CORRUPTION Syndromes of Corruption

Influence Markets 87
anti-corruption laws and their enforcement but also party systems, the
legal foundations of markets, electoral systems, and the rules of political
finance. Cultural factors, which are more often invoked in the countries
that inhabit our other three clusters, are important too: liberal outlooks
on politics and the economy are a political and social culture, after all.
Behavior within Influence Markets is influenced by conceptions of citizenship
and authority, of mutual exchange and obligation, and of course
of right and wrong – values and judgments influenced by the sorts of
everyday experiences and home truths that comprise culture everywhere
(Johnston, 1986b, 1991). Finally, as Theobald (1990) reminds us, patrimonialism
and the pull of kinship, ethnicity, and other kinds of primary
ties are far from absent in liberal systems. Influence Markets will continue
to evolve in both legitimate and illicit ways.
One final question is worth posing: does Japan really belong in this
group? The frequency of scandals and the scale of money involved were,
for many years, much greater than that seen in the US and Germany,
while the factionalism within the LDP and the corruption-aided hegemony
of that party are reminiscent of the Christian-Democrat dominated
political cartel that dominated Italy until 1993 (Johnson, 1995; see also
chapter 5 of this book). Both parties, in fact, suffered major defeats in that
year. But Italy’s corruption crisis was driven in part by the rise of an
aggressive new generation of jurists and, perhaps, the accumulating
effects of economic liberalization and EU policies upon businesses
(Golden, 2002). Once underway it disrupted key business–political connections
and shattered the old party system. The LDP, by contrast, was
back in government within a year as a coalition partner, and it has stayed
there ever since. Japan’s political class and national business leadership
were stirred up but hardly displaced (Boisseau, 1997: 132).
Boisseau also draws a parallel between Japan and Germany’s path to
democracy, noting (as did Seibel for Germany) that a modernized state
administrative core came well before democracy and was the spine of the
system. As in Germany, he argues, democratic processes are less valued
than the material goods the state can dispense (Boisseau, 1997: 135).
Competitive political parties, when they arose, were less the voice of
contending segments of society than elite gatekeepers to bureaucratic
influence. Similarly, in Germany Seibel (1997: 92) notes an emphasis
on outcome – who gets what – over democratic process as a value in itself,
and suggests that notions of public office as impersonal power held in
temporary trust are only weakly developed.
Another comparison is relevant to Japan. Its ‘‘money politics’’ outwardly
resembles that found in Korea. Given regional similarities and
the complex, intertwined histories of those two countries, putting them