CORRUPTION Syndromes of Corruption

22 Syndromes of Corruption
center stage. Enhancing state capacity is now a top priority for institutions
such as the World Bank (see, for example, Levy and Kpundeh, 2004).
Agencies such as USAID are taking a more nuanced view of corruption as
a problem embedded in social contexts, and are working on ways to
distinguish among differing varieties. Still, interests and institutions primarily
concerned with economic development will continue to set the
anti-corruption agenda for some time to come. To make that agenda
more responsive to the diversity and complexity of corruption we need to
understand underlying causes of corruption and how they vary among the
world’s societies. Those contrasts are of more than theoretical interest: in
rapidly changing societies they make for qualitatively different development
and corruption problems, not just differences in amounts.
Change from within
Years ago Denison Rustow (1970: 341–350; see also Anderson, 1999)
pointed out that the factors that sustain democracy where it is strong –
literacy, affluence, multiparty politics, a middle class – are not necessarily
the same as those that brought it into being to begin with. He argued
that democracy grew out of ‘‘prolonged and inconclusive political
struggle ... [T]he protagonists must represent well-entrenched forces
... and the issues must have profound meaning to them’’ (Rustow,
1970: 352). In those struggles, ‘‘Democracy was not the original or
primary aim; it was sought as a means to some other end or it came as a
fortuitous byproduct of the struggle’’ (ibid.: 353). Much the same is true
of reform. Checks and balances, accountable leaders, liberal markets,
competitive elections, and administrative transparency do much to control
corruption in countries where it is the exception rather than the rule,
and where they enjoy broad-based legitimacy. It does not follow, however,
that the absence of such factors is what explains corruption where it is
extensive, nor that putting them in place will control the problem.
Historically, many societies reduced corruption in the course of contending
over other, more basic issues of power and justice (Roberts, 1966;
Johnston, 1993). Checks against various abuses were not so much
schemes for good governance as political settlements – rules that contending
interests could live with and could enforce by political means,
allowing them to pursue their own interests while protecting themselves
against predation by others. The institutions and norms of lowcorruption
countries not only shape political and economic participation;
in a long-term sense they are also the products of such participation. They
ratify and enforce underlying settlements regarding the uses, and limits,
of wealth and power. They were created and continue to work not just