Presenting Work Package One
Bo Rothstein
Second ANTICORRP General Meeting, EUI-Florence
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What is Work Package One?
Social, legal, anthropological and political
approaches to theory of corruption
Partners: QoG, Hertie, EUI, UNIBG
One deliverable – month 24.
A state-of-the- art report on theories and
harmonized concepts of corruption
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The objectives of WP 1
• To analyse the landscape of different conceptualizations of
corruption and related concepts such as clientelism, patronage,
particularism, state capture and patrimonialism.
• To analyze the conceptualization of what is generally
understood as the opposite to corruption such as good
governance, universalism, impartiality, impersonal rule, rule of
law and quality of government.
• To relate existing definitions of corruption and the opposite to
corruption to various approaches in modern political philosophy
about social justice, human rights and political equality.
• To describe the implications of various definitional/theoretical
approaches considering their fruitfulness for empirical research
and public policy.
• To provide the project with a harmonized taxonomy of the
various definitional strategies of the above mentioned concepts
that will be related to their implications for research and policy.
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Why is this conceptual work important?
In order to study it, we have to know what we
are speaking about
Terminology is this area can be very confusing
and the debate is intense
If we do not have a clear definition, we cannot
operationalize and measure
If we cannot measure, we cannot explain
variation
If we cannot explain variation, we cannot
provide advice on how to combat corruption
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Terminology
Good Governance
State Capacity
Government effectiveness
Corruption
Clientelism
Patrimonialism
State capture
Rule of law
Universalism
Quality of Government
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The main issues in defining C and not C
• Broad/Encompassing or Restricted/Precise?
• Universal or Relative?
• Substance or Procedurial?
• Normative or Empirical?
• Governance or Government?
• Multi- or unidimensiona?
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Broad definitions of Good Governance
• World Bank: “the traditions and institutions by
which authority in a country is exercised”
• “(1) the process by which government are selected,
monitored and replaced, (2) the capacity of the
government to effectively formulate and implement
sound policies, and (3) the respect of citizens and
the state for the institutions that govern economic
and social interactions among them” (Kaufmann,
Kraay, and Mastruzzi 2004, 3)
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Problems with broad definitions
• ”If it is everything, then maybe it is nothing?”
• If just ”good democracy”, then why do we need another
concept?
• And…..the correlation between D & C is J-shaped!
• We would like to know if democracy increases control of
corruption and if democracy is included in the definition
this is not possible
• The line between ”bad public policies” and corruption
will be blurred
• The line between ordinary criminality (e.g., theft) and
corruption becomes unclear
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Relativistic definitions
• Corruption = ”the abuse of public power for
private gain”
• But was should be considered ”abuse”?
• What is the normative standard that is
transgressed when there is ”abuse”?
• This definition invites relativism
• Without a standard the specifies ”abuse” it
cannot be used for comparative research
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Normative arguments for a universal definition
• Should we accept a relativistic understandings of
concepts like democracy, human rights or gender
equality?
• If not, why should we accept a relativistic definition of
corruption?
• If we accept a relativistic definition, we can forget the
ambitions to meausere and compare
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How good is the empirical backing for relativism?
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The Public Goods Approach
• Every soceity have had to produce some public goods
• Some people will be guardians of these public goods
• Public goods are supposed to serve the whole
community in according to some universal standard
• When the public goods are used to favor some instead
of being delivered according to a universal standard,
people will react against this as favoritism
• The opposite to justice is not equality, but favoritism
• Corruption is an expression of such favoritism
• The norm that is abused is universalism (aka impersonal
rule or impartiality)
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Should policies (substance) be included?
• World bank: ”Sound policies”
• But do they really know?
• If so, which policies are ”sound” policies?
• Who should decide?
• Why should people accept?
• The Problem from Plato and Lenin - Do we want
democracy to be replaced by epistocracy?
• Democracy is usually not defined by content but
by procedures so why should the opposite to
corruption be?
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Normative or empirical definition?
• Empirical studies of political legitimacy – a surprise:
• "General governance (a composite of the rule of law,
control of corruption and government effectiveness)
clearly has a large, even overarching, importance in
global citizen evaluation of the legitimacy of states.“….“it
is notable that democratic rights, while certainly
qualifying as one of the most important causes of
legitimacy, turn out to be roughly on par with welfare
gains, and both of these are far less important than good
governance. This clashes with standard liberal
treatments of legitimacy that give overall priority to
democratic rights“ (Bruce Gilley 2006)
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Political Legitimacy cont.
• ”It is Quality of Government and the impartial treatment
on the output side of the political system, and not
electoral democracy, that creates regime legitimacy”
(Gjefsen 2012)
• Thus, when people evaluate the legitimacy of their
governments, the norms that dominate process of policy
implementation are very important
• This speaks in favor of a normative definition of
corruption and that opposite to corruption
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Problems with empirical definitions
• Fukuyama: ”Bureaucratic Autonomy” and ”State
Capacity”
• Both can be used for very bad purposes
• Acemoglu & Robinson: What is required is ”inclusive
institutions”, defined as system that “allow and
encourage participation by the great mass of people in
economic activities that make best use of their talents
and skill and enable them to make the choices they
wish” + rule of law. property rights, etc.
• Well, big news: The good society produces the good
society”’
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John Rawls and the two great hopes
• By arranging fair procedures for collective decision-making (=
liberal democracy) the probability of just outcomes will
increase (Rawls)
• By arranging fair procedures for the implementation of these
decisions (= QoG), the probability of just outcomes will
increase
• In both cases, there can be no guarantee, we are talking about
probabilities.
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Government or governance?
• The two worlds of governance
• Governance mode 1 as understood by public adminstation &
public policy scholars studying steering problems in western liberal
democracies
• A non-normative and functionalist critique of hierarchial and rule-oflaw administration (Weberianism).
• Focus on private-public partnerships, pseudo-market solutions,
new public management, civil society, global governance, etc.
• Governance mode 1 is a meta-concept for all types of social coordination, weather or not the state is involved
• Mostly case studies: Weak on conceptual precision and
operationalizations and therefore no ”metric” measures.
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Governance mode two.
• The ”Good Governance” agenda
• Governance as a problem for developing and transition
countries
• Normative (”good”) and empirical
• State-centered: corruption, clientelism, rule of law,
property rights, meritocracy, competence, capacity,
• Strong focus on operationalizations and metric (large n)
measurements
• This ”same terminology for different things” has
created a lot of conceptual confusion
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Multi- or unidimensional definition?
• If multi-dimensional – how do we weigh different items.
• Is a democracy with no independent massmedia but
perfectly free and fair elections” a 50 % democracy?
• For democracy á la Robert Dahl – ”political equality”
serves as the single basic norm
• Could there be a similar norm for what should count as
the opposite to corruption?
• Mungiu-Pippidi: Ethical Universalism
• North, Wallis & Weingast: Impersonal/open access rule
• Rothstein & Teorell: Impartiality in the excerise of public
power
• Differences are mainly terminological
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The Advantage with the ”Basic Norm” Approach
• Democracies comes in many different institutional
configurations
• Still, we call Switzerland, the United States and Denmark
democracies.
• We shoudl expect countries with ”good government” also to
come in many different institutional forms
• The Danish/Norwegian and the Swedish/Finnish central
public adminstration is institutionalized in very different forms
• Conclusion: Successful Anti-Corruption (as succesful
democracy) can exist with many different institutional forms
• The ”action” is not in the specific institutional configuration,
but in the basic norm upon which the institutions operate.
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Conclusions
• Definitions of Corruption and the Opposite to
Corruption should be:
• Restricted
• Precise
• Universal
• Procedural
• Normative
• Government oriented
• Uni-dimensional
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Political Philosophy and ANTICORRP:
A final word from John Rawls:
• “A just system must generate its own support. This
means that it be arranged so as to bring about in its
members the corresponding sense of justice, an
effective desire to act in accordance with its rules for
reasons of justice. Thus the requirement of stability and
the criterion of discouraging desires that conflict with the
principles of justice put further constraints on institutions.
They must be not only just but framed so as to
encourage the virtue of justice in those who take part in
them” (A Theory of Justice, p 241)
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