CORRUPTION Syndromes of Corruption

Wealth, power, and corruption 13
specific actions cannot capture. Indeed, I will suggest in my concluding
chapter that continuing economic liberalization and changes in the role of
the state may eventually drain much of the meaning out of behaviorclassifying
definitions of corruption.
At the same time this approach, with its emphasis upon institutions, does
not disregard politics and public institutions. Given the recent controversies
over power and accountability within private organizations as diverse
as Enron, the Roman Catholic Church, the US Olympic Committee,
United Way charities, and intercollegiate sports programs – to name just
a few examples from the United States, where public–private boundaries
are relatively clear – that may seem unduly restrictive. But governments
remain important sources of decisions, benefits, and punishments nearly
everywhere. If they were not, few would bother to corrupt them. Where
they fail to perform those functions authoritatively and justly, that is a
serious problem. Corporate fraud can closely resemble corruption in behavioral
terms, and may be linked with it in numerous ways. In the business
sector wealth and power may be essentially the same thing. Private-sector
abuses of trust may signal deterioration of a society’s social and normative
fabric. But my primary concern is with relationships among political and
economic participation and institutions, as noted above, not with categorizing
specific actions, and we gain nothing by stretching our notions of
corruption to include all forms of high-profile wrongdoing. We already
have many concepts, such as fraud, theft, and failure to perform fiduciary
duties, that are readily applicable to the private sector. My emphasis, therefore,
will be primarily upon systemic corruption problems, with weak
states or public–private boundaries being important aspects of some of
the syndromes of corruption we will consider.
Conclusion
International development policies and the aspirations of people and
societies around the world have been powerfully affected, over the past
generation, by the ideals and difficulties that will be the focus of this book.
A healthy synergy between emerging markets and democratization was
widely hoped for as the 1990s began, but has more or less been left to
chance: liberalized politics and economies were expected to support each
other, even if nobody knew quite how that would come to pass.
Participation, in forms both helpful and harmful, proliferated while
state institutions were being deemphasized, rolled back, or even defined
as causes of corruption and barriers to development. Thus, for many
citizens ‘‘democracy’’ has meant increased poverty and insecurity in
personal life, and ineffective leadership and policy in the public realm.