CORRUPTION Syndromes of Corruption

112 Syndromes of Corruption
could participate – or to the kinds of practices involved, and here the case
is stronger. Elite Cartel corruption included a few people while excluding
many more in part because limits upon economic – and later, political –
competition were a major purpose of the whole process. Had policy
benefits been spread much more broadly they would not have been
worth the large prices they commanded. While the vehicles of corruption –
foundations, charities, and the like – did change, and the amounts of
money grew considerably, Korean corruption stayed focused upon a
relatively narrow stratum. Those sorts of limits distinguish Korea’s case
both from more open Influence Markets and from many of the wilder
practices we will consider in later chapters.
Just another Japan?
Korea’s past and present are closely intertwined with Japan’s (Tat, 1996:
545). ‘‘Money politics’’ in Korea outwardly resembles that of Japan too.
Yet the two countries fall into different clusters in our statistical analysis
(chapter 3), and the argument here is that they embody differing corruption
syndromes. Is there really such a difference?
I argue that there is a difference, less of form – practices of corruption –
than of function: the sort of response corruption embodies to deeper
dynamics of participation and institutions. (‘‘Function’’ as used here
should not be confused with the old claims that corruption was ‘‘functional’’
for development.) In Korea as in Japan ‘‘money politics’’ was a
critical prop to the regime; but Pye (1997: 214, 228) argues that the
implications of such processes depend upon the kinds of elite networks
and agendas that are being sustained. Japanese political figures
positioned themselves as middlemen between business interests and
farmers, on the one hand, and a strong, remote bureaucracy on the
other. Influence dealing of that sort helped the LDP build an electoral
monopoly lasting forty years. In Korea, by contrast, the stakes of money
politics were not just specific decisions but also the power and sustainability
of the regime. Japan’s LDP, while a hegemonic and factionalized
party, has a real base in society; it also encompassed significant electoral
competition – the source of considerable corruption – and its 1993 defeat,
while spectacular, was temporary.
Until the 1990s Korea’s regimes did not, and could not, depend upon
popular support in the LDP manner, even if rising living standards
backed up by the threat of coercion kept most citizens compliant.
Power in Korea was won and exercised within a comparatively small
elite stratum (Hwang, 1996: 319; Tat, 1996: 545) rather than by building
a base in society at large. Political challenges were episodic, difficult to