CORRUPTION Syndromes of Corruption

194 Syndromes of Corruption
qualitative and quantitative. But might we merely have rediscovered the
effects of increasing amounts of corruption? The question is a serious one,
but for several reasons I argue that the answer is no. For one thing, the
corruption indices used in the plots in chapter 3 – which, it is worth
repeating, were not used in defining the four groups – are open to considerable
doubt on grounds of validity and, to a lesser extent, reliability
(Johnston, 2001a). Perception-based indices emphasizing high-level
bribery likely exaggerate overall differences between affluent market
democracies and societies like Russia, Kenya, and Indonesia. Even if
not, ‘‘more corruption’’ can mean many different things – frequent
cases, high-level involvement, major political or economic costs, links to
violence – involving a range of possible stakes and participants, as our case
studies have shown.
Moreover, to suggest that amounts of corruption account for the sorts
of contrasts on view in our case studies is to put an immense explanatory
burden on one factor. Those contrasts are multidimensional and exist on
several levels, ranging from attitudes to politics and social trust to behavior
such as theft and violence to factors such as the security of property
and strength of civil society; it seems unlikely that they are explained by
more or less of any one thing. Further, it is not obvious that corruption by
itself explains as many development problems as we are sometimes told it
does. It is embedded in, and interacts with, complex processes of change –
indeed, it is more likely symptomatic of such factors than their cause.
Corruption is an attractive ex post explanation for poverty (Sindzingre,
2005) and political pathologies, particularly from the consensus view of
corruption as both cause and effect of difficulties in economic liberalization.
But can we really say, with respect to any of the cases discussed
here, that reducing corruption by X would yield Y amount of additional
growth or Z improvement in democracy? Making the systemic changes
required to check corruption would likely pay major economic and
democratic dividends, but that just brings us back to the question of
what contrasting societies’ corruption problems, and their underlying
causes, might be.
The activities we see in the four groups – ‘‘money politics,’’ complex
exchanges of corrupt incentives networking diverse elites, economic and
political empire-building by oligarchs, and outright exploitation by
powerful political figures and their protégés – differ from each other in
important respects. Further, the scatter plots in chapter 3 suggest a
discontinuous pattern: most Influence Market and Elite Cartel cases
have high development scores, despite widely varying apparent amounts
of corruption, while Oligarch and Clan and Official Mogul cases exhibit
widely divergent levels of development despite comparably high