Corruption as an Umbrella Concept

Research on corruption has grown exponentially in the past two decades. An unfortunate development has been the mingling of the concept of corruption with related concepts, raising the spectre of “collective conceptual confusion”. This paper recasts the concept of corruption as an umbrella concept highlighting the family resemblance structure between corruption, clientelism, patronage, patrimonialism, and state capture. This transposes corruption to a category that can fit many cases reasonably well, but as Wittgenstein points out “on close examination it can become clear that for most cases the fit is not perfect.” This approach expounds each of the adjacent concepts, simultaneously elaborating on the spaces they share with corruption. This not only clarifies a set of commonalities, that are analytically important, but also explains the survival of the implicit understanding of these concepts as corruption thus far.