CORRUPTION Syndromes of Corruption

88 Syndromes of Corruption
into separate categories may seem an error. But there are important
contrasts too. For most of the post-war era Japanese politics revolved
around competitive elections – even if the competition was as much
within the LDP as between it and other parties – while Korea remained
a dictatorship. Korea is still consolidating democratic political processes
and key regulatory institutions. Japan’s bureaucracy was widely regarded
as independent – even remote – but of high quality for most of that period,
while Korea’s was more politicized – colonized in important respects
by the personal networks of top national figures. Both economies are
dominated by huge industrial combines, but Japan’s were not the objects
of manipulation by political leaders in the ways Korea’s chaebols were for
many years. Japan’s national political elite is larger and less tight-knit than
Korea’s. Korean corruption was shaped much more by collusion among a
tight-knit national elite – one that for many years possessed a political
monopoly sustained partly by coercion but also by the shared spoils of
corruption. More recently Korean elites have used corrupt influence as a
kind of rearguard action against rising political competition and economic
liberalization – unlike their Japanese counterparts who found the
threat of political competition quite useful as a way to extract money from
businesses.
‘‘Money politics’’ has indeed been the style of corruption in both Japan
and Korea, but the alignments of interests it served, its relationship to
political competition, and the role played by strong (Japan) versus weaker
(Korea) state institutions, have differed considerably for most of the past
half-century – enough so to justify the two countries’ places in different
categories of corruption. These contrasts reflect combinations of participation
and institutions that differ from the Influence Market syndrome.
They will become clearer as we look at Korea, along with Italy and
Botswana, in our discussion of Elite Cartel corruption in chapter 5.