CORRUPTION Syndromes of Corruption

The international setting 23
because they are ‘‘good ideas,’’ but because they engage and protect
lasting interests in society.
Thus, an understanding of corruption where it is common requires not
just an inventory of what seems to be missing by comparison to lowcorruption
countries, but an analysis of what is influencing their political
and economic development. What sorts of political and economic opportunities
exist, who puts them to use, and what are the trends in those two
arenas? What institutions shape, restrain, and sustain economic and
political participation, and how effective are they? Such influences do
not easily reduce to any single dimension; countries including affluent
market democracies diverge from the ideal laid out in chapter 1 in many
different ways. As a result, we should expect to encounter many kinds of
corruption problems reflecting differing origins, affecting societies in
distinctive ways, and requiring appropriate, carefully tailored countermeasures.
Recognizing and understanding those contrasts, however,
have proven to be difficult within the limits of the consensus worldview.
Why worry about corruption?
If development does reflect complex and interrelated influences, why
single out corruption for such concern? Looked at one way it is just
another form of influence, decisionmaking, and exchange, and ‘‘development,’’
broadly speaking, entails broadening and deepening such processes.
Moreover, while corruption is formally illegitimate it does not
follow that approved procedures and institutions are necessarily moral or
effective. Official policy may be inherently unjust; a Ministry of
Development that pursues fundamentally flawed policy will fail at its
mission even if corruption is eliminated. Calling new policies and procedures
‘‘reforms’’ does not make them beneficial; often the language of
reform masks agendas that benefit very few. A poor but non-corrupt
country would still face all of the problems associated with being poor.
Indeed, during the first round of debate over the developmental effects
of corruption, roughly between the late 1950s and the mid-1970s, one
side held that corruption might have considerable political and economic
benefits (Leff, 1964; Bayley, 1966; for opposing views, Andreski, 1968;
Myrdal, 2002). Corruption, the argument ran, was a way for elites to
build their political backing in society and to win cooperation in both
parliaments and bureaucracies, a way for entrepreneurs and investors to
break through bureaucratic bottlenecks, an informal price system in
tightly regulated economies, and a cushion against the worst social dislocations
of development. A somewhat different argument (Leys, 1965)
suggested that corruption be judged against actual alternatives available