Political Corruption in America: A Search for Definitions ... - See also

982 The American Political Science Review Vol. 72When the "favor" done for a constituentcoincides with personal enrichment, then thecharge of conflict of interest is relevant. Clearlyour sample is ambivalent and divided about thepropriety of these acts.In sum, the simple rank ordering of our tenexamples shows at one end of the continuum aclustering of acts that are clearly illegal orrepresent a direct financial gain, at the other,acts that are minor influence peddling, and inbetween a set of acts representing a variety ofconflict-of-interest situations. A Guttman scalingprocedure revealed that this set of acts wasunidimensional. They scaled in the same orderas discussed, and produced a coefficient ofreproducibility of .95, as shown in Table 4.1 0Our categorization of the components of acorrupt act aided in pinpointing some of thereasons for differential perceptions of the corruptnessof various acts. The nature of thefavor, the donor, the public official, and particularlythe payoff were all useful in analyzingthese perceptions. Acts most perceived as corrupttended to have different characteristicsfrom those few perceived as corrupt. And,where there was near-unanimity about thecorruptness of an act, more components of theact were regarded as corrupt than where therewere divided sentiments. Using only these tenacts, it could not be determined which (if any)components, or combinations of components,were crucial in influencing perceptions. Moreresearch on that point is necessary. We haveonly explored reasons why some acts areperceived as more corrupt than others; we havenot yet tried to analyze why there are intergroupdifferences in perception of corruption,particularly differences between elites and thepublic. I IDiscussionPolitical corruption has not been subjectedto the sort of rigorous analysis received byother phenomena in American politics. In largemeasure, the difficulty of defining "politicalcorruption" accounts for this neglect. Thepresent analysis develops a fourfold classificationscheme composed of what we consider theessential ingredients of every act of politicalcorruption. While this scheme is not a "theory,"it does offer a conceptual frameworkhelpful in comparing and analyzing potentiallycorrupt acts. In doing that it allows us to avoidthe definitional pitfalls which have stalematedthe study of corruption for so long. Theseproblems can be avoided because the componentsof our conceptual scheme allow one toanalyze acts classified as corrupt according toany of the corruption definitions describedearlier: the public opinion, public interest, andlegalistic definitions.The scheme, for instance, renders the "publicopinion" definition more usable by refiningit in such a way as to allow gradients ofcorruptness in an act and to assist in findingreasons why public officials and elites holdsimilar or divergent beliefs about a particularcorrupt act. This can be accomplished bysystematically varying each component of ourscheme over a wide variety of acts. The resultshould enable researchers to pinpoint differencesbetween elites and the mass public,and thus to infer why there are divergentareas-"gray areas of political corruption."Might it be because the two groups view the"payoff" differently: what is seen as small orpetty by public officials may be viewed as largeand serious to citizens? Or, does the divergencelie in the perception of what is extraordinary inthe act providing the favor? Many similarexplanations could be posited and tested.government contracts can be arranged within theconstraints of the law and ethics. But some legislatorsare not content to wait until election day to bask inthe gratitude of the voters."10This correlation matrix of the ten items partiallyconfirms the clustering into three groups though thecorrelation between the two influence-peddling itemsis very small.I We have no public opinion data to test hypothesesabout elite-mass differences. We do, however,have data on how our respondents think citizens feelabout these acts. While the rank ordering or legislators'perceptions of citizens beliefs of corrupt acts is similarto the respondents' belief that most citizens would seeevery conflict-of-interest act as corrupt (Table 3). Theonly acts the majority of our respondents believecitizens would not condemn are the WEAPONS andLAW SCHOOL acts. Unfortunately, these data do nottest our propositions. They are only suggestive. Therespondent's views of citizens reactions to thesepotentially corrupt acts also form an acceptableGuttman scale, with a CR of .94 and with no itemshaving more than 10 percent error.One study that surveyed public opinion aboutcorrupt acts was that of John Gardiner (1970), whoassessed the attitudes of citizens about politicalcorruption in their community. While he examinedtolerance of corruption as it related to several socioeconomicattributes, he did not compare public andelite attitudes. He did find, however, that moreeducated people were less tolerant of corruption thanthose with less education.