CORRUPTION Syndromes of Corruption

44 Syndromes of Corruption
backers. Those involved can have a variety of power bases, such as
business, the military, the bureaucracy, a political party, or ethnic or
regional social ties. Official positions will be particularly valuable, but
less secure than in Influence Market cases because of more rapid liberalization,
growing political competition, and weaker institutions. Elites’
corrupt linkages will often bridge the public–private gap.
A mature political machine offers an instructive example of Elite Cartel
corruption. Shefter’s (1976) account of the rise of Tammany Hall in New
York City describes a phase during which segments of the political and
business elite virtually merged at the top of the organization. Tammany
welded city government and entrepreneurs’ wealth into a formidable combine
strong enough to limit political and, in sectors dominated by businesspoliticians,
economic competition. The Tammany leadership was smaller
and more monolithic than the elite cartels of whole countries, and many
societies in this group will not be as turbulent as nineteenth-century New
York. But I will suggest in chapter 5 that two generations of power- and
spoils-sharing among Italy’s non-communist parties prior to the early
1990s, and the networks of presidents, politicians, business leaders, military
figures, and families that dominated Korea from the 1960s through at
least the mid-1990s, illustrate how interlocking networks of elites can use
corrupt as well as legitimate influence to maintain control.
Official institutions that are only moderately strong will both facilitate
and (from the elites’ standpoint) necessitate such linkages. Moreover they
weaken anti-corruption efforts and make life more difficult for would-be
political and economic competitors. These systems will not be wholly
undemocratic or uncompetitive, and in some respects Elite Cartel corruption
will be a stabilizing force. But corruption in these cases plays a
different role, and has different uses, from the Influence Market variety.
Instead of dealing in access to well-institutionalized decisionmakers,
corruption in these cases is a systemic mechanism of control, often
defensive in nature.
Oligarch and Clan corruption In other societies major political
and economic liberalization – in some cases, simultaneous if poorly
integrated transitions – and weak public–private boundaries have put a
wide variety of opportunities in play in a setting of weak institutions. The
dominant form of corruption here will consist of a disorderly, sometimes
violent scramble among contending elites seeking to parlay personal
resources (e.g. a mass following, a business, a bureaucratic fiefdom,
judicial or organized crime connections, or a powerful family) into both
wealth and power.