Corruption as Informal Governance: Beyond Compliance, Deviance, and Moral Failure

Corruption is commonly conceptualised in political science as deviant behaviour, institutional failure, or moral breakdown, to be addressed through transparency, compliance, and equal enforcement. While these approaches have generated extensive reform agendas and measurement tools, they struggle to explain a persistent empirical pattern: in many political and administrative systems, practices labelled as corruption are widespread, routinised, and yet compatible with institutional stability and predictability. This paper advances a governance-centred reconceptualisation of corruption as a structural phenomenon rather than an episodic deviation from otherwise functioning institutions. It argues that what is often described as corruption should be understood as structural corruption: a patterned set of informal practices embedded within formal institutional arrangements, through which actors manage contradictory legal demands, enforcement constraints, and political pressures. From this perspective, corruption is not external to governance but constitutes a mode of informal governance that sustains institutional workability under conditions of constraint. The paper situates structural corruption in contexts characterised by uneven, incomplete, or selectively realised modernisation, where formal legal frameworks proliferate faster than administrative capacity, political consensus, or enforcement coherence. In such settings, the formal institutions associated with modern governance—rule-based administration, legal equality, and impersonal authority—exist alongside informal mechanisms that compensate for their partial or inconsistent implementation. Corruption emerges not as a remnant of pre-modern practices, but as an adaptive response to the internal contradictions of modern institutional forms that are only partially realised in practice. To analyse these dynamics, the paper introduces CODYREF (Corruption Dynamics and Enforcement Fields) as an analytical framework for mapping how corruption is structured through unequal access to protection and differential exposure to sanction. Rather than reducing corruption to individual incentives, cultural norms, or weak capacity, the framework conceptualises corruption as relational and positional: its risks, legitimacy, and moral evaluation depend on actors’ locations within enforcement fields shaped by political economy and power relations. Drawing on empirical material from Russia and Ukraine developed across a broader research programme, the paper illustrates how structural corruption stabilises governance in contexts of regulatory overload and institutional contradiction. These practices facilitate coordination, mitigate uncertainty, and redistribute risk, even as they generate inequality and moral ambivalence. This perspective also helps explain why anti-corruption reforms premised on uniform compliance frequently fail: by targeting symptoms rather than the structural functions corruption performs, such reforms often undermine institutional workability without resolving the conditions that make corruption persist. The paper contributes to corruption studies by offering a theoretically grounded alternative to principal–agent, collective-action, and integrity-based models. It reframes corruption as a political and institutional phenomenon rooted in the limits of modernisation and enforcement, and it opens new avenues for analysing reform strategies that acknowledge, rather than deny, the informal governance mechanisms through which many contemporary political systems actually operate.