, handle revenues, and enforce laws in demonstrably fair and effective ways could change popular expectations of and responses to government and politics. Rothstein (2011), for example, has emphasized the value of universalism: policies “that apply equally to everyone” (Anttonen et. al. 2012). In practice that seemingly straightforward principle can raise complex questions, but the key is policy that benefits wide segments of society in visibly fair and understandable ways. Uslaner (2017), for example, has shown a strong and remarkably persistent link between mass educational attainment in 1870 and low levels of apparent corruption today. Part of that relationship can be attributed to the effects of education itself via connections such as personal autonomy, awareness

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of rights and responsibilities, and so forth, but it seems likely that the universality of access to education also contributes to the relationship by shaping expectations regarding government’s obligations to society. Universalistic policies can bridge social divisions rather than exacerbate them, build trust in government and among citizens, encourage expectations of fair and reliable official treatment, and persuade citizens that they have a lasting stake in good government. By contrast, officials who can be “persuaded” usually are helpful only in the short term, must be placated again and again, and are open to the influence of other clients who can pay more and have fewer scruples. Universalistic policies will not necessarily provide identical treatment to all, but where differences are called for they should be on the basis of clear and consistent criteria. Programs providing a return on one’s own contributions can build trust and positive expectations of what government can and should do.2 Universalistic policies can emphasize openness, accountability, and transparency not just to inhibit or reveal misconduct, but also to give visible recognition to the importance of treating citizens fairly and conducting public functions effectively. In terms of building strong and lasting public pressure for just and consistent treatment, they will be far preferable to a patchwork of special privileges and exceptions. These ideas underline the fact that the political dimensions of our approach to reform do not just amount to constant or aimless conflict. Policies and administration emphasizing a convergence of citizen values and interests are political initiatives too. So too are anti-corruption tactics that disrupt corruption-prone “niche networks” linking interest groups, policymakers, and implementers into insider schemes for agency and program capture.

But, don’t we do these things already…? Organizations of many sorts already do things resembling what we have outlined here. But are we doing too much, in fragmented and uncoordinated ways, and on too short a timeline – too many projects without careful sequencing that soak up time, commitment, and resources, working at cross-purposes or, by flailing and failing, produce a sense of public resignation and political futility? Maybe a more selective approach is in order. How do we choose higher- versus lowerpriority reforms? What should we defer until later stages? How can we monitor and measure effects? Whom, specifically, are they intended to help, who will have a stake in their success, and what are they intended

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to hinder? Who gets credit for them, for better or worse? Do our projects and activities seem likely to produce more equitable power relationships in the middle to long term? How, and why, do we expect that to happen? What are we prepared to do to check corruption within our programs and among our backers? Many of these questions will be familiar. But they are examples of the sorts of risks, unintended consequences, and complexities – along with opportunities – that will inevitably shape the outcomes of our anti-corruption choices. The most important lessons are to plan and act for the long run, yet be tolerant of contention and reversals in the short term; to be cognizant of emergent opportunities, some of which may come disguised as corruption scandals and reform failures; to recognize the deeply political nature of what we are attempting to do, rather than trying to insulate “governance” from political influences; to be selective in our choices of reforms and to sequence them in careful ways; to remember that some of our better-governed societies today emerged from periods of extensive corruption in the past, often via contention over fundamental political questions, not through best practices or anti-corruption master plans; and to help produce change with people and according to their senses of what their needs and problems are, rather than for people – or, for the sake of our own reputations. There are indications on several fronts that those sorts of ideas are being applied and their implications taken seriously. Global Integrity, for example, has developed a promising new “Listening, Learning, and Adapting” strategy that emphasizes “tailored” and contextualized advice to changemakers in areas such as anti-corruption and service delivery, and then uses feedback and results to refine the effort (Global Integrity 2020). A new “Curbing Corruption” project breaks down corruption on a sector-by-sector basis (e.g., health, fisheries, construction) and then, for each, identifies characteristic types and vulnerabilities as well as challenges and opportunities for reform (Curbing Corruption 2020). TRACE International provides a variety of antibribery resources and training programs for subscribing businesses, including – notably for our purposes here – highly sophisticated data analysis estimating the severity and sources of corrupting pressures a firm is likely to encounter in a given country, government sector, and line of business (TRACE International 2020). The ERCAS Index of Public Integrity (ERCAS 2019), discussed earlier in our section on measurement, breaks down public integrity into six dimensions

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measured in ways that maximize validity and reliability. OECD deploys its formidable data holdings and analytical capacity to examine specific dimensions of public integrity, and to develop detailed assessments and recommendations, for a variety of countries and for major units of government within them (OECD 2020). What makes these initiatives, and others not named here, noteworthy is that they seek to analyze corruption in its full context and complexity, to avoid one-size-fitsallow reforms, and to base their recommendations on robust analytical frameworks that allow the incorporation of new lessons and results as they emerge. There are of course no guarantees of success. Several possible futures await us; while we can hardly choose authoritatively among them at this stage, it is worth considering the diverse paths reform might take, be it because of or in defiance of the best policies we can devise. That is the focus of our concluding discussion.

III Corruption and reform, 2050 Wherever we might stand vis-à-vis corruption today – making slow and uneven progress, at a stalemate, or losing ground – the situation will not remain unchanged. Much lies beyond our reach, and even our imaginations; other factors may be more readily anticipated and open to our influence. What might some of those scenarios look like, and what might they suggest about the opportunities and choices we face now?

Civic virtue triumphant? We are unlikely ever to see a world without corruption, if only because there is no consensus as to what the term means. Moreover, the basic notion of corruption itself originates out of clashing notions of where power comes from, how it may and may not be used, and whose interests it should and should not serve (Johnston 2014: Chapter 1) – questions that will never be answered to the satisfaction of all. Corruption control via appeals to individual morality is problematical, as we all must concede from personal experience. Civic virtue, for its part, often confronts an even more complex mix of rewards, temptations, costs, and uncertainties. Civic principles are more likely to be among the eventual outcomes – if only in the form of stalemates or provisional settlements – of contention over core issues of power and justice than

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any kind of starting point for good government. Those principles are never settled once and for all and in practice are continually vulnerable to collective action problems if not outright defections. For those societies that have moved from extensive corruption problems toward higher-integrity government and politics, the driving force was often pressure from ordinary citizens or groups of elites demanding respect for themselves and their interests. Such contention, and anti-reform backlash, should not necessarily be seen as a sign of failure, but rather might indicate that such demands are beginning to gain some traction. Even when they seem relatively settled, systems of laws and frameworks of norms will have to adapt in order to survive. Reformers might work for the good society in which integrity as wholeness rules the day, but taking humans as they are in the context of the world we have, is such a grand goal attainable?

Data to the rescue? Our contemporary emphasis on transparency has scarcely produced a massive rollback in corruption, lasting increases in trust in government, or a surge in social accountability. Indeed, in some ways, transparency can do more to underline the scope of existing problems and create new leverage for various political paymasters than to prevent or punish corrupt dealings (D’Angelo et al. 2017; Johnston 2019). Greater transparency has certainly yielded immense amounts of new data on political financing, public revenues and expenditures, and government contracting and procurement. But who can use and interpret such data? Can anyone mount a political response on a par with the abuses of wealth and power they may reveal? Will such data tell us where to attack corruption, what to do about it and, no less important, how to know whether we are making progress? Can transparency become a ritualized diversion, offering the appearance of openness while suspect activities remain concealed or obscured in other undisclosed ways? Transparency may tell us a great deal about a government’s routine activities and finances, but can it reveal cross-border flows of money, weapons, strategic commodities – and human beings? In these and other areas “sunlight” alone may do little good: at a minimum we need people and organizations to scrutinize whatever transparency reveals, analyze data in valid and rigorous ways, and put what they learn to political uses (Cain 2014). Such capacity is not evenly distributed in or among societies: self-interested businesses and organizations are

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more likely to take lasting advantage of transparency than will average citizens. We may need to develop systems of “positive transparency” whereby public and private organizations do not just open the window for anyone who wishes to look, but aggressively publicize their data and recruit citizens – ideally, those with a stake in checking abuses of wealth and power, and in improving government performance – to analyze what they see. Simply allowing scrutiny is unlikely to greatly reduce corruption.

The privatization of everything? Taking the bureaucrat out of the loop via privatization, thereby depriving officials of their leverage over private parties, was not only an article of neoliberal faith in the 1980s and 1990s; it was also seen as a promising anti-corruption strategy. Enthusiasm for that approach has receded somewhat in recent years as heavily privatized economies have come under fire for generating wider inequalities, and for neglecting important public goods such as environmental protection, labor legislation, and the like.The anti-corruption aspects of that agenda proved wanting as well; Argentina, for example, seems to have seen corruption intensify or at least remain entrenched under both aggressively privatizing governments and those that partially brought back the public sector (Manzetti 2009; Guillan Montero 2011). At the very least it became clear in several parts of the world that privatizations routed through weak regulatory and market institutions could easily become as corrupt as the official dealings they were intended to preempt. We may still be seeing continued privatization by informal means as heightened inequalities and liberalized rules facilitate agency capture and give the wealthy outsized influence over political finance. Trends toward influence-market and institutional corruption enable powerful private interests to hollow out regulatory and policy processes while enjoying the protection of laws and institutions. The proliferation of offshore and technologically arcane international finance dealings, shell companies, and the like can create unregulated and well-concealed financial havens for the wealthy and well connected, and for those enterprises that seem to do business everywhere yet are not effectively taxed or regulated anywhere. Those people and organizations can move money in seconds and can alter their processes and structures far faster than law enforcement and ACAs can adapt. Indeed, illegality might become relatively unimportant as privatizing firms and individuals do more or

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less as they please while facing few of the legal or institutional restrictions that might otherwise give them reasons to bribe. Reformers must remember why we need sound, high-integrity public institutions, why it is foolish to entrust an unshackled private sector or liberalized market mechanisms to uphold the public interest, and indeed that the notion of a public interest does not merely equate to the aggregate of private desires. Rules, institutions, and limits are equally essential for routine private-sector activities: as Bo Rothstein has astutely noted, “You can have a market for anything as long as you do not have a market for everything” (Rothstein 2011: 209).

The piratization of everything? As the growth of inequalities, the hollowing-out of state functions and authority, and a privatized world of global finance move toward their logical extremes, might we see an elite-driven, smash-and-grab economy emerge as global and local oligarchs contend over wealth? That is an extreme scenario to be sure, one that can still stretch the imagination. And yet: who or what is to prevent such an outcome and stand in the path of the powerful interests bringing it into being? At the very least, there is a clear message for reformers: continuing to view corruption as mostly quid pro quo bribery, as the same thing everywhere, and as a national trait of whole societies may very well be to ignore the most important forces shaping the future. A collateral lesson is that we cannot hope to preempt this grim scenario if we do not address political agency: who creates, maintains, and benefits from the power imbalances within political systems? Oligarchs and financial pirates may be venal and devious, but they are not fools; rising concern over institutional and influence-market corruption shows us how adept they can be at writing their advantages into law and protecting their assets behind institutions originally intended to benefit the larger public.

Populists ascendant? The hegemony of wealth sketched out above is unlikely to come into being without a fight, but will it be the sort of constructive corruptionchecking contention discussed throughout this book? Or will it take the form of current varieties of “populism,” stated here in quotation marks as it is usually a way of misusing democratic processes in order to take advantage of those who feel left behind in their societies? The

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rise of illiberal democracy and its impresarios in places like Hungary, Poland, the Republic of the Philippines, and the United States reveal those dangers in sharp relief. If the anti-corruption industry does not become a great deal more adept at harnessing mass resentments of growing inequality, economic stagnation, political exclusion (Warren 2004), legal corruption, and cultural disrespect, populist leaders – at times, involved in corrupt alliances or dealings of their own – have shown their ability to do so. In effect ordinary citizens, angered for good reason by abusive exercises of privilege on the part of some elites, may give over their political energies and loyalties – and ultimately, their choices – to others who operate even further outside liberal democratic frameworks. If so, they will have traded one form of elite exploitation for others that are often intensified by access to official powers and state resources. From a reform standpoint, today’s populism appears as a huge, glowing neon sign telling us of reform opportunities that are being lost for want of effective linkages to the problems, resentments, and aspirations of citizens.

Something like…justice? A final alternative future – a tolerable and lasting degree of political, economic, and social justice for all – might seem to echo the “civic virtue” outcome. But it differs in important ways. First, it constitutes not so much a grand social settlement based on “being good” as a moving equilibrium among people and groups asserting and protecting their interests, not by violence or mob rule but by political action within a legitimate framework of laws, norms, and institutions. Alliances form, shift, and dissolve; controversies arise and intensify, perhaps producing policy changes, and eventually give way to new differences and disputes. The public agenda and its political processes might well be tumultuous, not a happy consensus. But perhaps contending interests and values can exist in a working balance, rules and norms be observed if only for pragmatic reasons, and outright injustice become very much the exception. Such a political balance would not always be satisfying, but while few get all they want, none would be perpetually left out. Outcomes would be far from ideal, but good enough (see, for an analogous argument, Grindle 2007), and a workable level of individual and social wellbeing could be sustained. Those outcomes would be tolerably just not only in substance but also because they were forged in participatory fashion. With respect to corruption, in this scenario

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we would not see anything like “zero tolerance”: someone will always seek an illicit advantage or try to avoid a deserved punishment, and someone else will often be willing to strike a deal. But often enough those activities would be punished and – better yet – deterred, not just by laws but also by widespread social disapproval and accepted expectations and norms. Clearly this scenario, and the aspirations it embodies, is nowhere near as modest as the heavily qualified language above might suggest. Its lesson of this scenario for reformers? Liberal democracy in merely its procedural senses will not do; most if not all such countries fall short of the scenario outlined here, and a distressing number are moving away from it. Moreover, liberal democracy, as the Influence Markets or Institutional Corruption concepts suggest, is prone to complex and deeply entrenched varieties of corruption of its own. Further, success is unlikely to be the attainment of collective morality or perfect equality, but rather a system of values, attitudes, and processes that reflect and uphold a balance between liberty, on the one hand, and essential social obligations and restraints. It requires open, competitive, well-regulated political processes – not “governance” insulated from political influences – and to realize that justice must reside in those processes as well as in specific outcomes. Totally eradicating corrupt activities is impossible. If we can, however, pursue justice and fairness less as a public good than for our own sakes – if our system dependably treats you fairly, chances are I will be better off too – then we may muddle our way through to better government and a fairer society.

IV Conclusion: The conundrum of corruption By now it will be clear that this book is not a how-to manual for reformers. We have not sought to spell out novel countermeasures or collect “best practices.” As we have noted at several points, much of what the reform industry seeks to do is worthwhile and indeed, necessary in many settings. Where things have gone wrong is in the industry’s overall analysis, and thus in its tendency to apply standard ideas and remedies at whole-country levels without much adaptation to local variations in corruption itself, without explicit theories of change, and without sufficient attention to the political foundations any reforms must have if they are to succeed. The fundamental issue, we have argued, is not transparency, political will, ratios of costs to benefits, constitutional architecture, or even the letter of the law. Instead,

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it is the basic imbalances of power that enable the few to exploit the many. If corruption is a symptom or manifestation of those imbalances, it makes little sense to attack it in the absence of a workable strategy for rebalancing power in the long run. Therein, perhaps, we most clearly see the conundrum of corruption – that a bundle of problems and abuses with compelling human costs has called forth a reform industry that, by its origins and sustaining interests, is ill-disposed and unable to bring about the fundamental rebalancing of power that reform will require. Of the sincerity and courage of most working in that industry there can be little doubt; still, they – we – ended up doing many of the right things but for the wrong reasons, in unspecified sequences, at the wrong levels of analysis, with few real ways of knowing whether they are having any effect. As our emphasis on imbalances of power should make clear, we aim for very large long-term goals revolving around the ability of people to govern themselves, effectively to be sure but also justly. Still, our next steps must be careful, based on an understanding of contrasting situations and problems, and politically realistic. For those reasons, most of what we propose is indirect and long-term in nature, aimed more at fostering a political and social climate in which corruption controls can succeed than at specifying needed controls themselves. In some settings, direct anti-corruption offensives may be premature or even dangerous, putting the victims of corruption at further risk rather than putting meaningful pressure upon bad actors in the economy or the regime. At times, as we suggest in Chapter 7, prior challenges must be addressed first, and those will require time, considerable patience, and political insight. At the same time, progress can be made even in some authoritarian settings, depending upon the quality of leadership, local economic opportunities and political realities, and cross-border influences too.We do not recommend authoritarian political moves, even if they are accompanied by proclamations of “political will”; the dismal records of many societies where corruption has been a pretext for coups d’etat are there for all to see, and to serve as cautionary tales. Our recommendation for the contemporary reform industry, therefore, is not to dismantle current policies and programs, much less to quit in resignation. It is, instead, to step back, catch our collective breath, and contemplate the histories of societies where corruption has been brought within some limits and where the quality of government is promising. That assessment will of necessity be humbling, as those success stories rarely if ever grow out of the efforts of a dedicated

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anti-corruption movement – much less, from an industry that has become large and forceful but not very adaptive. Instead, they reflect the refusal of specific people and groups – sometimes, subgroups of elites and sometimes large segments of society itself – to put up with mistreatment by those who govern. Driven by needs and interests of their own, they have challenged their abusers by political means in ways – often, quite contentious – that could not be ignored. The result has not been ideal governments or totally harmonious societies, but rather a workable balance that citizens may hope to sustain if they stay engaged with political processes. Our job as reformers is to help bring that sort of balance into being and to encourage and enable people to demand and maintain governments that are open, responsive, and above all, just. In a world in which humans govern humans, that is as close to civic virtue as we are ever likely to get.

Notes 1 A frequent question with respect to such measures is how we can know whether any improvements are the result of reductions in corruption, or rather reflect more general improvements in the economy or the quality of government. At a scholarly level that is a fascinating question worth careful study. But from a reform standpoint we may not care, at least until enough time has passed for improvements to become routine: if reforms have facilitated better use of public power and resources and have improved outcomes for citizens on a lasting basis, we are quite likely checking some corruption en route to accomplishing other good things. 2 In the United States, for example, many social welfare programs, even though they are not particularly generous or redistributive, are often popularly – and mistakenly – viewed as indiscriminate handouts subject to extensive fraud. By contrast, the Social Security system, to which people contribute throughout their working lives, is widely supported. That welfare fraud is far less common than many citizens think, that Social Security is widely misunderstood as being a personal savings scheme rather than the social insurance program it actually is, and that both kinds of policy are under continuing attack by candidates seeking polarizing “wedge issues,” do not alter the fact that Social Security, viewed by most as a return on their own efforts, has a strong base of support.

References Anttonen, Anneli, Liisa Häikiö, and Kolbeinn Steffánson. 2012. Welfare State, Universalism, and Diversity. Cheltenham, UK, and Northampton MA: Edward Elgar.

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Bauhr, Monika. 2017. “Need or Greed? Conditions for Collective Action against Corruption.” Governance 30:4 (October), pp. 561–581. Cain, Bruce E. 2014. Democracy More or Less: America’s Political Reform Quandary. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Camerer, Marianne. 2006. “Measuring Public Integrity.” Journal of Democracy 17:1 (January), pp. 152–165. Curbing Corruption. 2020. “Practical Help for Reform-Minded Officials, Politicians, Agencies, Companies and Others.” Online at https://curbingcorruption.com/ (Viewed 14 July 2020). D’Angelo, James (with David C. King and Brent Ranalli). 2017. “The Evolution of Transparent Corruption.” Unpublished ms.: Online at http:// congressionalresearch.org/extrafiles/images/DAngelo2017Evolution OfTransparentCorruption.pdf (Viewed 14 July 2018). ERCAS (European Research Center for Anti-Corruption). 2019. “Index of Public Integrity.” Online at https://integrity-index.org/ (Viewed 14 July 2020). Global Integrity. 2020. “Listening, Learning and Adapting: A Strategy for Uncertain Times” (April 20). Online at https://www.globalintegrity.org/resource/ listening-learning-adapting-a-strategy-for-uncertain-times/ (Viewed 14 July 2020). Grindle, Merilee S. 2007. “‘Good enough governance’ revisited.” Development and Policy Review 25:5, pp. 533–574. Guillan Montero, Aranzazu. 2011. “As If: The Fiction of Executive Accountability and the Persistence of Corruption Networks in Weakly Institutionalized Presidential Systems, Argentina (1989–2007).” Ph.D. thesis, Georgetown University, Washington, DC. Johnston, Michael. 2010. “Assessing Vulnerabilities to Corruption: Indicators and Benchmarks of Government Performance.” Public Integrity 12:2 (Spring), pp. 125–142. Johnston, Michael. 2013. “Good Governance: Strategies and Tradeoffs for Measurement and Assessment”, prepared for the World Bank Expert Group on Measuring Governance. Presented at the World Bank, Washington, DC, September 30. Johnston, Michael. 2014. Corruption, Contention, and Reform: The Power of Deep Democratization. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Johnston, Michael. 2019. “Limits and Ironies of Transparency: Controlling Corruption in American Elections.” Election Law Journal 18:3 (September), pp. 282–296. Originally prepared as a conference paper for Colloque Transparence (workshop on the limits and shortcomings of transparency as a good-government strategy), University of Burgundy, Dijon, October 2016. Khanna, Jyoti, and Michael Johnston. 2007. “India’s Middlemen: Connecting by Corrupting?” Crime, Law and Social Change 48:3–5, (Sept.–Dec), pp. 151–168. Manzetti, Luigi. 2009. Neoliberalism, Accountability, and Reform Failures in Emerging Markets: Eastern Europe, Russia, Argentina, and Chile in Comparative Perspective. University Park, PA.: Pennsylvania State University Press.

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Mungiu-Pippidi, Alina. 2015. The Quest for Good Governance: How Societies Develop Control of Corruption. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Mungiu-Pippidi, Alina, and Michael Johnston. 2017. Transitions to Good Governance: Creating Virtuous Circles of Anti-Corruption. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development). 2020. “Public Integrity”. Online at https://www.oecd.org/corruption-integrity/Explore/Topics/public-integrity.html (Viewed 14 July 2020). Oldenburg, Philip. 1987. Middlemen in Third-World Corruption: Implications of an Indian Case.” World Politics 39:4 (July), pp. 508–535. Putnam, Robert D. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster. Rothstein, Bo. 2011. The Quality of Government: The Political Economy of Corruption, Social Trust and Inequality in an International Comparative Perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thomas, Melissa A. 2015. Govern Like Us: U.S. Expectations of Poor Countries. New York: Columbia University Press. TRACE International. 2020. “Anti-Bribery Compliance Solutions.” Online at https://www.traceinternational.org/. (Viewed 9 July 2020). Uslaner, Eric M. 2017. The Historical Roots of Corruption: Mass Education, Economic Inequality, and State Capacity. Cambridge and NewYork: Cambridge University Press. Warren, Mark E. 2004. “What Does Corruption Mean in a Democracy?” American Journal of Political Science 48:2 (April), pp. 328–343.

INDEX

Page numbers in italic indicate figures. Page numbers in bold indicate tables. ACAs, 7, 18, 36, 67, 70–77, 85, 137–138, 167; origins, 70–71; results 75–77 academic institutions 3, 9, 29 accountability 17, 139, 139, 143–144, 154, 157 administrative processes 18 aid-and-development sector 9, 29, 96, 141 Airbus SE 36–37 Aquino, Corazon 102 Aquino III, Benigno “Noy” 102 Andersson, Staffan 50, 60 Andrews, Matt 13, 15 Anechiarico, Frank 50, 60 Anti-Corruption Agencies see ACAs anti-corruption campaigns 34–35; see also mass campaigns anti-corruption industry 7, 98; academics 28, 31–32; beneficiaries 122–125; challenges 20–22; current activity and thinking 25–45; goals 18, 33; institutionalization 118–119; limitations 117–129; origins 8–18, 127; practitioners 28–31; strategies and tactics 14, 17, 20, 33–42 assessment 33; see also measurement authoritarianism 9 Avolio, Bruce J. 73

backwardness see corruption, as backwardness Bardhan, Pranab 72 Bass, Bernard M. 73 Bauhr, Monika 132 behavioral revolution 29 Bell, Daniel A. 106 “best practices” 10, 17, 98, 127, 142 Bhargava,Vinay 138 Bolongaita, Emil 138 Braumoeller, Bear F. 104 Bretton Woods 4, 29, 121, 126 bribery 15, 36, 50, 53, 55, 56 Brinkerhoff, Derick D. 15 British Aerospace 41 Byrnes, Timothy A. 64n5 Cameron, David 97, 118–119 causal complexity 134, 136–140 change: from above 94–95; from below 100–103; from external pressure 95–100; misconceptions 103–108; processes 142, 157; systemic 93, 131; see also theories of change civic progress 13 civic virtue 165–166 “civil society” approaches 17–19, 34, 38–39, 100–103, 108, 109n1, 121 collective action 19, 20, 62, 141 “compliance” 3, 10, 36, 54–55, 119 conflicts of interest 56

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corruption: assumptions 26–28; as backwardness 58–61, 131; definitions 18–19, 31, 49–50, 140, 165; as deviance 53–55, 131; diversity 131–134; embedded 125, 161; frameworks 50–62; grand vs. petty 15–16, 62, 161; indices 11, 52, 57; “legal” 5, 35, 53, 107; as moral decay 50–51; as national trait 56–58; “need” vs. “greed” 132, 161; “normal vs. systemic” 61, 62; syndromes 132–134, 137, 139, 139; systemic 61–62, 72; transnational 58; see also governance corruption Corruption Eradication Commission, Indonesia see KPK Corruption Perception Index see CPI Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau, Singapore see CPIB CPI 4, 6, 30, 31, 51–52, 57–58, 63n1, 97, 145 CPIB 70, 72 crime-prevention approaches 14, 33–37, 69, 125; see also ACAs Curbing Corruption 164 decentralization 78–79, 82–85, 96 definitions see corruption, definitions democratization: deep 137, 139, 139; “third wave” 8, 127 deregulation 39, 123 deterrence 9, 35 deviance see corruption, as deviance digital revolution 40 drug cartels 56 Duterte, Rodrigo 102 EITI 96, 99 elite cartels 132–134 embeddedness see corruption: embedded Emmanuel, Rahm 22 enforcement 18, 35, 68, 70, 72 ERCAS 164 ERCAS Index of Public Integrity see IPI Estrada, Joseph 4, 102

European Research Center for Anti-Corruption see ERCAS European Union Article 7 process 99 European Union Convention against Corruption Involving Officials 96 Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative see EITI FATF 96, 99 FCPA 4–5, 36, 40–41, 96, 98 Financial Action Task Force see FATF Foreign Corrupt Practices Act see FCPA “forensic” approaches 55 “framing” corruption see corruption, frameworks freedom of the press see press freedom Fritzen, Scott A. 94 Fukuyama, Francis 149 Global Integrity 28, 52, 164 Godber, Peter 86n2 Goldsmith, Arthur A. 15 “good governance” 3, 7, 10, 18, 29, 60, 119, 141, 142; characteristics 12–13; shortcomings 14, 156 governance corruption 51 Graycar, Adam 131 Grindle, Merilee 73 Hadiz,Vedi R. 84 Heywood, Paul 14 Hulme, David 82 Huntington, Samuel 105–106, 127 Hussmann, Karen 132 ICAC 38, 70–72, 86n2 imbalances of power see power: imbalances IMF 9, 150 incentive-based reforms 14, 20, 34, 37–38 inclusion 127 independent judiciary 17, 108 Independent Commission Against Corruption, Hong Kong see ICAC

Index  177

Index of Public Integrity see IPI indices see corruption: indices; see also CPI; IPI “influence markets” 132, 134, 170 integrity 127, 140 international aid organizations 12, 96, 122, 141, 159 International Monetary Fund see IMF International Organization for Standardization see ISO international treaties and conventions 34, 40–42, 67, 95–96 IPI 52, 60, 145, 164 ISO 36 Juvenal 71 justice 8, 127, 141, 169–170, 172 Kagame, Paul 162 Kant, Immanuel 28 Kaputadze, Alexander 147 Kaufmann, Daniel 7, 81 Khan, Mushtaq 106 Klitgaard, Robert 33, 37, 54, 61–62, 79, 82–83, 93, 140 KPK 75 Lee Kwan Yew 94, 147, 162 “legal corruption” see corruption, “legal” lending organizations 12, 122, 141 Lessig, Lawrence 107 liberal democracy 170 liberalization 34, 39–40, 68, 69, 77–85; origins 77–79 Lowi, Theodore J. 55 macroeconomic modeling 55–56 Madison, James 105 Magna Carta 143 Mann, Michael 76 Manor, James 79 Manzetti, Luigi 81 Marcos, Ferdinand and Imelda 4, 102 Maslow, Abraham 128n2 mass campaigns 101–103, 159 McCourt, Willie 82 McFaul, Michael 81

measurement 33, 52, 55, 63, 156–157, 160, 172n1 modernization theory 103, 105–108 monopolies 83 moral decay see corruption: as moral decay Mungiu-Pippidi, Alina 59, 75–76, 85, 138–139 nation-states 16, 57; see also corruption: as national trait National Integrity Systems (NIS) 57, 63n4 Nelson, Joan 79 neoliberalism 12, 167 NGOs 97 Non-Governmental Organizations see NGOs Nye, Joseph 49 OECD 165; Anti-Bribery Convention 4–5, 27, 36, 41, 96, 121 “official moguls” 133, 134, 139 offshore markets 40 OGP 96, 99, 146 oligarchs and clans 133, 134, 168 Open Government Partnership see OGP opposite of corruption 140–142 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development see OECD organized crime 38, 62 oversimplification 55–56 P–A models 14, 19, 20, 49, 54 P–A–C models 19, 20, 54 patrimonialism 80 “people power” 19, 38, 101–103, 159 Pinochet, Augusto 162 policy 162–163 policy evaluation 68 “political will” 15, 16, 18, 21, 69, 94–95, 99, 103–104, 109, 119, 148, 171 politics 140, 155–156 popular consent 13, 16

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populism 5, 159–160, 168–169 poverty 7 power 56, 165; imbalances 14, 21, 25, 120, 141, 156, 159, 171; limits 17; rebalancing 171–172; systems 11 Prenzler, Tim 131 press freedom 17, 18, 108 Principal-Agent models see P-A models Principal-Agent-Client models see P-A-C models private-sector corporations 122–123 privatization 39–40, 77–82, 85, 96, 123, 167–168 process-tracing analysis 135–136 public finance reforms 67 public-private partnerships 39 Putnam, Robert D. 160 quantitative analysis 29 Ramos, Fidel V. 102, 159 reform consensus 11–12 reform industry see anti-corruption industry Reinsberg, Bernhard 81 resource management 7 Roll, Michael 73 Rothstein, Bo 40, 162, 168 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 105 rule of law 17, 18, 35, 108 rules vs. values 20 Saba, Roberto P. 81 Sampson, Steven 10 Sapin II 5 Savedoff, William D. 132 Scott, James 104 sector-level analysis 132 sequencing of tactics and strategies 157–158 Shevardnadze, Eduard 146 Siegelbaum, Paul 81 Siemens 41 Simpkins, Edgar 58 Singapore Prevention of Corruption Act 70

Smoke, Paul 78–79, 85 social capital 17, 39, 160 social networks 17, 39, 158, 160 Social Security 172n2 stagnation 9 “structural adjustment” strategies 12 systemic corruption see corruption, systemic systems of power see power: systems Talleyrand, Charles-Maurice de 92 theories of change 86n1; better 131–140; lack of 7, 13; linear 67–68; monocausal 67–69; need for 18, 21–22, 33, 42, 157; see also change Thompson, Dennis F. 107 TI 4, 6, 9, 14, 28, 30, 57, 63n1, 97, 119 TRACE International 28, 43n5, 164 trade organizations 12, 122, 141 transparency 9, 16, 18, 34, 67–69, 108, 166–167 Transparency International see TI Transparency International Corruption Perception Index see CPI Turner, Mark 82 Twain, Mark 128n2 Types, Actors, Sectors, and Problems (TASP) approach 131–132 UNCAC 4, 41, 71, 86n3, 95–98 United Kingdom Bribery Act 5, 96 United Nations Convention Against Corruption see UNCAC United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) 96 United States Foreign Corrupt Practices Act see FCPA United States Supreme Court 53 urban renewal 128n1 Uslaner, Eric M. 162 values vs. rules see rules vs. values

Index  179

Warren, Mark E. 107 WGI 4 whistleblower protection 156 White, Roland 78–79, 85 Wolfensohn, James 4 World Bank 9, 14, 28, 78, 82, 86n4, 96, 98, 150

World Bank Institute World Governance Indicators see WGI World Economic Forum 14 Wraith, Ronald 58 Xi Jinping 77, 102