Abuse of Office Vs. Abuse of Power: A Normative Criterion for Defining Corruption in Democratic Institutions

Despite extensive scholarly attention, corruption remains a conceptually contested phenomenon, with significant implications for how democratic institutions are evaluated, governed, and reformed. The dominant definition, understanding corruption as the abuse of public office for private gain, has proven analytically useful but normatively insufficient in contemporary democratic contexts. This paper argues that the traditional abuse of office framework fails to capture forms of wrongdoing that occur through formally legal, procedurally compliant, yet normatively corrosive exercises of power. As a result, it obscures critical mechanisms of institutional degradation and weakens the conceptual foundations of accountability and anti-corruption policy. The paper advances a normative distinction between abuse of office and abuse of power, proposing the latter as a more comprehensive criterion for identifying corruption in democratic institutions. While abuse of office presupposes a violation of formal rules or fiduciary duties, abuse of power encompasses practices that exploit institutional authority in ways that undermine the moral purposes of public office, even when such practices remain legally permissible. Drawing on political philosophy and normative institutional theory, the paper conceptualizes public office not merely as a legal position but as a moral practice oriented toward the realization of collective goods, fairness, and institutional integrity. Building on this normative reconstruction, the paper develops a criterion for corruption grounded in institutional integrity rather than legal transgression alone. Corruption, it argues, should be understood as the systematic deviation of power from its justificatory purposes, regardless of formal compliance. This approach captures phenomena such as regulatory capture, strategic legalism, and ethically hollow governance, which often escape conventional corruption measures yet contribute decisively to democratic erosion. The paper further demonstrates how competing conceptualizations of corruption generate divergent implications for accountability mechanisms and policy design. Legalistic definitions tend to prioritize punitive enforcement and compliance-based monitoring, while power-centered normative frameworks support preventive, integrity-based approaches to institutional design. By foregrounding the moral meaning of public office, the proposed framework enables a more accurate diagnosis of institutional failure and offers clearer guidance for evaluating governance quality in complex democratic systems. The paper contributes to ongoing debates on corruption by clarifying the normative stakes of definitional choices. It argues that redefining corruption as abuse of power, rather than merely abuse of office, provides a conceptually robust foundation for assessing institutional legitimacy, strengthening accountability, and addressing forms of democratic decay that remain invisible under prevailing frameworks. This reconceptualization is particularly relevant for contemporary democracies facing rule-of-law backsliding and ethical hollowing under conditions of formal legality.