The Escape of Administrative Law: Consequences on Corruption in the Spanish Case

This paper aims to find out to what extent the administrative reforms inspired on New Public Management (NPM) increase corruption. My central hypothesis is that the efficiency that seeks to promote NPM is reached through an increase on public servants’ discretion possibilities that increases corruption. The research will be addressed through mixed methods with a triangulation design. The quantitative methodology is based on the statistical method with a large-N design consisting of the exploitation of a database of corruption cases in Spain from 2016 to 2018. The database I have created includes the judicial sentences for corruption felonies issued in Spain during that period (N=857). I consider several variables for each unit of observation that define the basic characteristics of the corrupt actions, the condemned person, and the administration where the corrupt behaviour took place. I have chosen this operationalization of corruption because of its objectivity, compared to the use of media information, the usual tool of the research on corruption relating to the Spanish case. I have also rejected the use of surveys about perceptions due to the same problem of objectivity but, anyway, this tool is only available at the state level, as is the case of victimization surveys. Thus, the conclusions of the analysis of this database will be the first piece of empirical evidence about corruption in Spain using an objective measure based on judicial resolutions. The qualitative methodology lies on a comparative study of three relevant cases of corruption in Spain. These three cases are referred to different territories (the city of Marbella, the Autonomous Community of Andalucía, and the province of Tarragona); different levels of the administration (a city council, a regional government, and several administrations in the last case); and different public activities (construction licenses concessions, public subsidies entitlement and health services provision contracts). Nonetheless, the three cases have in common the fact that the administration where the corrupt behaviours took place is a public entity designed in accordance with the principles of NPM. With this design I intend, firstly, to overcome the difficulties to conceptualize and measure corruption. Therefore, I use the qualitative analysis that permits to enlarge the elements of the corrupt situations considered in the study of each selected case. Meanwhile, the quantitative analysis will be more limited in the sense that it will consider only certain concrete elements of the case defined as variables in the database, even if in turn it can improve the generalization of the results. This study will not certainly resolve the controversy about the consequences of the escape of Administrative Law characteristic of NPM in relation to corruption. However, the preliminary results of the research show that the presence of entities of NPM in the recent corruption cases in Spain clearly exceeds the general presence of this kind of public bodies in the Spanish administration.