The Fifth Step of the Corruption Pyramid: Office Accountability and its Implications for Measuring Corruption

Recent debates in corruption studies have highlighted persistent conceptual ambiguities surrounding what corruption is, how it should be normatively assessed, and how it can be meaningfully measured. While classical definitions emphasise the abuse of entrusted power for private gain, recent contributions have sought to refine this understanding by unpacking the normative dimensions embedded in corrupt practices and their institutional consequences. Philips and David-Barrett (2025) propose a “corruption pyramid” that conceptualises corruption through four cumulative elements: entrusted power, abuse, private interest, and harm to the public interest, thereby moving beyond minimalist definitions and explicitly incorporating harm to the public interest as a constitutive component of corruption. Building on this framework, this paper argues that a further conceptual step is necessary to fully capture the distinctive wrong of corruption and its implications for measurement. Drawing on Ceva and Ferretti’s (2023) account of political corruption as an interactive wrong grounded in an ethics of office accountability, the paper proposes adding a fifth layer to the corruption pyramid: a deficit of office accountability. Corruption typically involves the misuse of entrusted power for private gain that might harm the public interest. Across its manifestations, it also often embeds a failure of officeholders to justify their actions in light of their mandate and the raison d’être of the institution they serve. This accountability deficit is relational and institutional in nature, affecting how officeholders answer to one another and to the public, and it constitutes a core normative feature of corruption rather than a mere contextual condition. The paper then explores how conceptualising corruption as a deficit of office accountability might improve existing measurement approaches. It argues that most contemporary corruption metrics, despite significant advances toward multi-source and multi-level measurement, remain primarily oriented toward instances of law-breaking, individual experiences and perceptions or institutional mechanisms and procedures. While these dimensions are essential, they do not fully capture the quality of accountability relations within public offices, particularly failures of answerability and justification that may not manifest as illegal acts, quantifiable experiences and perceptions or formal anticorruption institutional mechanisms and procedures. This leads to a systematic blind spot in corruption studies: the difficulty and promise of measuring corruption as a relational phenomenon and a challenge of institutional ethics. Integrating indicators that reflect accountability deficits, such as weak internal justification practices, limited institutional self-scrutiny processes, or the normalisation of mandate-deviating conduct, would enable corruption metrics to better capture the ethical and organisational dimensions of corruption. This shift would support measurement strategies that are more sensitive to context, normative standards, institutional practice, and the multi-level dynamics through which corruption emerges.