CORRUPTION Syndromes of Corruption

From analysis to reform 197
emphasizing punishment and prevention too often treats corrupt deals as
discrete problems, and their perpetrators as deviants. But if the problem
is systemic – deeply embedded in society and its development – reform
must also mobilize the interests and energies of society itself.
The forces keeping corruption within bounds in an advanced society
are not necessarily those that brought it under control to begin with.
Effective laws, punishments, and anti-corruption attitudes are as much
the results of long-term democratic and economic development as their
causes. Reform thus has critical social dimensions: laws and procedures
must be seen to be consistent with cultural values and conceptions of
fairness and legitimate authority. So must the responses expected of
citizens. In some societies, urging citizens to report corruption draws a
flow of useful responses; in others people refuse, for reasons ranging from
distrust of government and the police to the after-effects of times when
citizens were coerced into denouncing each other (post-war France is an
example of the latter sort). Efforts to mobilize civil society will need to
take patterns of identity and social divisions, levels of trust, citizens’ and
leaders’ expectations about venality (Manion, 2004), traditions of reciprocity,
and complex status systems into account. Thirty years of effort by
Hong Kong’s ICAC, for example, have produced a situation in which
seven in ten citizens say they are willing to report corruption, but getting
to that point required a long process of linking reform to language, social
relationships, and traditional values (Chan, 2005). While behavior must
come into line with the law, laws must be fitted to societies in realistic
ways, as Influence Market societies have done (perhaps, at times, to
excess). Detection and punishment will be most effective when backed
by social consensus, and when people have real political and economic
alternatives to corrupt practices and rulers. And reform is never finished:
as we have seen, affluent market democracies need institutional renewal
and infusions of participation and competition from time to time.
Influence Market and Elite Cartel societies have systemic corruption
problems with important costs, yet in the long term they seem able to
withstand the corruption they experience. Our syndromes and case studies
suggest that they accomplish that in different ways – in the first
instance, through a legitimate and effective framework of institutions,
and in the second through political settlements among major elites. 1 The
first governing strategy forms the core of consensus reform agendas, but
the second might be more attainable for many societies in the short to
middle term. Neither is a solution for all time: consider, for the former,
1 I thank an anonymous referee for very useful comments on this particular comparison.