Corruption as a Principal Agent Problem, Collective Action Problem, or Something Else?

For a growing number of authors the wide-scale failure of anti-corruption programming lies in its inappropriate theoretical foundations. Principal-agent theory, which overwhelmingly influences anti-corruption programming, depicts corruption to be a ‘principal-agent problem’. Critical of this, several have recently argued that corruption is best understood through the prism of collective action theory, as a collective action problem. From this perspective, the application of principal-agent theory mistakenly assumes that there will be ‘principled principals’ in civil society and in positions of power enforce anti-corruption reforms. Instead, for these authors, systemic corruption persists because people find little gained in abstaining from or resisting corruption if they cannot trust that others will do the same. We contribute to the discussion by advancing three main arguments. First, the application of collective action theory, thus far, to the issue of corruption has been incomplete and narrow. Second, once the scope of potential contributions from collective action theory is widened, instead of the two theories being diametrically opposed, as they have been portrayed, they prove to be in fact complementary. Most crucially, in their present treatment, both perspectives share a crucial blind spot; in imagining corruption as only a ‘problem,’ both theoretical camps have failed to acknowledge that corruption often persists and political will to implement meaningful reforms often lacks because, in many contexts, corruption solves a host of political and social problems.