On the Place of Institutional Settings in the Conceptualisation of Political Corruption

Over the last quarter century several scholars have argued that while bribery is relatively rare in developed democracies, some forms of legal misuse of power have become the norm. Moreover, the abuse of power is often done by decent people who are effectively forced into circumventing democratic processes for their political survival. According to this literature, past conceptions focused overwhelmingly on bribery (also called individual corruption, or the conventional/narrow conception of corruption) and did not consider the rise of this more subtle form, which is often called institutional corruption. To get a better grasp on the challenge at hand, it is argued, we should contrast individual with institutional corruption and focus more attention on the latter (Johnston 1995; Lessig 2011; Thompson 1993; Warren 2004). The current paper challenges this institutional approach. The scholarship that has arisen around this conceptualization has produced a number of achievements, one of which is to highlight the difficulty, for politicians, of avoiding legal forms of misuse of power even in democracies. That is, a politician need not be greedy in order to act in ways that harm democracy and circumvent the public will (Lessig, 2011; Thompson, 1995). This scholarship is also helpful in pointing out that moralism may harm democracy. Finally, according to this corpus, it is clear that we need democratic politics in order to fight corruption effectively (Johnston, 2014; Thompson, 2013; Warren, 2010). But, as we shall show in the following pages, the conception of institutional corruption also suffers from deep difficulties. In short, the dichotomy between individual and institutional corruption is based on a caricature of past conceptions of corruption that actually obscures the core of political corruption. Similarly, the emphasis on institutions is at the expense of social structures and again obscures the root cause of systemic corruption. In fact, the new literature offers two partial conceptions of corruption – bribery or institutional corruption – neither of which captures the kind of problems contemporary regimes have to confront. In a more positive vein, our main argument in this paper is that an interest in agential features – properly understood – and in social structures, is part and parcel of any meaningful conceptualization of corruption. In contrast to recent literature, such an interest is not equivalent to a moralistic position, nor does it presuppose that only evil people are engaged in corruption. Before proceeding, a preliminary remark is needed. There is no doubt that institutions are necessary to explain why insufficient regard for the public is the norm – when this is indeed the case. Institutions sometimes have tremendously positive effects, and sometimes we can reduce corruption dramatically just by changing them. However, we argue that the root cause of systemic corruption in contemporary democracies is not solely institutional, but instead relates to broader issues of political economy. Second, even though institutions are indeed important, the conceptual landscape should not be limited to just bribery and institutional corruption, focusing on the circumvention of democratic processes, harm to public trust and violation of democratic norms. The paper has three main parts. The first introduces the concept of political corruption, and briefly discusses why we should conceptualize and study it. We then present a very short genealogy of the modern conceptualization of political corruption. The second part of the paper presents the institutional conceptualization and argues that it is grounded in three misconstructions. First, we briefly explain why deliberation and representative institutions are inappropriate baseline or reference points for political corruption. Second, we argue that the institutional conceptualization misconceives the nature of institutions. As a result, it glosses over two crucial elements: the interplay between self-interest and ethical behavior among agents; and the role of meta-institutional factors. The third issue concerns circumvention of the public's expressed preferences and harm to confidence in government and in democracy. We explain why, in our view, these cannot be the core of political corruption in democracies, but are – at most – manifestations of or proxies for political corruption. We conclude this part by rejecting the idea that we can understand political corruption by focusing on institutions. In the final part of the paper, we argue that systemic (or institutionalized) corruption is better understood through standard conceptualizations of political corruption and not in contrast, nor as an alternative, to individual corruption. In order to understand problems of corruption in democracies, we must also take into account agential and meta-institutional factors. That is, we must retain (a) the agential element, referring to agents’ attitudes (motivations, intentions, and awareness) as to the nature of their public behavior and to the public more generally, and (b) the meta-institutional elements, including a substantive notion of the common good and economic and social factors. Without the former, the difference between corruption and other forms of injustice or incompetence disappears (Philp and Dávid-Barrett, 2015). Worse, we lose the capacity to cope with excessive self-regard in politics. Without the latter – i.e., a notion of the public interest that is independent of democratic processes and without social structures – it is too difficult to grasp cases in which powerful agents come to dominate processes, institutions, deliberation and legislation for their own benefit, or to understand how they do it. We conclude by contending that the attempt to focus on institutions and ‘institutional corruption’, may actually impoverish democratic politics.