Politikwissenschaft 148 - DVPW

Vergleichseinheiten, die auch nicht-deutsche, außer-europäische und
nicht-christliche religiöse wie säkulare Vergleichsgruppen mit einbezieht.
Vorschläge für Vorträge bis zum 15.4.2013 bitte an: Antonius Liedhegener
(Antonius.Liedhegener@unilu.ch); Ulrich Rosar (ulrich.rosar@uni-duesseldorf.de).
Corruption and Political Power from a Comparative Area Perspective
Panelorganisation:
n: Dr. Christian von Soest (christian.vonsoest@gigahamburg.de);
Dr. Thomas Richter (thomas.richter@giga-hamburg.de),
beide GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Hamburg;
Diskutantin: Prof. Dr. AlinaMungiu-Pippidi, Hertie School of Governance
The third wave of democratization has largely been a disappointment in
regard to lowering corruption and improving governance. Numerous studies
have investigated the causes of the enduring and pronounced levels of
corruption in various world regions from different perspectives. However,
we still lack consistent comparative knowledge from different areas across
the globe on why corruption has persisted and on what drives the creation
of impartial forms of rule as opposed to systemic particularistic modes of
governance.
One reason could be the prevailing research focus that has been dominated
by highly aggregated large-N studies, which tend to gloss over significant
cross-regional differences and variation within regions. Therefore, the
macro-statistical approach “does not tell us much about the underlying
causes and contrasting corruption problems” (Johnston 2005, 35). On the
other hand, single-case studies, which explicitly investigate individual cases
of corruption, rarely provide generalizable results. This panel attempts
to find a middle ground and aims to put insights from different world areas
into a comparative perspective.
Important in this respect is the conceptualization of the very notion of corruption
and other (more or less similar and often region-specific) concepts
such as patrimonialism, neopatrimonialism, clientelism, bossism, booty
capitalism, or sultanism. The encyclopedic understanding denotes corruption
as the “misuse of public office for private benefit.” Yet there is a need
to go beyond this actor-centered and voluntaristic understanding of corruption
by introducing a political and societal dimension to it. Our starting
point is the observation that corruption is often the result of the institutionalized
(and therefore positively sanctioned) behavior of (state) agents.
As a result, any analysis treating deeply ingrained informal practices as
deviations from the norm, as solely individual “misuses” of authority or
even as normatively deficient, is conceptually inadequate.
Frühjahr 2013
Nr. 148
62