How Conceptualizing Corruption as Deficit of Office Accountability Challenges Existing Measures

Existing measures of corruption, e.g., Transparency International’s “Corruption Perceptions Index,” the World Bank’s “Control of Corruption” indicator, and the European Commission’s “Eurobarometer,” have long shaped scholarly and policy debates. Yet these measures rest on a behavioral and legalistic conception of corruption which importantly reduces the complexity of the phenomenon. They operationalize corruption as the observable abuse of entrusted public power for private gain. They thus focus on standardly unlawful practices, leading to damaging outcomes, which imply violations traceable to specific agents and, therefore, imputable wrongdoing. In short, such measures presuppose that corruption is fundamentally an “externally legible” act: bribery, embezzlement, undue influence. Recent conceptual work in political theory questions the suitability of these measures to capture the core of the phenomenon they purport to track. By conceptualizing the core of corruption as a “deficit of office accountability” (Ceva and Ferretti 2021), such work emphasizes that corruption always entails a deviation from the justificatory standards that structure the exercise of powers of office, which is not exhausted by illicit transactions or by the pursuit of private gain. It highlights that, throughout its manifestations, the core of corruption resides in an exercise of power of office whose rationale may not be vindicated by the terms of its mandate and, therefore, distorts the cooperative architecture of institutional agency. This work helps to see how corruption arises not only in overtly wrongful conduct but also in subtle forms of reasoning, justification, and coordination that misdirect institutional action. From this viewpoint, the dispositional features of officeholders—their evaluative postures, preoccupations, and practical identities (Ceva and Pedrini 2025)—matter not because they constitute corruption in themselves, but because they shape how officeholders act in their institutional capacity and can make corrupt uses of their power of office existing that measures cannot detect. This paper shows how the conceptual distance between existing measures and this office accountability approach is not one of degree but of kind. Behavioral measures are designed to capture incidents of rule-breaking, the frequency with which bribes are paid, or the perception that power is diverted for private ends. They presuppose that corruption is an event located in the conduct of individuals. But corruption, as a deficit of office accountability, may be neither externally visible nor overtly traceable. It may involve no intention to gain personally, no exchange of benefits, no explicit violation of a rule, and yet still take the form of a misuse of office when decisions are made for reasons officeholders are not in a position to justify as they should. Such misuse can be triggered by innocuous discretionary choices, routine accommodations among colleagues, unexamined loyalties, or the silent normalization of practices that gradually erode the justificatory structure of institutional action. It may even coexist with a formally compliant environment, where rules proliferate yet officeholders’ deliberation diverges from the terms of their mandate. The paper thus shows how the shortcomings of existing measures do not merely lie in their lacking granularity, but in their being anchored to the wrong explanatory ontology.