CORRUPTION Syndromes of Corruption

The international setting 31
indeed, entrenched officials can write election legislation that does little
to restrain their own campaigns and their contributors’ activities.
Contrasting corruption problems
Recent scholarship thus makes a strong case that corruption harms economic
and democratic political development. But two further points
emerge from the preceding discussion. First, corruption is both a cause
and an effect of such difficulties – in many ways, a symptom of deep-rooted
problems in the emergence of, and balance between, participation and
institutions. Second, these interconnections are complex and variable:
there are many possible permutations of, and strengths and weaknesses
in, participation and institutions. Corruption is thus unlikely to be the
same problem everywhere, and scores along one-dimensional indices
may tell us little about different sorts of societies.
Corruption as people live it
People and societies experience corruption in diverse ways. Patronage
machines (Mexico’s PRI), informal enterprises and self-dealing in a gray
area between the public and private sectors (China), extensive payments
by candidates to voters (Japan), politicized credit and development policies
(Korea), a sense of scandal surrounding private interests’ contributions
to parties and candidates (the United States and many other
democracies), official theft of public land for use as rewards for prominent
political backers (Kenya), and extortion practiced by police upon
small businesses and farmers (many poor countries) draw upon contrasting
kinds of power and resources, capitalize upon diverse institutional
problems and social vulnerabilities, create different sorts of winners and
losers, and embody differing distributions of, and relationships between,
wealth and power.
Contrasts abound at other levels too. Democratization in much of
Central Europe, and in the Philippines, has not markedly reduced corruption.
Democracy in India continues to survive despite significant
corruption and desperate poverty; Italy and Japan are established democracies
with relatively strong economies and a long tradition of extensive
corruption, marked in the past by major scandals. In some places corruption
and violence are closely linked, while in others the former may be a
substitute for the latter (Huntington, 1968). For thirty years high levels of
corruption coexisted with (and in some ways may have aided) rapid
economic growth in East and Southeast Asia, while in Africa it helped
keep people and countries poor. In the US and many other democracies