The Corruption Dilemma: Controlling the Power of the Powerful 9781955055437

Citation preview

The

CORRUPTION DILEMMA

The C ORRUPTION

Dilemma

C ONTROLLING the P OWER of the P OWERFUL Stephen D. Morris

b o u l d e r l o n d o n

Published in the United States of America in 2022 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Suite 314, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com

and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. Gray’s Inn House, 127 Clerkenwell Road, London EC1 5DB www.eurospanbookstore.com

© 2022 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Morris, Stephen D., 1957– author. Title: The corruption dilemma : controlling the power of the powerful / Stephen D. Morris. Description: Boulder, Colorado : Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Confronts a dilemma: How can we control the power of those actors who use that very power to define corruption and shape our efforts to fight it, all in accordance with their own interests?”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021055187 (print) | LCCN 2021055188 (ebook) | ISBN 9781955055284 (hardback) | ISBN 9781955055437 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Political corruption. | Political corruption—Prevention. | Capitalism—Political aspects. Classification: LCC JF1081 .M673 2022 (print) | LCC JF1081 (ebook) | DDC 364.1/323—dc23/eng/20220322 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021055187 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021055188

British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the United States of America

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992.

5  4  3  2  1

To my students, past and present, in both Mexico and the United States.

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” —Frederick Douglass

Contents

Preface

ix

1 The Political Nature of Corruption

1

2 The Definitional Dilemma

3 The Capitalism/Democracy Dilemma

19

41

4 The Political Dilemma

69

6 The Personal Dilemma

121

5 The Anticorruption Dilemma

93

7 Resolving the Corruption Dilemma?

145

References Index About the Book

159 179 185

vii

Preface

RESEARCH ON CORRUPTION—A ONCE NEGLECTED AREA OF STUDY, dramatically transformed beginning in the mid-1990s—has made tremendous strides over the past few decades; yet, progress in fighting corruption has lagged. Countless studies pinpoint the causes and consequences of corruption, develop and apply an assortment of metrics to measure it, formulate strategies and recommendations to battle it, and even identify some of the reasons why corruption seems stubbornly persistent in so many countries throughout the world. One problem, noted most recently by Michael Johnston and Scott Fritzen (2021) and Bo Rothstein (2021a), has been the failure to fully appreciate the political nature of corruption and the political context that defines and shapes it. This suggests that, rather than seeing corruption as basically an external and technical failure of the state, perhaps we should strive to better understand how corruption represents a fundamental dimension of politics, our conceptualizations of power, the law, and the state, and even our perceptions of justice and morality. Perhaps a deeper understanding of corruption goes beyond understanding how politics operates in the real world—as compared to our more normative (wish-craft thinking) theories on democracy and the state—to explaining how corruption arises from the dilemmas and contradictions embedded in politics itself. This book embarks in that direction. Part of the difficultly lies in the fact that, despite being fundamental to the nature of politics, crucial to our understanding of the ix

x

Preface

political world, and universally condemned, political corruption also represents a broad and highly contested and politicized construct. Not only is there no consensus on its meaning, but corruption sports multiple definitions that operate at various levels and generate substantial disagreement. Corruption refers not to one specific form of behavior such as, say, bribery, but to an assortment of activities, political relationships, and institutional and discursive phenomena. The multiple definitions, dimensions, patterns, and forms of corruption under this umbrella severely complicate measurement and hence the empirical search for answers. One easy illustration of this complexity centers on the seemingly simple task of comparing the levels of corruption in Mexico and the United States, the two countries frequently used here to illustrate the corruption dilemma. According to the opinions of experts and business leaders, the two are vastly different, with Mexico suffering substantially higher levels of corruption across all realms of government (see any year of the annual Corruption Perception Index by Transparency International). Separate measures of institutional strength and the rule of law further bolster this conclusion. Yet, according to the views of the public, the levels of corruption within these two vastly different neighbors seem quite comparable. In a 2013 Gallup poll, for instance, 79 percent of US respondents considered corruption widespread throughout the government (Gallup 2013); while in Mexico’s 2012 National Poll of Political Culture (ENCUP 2012), 72 percent of Mexicans ranked corruption 5 on a scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high). In fact, in the 2013 Global Corruption Barometer by Transparency International, 64 percent of respondents in the United States and 62 percent in Mexico believed to a “large extent/to some extent” that the government served the interests of the few rather than the many. Though it seems clear that experts and citizens from the two countries are not exactly referring to the same thing, it remains unclear as to what they mean by corruption (Morris 2018). The multiple definitions, breadth, and variation of what constitutes corruption both complicates and enriches the study. It complicates things by making it difficult to have a singular conversation or even one paradigm that in typical scientific format speaks the same language, clarifies, facilitates discussion, and drives the accumulation of knowledge. Unfortunately, in the face of the massive breadth and scope of corruption, analysts are too often forced to carve out their area and contribute to that niche. This means analysts usually pick or specify a single definition (“despite disagreement in the literature, here corruption will be defined as . . .”) or simply leave the concept poorly defined to

Preface

xi

focus their energies on quantitative empirical analysis using metrics that nonetheless assume a particular definition and, in the process, privilege certain forms of corruption over others. And yet, coincidentally, the same breadth and complexities of the concept also enrich the study by offering up multiple conversations rooted in many scientific disciplines and approaches. This enhances the study by challenging us to think multidimensionally, to consider and try to focus on moving targets and fluid concepts, and to entertain complex theories and their compatibility or incompatibility. From the former Mexican president Luis Echeverría to the current US president Joe Biden, many have used medical metaphors to describe corruption. While they and others typically cast corruption as a cancer, possibly the more apt medical term would be to refer to corruption simply as an illness. At some level, the concept of illness makes sense. Like corruption, the term is widely used, understandable, and universally considered a bad thing, yet scientifically, the term is of limited use. There is no literature or journal devoted simply to the study of illness per se; few studies explore the causes of illness or search for its cure. Instead, literature and lines of inquiry tend to focus on highly specific types and forms of illnesses from the physical to the mental, from the benign to the acute, each with its own etiology, composition, process, and, hopefully, cure. In contrast, corruption in general has produced such literature. Despite multiple definitions, nuances, and an array of taxonomies and typologies, many studies examine or empirically test the causes and consequences or offer policy solutions to something referred to simply as “corruption.” As Johnston and Fritzen (2021) note, anticorruption recommendations are often generically pitched to countries despite the prevailing patterns of corruption in each nation or the nature of their political and economic systems. There are notable exceptions, to be sure. By the mid-2000s, at least, some analysts had begun to disaggregate and differentiate types, forms, and patterns of corruption. They examined how certain factors may produce one form of corruption while another set of factors may produce another; or how certain types of corruption may have particular effects—such as undermining economic growth—while other forms of corruption have differing effects; or even how certain solutions may work on particular forms or syndromes of corruption but be ineffective or even harmful on others (e.g., Ang 2020; Gingerich 2013; Johnston 2005, 2014; Sun 1999; Sun and Johnston 2009). Clearly, much more work is needed based on a further disaggregation of the concept.

xii

Preface

*  *  *

Ideas behind The Corruption Dilemma were conceived well before its recently published companion book, The Corruption Debates: Left vs. Right—and Does It Matter—in the Americas (Morris, 2021c), and they represent the culmination of decades of research, writing, teaching, and incessant thinking about political corruption. Many of the ideas developed here have found their way into various conference papers, publications, presentations, discussions, and classes over the decades. As such, they have benefited from the feedback of many colleagues and students. In so many ways, The Corruption Dilemma tries to depict the confusion, the contradictions, and the lingering questions about corruption and its analysis that I have stumbled across over the years. As I often tell my students, confusion suggests a higher state of knowledge because it tends to reveal: (a) how things are much more complex than we might have initially imagined, or others tend to think; (b) that the more we know, the more likely we are to have more questions than answers; and (c) that contradictions and dilemmas almost always seem to accompany any analytical journey. I find this particularly true of corruption—an unwieldy concept that is moral yet behavioral, political yet technical, important yet poorly defined. Decades ago, when I informed my graduate advisor, mentor, and friend, the beloved Ed Williams of the University of Arizona, of my intention to dissertate on political corruption in Mexico, he warned me that corruption was either a Pandora’s box or a bag of worms (same meaning, just poor recollection of his exact words). To a degree, after all these years, The Corruption Dilemma suggests that he was, to some extent, right. The analysis of corruption carries with it enormous complexities and challenges at virtually all turns and levels: conceptual, theoretical, methodological, political, and in policy terms. Of course, in the mid-1980s few really cared to open or reach into the metaphorical box or bag. Back then, the study of corruption was limited, largely nonempirical, and located well outside mainstream political science. The political scientist and pioneering “corruptologist” Michael Johnston tells the story of his proposed panel on corruption being rejected for the American Political Science Association conference explicitly because the topic was just not that important, according to the conference organizers. But since the mid-1990s, that has been far from the case. In a dramatic historiographic shift tied to the end of the Cold War, the study of corruption has grown exponentially throughout recent decades, with contributions raining down from many disciplines. In

Preface

xiii

parallel fashion, corruption also grew during these years to become a salient topic among citizens, politicians, policy wonks, development experts, businesses, and national and international governmental and nongovernmental organizations and institutions. Of course, this heightened attention does not mean it is no longer an excruciatingly complex, Pandora’s box issue. If anything, the academic, political, and popular interest in corruption fastened to its dramatic political importance has merely complicated the issue, crystallizing perhaps even more its political underbelly. In this book I try to sort through some of the complexities, not only by understanding how the political context shapes corruption, but also by understanding how it colors our understanding and thinking about it: the political nature of corruption and the corrupt nature of politics. As with The Corruption Debates, this book benefits and in part stems from my unique interest in corruption in Mexico and the United States. Such an interest has helped bring into sharp relief the many similarities and differences of corruption in what are in so many ways two very different countries. This includes differences in the views of corruption separating experts from the two publics, the distinct patterns of corruption, the disparate literature, and the paucity of comparisons between developed and developing countries. As the reader will soon learn, this book draws extensively on examples from these two countries to illustrate the various dilemmas. Since the book represents years of work and reflection, it is somewhat difficult to pinpoint those to thank. Still, I wish to acknowledge the support and assistance provided by Irma Eréndira Sandoval Ballesteros (former secretary of public affairs in Mexico), John Mill Ackerman, Guadalupe Valencia García, Domingo Alberto Vital Díaz, Miguel Armando López Leyva, everyone at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), and Michael Federici and Mark Byrnes at Middle Tennessee State University for making my leave of absence and twoyear appointment at UNAM from 2019 to 2021 possible. This, along with the stay-at-home mandate for the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, gave me large blocks of time to focus on this long-term yet lingering project. I also wish to thank a number of corruption colleagues (that sounds nefarious, but it is not) for countless discussions, feedback, and presentations over the years that have helped shape many of my ideas, including David Arellano-Gault, Eduardo Bohórquez, Charles Blake, Arturo del Castillo, Ángeles Estrada, Daniel Gingerich, Manuel Alejandro Guerrero, Michael Johnston, Vladimir Juárez, Paul Lagunas, Fabiola Navarro, Fernanda Odilla, Bonnie Palifka, Joel Salas, and

xiv

Preface

Matthew Taylor. I have also benefited greatly from numerous conversations on the topic with my compadre Ernesto Alvarado; my adult children, David and Tania Morris-Díaz; and, of course, my wife, Celina Díaz. I also wish to offer a special thanks to my students over the years both in Mexico and in the United States, not only those who participated in my courses on corruption or transparency and accountability, but also students in all my courses where the topic of corruption frequently peppered our discussions and readings. Such presentations and discussions helped me to develop ideas, to engage the literature, to create explanations and arguments, and to receive feedback. I, too, am and always will be a student. Of course, despite the help of so many friends, colleagues, and students, I alone am responsible for the ideas, translations, and writing of this book. In many ways, despite finally thinking through these dilemmas, I remain confused—something that continues to nurture my insatiable inquietude and ongoing fascination with the topic of corruption. —Stephen D. Morris

1 The Political Nature of Corruption

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. —John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, a.k.a. Lord Acton (1834–1902)1

Corruption represents a failure to control the power of the powerful. Though broadly considered the abuse of power for personal gain, scholars, activists, politicians, and citizens all tend to hold different understandings and perspectives. Beyond agreeing that it is wrong, undesirable, and of immense political importance, they tend to disagree over corruption’s essential traits (the who, the what, and the why) and its outer limits—the meaning of corruption—as well as over which forms of corruption are more prevalent and which are more harmful. David Arellano-Gault (2020, 27–29) identifies more than a dozen definitions in the literature; the US public seems to entertain a much broader understanding of corruption than the restricted and technical views laid out in various Supreme Court decisions or even the views of experts; and meanings of corruption tend to differ along the left-right ideological spectrum (Morris 2021c). What some individuals consider to be corruption, for instance, may be neither illegal nor even a form of behavior, but instead refer to a systemic phenomenon embedded within 1

2

The Corruption Dilemma

institutions, laws, and policies (e.g., Lessig 2013; Sandoval-Ballesteros 2013; Thompson 2018; Vergara 2020). Others tend to dismiss such a wild conceptual formula as confusing corruption with just everyday politics. Either way, coupled with its centrality to politics, corruption remains a highly contested concept with its meaning constantly under construction. And yet defining precisely what corruption is (and what it isn’t) and how power should be constrained—thus setting the limits on the use of power—itself constitutes a political act, an exercise of power (Arellano-Gault 2020, 33). As such, it too is subject to the potential for abuse for personal or political gain. This study explores the political nature of corruption and the challenges of controlling the power of the powerful. The word dilemma in the title captures the central paradox: that the powerful are not only the subject of the controls but also the agents who influence how and where to limit power, and how and even whether to enforce those limits. In other words, the power needed to effectively control the powerful is paradoxically wielded by those whose power we seek to constrain. Embedded within this overarching corruption dilemma, however, lies a series of more specific dilemmas that arise from the political dimensions of corruption and the fundamental power imbalances found in different areas of society. These power imbalances shape the exercise of power to privilege and protect personal and particularistic interests at multiple stages: during the delineation of the limits on power (defining corruption), the creation and operation of state and societal institutions (that effectively limit or facilitate the use of power), the laws that establish the boundaries of permissible conduct (and hence demarcate the illegal forms of corruption), and the policies and enforcement decisions made by state officials who seek to police those boundaries. This book examines five such dilemmas. The first dilemma (or sub-dilemma under the heading of the corruption dilemma) is the definitional dilemma. Addressed in Chapter 2, it focuses on the question of how and who defines corruption, and how those with power enjoy a certain advantage in crafting our understanding of what corruption is, what it is not, how to study it, and where and how to fight it in ways that tend to best reflect and promote their own particularistic interests. After all, as I will describe in greater detail, power encompasses the power to create, define, and operationalize concepts such as corruption. Discussion of the definitional dilemma thus lays out much of the contentious debate over definition and the competing narratives. It describes the conventional or orthodox approach, the underlying interests the approach reflects and promotes, the criti-

The Political Nature of Corruption

3

cisms it has elicited, and the competing or counterhegemonic narratives that offer different definitions and perspectives on corruption. The second area concentrates on controlling the power of capitalist forces. In that corruption lies at the intersection of politics and the economy, Chapter 3 focuses on corruption within the rather complex and paradoxical relationship linking capitalism and democracy. The underlying tension that characterizes the capitalism/democracy dilemma stems largely from the fact that capitalism is premised on and facilitates individual decisionmaking and the pursuit of individual gain, whereas democracy concentrates on collective decisionmaking, collective gain, and the pursuit of the collective good. Analysis of this dilemma highlights, first, how certain forms of corruption and perspectives stem from this tenuous coupling of capitalism and democracy, and second, how corruption helps mitigate their coexistence. This dilemma underscores that controlling the power of the powerful refers not merely to the power of state officials or state institutions but also to capitalist forces that effectively convert wealth into power and, as a result, exert substantial influence over the state, thereby limiting the scope of democracy and collective decisionmaking. The more prevalent forms of corruption in the United States, for example, center largely on the influence of major corporations and the wealthy over the state, its policies, laws, and their implementation: what Michael Johnston (2005) once labeled as the influence market syndrome of corruption. This is accomplished by way of state capture, campaign finance, lobbying, the revolving door, control over the media and think tanks, and so on. While some dismiss these forms of influence as outside the scope of corruption, others see these forms of corruption as severely distorting, taming, limiting, or hollowing out democracy. Controlling that influence in accordance with basic democratic principles thus faces the challenge of controlling the power of the powerful capitalist forces. Like the challenge of controlling the influence of wealth over power, the third dilemma centers on the trial of controlling the influence of power over wealth (Johnston 2014, 8). Labeled here simply as the political dilemma, Chapter 4 shifts attention to the difficulties of controlling the power of those occupying the state. This is not about controlling democracy per se but rather about controlling the power and actions of those wielding the state’s power. Though the state embodies the democratic ideals of limited power (as expressed, for example, in the Constitution) and of prioritizing and serving the public interest, it is nonetheless controlled by individuals, parties, cliques, classes, and the like who wield an abundant amount of power (authority)—both the ideological

4

The Corruption Dilemma

and practical powers of the state—that they can easily leverage (abuse) to shape the definition of corruption, the laws, the institutions, policies, and, particularly, their implementation of those laws all in ways that maximize their privileges and their own personal or political interests. As with efforts to control the power of capitalist forces, controlling the power of those occupying the state is formidable. Even if we convince those in government to outlaw certain practices we collectively deem corrupt—an adjustment of the boundary of what constitutes corrupt and noncorrupt behavior—getting the law enforced by state officials when that law may run counter to their own interests remains somewhat challenging. Moreover, those occupying the state will not only privilege and prioritize their own interests when creating and enforcing these limits but will also tend to prioritize the state’s control of society over the state’s ability to control itself. After all, as US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once quipped: “The first instinct of power is the retention of power” (McConnell v. FEC, 540 U.S. 93, 263 [2003]). This challenge is particularly problematic in Mexico, where state officials have long employed multiple means to protect and promote their own interests, including a high degree of impunity for corrupt acts. Such a pattern enabled one political party to control Mexican politics for seventy years. While the definitional, capitalism/democracy, and political dilemmas all render difficult the tasks of identifying and fighting corruption, this endeavor is complicated even further by the politicized nature of corruption and its antithesis, anticorruption. With reference to the anticorruption dilemma, Chapter 5 highlights a range of factors that complicate the struggle against corruption, from the task of taking on deeply entrenched interests who influence our understanding of corruption— the corruption dilemma—to the politicization and weaponization of both corruption and anticorruption by competing forces. Reflecting the widespread agreement that corruption is bad, wrong, and yet politically salient, political interests tend to mobilize these issues in accordance with their own interests, all in ways that best protect, promote, privilege, and even shield those interests. Above all, this includes weaponizing the tools of anticorruption to undermine and weaken opponents both by those in power who seek to retain it and by outsiders who strive to gain it. In 2016, for example, Donald Trump ran on a campaign to fight corruption in the United States, to “drain the swamp,” but according to others, he eventually headed one of the most corrupt administrations in the nation’s history. Two years later in Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador also won an election promising to fight corruption; yet today some assail his efforts as disguised attempts to centralize power and

The Political Nature of Corruption

5

erect authoritarian controls. Such intense politicization of corruption that arises in part from the definitional dilemma severely obscures the fight against corruption. Stepping down from the structural, institutional, and political rungs of the ladder, analysis finally turns to the dilemma facing the individual. Every day, politicians, bureaucrats, corporate and labor leaders, and citizens all face difficult questions regarding corruption: about whether to engage in corruption or not; whether to blow the whistle and report a state official, a colleague, or a boss or remain quiet; whether to vote for a corrupt candidate or reelect a corrupt incumbent. In some cases, people may feel they have no choice and participate in corrupt exchanges merely to survive; in other cases, they may not even be aware that they are engaging in corruption. Either way, most feel forced to negotiate difficult tradeoffs among their own personal priorities, including maintaining a moral sense of who they are. Focusing on what is simply referred to here as the personal dilemma, Chapter 6 surveys the microlevel factors that influence our views and perspectives on corruption, how we contemplate our decision on how to act or react, and how those involved tend to perceive their own behavior. In line with the other dilemmas, research shows how those with power tend to have a somewhat distinct view on what constitutes corruption and a greater tendency to lie, cheat, and engage in what others consider to be corruption, though like everyone else, they tend to disguise and rationalize their own behavior. As the social psychologist Dacher Keltner (2016, 130) puts it, “It is the wealthy and powerful who don’t play by the rules,” in part by infusing a personal sense of exceptionalism: the notion that the rules (that exist) simply do not apply to oneself. Analysis of these corruption dilemmas spotlights the difficulties of controlling the power of the powerful. As such, it stresses the political nature of corruption and corruption’s seeming inevitability. Still, the concluding chapter, carrying a question mark, addresses whether it is even possible to resolve the dilemma and, in broad strokes, how to at least mitigate it. The discussion points, first, to the many successes in controlling the power of the powerful and how such an intense and exclusive focus on corruption too often tends to obscure that fact. Second, the chapter analyzes in broad terms the paths that seek to strengthen those controls. It highlights the struggle to broaden the debate over corruption beyond mere illegal behavior, the need to address power inequities and equalize power both among groups and across institutions, and the importance of deepening and expanding democracy (Johnston 2014). Finally, from a theoretical perspective, the

6

The Corruption Dilemma

chapter highlights the need to disaggregate the concept of corruption while acknowledging its inherently political foundations. But before exploring these various dilemmas, it is important to better prepare the set. Therefore, the remainder of this introductory chapter offers a conceptual and theoretical framework to address these dilemmas. It first presents a two-level framework on controlling the power of the powerful that teases out the ideological battle from the more practical, empirical struggle. This is followed by a discussion that defines power, ties corruption to power imbalances (Johnston and Fritzen 2021, 21), and then links certain forms of corruption to varying degrees of power asymmetries or concentrations of power. The chapter concludes by briefly outlining the purpose and potential contributions of the book. Corruption, as noted, reveals the failure to control the power of the powerful. In broad terms, the struggle to limit the power of the state over others and others over the state plays out at two distinct levels. The first is at the ideological level. Broadly, it centers on the construction of the concept of corruption: the limits on power, the scope of authority, and the general approaches on how to limit power. Reaching beyond the mundane academic chore of merely defining corruption, however, this ideological debate on whether, where, and how to limit power shapes the way state institutions are crafted, their missions, the guidelines and criteria established for making political decisions, and the laws and policies that specify the proper use (and hence misuse) of power. As a contested and constructive process, this ideological debate has, over time, seemingly conquered more and more democratic terrain, raising the bar and stretching the limits on the exercise of power. As a result, political operations once deemed legitimate and even routine are now normally considered illegitimate; what once was permitted is no longer.2 It is never a linear process, to be sure, with barriers at times contracting to permit activities once declared unacceptable and even illegal.3 But generally, via some sort of expansive spiral, demands to tighten restrictions on the power of the powerful, initially formulated as part of the resistance to power, have gradually, grudgingly but eventually come to be recognized and even acknowledged by the powerful themselves. In fact, in most societies, those assuming any position of authority within the state must first publicly swear fealty to the limits on the exercise of power.

The Two-Level Debate

The Political Nature of Corruption

7

But while a critically important step, such oaths, promises, and ideological consensus on the legitimate uses of power are hardly enough to limit power in practice. Hence, parallel to the contested ideological struggle, a similar battle takes place at the empirical or operational level. It concentrates on the detailed strategies and policies over how to make the agreed-upon limits effective in actual practice: the minutiae. Despite what at times may have been a long struggle to garner legitimacy, redefine corruption, reform existing institutions, or create new institutions and/or new laws, implementing those changes and making them operational is neither assured nor automatic. Far too often, the arduous and difficult struggle to persuade others to move the boundaries and pass a law to outlaw certain forms of conduct turns into an equally onerous climb to get the law implemented and make a real difference. Achieving the “right to have rights,” for instance, is mere prerequisite or a step on the road to ensuring that those rights are enjoyed and protected. Power, of course, is not monolithic. Historically, and at a broad theoretical level, the primary approach to control the power of the powerful has been to strategically counter power with power. This is usually pursued through some sort of structural, institutional, organizational, and even psychological balancing act. Many strategies dot the historical and institutional landscapes, including the early, congenital democratic efforts to balance the powers of the crown and the landed aristocracy; the balancing of the special virtues of personal, oligarchic, and popular systems of rule per Aristotle’s canon; dividing state power into separate institutions with shared functions, thereby creating a system of horizontal checks and balances as Montesquieu proposed; pitting ambition against ambition while broadening the scope of the polity to incorporate so many competing interests that they neutralize one another, as James Madison and modern-day pluralists suggest; breaking up bureaucratic monopolies and counterbalancing discretion with transparency and accountability, in accordance with Robert Klitgaard’s (1988) oft-noted anticorruption formula; divorcing partisan political interests from professional and technical perspectives and decisionmaking in the public administration as late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reformers taught; calibrating the power of society to match the power of the state, thereby empowering the citizenry to conduct vigilance far beyond the ballot box, as Pierra Rosanvallon (2008) describes, or a deepening of democracy as Johnston (2014) and Irma Eréndira Sandoval-Ballesteros (2013) encourage; and even equalizing a personalized sense of civic duty and altruism with the pursuit of one’s own personal interests. To date, however, such power matchings—pitting power against power,

8

The Corruption Dilemma

ambition against ambition, selfishness against selflessness—have failed to fully control the power of the powerful. More importantly, they implicitly highlight the fundamental role that inequality or the imbalances of power play in nurturing corruption (Johnston and Fritzen 2021, 21), a point I return to momentarily. Just as corruption persists, revealing the failure to control the power of the powerful, so too do these dynamic parallel processes of construction. Within the ideological realm, while some theorists defend existing limits, others strive to readjust the bar and reset the boundaries, sometimes in different directions. Concurrently within the operational arena, agents painstakingly try to finely tune the balances needed to truly force the powerful to abide by the limits that they themselves in fact acknowledge, seeking new and better ways to enforce the procedures and the laws. But both constructive and contested processes are fraught with obstacles and dilemmas. Not only are the powerful—those we seek to control—also the agents who wield abundant influence in both constructive arenas, deploying their power to protect and promote their own interests in the process—the corruption dilemma—but both the ideological and practical processes face the hard reality that controlling the power of the powerful is neither the only nor perhaps even the primary objective pursued by democracy, the state, the society, corporations, or the individual. As a result, proposed limits on power and their implementation frequently clash with other important values and objectives, such as protecting individual freedoms, promoting economic growth and material well-being, maintaining order, ensuring organizational efficiency and effectiveness, and even balancing the needs of the many against the needs of the few or the one. This inherently forges difficult choices, trade-offs, and perennial struggles to balance multiple objectives at multiple levels. Pitting power against power to control power highlights how corruption arises from the inequalities of power—what Johnston and Fritzen (2021, 21) refer to as “power imbalances.”4 As Patrick Dobel (1978, 959) notes, “Extensive inequality in wealth, power and status, spawned by the human capacity for selfishness and pride, generates the systematic corruption of the state.” Such imbalances of power not only underlie the existence of corruption—where unchecked power too often exploits the weakness of others (Tanzler et al. 2016, 25)—but also significantly shape the nature and outcome of the contested ideological debate to define corruption, the meaning and scope of authority and legitimacy,

Power Inequality and Corruption

The Political Nature of Corruption

9

the crafting of political institutions, laws, and policies, and their effective (or ineffective) implementation. Much research highlights a correlation linking inequality and corruption. Generally, such studies focus on economic inequality and just one dimension of corruption: illegal forms of corruption. Inspired in the celebrated phrase by Lord Acton linking power and corruption, the current analysis presents a model that links structural, institutional, legal, and conventional forms of corruption to ideal type categories relating to the distribution or inequalities of power. Such imbalances extend from absolute power, associated with the power to construct, and define the concept of corruption, to the power to distort the implementation or administration of public policy tied to administrative forms of corruption. In some ways, linking corruption to power imbalances offers partial confirmation of the better-known part of Lord Acton’s dictum provided in the epigraph—that “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Simply put, the more power, the more corruption. Grappling with this first requires defining power. Another contested concept, power, first, is “explicitly relational and asymmetrical: to have power is to have power over another or others” (Lukes 2017, 73). As such, references to power inevitably refer to relationships and distributions or inequalities of power. Second, power represents a capacity that can be exercised not just by individuals but also by collectivities, states, institutions, and systems (Lukes 2017, 72). It is thus possible to think not only in terms of the inequality of the power among individuals or groups but also, more importantly, among institutions—particularly, as we will see, between state institutions exercising power over society and those dedicated to controlling the powers of the state. Thus power, taken in all its forms and dimensions, is broadly defined as encompassing at least three dimensions: (a) compelling someone to act in a way they otherwise would not (Dahl 1957); (b) controlling the decisionmaking agenda, thereby making nondecisions a form of power, resulting in a type of coerced silence (Bachrach and Baratz 1970); and (c) fostering compliance by way of the hegemony of ideas exercised through the control of culture and ideology (Gramsci 1971)5 and the construction of self (Foucault 1980; see Lukes 2017).6 Yet while the first part of Acton’s hypothesis seems to make some sense (though it may in fact be a bit tautological),7 the latter part regarding absolute power misses the basic point at the heart of the corruption dilemma: that absolute power also encompasses the power—in a Gramscian and Foucauldian sense—to create (the power of naming) and define

10

The Corruption Dilemma

concepts such as corruption free from contestation and in such a way as to make the behavior of the absolute power unassailable, unimaginable, beyond the reach of expression, and by definition not corrupt. “Defining corruption,” as Arellano-Gault (2020, 33) correctly notes, “is an act of power.” Or as US presidential advisor Karl Rove once put it, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” A key part of the dilemma of controlling the power of the powerful thus resides precisely in how the inequalities of power permit those with higher degrees of power or the greatest concentrations of power—the power we seek to limit—to prevail in both the ideological struggle and in the empirical battle, thereby effectively shaping and later implementing the limits to power in tune with their own interests. The simplistic example of early (perhaps slightly mythical) notions of absolute monarchy—perhaps the closest earthly example approaching absolute power—is illustrative. In an absolute monarchy the sovereign constituted the sole source of authority, and, as Thomas Hobbes noted, stood beyond the reach of the law. 8 This basically meant that there were no limits on the sovereign’s power and that the sovereign could not, by definition, engage in corruption; in fact, there was really no delineation separating the private from the public.9 Only years later, via a long, drawn-out, and gradual process of contestation and resistance—themselves a sign of the loss of absolute power—did the crown’s power begin to be assailed and limited by the landed aristocracy (Johnston 2004). It is possible, then, to extend this thinking schematically to identify and tie distinct degrees of imbalances or inequalities of power to distinct forms of corruption.10 Though Chapter 2 explores in greater detail the debate over defining corruption and differentiates the various forms of corruption—structural, institutional, legal, illegal, political, and bureaucratic—it is nonetheless useful to sketch this framework here since it provides the foundation for the ensuing chapters. Beginning at a step below the level of absolute power—noting, again, that absolute power does not exist nor has ever truly existed11—lies what might simply be labeled hegemonic power. Borrowing from Antonio Gramsci, who coined the concept, hegemonic power represents the power to dictate the prevailing logic and morality within society largely by way of control over the ideological apparatus and discourse. Fundamentally, hegemonic power shapes not only our ways of thinking but also the prevailing institutions, laws, and policies in ways that privilege the interests of the hegemon. Defining corruption thus “gives one the upper hand in setting the rules and conditions to direct, propose and impose, if

The Political Nature of Corruption

11

necessary, the keys and ‘right’ ways to build anticorruption policies, institutions, norms, and programs” (De Graaf et al. 2010, 100, cited in Arellano-Gault 2020, 18). As such, the more orthodox approach to corruption crafted by the hegemonic power—also examined in Chapter 2— will tend to exclude certain forms of corruption, particularly what many identify as structural, institutional, and legal forms of corruption, while training particular attention on the forms of corruption most harmful to their interests. But unlike Lord Acton’s notion of absolute power, hegemonic power is not absolute; the power is at least partially limited. Despite their dominance, the views and actions of the hegemon remain open to contestation and dissent owing, first, to the fundamental right of free speech at least within democracies—a component of the broader democratic/rule-of-law narrative—and, second, to the physical and technical impossibility of repressing all forms of thought and expression. At minimum, this at least ensures the whispering existence of counter-hegemonic narratives rooted in democratic ideals that contest the formulations authored by the hegemon, basically calling out what some will deem the hegemon’s (ab)uses of power. In fact, it is this minimum level of contestation that equips us, in a Wittgensteinian sense, with the language and conceptual tools required to entertain the idea that certain forms of corruption coinciding with the interests of the hegemon have even occurred. Again, despite the dominance of hegemonic power, a sort-of democratic/rule-of-law template—also described in Chapter 2—tends to bound and condition the power of the hegemon. This ensures, for instance, that at a minimum no politician, regardless of their power, proclaims the virtues of corruption or promises on the campaign trail to promote it (even though secretly they may end up doing so).12 As shown, such a concentration of power is generally what has shaped the prevailing global paradigm regarding corruption despite ample and growing contestation in recent years (Johnston and Fritzen 2021; Rothstein 2021a, 2021b). A few rungs below the level of hegemonic power resides what might be called institutional power. This refers to the degree of power necessary to shape and/or control institutions—their mission, rules, and procedures—in ways that openly or shrewdly promote, protect, and privilege the interests of those wielding this power. Institutions, after all, embody invested power and, as such, prejudice its use and outcomes in certain ways. Such power can occur through initial institutional design or even institutional capture. In both cases, the institutions operate in ways that privilege particularistic interests over the public interest, prejudicing certain courses of action in the process. It is at this level

12

The Corruption Dilemma

where one encounters what Dennis Thompson (2018) denotes as institutional corruption and Sandoval-Ballesteros (2013) as structural corruption. This encompasses, for instance, the role moneyed interests play to bias the institutional framework in accordance with their own interests, the power to institutionalize the duplicitous exclusion of those affected by state decisions in the making of those decisions, as noted in Mark Warren’s (2006) definition of corruption, or even the control exercised by organized crime over parts of the state. Because the design must still roughly conform to a broader democratic narrative, be open to public criticism and debate, and comply with the existing ideological narratives regarding the limits of power (the broader definition of corruption), this degree of power is somewhat limited; it is not absolute. A further step downward resides the degree of power or power inequality required to influence the political agenda, the priorities of the state, the laws, and public policies but within the existing, constituted institutions. As with all policies, it includes the power to shape the norms that specify with excruciating precision the anticorruption statutes as well as the resources and priorities devoted to creating preventive mechanisms and/or investigating and sanctioning allegations of corruption. It lays out in highly technical terms exactly what is permitted and what is not and how to police the frontier. In practice, this level of power encompasses most forms of what some scholars denote as “legal corruption” (Kaufmann and Vicente 2011), much of what Arvind Jain (2001) labels simply as “political corruption” (as opposed to bureaucratic corruption), and the violation of what Mark Warren (2004) denotes as second-order norms. Centered largely within the political or input sphere, such corruption encompasses practices that technically are permitted by the law and facilitated by the institutions that, nonetheless, illegitimately privilege and promote particularistic interests and, as such, are considered by some as a form of corruption. As examined in Chapter 3, examples include the ability of moneyed interests to take advantage of the existing institutions of campaign finance, lobbying, and the revolving door in the United States to ensure that their views and interests are adequately reflected in policy (Gilens and Page 2014). It also includes the practices of political parties at the state level to use existing institutions and laws to draw electoral districts in ways that clearly privilege their own party (gerrymandering) or to use discretionary bureaucratic power, as in Mexico, to ensure the impunity of corrupt officials. Of course, once again, this power is significantly constrained by the broader democratic template, the prevailing definitions of corruption, and the conditions imposed by the constituted insti-

The Political Nature of Corruption

13

tutions. Even judicial decisions to protect these avenues of power, such as campaign finance, must abide by basic, fundamental democratic principles such as the protection of free speech and the right to petition the government—principles that enable private political financing and super PACs in the United States. Finally, at a lower rung we find the power imbalances producing what is more easily recognizable as corruption. This is where illegal forms of corruption reside, and it is the arena that receives the most attention from scholars, activists, and the bulk of anticorruption reforms. It is here where an institution, an organization, a group, or an individual wields sufficient power to illegitimately influence a particular decision or action by state officials and/or the implementation of a specific policy but does so in clear violation of existing law. A bribe certainly exerts power. But while such corrupt power is perhaps momentarily effective, it remains limited to a particular case and moment. It is thus far more restricted than higher orders or concentrations of power. It is constrained not only by the broader democratic template, the definitions of corruption and existing institutions, but more importantly by the law and policy itself. As a result, such exercises of power can rarely be done in the open or openly admitted: they often require subterfuge and the imaginative elaboration of increasingly complex schemes and networks that strive to at least give them the appearance of legitimacy and legality. They also invite public condemnation, shame, and profuse personal denials when brought to light. But while bribery or extortion forms of corruption clearly involve a degree of power (money or power talks), those wielding such power lack sufficient power to ideologically legitimize what they do or, in a sense, make graft or the diversion of public funds or protecting drug traffickers acceptable and legal. Of course, such corrupt power also entails the power of those occupying the state to take advantage of their authority to extort or demand a bribe from a citizen or a company or collude with others to ensure that such illegalities go undetected and, even if detected or denounced, go unpunished. After all, they largely control these instruments of the state. But even if they go unpunished, as they often do (impunity), such corrupt acts are nonetheless considered illegal and illegitimate and must be kept hidden. It is at this level that the prevailing paradigm, much of the literature regarding corruption, and the reams of recommendations to fight corruption fit and make the most sense. Cast within this general framework, fighting corruption (controlling the power of the powerful at all levels), as noted earlier, means the creation of some counter-power within the two-level game to contest the

14

The Corruption Dilemma

definitions and conceptualizations of corruption, the institutions behind institutional corruption, and the laws and policies that privilege certain interests over others resulting in legal forms of corruption, and, at the practical level, to prevent, detect, and punish illegal forms of corruption. Taking place within the confines of the broader democratic narrative, this agonistic political struggle produces a dynamic setting where the rules and boundaries of authority and legitimacy remain fluid, poorly defined, and subject to constant change. And yet, the mere struggle and the outcome to contain power with power itself also arises out of and reflects power imbalances and inequalities. After all, the power needed to limit power requires, to some extent, a matching degree of power by an individual, a group, or an institution that also holds/represents/embodies a particular worldview and promotes particularistic interests and priorities. In discussions of the development of the European state and democracy, for example, both Stephen Holmes (2003) and Charles Tilly (1985) use rationalchoice theory to describe how the crown eventually accepted limits on its power when it acceded to the demands of the landed aristocracy in exchange for their cooperation and their resources, which the crown desperately needed to fund its wars and internal operations. Not only did the crown accept these limits on its own power out of necessity— to secure interests deemed more important than the exercise of those specific powers—but the imposed limits reflected solely the particularistic interests of the landed aristocracy: the counter-power. The crown thus acceded to their demands and interests (grudgingly and always trying to circumvent them in practice), but not to the needs and demands of those outside that group, thus leaving weaker groups within society vulnerable to abuses of power by both the crown and the aristocracy. Viewed from a different angle, while the state requires legitimacy to rule, it needs the legitimacy of the more powerful sectors within society more than it does that arising from weaker sectors. So, just as power is limited by others with whom you seek cooperation and resources, it is more important to secure the legitimacy of those whose cooperation and resources are needed to rule. Consequently, even the limits on power reflect the basic inequities of power, privileging other competing interests in the process. Finally, in addition to shaping distinct forms of corruption and the nature of the limits on power, the inequalities of power, as is discussed later, also influence individual perceptions about the meanings of corruption, tendencies to cheat and engage in corruption, and subjective notions about the applicability of rules to oneself. As research discussed

The Political Nature of Corruption

15

in Chapter 6 illustrates, people with power and wealth tend to embrace a somewhat different understanding about what corruption is and perceptions about its prevalence. As inequality grows, this feeds a growing gap between the public’s perception of corruption and the elite’s perceptions. Shaun Bowler and Todd Donovan (2016, 273), for instance, note how “many Americans seem to have a different sense of corruption” than the standard definitions shaped by experts and the elite. The primary purpose of this study is to better understand how corruption is engrained in politics and vice versa. But rather than adopting one definition while excluding others, the current approach juggles multiple and competing definitions of corruption and different forms of corruption while also keeping a certain focus on the core concept. The multiple definitions discussed in the next chapter are thus set out as components of the ideological debate that embody and represent competing particularistic interests and motives. In exploring the different types and patterns of corruption, the current study seeks to pursue a multilayered approach to highlight the underlying causes and forces shaping many of the more predominant forms and patterns of corruption and the vast challenges of curbing corruption. Recognizing the quintessential political nature of corruption and anticorruption means acknowledging not just how corruption relates to controlling the power of the powerful, but also how our understanding of corruption, the patterns of corruption, and the nature of anticorruption strategies are all products of the inequality of power and the role of power and privilege (even our own) in society. In other words, just as power shapes the authority embodied in institutions and laws, so too does it shape the abuses of that authority and the prevailing views on the nature of corruption: what it is and how to fight it. Corruption’s fundamental political nature thus lies behind the contested nature of the term’s meaning; it is fastened to the perennial political conflicts over the proper nature and role of the state, of authority, and the use of state power; and it finds expression in the highly politicized and often polarized setting of fighting corruption. So, what does Corruption Dilemmas try to explain? What questions does it really seek to answer? At one level, it aims to better understand why corruption exists and, more importantly perhaps, persists even though everyone condemns it and despite the decades of heightened attention, intense governmental and public mobilization,

Purpose and Contributions

16

The Corruption Dilemma

and the institutionalization of anticorruption efforts nationally and worldwide. Moreover, the book strives to highlight the contentious nature of the debate and the struggles to establish, maintain, defend/ question, alter, and move the boundaries separating acceptable from unacceptable behavior as well as the deep-seated contention over how to prevent, detect, and punish those traversing the boundaries. Within this context, the book also underscores the various trade-offs and conundrums. Of course, if fighting corruption means controlling the power of the powerful, then it should be expected that the struggle would be an exceedingly arduous one. But the resistance and persistence of corruption also likely reflect in part our lack of understanding of how the forces fostering corruption evade, resist, and co-opt ostensibly anticorruption measures; how corruption evolves and responds to anticorruption efforts to survive; and how the powerful bend institutions to protect their interests, even to the point of making certain forms of corruption legal and certain forms of fighting corruption illegal and antidemocratic.

Notes

1. Letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887 (Figgis and Laurence 1907). 2. Juán Pardinas (2019, 307–308), for example, tells the story of a mayor of a small town in the state of Mexico in the early 1980s who assigned himself a salary of Mex$400,000, used municipal resources to finance a film that he starred in, and later died flying his own plane. Pardinas’s point is that back then all of this was legal and “were not cases of corruption per se because the institutional setting was total discretion, opacity and disorder.” Yet today, much of this is illegal. This process of redefining the limits is ongoing. In fact, at the time of this writing, the Mexican congress is reforming Article 74 of the Constitution to eliminate partidas secretas (secret accounts), a constitutional prerogative that presidents historically used to divert funds. Under Salinas de Gortari (1988–1994), for example, the account received US$200 million per month, funds he apparently distributed to his brothers, friends, bureaucrats, business leaders, legislators, writers, journalists, and media owners. During his final month in office, he made forty-one bank transactions involving over Mex$652 billion (see Badillo 2021b). 3. Moving the out-of-bounds markers outward by eliminating prior limits on power also occurs. Amiati Etzioni (2014), for instance, notes how even practices in the 1970s considered illegal in the United States are now considered legal because of the rulings in Buckley v. Valeo (1976) and Citizens United v. FEC (2010). 4. Though related, the idea of power inequality or imbalances goes beyond most definitions and treatments of inequality in the literature, which tend to center on inequalities of wealth and income. Of course, the fact that wealth often translates into power—that wealth inequalities parallel power inequalities—captures much of the capitalism/democracy dilemma. 5. The notion of cultural hegemony developed by Gramsci was originally presented in his prison notebooks to describe the hidden power of capitalist forces

The Political Nature of Corruption

17

to disguise the contradictions of capitalism operating through what Karl Marx described as the ideological/cultural superstructure (see Gramsci 1971). 6. The idea of power has long incorporated not only the resources to force someone to behave in a certain manner but also the determination of the rules of the games and perceptions. Exploring the absence of challenges to the powerful in Appalachia, J. Gaventa (2012, 9–12) distinguishes three dimensions of power: (1) the one-dimensional approach to power focuses on controlling behavior; (2) the two-dimensional approach, based on Schattschneider, relates, in addition, to how power “decides what the game is about . . . [and] who gets in the game”; while (3) the three-dimensional approach also involves determining wants and conceptions of issues. Gaventa (2012, 12) links this form of power to Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, or what Ralph Milliband (1969) considers ideological predominance for the “engineering of consent.” 7. The famous statement seems to suggest that power (authority) is a causal agent triggering corruption. Yet, authority (a subset of power) is a necessary ingredient for corruption (defined as abuse of authority) to occur rather than a cause. In other words, it is like saying, “Those with authority are more likely to abuse authority than those without,” which is largely tautological. Still, it does link corruption to the inequalities of power in that for corruption to occur, some must have authority (power) over others. Since power is relational, the statement thus offers a hypothesis linking the degree of inequality in power/authority to corruption: that corruption is a product of unequal power. 8. Hobbes argued that in the absence of nonhuman-based authority it is impossible to have rule of law over man because the sovereign has the final say (Hampton 1994). 9. This does not mean that corruption did not exist since the sovereign outsourced her/his authority to agents who could and did thwart the interests of the sovereign. The point here, of course, is that the sovereign could not commit corruption. 10. An earlier draft of this section is presented in Morris (2021a). 11. Perhaps the only notion of absolute power relates to various imaginations of god, particularly within monotheistic religions. However, I doubt Lord Acton meant to imply anything regarding god’s absolute corruption. 12. See Breit (2010) on the role of discourse in the social construction of legitimacy and power relations.

2 The Definitional Dilemma

The British learned late in the eighteenth century that “influence” is nothing but a euphemism for “corruption,” but contemporary political science chose to ignore this lesson. —Adam Przeworski (2010, 97)

The meaning of corruption is blanketed in confusion and disagreement. As Paul Heywood and Jonathan Rose (2014, 524) describe it, “Academic research has struggled to develop an adequate conceptualization of corruption, which recognizes the complexity of the concept, its rootedness in certain ways of thinking about the nature of politics, and its relationship to social and economic exchanges.” This confusion and disagreement extend beyond academics, who tend to meticulously debate such things ad infinitum, to include politicians, judges, bureaucrats, anticorruption activists, and fellow citizens. Whereas Aristotle cast corruption as a form of government focused on “rule with a view to the private interest” (1996 book III, 1279, cited in Wallis 2006, 29–33), for instance, the US Supreme Court has largely confined it to nothing short of an explicit quid pro quo between a public official and a citizen (see McDonnel v. U.S. 2016; Chayes 2020, 11–14; Teachout 2014). Whereas large majorities in Mexico and the United States feel that their governments serve the interests of the few rather than the many, Transparency International’s (TI’s) renowned rankings of corruption by experts place the two countries in wholly different categories (Morris 2018). 19

20

The Corruption Dilemma

Yet amid and despite the confusion, everyone seems to agree that corruption is both harmful and important. According to polls, politicians’ speeches, the missions and budgets of national and international organizations, international treaties and national laws, the billions in aid dedicated to fighting it, and the multiple academic conferences and papers, the people, the experts, and the politicians all consider corruption a huge problem. And just as opponents often wield the term corruption to delegitimize and attack those running the government, officials and allies often brandish it as a weapon to cripple their opponents. Donald Trump’s “stop the steal” supporters following the 2020 US election decried electoral fraud (a form of corruption) and fought for democracy, while others, also in the name of democracy, were equally convinced that the president was seeking to subvert democracy and corruptly retain power. This coupling of the absence of a clear definition together with its political saliency has prompted Jonathan Mendilow and Ilan Peleg (2014, 1) to go so far as to claim that corruption merely represents a “term of disparagement against disliked government or individual officials”; or, as Susan Rose-Ackerman (2018, 98) suggests, it is a term used simply “to condemn behavior that violates the speaker’s values.”1 But defining corruption, delineating the limits of power—part of the ideological debate noted earlier—is important precisely because it goes well beyond mere definition. “How a social phenomenon like corruption is defined shapes the terms for analyzing it,” Janine Wedel (2012, 456) notes, as well as our approaches to fighting it. Though I will say something here about how to define this slippery, polysemic concept, the current chapter focuses more on the dilemma of defining corruption: in short, the implications and outcome of these ideological disagreements set amid corruption’s political importance. To briefly summarize the argument presented in this chapter, what is referred to here as the definitional dilemma reflects the inherent and paradoxical political context encasing the ideological struggle to define it. But unlike most concepts, the stakes in defining corruption are high. After all, defining corruption represents the key to determining the limits of acceptable behavior in government and society, thereby structuring political opportunities, costs, and consequences. Part of the dilemma, however, is that those wielding power, particularly government officials and those with resources able to exert significant influence over the state, play a disproportionate role in shaping our understanding and approach to corruption, thereby crafting the prevailing orthodoxy or paradigm. They do so, as one might expect, in ways that, within certain constraints and parameters, reflect, promote, and protect their own personal and political interests and perspectives. Paradoxically then, while corruption fundamentally refers to limiting the power of the

The Definitional Dilemma

21

powerful, power plays a major role in navigating the debate and forging the prevailing paradigm. In The City of God, Saint Augustine refers to an encounter between Alexander the Great and a pirate. Alexander asks with what right the pirate infests their waters, to which the pirate responds: with the same right that you do, but since I have a small boat, you call me pirate and since you have a fleet, you are called emperor. But more than the navies, the difference is who gets to establish the names: the emperor is so-called by others, which in turn gives him the power to name the pirate—thus a question of power and sovereignty that centers on superiority—not right, but merely the consent of others: legitimacy (Ferrero 1992, cited in Mejía Madrid 2017). Such is the ideological debate over defining power and authority and, in a sense, their opposites. This chapter begins by focusing first on corruption at perhaps the highest level of abstraction, pinpointing the core nature of the concept: limiting power. Analysis centers on the concepts of authority, rule of law, and democracy. Like corruption, these concepts all relate to the fundamental idea of limiting the exercise of power. As such, the section provides a sort of metanarrative within which the debate over corruption exists. Despite the many disagreements over the precise meaning of corruption and the lines delineating its boundaries, competing arguments (by officials and opponents, the right and the left, the politician and the bureaucrat, the citizen, and the elite) are not wholly arbitrary; instead, they are all bounded by and must appeal to the constraints, conditions, and parameters imposed by this democratic/rule-of-law metanarrative defining the appropriate uses of power. The subsequent section then briefly tries to map the primary areas of disagreement over the meaning of corruption. It distinguishes among competing formulae along the lines of the “who,” the “what,” and the “why” of corruption. Such mapping not only provides a guide to understand the parameters of the definitional debate but also helps identify the central components that make up the prevailing orthodox or conventional view on corruption reified within the massive global anticorruption industry (Sampson 2010) as well as dissenting, counterhegemonic views. This is followed by a closer examination of the dominant paradigm—its meaning as well as its theoretical foundations and anticorruption strategies—and an exposé of the political and economic interests underlying this perspective. Building on the prior discussion, the chapter’s final sections explore this idea of the definitional dilemma. Emphasis centers on how the power that the concept of corruption seeks to contain, on the one hand, paradoxically influences our understanding of it on the other; how other

22

The Corruption Dilemma

agents seek to contest the dominant view and alter the dynamic boundaries of acceptable behavior; and how such debate and contestation takes place and is bounded within this broader democratic template. The final section draws on the definitional dilemma to preface the other dilemmas examined in subsequent chapters.

Limiting Power: Authority, the Rule of Law, and Democracy

Corruption is often described as the abuse of power for personal gain. This casts anticorruption, its antithesis, as the quest to limit (the) power (of the powerful). The idea of corruption thus raises questions about how and where to delineate the “out-of-bounds” markers for the use of state power and, subsequently, how to enforce those limits: the twolevel ideological and empirical struggles alluded to in the introductory chapter. But before considering the nuances that separate the different definitions and approaches to corruption—the substance of the ideological debate—it is important first to bring into the discussion three concepts related to this central idea of limiting power: authority, the rule of law, and democracy.

Authority Power, as noted in the prior chapter, is a commonly deployed concept in political science. To reiterate, it is routinely defined as compelling someone to act in a way they otherwise would not by the use or threatened use of force or, in a Gramscian and Foucauldian sense, by way of the hegemony of ideas and forms of reasoning. Authority, by contrast, is an oft-neglected concept in the discipline. It refers to a specific form or subset of power: power that has been deemed acceptable and permissible.2 Authority, in short, constitutes the legitimate use of power that is in some way granted to and embodied within the state, its laws, and institutions and deployed by the people occupying the state. Or to use TI’s definition of corruption, authority refers essentially to “entrusted power.” Max Weber (1978), of course, famously held that such authority could stem from traditional, charismatic, or legal-rational foundations (or some combination of these). Generally reflecting the latter, political constitutions today reify and map political authority. They specify exactly what the state can and cannot do, thus limiting the power of the state to only those tasks deemed legitimate. At an exceedingly broad level of abstraction, then, corruption can more appropriately be considered the abuse of authority rather than the abuse of power: it is conduct that oversteps the bounds of authority.

The Definitional Dilemma

23

But corruption is much more than simply transcending those boundaries. Corruption also represents the leveraging of state authority by state officials (those occupying the state) and outsiders to exercise nonlegitimate forms of power: in a sense, of converting authority back into sheer power. The state, after all, remains a mere abstraction: an ideal. But, in fact, the state refers to the organizations, resources, institutions, and laws controlled and/or occupied by individuals and groups all with their own particularistic interests, or what E. E. Schattschneider (1960, 71) refers to as mobilizational biases. And while they are theoretically bounded by the limits placed on the state’s power, the state’s authority provides them with the ideological power and cover as well as the practical tools of governance to wield nonlegitimate forms of power (and, paradoxically, as part of the definitional dilemma described later, play a major role in both establishing and policing those boundaries). Corrupt police officers, for example, convert and exploit the authority of their badge to exercise power either to their own advantage or to the advantage of their superiors, the institution, the party in power, or the state. Normally when police operate corruptly they are engaging in an illegal act; but they are uniquely able to do so because they personify the state’s authority and are equipped with the tools needed to exercise it, including a level of discretion and even the organizational and institutional support that too often enables them to act corruptly with impunity. Even when politicians craft an institution, a law, or a policy that illegitimately protects or promotes their own political or personal interests, they not only violate the conditions of their authority (to serve the broader public interest) but are also able to do so precisely because of the authority they hold. They can then use the same authority to encase their actions in euphemisms and protect themselves from attacks, while at the same time denouncing and even declaring war on corruption. To illustrate again using the simplistic historic example of absolute monarchy noted earlier, the once hegemonic ideology of the divine right of kings basically held that an unknowable god granted them their authority (legitimate use of power). While theoretically the only limit to the crown’s authority was to overstep the bounds determined by this unknowable god, in practical, earthly terms this granted them virtually unlimited and uncontested authority.3 This did not mean that all forms of corruption were absent under such a system since the crown had to outsource their authority to agents who, acting on the crown’s behalf, could easily overstep the bounds of the authority granted to them by the crown. Still, the sovereign, by definition, could not act corruptly. With time, however, again as alluded to earlier, even the god-granted authority of the crown came to be contested and defined in more earthly terms. The

24

The Corruption Dilemma

crown acknowledged a moral responsibility to serve the kingdom and its subjects rather than their own individual interests, thus conceptually and legally separating the idea of the public from the private, and marginally, at least, limiting their use of power. Much later, the notion of constitutional monarchy emerged to further restrict the crown’s power, ruling that certain actions lay beyond what was considered acceptable or legitimate, leading to initial power-sharing arrangements with the nobility: something that eventually evolved and became institutionalized by the creation of a parliament (Johnston 2004; Vergara 2020, 59).4 Not all uses of power constitute corruption, of course. The mere notion of authority refers to bounded power where the exercise of power is considered legitimate and not corrupt. In fact, the proper use of authority is often the norm and not the exception. Still, as Lord Acton suggested, generally those with power—whether the power is rooted in ideology, structure, ethnicity, gender, and so on—tend to leverage that power to exploit others in pursuit of their interests, thereby exceeding the acceptable boundaries on the exercise of power.5

The Rule of Law and Democracy Like the concept of authority, both the rule of law and democracy also impose limits on the state’s power. But while authority simply limits power to what is deemed legitimate, the rule of law and democracy add substance and meaning to what is considered legitimate. At minimum, for instance, the rule of law specifies that the law must be created by authorized bodies, be generalizable, not be used arbitrarily, apply equally to all regardless of wealth or connections, including those controlling the state, and that whatever the government does, it does based on the law (Bingham 2010; Flores and Himma 2013; Raz 1979; Tamanaha 2004). It suggests that no one is above the law. “Thicker” or substantive definitions of the rule of law, including Guillermo O’Donnell’s (2004) depiction of the democratic rule of law, impose additional limits on the state’s power by restricting the content of the law or requiring that the law include certain elements. Criteria limiting the reach of the law include, for example, that the law not violate individual freedoms and liberties, including the right of private property; criteria specifying substantive components to the law include, for instance, the separation of state power across institutions, the existence of an independent judiciary, and even mechanisms of accountability.6 It is clear that the concept of the rule of law not only restricts state power but also does so in ways quite reminiscent of our general understanding of corruption: that state officials, just like the rest of us, must comply with the law, not exercise power arbitrarily, and not favor the interests of some over others.

The Definitional Dilemma

25

Like authority and the rule of law, democracy also limits the exercise of state power. As Francis Fukuyama (2014, 33) acknowledges, “Modern democracy was born when rulers acceded to formal rules limiting their power.” Above all, democracy, as identified early on by Aristotle and others, specifies that the appropriate use of power is to serve the public good over the private interests of the rulers (in other words, government for the people). As O’Donnell (2010, 99) notes, “The rights of judges, of members of the legislature, and of all other legal officeholders are justified by the interests of the office. . . . The ultimate justification of the rights depends on the fact that . . . they protect and promote the interest of the community as a whole; they promote and protect common goods.” Modern, liberal, and procedural forms of democracy impose additional limits on the state’s power. They specify, for instance, the exact mechanisms that must be used to select political leaders (elections—government by and of the people), what the state can and cannot do with respect to certain basic freedoms considered instrumental to the procedures of selecting leaders (freedom of speech, the press, association, etc.) as well as other supposed “inalienable rights.” Democracy also lays out the precise procedures that must be followed to create, administer, and adjudicate the law. More substantive or “thicker” definitions of democracy go further by detailing not only how political decisions and the law are to be made and leaders selected (procedural notions of legality and democracy) but also why, how, and for what purpose (such as promoting human dignity, human rights, and equality) (Alvarez et al. 1996; Boix et al. 2012). As with broader, substantive definitions of the rule of law, such substantive criteria normally include the protection of human rights, the promotion of human dignity, freedom and equality, and even effective representation and accountability. Democracy even seeks to cap the level of discretionary power. “Democracy’s sweeping discretionary powers must operate through some set of decision rules and may not be used to violate core rights and periodic elections” (Alexander 2002, 1159). This limitation largely reflects what Mark Warren (2004), in his conceptualization of corruption, refers to as second-order norms: the rather ambiguous principles or criteria that should govern decisionmaking by public officials, such as fairness, justice, and equality. It is worth noting, of course, that many nondemocratic, nonliberal, or authoritarian regimes that lack many of the limitations on power found in more liberal democracies nonetheless tend to hold to the core democratic tenet that the state should serve the public’s interests (government for the people if not by and/or of the people). Like Plato, Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin rejected the notion that the people could or should select leaders capable of ruling on behalf of the common good. For Plato,

26

The Corruption Dilemma

democracies, sadly, meant a government ruled by the impulses of the people rather than the pursuit of the common good, while Marxists considered the people largely incapable of recognizing their true interests because of some combination of alienation and false consciousness. Though in both scenarios these thinkers believed rulers should be drawn from the intellectual or enlightened class, the state’s foundational purpose remained the same: to serve the interests of the people.7 Fundamentally then, democracy and the rule of law define authority: the agreed-upon, legitimate limits on state power. Together, they hold that the state’s power should be limited, that all those empowered (or authorized) by the state are bound by the law, and that the state should act justly to serve the interests of the people.8 This democratic/rule-of-law metanarrative (herein referred to at times as the democratic narrative or template) thus constitutes the normative and ideological narrative defining the state’s authority and, thus, serves as the key to understanding the concept of corruption. Using the language of social contract theory, we essentially grant (acknowledge) to the state the authority to exercise certain powers (over us) for the purpose of serving our collective good (or, to use a different term, the interests of the “we” constituted as a nation). This upper-level constraint or guiding principle thus serves as the basic template as to what the state can and cannot do and how it can do it (the precise out-of-bounds line delineating authority and corruption). In a more practical sense, the overriding power of this democratic narrative means that elected and nonelected officials must ground their discourse and appeals in democratic principles that define the state’s legitimacy and authority. Rhetorically at least, they must commit to promoting the public good, to rule on behalf and for the people, to pursue justice, to recognize that they too are subject to the rule of law, and, to be sure, to denounce corruption (Scott 1990, 18). And though this principle remains exceedingly abstract and subject to extensive political debate and construction, it nonetheless constitutes the discursive tent under which all arguments related to authority, the use of state power, and corruption take place. In short, it bounds the ideological debate on corruption. At the same time, this noble task of serving the public interest—the modern sovereign— enshrines the state with almost unlimited ideological authority and equips those controlling the state with exceedingly powerful tools that they can (ab)use to exercise illegitimate power with impunity (see Chapter 4). As always, the political fight over the devilish details takes place much further down the ladder of abstraction. No one contends that the state should not serve the interests of the people;9 instead, we argue over what those interests are (ideological debate), how to determine those interests (institutional design), and how to achieve them in prac-

The Definitional Dilemma

27

tice (institutional design, laws, and public policies). Likewise, no one believes that the state’s power should not be limited; instead, we debate what the state’s authority should and should not encompass, whether institutionalized authority can actually accomplish its fundamental task of serving the people or whether people in power (those occupying the state) can, in fact, abide those limits.10 As Runciman (2008, 208) notes, the “democratic language can be both a mask for power, and a means of removing the mask.” Of course, the most effective and efficient way to exercise power in any society is through the effective control, use, and manipulation of the narrative determining the nature and limits of authority; or, basically, winning the ideological debate over the details and, in turn, shaping the institutions, laws, and policies. After all, as Steven Lukes (2017, 1) avers, “power is at its most effective when least observable.” In line with Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, convincing others that the power you exercise is right, appropriate, and legitimate, consistent with the principles of authority, is a far more efficient means of wielding power than the costly use of coercion or the illegitimate exercise of power. It is preferable to use one’s power and influence to shape the institutions and laws rather than to use that power to undermine them, putting oneself at risk of public condemnation and sanction. Even so, this democratic/rule-of-law narrative provides the legitimizing context or template for all these political arguments for and against certain definitions of corruption, institutions, laws, policies, and their implementation.

Scope and Dimensions of Disagreement: The Who, What, and Why of Corruption

Below this canopy lies the debate over corruption. Indeed, scholarly and public debate over the definition of corruption runs deep (see Alemann 2004; Andersson and Heywood 2009; Heidenheimer 1970; Heidenheimer and Johnston 2002; Johnston 1996, 2004; Kurer 2005; Philip 1997; Warren 2004). The concept is clearly polysemic and contested.11 But rather than trying to resolve this debate, critique certain viewpoints, or “plant the flag” and adopt a particular definition and dismiss others, the purpose here is to try to capture the multiple meanings and approaches to corruption as part of the political landscape. This milieu not only provides the setting to contrast competing interpretations on corruption and the many different forms of corruption but also helps to distinguish an orthodox, hegemonic view from dissenting or counterhegemonic views. In short, it lays out the various components of the ongoing political debate. In simplified form, much of the definitional controversy surrounds three areas:

28

The Corruption Dilemma

subject, norm, and motive, representing what I call the “who,” “what,” and “why” of corruption. For example, Joseph Nye’s (1967) oft-cited definition of corruption refers to behavior by a public official (subject: the “who”) that deviates from the formal duties of public office (norm: the “what”) for personal gain (motive: the “why”).

The “Who” of Corruption: Individual Versus Systemic Views Answers to the “who” question of corruption generally divide between those depicting corruption as a form of individual behavior—though even here many still raise questions about the specific characteristics of the individuals who can be involved in such behavior12—versus those casting corruption as a systemic phenomenon. The behavioral view, grounded in the assumptions of utility maximization and public and rational choice theories, perceives corruption as a form of individual deviance. As such, it denotes an act that reflects purposeful conduct and individual (moral) choices. This perspective reigns as one component of what herein is referred to as the “conventional or orthodox paradigm.” In short, it defines corruption as an act carried out by individuals. Others, however, cast corruption as systemic, not behavioral. This approach builds on—or resurrects—the historic, classical understanding of corruption as a collective state of being rather than an individual act (Dobel 1978). Aristotle, as noted earlier, cast corruption not as a specific act but rather as a form of government focused on “rule with a view to the private interest” (1996 book III, 1279, cited in Wallis 2006, 29–33). In recent years, the systemic perspective has grown within some academic circles to encompass a host of dissenting ideas tied to constitutional materialism (Vergara 2020), institutional corruption (Thompson 2018), legal corruption (Kaufmann and Vicente 2011), and structural corruption (Sandoval-Ballesteros 2013). As Lawrence Lessig (2011, 231) notes, “It is not individuals who are corrupt within a wellfunctioning institution. It is instead an institution that has been corrupted.” From this perspective, then, corruption encompasses acts that may be legal but are questionable in terms of legitimacy and the rule of law (Funderburk 2012, 19). As such, rather than focusing on the acts of individuals, the systemic view highlights more the context of individual actions, training our attention on whether the institutions themselves are appropriately structured and perform in ways consistent with the purposes that justify their existence and that imbue them with authority, or whether, instead, they facilitate and promote the pursuit of particularistic interests or predetermine certain courses of action.

The Definitional Dilemma

29

The “What” of Corruption: Norms, Principles, and Boundaries All observers seem to agree that corruption represents a normative concept, meaning that it violates some norm or principle and, as such, is bad; but competing definitions highlight a myriad of distinct boundaries that seek to specify the “what” of corruption: the line being crossed. Arguably the most common approach to flag the boundary—and a second component of the conventional approach—is the law (Heidenheimer 1970): the written and accepted rules that go to great lengths to detail the responsibilities of public officials, or, in short, their “formal” duties as Nye (1967) noted. This rather narrow and seemingly easier empirical approach tends to cast corruption as a failure by state officials to “follow the rules,”13 violating a chief principle of the rule of law. But as Robert Williams (1999, 505, cited in Mendilow and Peleg 2016, 4–5) affirms: “Using only legal criteria to define corruption is to endorse the authority of the strong rather than the just” and to divorce corruption from its normative foundations: an implicit reference to the corruption dilemma. Questioning this legal-based approach,14 others have thrown a handful of normative principles at the wall to see what sticks. Competing formulae contend that corruption, by definition, violates the principles or limits determined by public opinion,15 the public interest (Aristotle), the common good, an ethic of universalism or nondiscrimination in the implementation of public policies (Kurer 2005; Mungiu-Pippidi and Johnston 2017; Rothstein and Teorell 2008), the duplicitous exclusion of those affected by the decision in the making of the decision (Warren 2004, 2006), key principles of the democratic process (Thompson 2013; Lessig 2011), or autonomy (Miller 2010). Manuel Villoria et al. (2014, 198), for example, like Aristotle, define political corruption as “the supremacy of particular interests in public decisions, and thus the exercise of authority for the sake of a few.” Indeed, there are many normative principles or criteria to choose from. The “Why” of Corruption: Motive and Outcome The third contested component relates to motive. In some form or another, virtually all definitions of corruption tend to tout private gain as the primary motive: a third component in the orthodox definition (abuse of entrusted power for private gain). By doing so, most perspectives tend to cast corruption as reflecting personal greed and avarice on the part of “trusted” public officials with their individual decisions grounded in a context in which they rationally act based on an assessment of the balance of risks and opportunities (the principal-agent

30

The Corruption Dilemma

approach). It is this illegitimate pursuit of private gain that above all defines, through contrast, the idealized virtue that public officials should, as officials of the state, prioritize the public interest. But despite its ubiquity in most definitions of corruption, the issue of motive is not simply whether the agent is pursuing personal gain; instead, it is only about those situations in which doing so (pursuing personal gain) violates the norms defining corruption. Not only is the pursuit of personal gain a basic assumption of rational choice or utility maximization theories, but no one suggests that public officials should eliminate all concerns for their own personal well-being. In fact, it is not a problem when their pursuit of personal gain—such as representing constituents well to be reelected, faithfully fulfilling the responsibilities of the position to get a personal promotion or a raise or to gain recognition and respect— is consistent with the pursuit of the public interest, the letter of the law, or other guiding principles; the issue is only when they deviate. Instead, the larger issue related to motive centers on whether the illegitimate pursuit of personal gain (corruption) reflects solely the personal interests of the agent involved or whether it in fact stems from the pursuit of broader political, partisan, familial, business, ethnic, class, institutional, or organizational interests. In other words, it is when such conduct is rooted in the pursuit of particularistic interests as opposed to the public interest: the extent to which corruption runs counter to an institution or is embedded within it and sustains it. By overly emphasizing personal gain and hence individual motive, prevailing views too often fail to incorporate the broader political and institutional contexts in which corruption occurs.16 The point, as Villoria et al. (2014, 198) note, is the pursuit of particularistic interests whether that involves solely personal gain or not. From a systemic perspective, the question of motive—a human trait—seems less intuitive. Systems and institutions, after all, cannot have motive. Still, even from a systemic perspective, one can focus on the motives of those formulating the laws and the institutions and, importantly and impersonally, those enjoying the materialistic outcomes of the institutions, laws, and policies. In other words, in addition to the motives of those making them, the institutional perspective asks whether the institutions and policies achieve their stated purpose that justifies them or whether they in fact foster some other, illegitimate outcome that effectively serves the particularistic and personal interests of some. While a campaign finance system has no motive per se, for instance, the question is whether materialistically the system results in a government that truly represents the will of the people—as elections are designed to do—or instead (re)produces a government that responds to and serves the interests of the few: what many consider an illegiti-

The Definitional Dilemma

31

mate and a corrupt outcome. At a much broader level, then, does the existing constitutional system materialistically create, protect, and ensure a government that promotes the interests and will of the people, or does it produce oligarchy: rule by and for the few, what Aristotle deemed corruption (Vergara 2020)?17 Figure 2.1 tries to map the scope of contestation over the definition of corruption. It shows how corruption can variably refer to individual acts by public officials who violate the basic norms of public office exclusively for private gain (orthodox definition) or for political or institutional gain; to individual acts by anyone with control over resources that violate certain fundamental principles, such as ethic universalism or democratic inclusiveness, that should govern the making of official policy or the distribution of public goods but may not be fully incorporated into the law itself or be illegal; to an institution or sets of institutions, including all related laws and norms, that privilege certain interests over the broader public interest (systemic and institutional corruption); and even to acts by public officials that the public generally considers to be illegitimate and corrupt even though they may be perfectly legal (legal corruption).18 While many, if not most, of these criteria are not mutually exclusive and in fact tend to overlap, providing a sort of impressionistic image of corruption as an umbrella concept, there are still clear differences and contradictions among the formulae, resulting in substantial debate.19 Such differences set the stage for the Figure 2.1 Mapping Definitional Differences

Note: *Components of the conventional or orthodox view.

32

The Corruption Dilemma

competing ideological and political battles that both forge consensus and question it.20 As noted previously, these battles are contained within a broader democratic/rule-of-law narrative.

The Power to Define Corruption: The Prevailing Paradigm and Its Critics

The various components within this definitional smorgasbord are not equal; some carry more weight than others. As noted, many analysts and practitioners have contributed to the emergence of a type of orthodox interpretation that enjoys the endorsement of many, particularly Western governments, international organizations, activists, politicians, and scholars, all institutionalized within what Steven Sampson (2010) terms a global anticorruption industry. As Michael Johnston and Scott Fritzen (2021) describe it, this paradigm tends to cast corruption as a form of deviant behavior stemming from the failure of bureaucratic institutions to effectively limit discretionary authority, monitor behavior, and sanction wrongdoing. This conventional or orthodox approach contains several characteristics. It tends to employ a nation-state–centric view that sees corruption as arising from national factors and implicitly assigns blame to the state and state actors rather than those outside the state. In turn, this perspective tends to center anticorruption recommendations on curbing and/or eliminating state functions (Heywood 2017; Sandoval-Ballesteros 2013; Walton 2015). The orthodox approach also refers primarily to the forms of corruption most commonly found in developing countries rather than those occurring in more developed countries (Murphy 2011). Coincidentally, the orthodox vision tends to downplay or dismiss many of the systemic and institutional forms of corruption—the forms of corruption more commonly found in developed countries—or corruption arising from the state’s relationship with developing countries (Murphy 2011). Presenting a view of corruption as separate from politics (apolitical)—offering what proponents see as an essentially objective (nonpolitical) understanding of the term and hence a scientific, technocratic approach to fixing it—the dominant perspective also largely dismisses the need for broader systemic changes that might challenge the status quo (Johnston and Fritzen 2021, 119). Theoretically, it envisions corruption by way of a principal-agent framework that, in turn, suggests the need for institutional reforms designed to limit the discretion of bureaucratic officials and strengthen the detection and punishment of violators (Rose-Ackerman 1999; for a critique see Rothstein 2021a and 2021b). Some critics also question the monochromatic view of corruption within the orthodox narrative, the metrics used to measure corrup-

The Definitional Dilemma

33

tion, and the universal “one-size-fits-all” recommendations for fighting it.21 Such views, accordingly, sustain and empower a global institutionalized anticorruption industry created by international treaties, international organizations (intergovernmental and nongovernmental), the foreign policies of Western powers, and massive amounts of resources dedicated to promoting policy reforms primarily in the developing world (Johnston and Fritzen 2021). Beyond questioning the orthodox perspective, theories, and recommended reforms, critics have also highlighted the underlying political and economic interests these views tend to privilege, protect, promote, and, perhaps, even disguise. As Johnston (2005, 6) notes early on, “the vision that has emerged over the past decade is a partial one at best.” As part of an effort of “deconstructing the ideological and conceptual underpinnings of the dominant definitions and interpretations of corruption” (Brown and Cloke 2011, 117), the multifaceted critique sees the prevailing orthodoxy represented and promoted by the anticorruption industry as embedded in a liberal understanding of the nature of markets and their relationship to government (Bukovansky 2002, 3). It not only hoists Western democracies as the ideal political-economic system and the host of universal “best practices” (Johnston and Fritzen 2021, 127) but also focuses on and prioritizes the forms of corruption that perniciously impact international businesses and Western interests while downplaying the forms of corruption that benefit them.22 As Sampson (2010) and Grzegorz Makowski (2016) admit, the corruption paradigm arises from the novel focus on corruption by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and development agencies as a major problem of development in the wake of the Cold War. Emerging from the World Bank, the highly influential international nongovernmental organization (NGO) Transparency International beginning in the mid-1990s helped insert corruption high atop the agendas of Western governments and development agencies, effectively institutionalizing anticorruption worldwide (Sampson 2010).23 As Makowski (2016, 59) avers, the “organizational ownership of the social problem of corruption usually remains in the hands of international organizations.” The paradigm, moreover, tends to reflect an anti-state, ahistorical, and anti–developing country bias while promoting neoliberal economic and structural reforms championed by and benefiting Western governments. As Peter Bratsis (2003, 19) contends, the modern concept of corruption does not function as an explicitly normative construct, but rather as the articulation of categories of bourgeois political ontology. The approach is “based upon an implicit understanding of ‘proper’ politics as being Western-style liberal democracies” (Andersson and Heywood

34

The Corruption Dilemma

2009, 750) and is embedded within a neoliberal model that is inherently anti-state (Hall 1999). Seen as part of the normal workings of the global capitalist and imperialist system (Bedirhanoglu 2007), the perspective thus helps reinforce the power of developed countries over the developing countries (De Maria 2008; Murphy 2011). It not only tends to blame corruption on the culture (Coronado 2008), state, and state officials of developing countries (Bukovansky 2006, 183) but also provides a convenient explanation as to why the pro-market reforms recommended by the West over the past two or three decades have not produced the promised results (Brown and Cloke 2004, 273). Consistent with the framework linking inequality to corruption presented in Chapter 1, the orthodox paradigm on corruption reflects the hegemonic power of Western economic and political interests. As noted in the introductory portion of this chapter, the definitional dilemma refers to the paradox embedded within the ideological struggle to define corruption. It contends that those wielding power, particularly government officials and those with resources exerting significant influence over governments and society, play a major role in shaping our understanding and approach to corruption and determining the prevailing orthodoxy. They do so, as one might expect, in ways that, within certain limits, reflect their own political interests and perspectives. Paradoxically then, while corruption fundamentally refers to limiting the power of the powerful, power nonetheless plays a major role in navigating the debate and forging prevailing perspectives and the ruling paradigm. The definitional dilemma builds on a series of three suppositions. First, it holds that far more is at stake than simply semantics or an academic definition. Defining corruption goes a long way in determining how the concept is understood theoretically, how it is measured, and how to fight it. It lays out what is acceptable and what is not. Defining corruption, moreover, determines how institutions, laws, and policies seek to limit the power of the state and state officials. Second, acknowledging the political saliency of this debate, the definitional dilemma also recognizes the contested nature of the discursive battle to define corruption. As Paul Heywood (1997) points out, any definition of corruption presupposes some notion of “uncorrupt” politics or proper government, the subject of intense ideological debate over the nature and purpose of politics, and, as Johnston (2005, 10) suggests, “contention over who gets to decide its meaning.” The higher the stakes, the more contentious the debate.

The Definitional Dilemma

The Definitional Dilemma

35

Third, borrowing from a constructivist and Wittgensteinian perspective, the definitional dilemma holds that no single perspective (definition, institution, law, or policy regarding corruption) can be considered entirely neutral or objective (Mouffe 2005, 97), creating what E. E. Schattschneider (1960, 71, cited in Lukes 2017, 6–7) denotes as mobilizational bias: “All forms of political organization have a bias in favor of the exploitation of some kinds of conflict and the suppression of others because organization is the mobilization of bias.” In short, none is free of bias; instead, all tend to reflect, privilege, promote, and protect certain underlying particularistic interests. This means that no institutional arrangement or position regarding the limits on power can be considered completely objective, though supporters will certainly (and by necessity) claim them to be so; instead, they invariably reflect the underlying interests and/or confer privilege. As Stephen Holmes (2003, 22) notes with respect to the rule of law, “If we define the rule of law in such a way as to exclude the disproportionate influence of organized interests on the making, interpreting, and applying of law, we have identified a system that has never existed and can never exist.” Reminiscent somewhat of path dependency theory (see Pierson 2000), not only do existing institutions, laws, policies, and so on preclude certain outcomes and help predetermine others, but such outcomes inevitably favor certain political interests while handicapping others. This suggests that the contested debate over defining corruption is driven by political and economic interests (Bukovansky 2006, 199; Johnston and Fritzen 2021, 21). As Akhil Gupta (1995, 385, 388) notes, the discourse of corruption relates to the “cultural practices by which the state is symbolically” created, just as “the other face of a discourse of corruption . . . is a discourse of accountability.”24 The debate reflects the antagonism and ideological tensions created by different underlying understandings of the role of the state and the nature of democracy itself (Mouffe 2005, 97). The debate, in short, constitutes a “war of position in the Gramscian sense, that is, the search for power through the cumulative conquest of ideological spaces on the cultural/ideological sphere” (Forattini 2020, 19). This, in turn, builds on notions of power, such as Gramsci’s, that go beyond merely controlling the behavior of others to controlling the basic nature of the game, who gets to play, agendas and issues, and the engineering of consent (Gaventa 2012). As described earlier, since the 1990s this war of position has forged a conventional approach regarding the nature of corruption that reflects, promotes, and facilitates the economic and political interests of Western powers and international business (Johnston and Fritzen 2021).

36

The Corruption Dilemma

As part of the ongoing debate, however, the prevailing orthodoxy has come under increasing attack. Critics push broader conceptualizations of corruption that question the status quo, expose the political and economic interests underlying the orthodox view, and seek to adjust the boundaries limiting political power. This is part of the constructive process, of course, out of which the limits defining corruption change over time and place. Whereas clientelism and patronage were once accepted throughout Europe, they are now considered forms of corruption (Tanzler et al. 2016, 1, 21). Within this process, opponents first push for changes at the ideological level and then, once achieved, struggle for their enforcement. From 2014 to 2017 in Mexico, for example, civil-society organizations and opposition parties mobilized a massive campaign to push a series of constitutional, institutional, and legal reforms resulting in the creation of Mexico’s new National Anticorruption System (SNA in Spanish) and an autonomous justice department both equipped with citizen oversight and guidance, and above all, obviously, focused on fighting Mexico’s deeply entrenched corruption and impunity. Yet today, many of these same actors are now focused on the empirical realm, struggling to get the reforms implemented. In many cases, they even fight to block counter-reform proposals. In sum, on the one hand, corruption represents the abuse of authority, and anticorruption represents efforts to effectively constrain and limit the exercise of power; and yet, on the other hand, that same power that we seek to limit paradoxically plays a fundamental role in determining the meaning of corruption, the institutions, the agenda, the laws, the policies, and priorities regarding corruption in ways that best promote and protect their own political and economic interests. Since both corruption and its definition are the product and vehicle for the exercise of power, it is impossible to separate definitions, institutions, and laws from the struggle for and against power. The fight over definition is inherently part of the same political effort to control the power of the powerful. Thus, while proponents of the prevailing hegemonic paradigm seek to sustain and defend it, critics seek to question the prevailing views, expose the current limits as serving particularistic interests rather than the public’s, and thereby alter the boundaries and tighten the limits on state power. At the same time and set within a context of competing definitions and perspectives, actors and interests struggle to tarnish their opponents as corrupt and dismiss allegations of their own corruption as being either just normal politics, the abuse of power by opponents, or even part of their effort to fight corruption (see Chapter 5). And yet, this paradoxical and dynamic debate—defining corruption, establishing institutions, laws, and procedures—is constrained by and contained within a broader democratic template specifying whatever

The Definitional Dilemma

37

formula proposed must theoretically serve the public interest and conform to the basic principles of democracy and the rule of law. For many, this means promoting ideological and institutional means to minimize domination (Ian Shapiro cited in Ackerman 2006, 23) and weaken the ability of the powerful to privilege their own interests. The highly contentious and constructive debate over proper politics and good government thus represents the flip side of grappling with improper politics and bad government. The definitional dilemma provides the foundation for the other dilemmas discussed in subsequent chapters. The lack of an agreed-upon definition and the inability to design objective institutions, laws, or their implementation, including anticorruption policies, all reflect power imbalances within society. The capitalist/democratic dilemma of Chapter 3 builds on this by highlighting the structural power of capitalism and capitalist forces—within the limits provided by the democratic narrative—and their role in shaping what many see as the prevailing paradigm, institutional forms of corruption, the patterns of impunity vis-à-vis corruption, and both legal and illegal forms of corruption. The political dilemma, the subject of Chapter 4, in turn, builds on the definitional dilemma by focusing on the inherent structural advantages enjoyed by those occupying the state, enabling them to use the state’s authority and tools to promote policies and their implementation in ways designed to enhance, protect, and maintain their control. The definitional dilemma also directly creates the setting for the anticorruption dilemma described in Chapter 5 by feeding multiple narratives pitting inpower groups against out-of-power groups and the political uses of anticorruption by both groups. Finally, the definitional dilemma nurtures the personal dilemma in Chapter 6 by providing the rather ambiguous context within which personal decisions are made, manipulated, and rationalized.

Looking Ahead

Notes

1. Anthropologists Sarah Muir and Akhil Gupta (2018, S6) point precisely to the lack of definitional precision as the key to the concept’s success as a global term. Being hard to define and yet always considered bad, it is easy for people to use it to condemn any social ills. 2. Both Talcott Parsons and Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of power, emphasizing legitimacy, seem akin to the concept of authority (see Lukes 2017, 32). 3. Based on the belief that they asserted God’s earthly claims, some popes during the Middle Ages “advanced the clergy’s supremacy over kings” (Shlain 1998, loc. 6583, ch. 30).

38

The Corruption Dilemma

4. As noted in the introductory chapter, both Holmes (2003; 2006) and Tilly (1985) emphasize how the early state accepted these limitations on the use of power in exchange for the needed cooperation and resources provided by strategically important groups within society. Such bargaining and negotiations eventually turned into recognized rights, institutions for sharing power, and democracy. 5. This extends beyond the political realm discussed here. The power enjoyed by men from a biased, misogynistic system and an embedded androcentric ideology too often leads some to cross the line and abuse that power by engaging in various forms of sexual assault and sexual violence. White privilege—the power tied to race and an ideology of racism—not only perpetuates its own existence but also encompasses even illegal actions such as lynching that are too often met with impunity: a pattern seen in certain cases of corruption by state officials or even large banks that are “too big to fail.” From a big picture perspective, all such abuses of power can be cast as forms of corruption, but not all exercises of power are corrupt. 6. In a typical multilayered definition encompassing both minimalist and substantive components of the rule of law, the 2004 UN Secretary-General’s report on The Rule of Law and Transitional Justice in Conflict and Post-Conflict Societies defines the rule of law as the “principle of governance in which all persons, institutions, and entities, public and private, including the State itself, are accountable to laws that are publicly promulgated, equally enforced, and independently adjudicated and which are consistent with international human rights norms and standards” (cited in Hurwitz and Studdard 2005). 7. Lenin (1965 [1917], 104, cited in Carnoy 1984, 59), of course, rejected liberal or bourgeois democracy as “democracy for the rich.” Envisioning class conflict as irreconcilable and the state as the repressive apparatus of class domination, Lenin saw both bourgeois democracy and the transitional dictatorship of the proletariat as distinct forms of class domination. The subsequent withering away of the state imagined by Friedrich Engels could only occur after the state has taken possession of the means of production in the name of society, thereby ending class conflict. With no class conflict, there is no longer a need for the state. 8. This principle—serving the common good—is but one component of the democratic narrative, but it is arguably the most important. As a political regime, democracy of course means more than just privileging the public interest. It includes elections and liberties (further restrictions on power). Yet at one level, elections and liberties can be seen instrumentally as the means to achieve the first-level principle of serving the public interest. They are also the subject of long debate as to whether they achieve that objective. Even authoritarian regimes that do not necessarily use elections or recognize individual rights enjoy authority that is claimed and rooted in the democratic narrative of serving the people. It remains unclear which regime best achieves that objective. From a slightly different perspective, it is possible to note how Abraham Lincoln’s description of democracy as a government “by the people, of the people and for the people” actually identifies three distinct purposes (the last being the foundational democratic narrative noted here and recognized by both democratic and authoritarian regimes) that may or may not empirically align. 9. Some contend that such a thing as the public or common interest does not truly exist. Frederich Hayek (1978) and the Austrian school of economics, James Buchanan, and many modern-day libertarians in the United States, for example, contend in zero-sum fashion that any powers granted to the state represent a loss of individual freedom (Tanenhaus 2017). 10. Theories and ideas associated with anarchism, for example, hold that any form of institutionalized authority cannot protect or promote the public interest.

The Definitional Dilemma

39

11. Gallie (1955–1956, 123, cited in Lukes 2017, 62) defines a “contested concept” as a concept that “involves endless disputes about their proper uses on the part of their users.” 12. For most observers, the “who” involved in this behavior is not just any individual, but rather public officials or individuals working for or on behalf of the state. Still, some reject this narrow, state-centric view for neglecting business or others with collective power over resources (De Maria 2008, 186; Murphy 2011; Warren 2004, 332). Even TI’s most recent iteration of the definition of corruption refers to “entrusted power” but not to the state or state officials specifically. 13. Given the vastness of the state’s legal expression, using the law to encase and define corruption arguably expands rather than restricts the concept of corruption to engulf such neighboring concepts as the rule of law and even democracy. In short, if corruption refers to any violations on the legal limits of state power by state officials or the state itself, then its scope becomes vast, more akin to the concept of “state crime” (Green and Ward 2004). Corruption in this expanded legalistic view thus includes not just the more traditional crimes associated with corruption (bribery, extortion, conflict of interest, and abuse of power) but also other violations by state officials such as electoral fraud, vote buying, vote rigging, electoral manipulation, the violation of human rights, impunity, violations of the rule of law, etc. In the final tally, all these are considered violations of public norms by public officials based in the law. This also makes it difficult, conceptually, and methodologically, to separate corruption from the rule of law and democracy (see Morris 2021b). 14. Among the many criticisms of the legal-based approach is that it takes the law as given and thus tends to divorce corruption from its normative foundations and neglects the fact that the law itself can be a product of corruption—an idea captured best by the concept of “legal corruption” (see Kaufmann and Vicente 2011; Dincer and Johnston 2014; Selds 2014; Thompson 2013; 2018). It also highlights the fact that the law is unable to cover all possible corruption scenarios given the role of discretion in decisionmaking and the inability to know why people make certain decisions. Finally, the law always tends to be reactive rather than proactive. We first decide something is corruption (ideological level) before deciding to make it illegal. 15. In Buckley v. Valeo (1976), the US Supreme Court referred to the concept of the “appearance of corruption,” thus acknowledging that public opinion may see corruption even where it does not exist. Indeed, many US laws target and prohibit not just corruption per se but also the appearance of corruption, such as laws prohibiting any potential conflict of interest. 16. The issue of motive raises the question of intent. While the orthodox behavioral- and legal-based approach certainly makes intent central to committing an act of corruption, the institutional perspective makes it possible for individuals to be involved in corruption without their intent. Rather than consciously deciding to engage in an act of corruption, individuals within the context of institutional corruption may simply be complying with the formal and informal rules of the institution without recognizing the biases or privileges created by the design or operation of the institution. 17. As one example of the variable forms of corruption, Etzioni (2014) distinguishes three types of definitions: (a) the personal—narrow definition—involving the illegal use of public power for personal gain. Commonly used by economics, it refers to bribes or theft, but not deflection of resources to interest groups; (b) a broader definition—as illegal use of public power and resources for private gain, which includes personal gain and illegal deflection of public goods to advance the causes and coffers of private (special interest) groups. Theoretically, it assumes that politicians should promote the common good or the public interest (and that such a

40

The Corruption Dilemma

thing exists); and (c) the legal but illicit (or unethical) conduct—much broader definition—“use of public power and resources for legal but illicit purposes.” 18. Ofer Raban (2011) contends that the definition of corruption adopted by the US Supreme Court in the Citizens United (2010) case is contrary to the definition found in the anti-bribery law and that campaign contributions and expenditures violate the definition used in the anti-bribery law. This leads him to refer to the “constitutionalizing of corruption” in the United States. 19. There is significant overlap among the components of the definition. Norms specifying how public officials and others engaging the government should act are largely spelled out in the law; the law, in turn, generally embodies and rests on a narrative that privileges the common interest; and public opinion tends to embrace and express this narrative. In short, the law codifies what public opinion collectively deems to be in the public interest, just as certain forms of discrimination in the distribution of public goods or the mechanics of duplicitous exclusion are considered illegitimate by the public. And yet, there are also clear differences and even contradictions. Something the public considers corrupt or something that detracts from the public interest or even violates basic underlying principles of justice and democracy may be perfectly legal (“legal corruption”), just as certain institutional arrangements that promote specific political interests may go unrecognized by the public and/or be unsanctioned by the law. 20. In the end, most criteria are vague and, sadly, when taken individually, inadequate. The more precise the criterion, such as a narrow use of the law or “formal duties” of public officials, the more likely that specific examples of corruption escape its embrace; but specifying such broad terms as the public interest or even a broad notion of the law is also fraught with difficulties, sucking in way more than what most people would consider corruption, including neighboring concepts such as rule of law and democracy (Morris 2021b). 21. Johnston and Fritzen (2021) provide a detailed critique of the paradigm focusing primarily on its analytical and theoretical failures to effectively provide the tools to address corruption. Among the criticisms of the efforts to measure corruption, see Wathne and Stephenson (2021). 22. Wedel (2012, 454) highlights the influence of economics on corruption research. Corruption research, he contends, has been influenced “by the perspectives, agendas, and resource opportunities of the field of international development, the study and practice of which has been dominated by economists.” 23. Interestingly, for years, international financial institutions such as the World Bank, which eventually played a major role in igniting global interest in corruption in the 1990s, were prevented from addressing the issue of corruption by their institutional mandates that proscribed them from getting involved in domestic politics. Yet, in part by shifting the focus to institutions and the concept of good governance, these institutions began to pencil corruption into their agendas. In some sense, they became involved in political matters by depoliticizing corruption and euphemisms. 24. Maarten Hajer (2005, 300), for example, defines discourse “as an ensemble of ideas, concepts, and categories through which meaning is given to social and physical phenomena, and which is produced and reproduced through an identifiable set of practices.” The underlying idea is that such narratives compete for dominance or hegemony, which is achieved when a particular narrative starts to determine the way a social unit conceptualizes reality, known as discourse structuration, and when the discourse is manifested in institutional arrangements (a system of measurement and policy measures), known as discourse institutionalization (Gephart 2012, 10).

3 The Capitalism/Democracy Dilemma

Gold is a Wonderful thing! Whoever possesses it is lord of all he wants. By means of gold one can even get souls into Paradise. —Christopher Columbus (in a letter from Jamaica, cited in Brioschi 2017, 76)

To preserve its power, the governing class must be “adept in the shrewd use of chicanery, fraud, [and] corruption.” —Gaetano Mosca, The Mind and Society

Chapter 2 located the essential criteria defining corruption within a broad democracy/rule-of-law narrative that limits the state’s power (its authority) to serving the public interest. But while democracy and the rule of law establish the general parameters (and nurture a range of instrumental constraints that further define the state’s authority), more specific criteria defining and operationalizing corruption remain contested. This ideological debate results not only in competing formulae about what constitutes corruption and where the boundary should be drawn but also intense criticism and mutual accusations. Rooted in the constructivist and Wittgensteinian idea that no institution (or law or policy) can be totally free of bias or the privileging of particularistic interests or outcomes over others, the prior chapter also highlighted the role powerful Western economic and political interests have played in putting together an orthodox (hegemonic) understanding of corruption that 41

42

The Corruption Dilemma

reflects and protects to the degree possible their own interests. Though still constrained by the democratic/rule-of-law narrative, their influence has crafted official views on corruption; the institutions, laws, and policies delineating the fine lines separating acceptable from unactable behavior; and anticorruption agendas and strategies worldwide. Building on the analysis of the definitional dilemma, this chapter turns attention to the somewhat contradictory relationship linking capitalism and democracy, and capitalism’s ties to corruption. Rooted in competing views regarding the appropriate role of the state, the scope of authority, and, hence, the meaning of corruption—all subsumed under the democratic narrative—the clash between capitalism and democracy has a fundamental impact on corruption, and vice versa. Conceptually, of course, corruption operates at the intersection of the economic and political spheres. It grapples with the issue of limiting the pursuit of wealth and power; it essentially seeks to prevent politicians from plundering the economy and economic interests from dominating politics (Johnston 2005, 1, 9). Citing Edmund Burke, Jonathan Mendilow and Ilan Peleg (2014, 9–10) similarly pinpoint these two directions of corrupt influence: “the use of political authority to extend social and economic power beyond the limits set by the constitutional principles for the authoritative distribution of resources and the resolution of societal conflicts” and “the use of social and economic power to gain political ends in breach of the basic principles by which political resources are distributed.” This chapter focuses on the power of capitalist forces. It tries to show, first, how the contradictions within the capitalism/democracy dilemma help explain much of the nature and patterns of corruption today and the difficulties and contradictions in fighting it; and second, how corruption—both conceptually and practically—helps alleviate the contradictions between capitalism and democracy, thereby mitigating their rather tenuous coexistence. The chapter begins by exploring the nature of the capitalism/democracy dilemma. It highlights the distinct and contradictory ideological foundations of the two and capitalism’s structural power over the state. Building on this, the subsequent section explores the patterns of corruption that emerge from the dilemma, stressing in particular the corruption crafted by a powerful capitalist class exercising influence over the state. It emphasizes institutional and legal forms of corruption, the advantages wealth enjoys in most illegal forms of corruption, and the impact of economic inequality on corruption, drawing on the illustrative cases of the United States and Mexico. The chapter then turns to an examination of how corruption helps assuage

The Capitalism/Democracy Dilemma

43

the contradictions between capitalism and democracy by formally and informally taming and keeping democracy within limits deemed acceptable to capitalist interests while also checking the corruption of the state. Recognizing how capitalist influence over the state represents just one pattern of corruption, the concluding section turns the tables to reiterate the state’s structural power and its impact on corruption, thereby setting the stage for an examination of the political dilemma in Chapter 4. The relationship between capitalism and democracy has triggered substantial debate over the years. While Joseph Schumpeter (1942) suggested that historically the two systems arose in unison through a mutual causal relationship, Adam Przeworski (2019, 17) contends that “looking into history shows that we should be surprised by the coexistence of capitalism and democracy.” As part of the complexity of the relationship, empirically, capitalism appears to be a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for the presence of democracy (Berger 1986; Dahl 1990); but democracy is not necessary for the existence of capitalism. Lying behind such findings are extensive arguments from all sides about the compatibility or incompatibility of the two (Almond 1991). The former view suggests the two are twin components of a functioning system that reinforce one another; the latter argues that capitalism undermines democracy and/or that democracy threatens capitalism (Boix 2003; Houle 2009). Reminiscent of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, much of the contradiction stems from fundamental differences in their supporting ideologies and their relative power. Democracy, as discussed earlier, is a system bent on limiting the power of the state. It grants and defines the scope of the state’s authority and enshrines the public interest as the state’s overarching purpose. In modern liberal democracies, the democratic state shoulders many more limits on its power, ranging from the precise means to selecting political officials (elections) and what the state can and cannot do regarding individual liberties, to exact structural mechanisms of accountability (separation of powers), to even procedural laws on how state officials should make decisions and why, all crafted as core instruments to help achieve the state’s broader objective of serving the people. As such, democracy represents a system designed to discover, express, and implement collective preferences about the distribution of resources serving the collective good (Przeworski and Wallerstein 1988, 11). Echoing the central theme here, for Kenneth Bollen (1980; 1993),

Capitalism/Democracy Dilemma

44

The Corruption Dilemma

who views democracy within a typology rather than a taxonomy, the degree of democracy hinges on the extent it can fulfill those collective preferences by minimizing “the political power of the elite” and maximizing “that of the non-elite” (1980, 372). Capitalism, in contrast, rests on a narrative praising the virtues of individual self-interest and individual liberties.1 Its foundational principle is the individual right of private property, with individual gains from personal initiative that are private and separable rather than public and aggregate (Johnston 2005, 8). In contrast to democracy’s emphasis on collective preferences about the distribution of resources, resources under capitalism are privately owned and decisions regarding their allocation are rooted in the private prerogative (Przeworski and Wallerstein 1988, 11). In contrast to democracy’s emphasis on cooperation, capitalism emphasizes competitive self-interest. And in contrast to democracy’s emphasis on openness, capitalism operates based on a logic of secrecy (Manriquez 2019). Within this liberal-capitalist narrative, any sense of the public spirit or civic virtue remains largely detached from the individual (and even individual morality); instead, it is projected onto the overall functioning of impersonal market forces that, fully consistent with the broader democratic principle of serving the common good, is thought to maximize societal well-being and the public interest. Market capitalism, in short, enshrines competition among private individuals controlling their own resources (including the sale of labor) and pursuing their own selfish interests as the most efficient and robust means to achieve the public interest while simultaneously maximizing individual freedom. Arguably then, both systems focus on a similar objective: the pursuit of the common good. Yet, the capitalism/democracy relationship finds both attempting to contain and constrain the influence and harm coming from the other: one form of pitting power against power. In other words, capitalism strives to limit the scope and impact of democracy’s collective good decisions (since it undermines individual initiative and produces what some see as a suboptimal or less efficient outcome), while democracy seeks to limit the scope and impact of capitalism’s emphasis on the free market (since it tends to weaken the pursuit of collective decisionmaking and collective goods). But reflecting on this ideological tug-of-war between the two systems, many suggest that capitalism tends to enjoy the upper hand, resulting in a weakening, taming, or subverting of democracy. This is perhaps easier to view from the extreme. The orthodox Marxist approach envisions the bourgeoisie (capitalist class) as control-

The Capitalism/Democracy Dilemma

45

ling the state, capturing its authority and repressive machinery to promote and prioritize its class interests over the public interest. According to this view, the bourgeois democratic state is a mere facade (superstructure) serving primarily to disguise and legitimize capitalist hegemony and facilitate class domination. Fundamentally then, this perspective holds that the two systems are incompatible. Indeed, Marx himself rejected the coexistence of private property and universal suffrage (cited in Przeworski 2019, 17).2 According to the authors of “Corrupción, capitalismo y democracia” (2020), when laws are changed or written according to the money that is circulated among legislators, when the different parties and candidates all represent the same political program and the same class interests, when these candidates and parties behave more like merchants of the vote than representatives of some alternative program, or when elections are won by whoever has the most money to buy votes, pay for publicity and manipulate consciences, then we cannot speak of real democracy, at least, one that serves the majority. . . . Under capitalism, democracy cannot be any other way.

Such a situation, as Sheldon Wolin (2008, 131) observes, demotes democracy from a formative principle to a rhetorical function within a corrupt system. But views pointing to the disproportional power of capitalism and its effects on democracy are not just part of an extreme Marxist narrative. This view is equally common among non-Marxists and even in mainstream Western political science. Robert Dahl (1990), for example, acknowledges that democracy is “impaired” by the inequality created and protected by capitalism; Charles Lindblom (1977) characterizes the capitalist corporation as a “barrier to fuller democracy”; and Joseph Schumpeter (1942) recognized that “there are some deviations from the principle of democracy which link up with the presence of organized capitalist interests . . . that the means at the disposal of private interests are often used in order to thwart the will of the people” (cited in Almond 1991). Or as Przeworski (2010, 97) points out, “money has endless ways to infiltrate itself into politics.”3 Many posit that the advantage enjoyed by capitalism in its clash with democracy stems primarily from the state’s structural dependence on the resources controlled by businesses and the wealthy. Simply put, the state must rely on (and hence bargain with) capitalist forces because it is unable by itself to organize production, mandate investment, command consumption, gain cooperation, or fund its own operations using force (Holmes 2003, 2006; Offe 1975; Lindblom 1977). In Charles Tilly’s

46

The Corruption Dilemma

(1985) analysis of the rise of the European state noted earlier, for example, the state’s structural dependence on private capital forced the crown to negotiate and bargain with the landed aristocracy (the holders of wealth) to ensure access to the resources needed to fund the state’s operations and its wars. In the process, the state acceded to the demands of the aristocracy recognizing and abiding certain limits on its powers, particularly those related to the interests of the aristocracy. Eventually, this bargaining between the political and economic elite gave rise to parliament, the establishment of basic rights, and the other paraphernalia of democracy. In short, the theory of structural dependence suggests that capitalists enjoy a privileged position because they command the resources the state needs (Luxemburg 1970; Pashukanis 2017). Consequently, “whatever goals government wishes to obtain is circumscribed by the public power of capital” (Przeworski and Wallerstein 1988, 11). Capitalism further conditions state power indirectly by way of its effects on society, thereby reinforcing the state’s structural dependence on capitalism. This includes the capitalists’ powerful and persuasive ideological narrative appealing to individual initiative and reward, its material control over key aspects of societal well-being (production, investments, jobs, wages, consumption, etc.), and the economic inequalities exacerbated by market forces. The influence is indirect since such factors shape the values and material needs of the public, which, in turn, formulate and press their demands on the state (see “Corrupción, capitalism y democracia” 2020). The capitalist narrative is so persuasive, for instance, that Freddie Choo and Kim Tan (2007) characterize the “American Dream” as a rationalization that emphasizes monetary success as the ultimate symbol of individual success (see also Dupuy and Neset 2018). As a result, “vote-seeking politicians are dependent on owners of capital because voters are” (Przeworski and Wallerstein 1988, 12). Owing to this influence, politicians and state managers representing the people tend to internalize the interests of the capitalists, who, in turn, use their power to push the state to support, promote, and protect their class interests (Miliband 1969).

Inequality and Corruption In addition to leveraging the state’s structural dependence on capital, which gives capitalist forces a “leg-up” to influence the definition of corruption and control the laws and policies to delineate the acceptable and unacceptable ways of exercising power, capitalism also indirectly promotes forms of corruption by way of the inequality it tends to reproduce. Indeed, many cross-national studies suggest a positive relationship link-

The Capitalism/Democracy Dilemma

47

ing a nation’s income inequality to corruption (e.g., Ariely and Uslaner 2017; Bardhan and Mookherjee 2000; Casas-Zamora and Carter 2017; Gleaser et al. 2003; Husted 1999; Swamy et al. 2001; You and Khagram 2005). Early on, in fact, Jean-Jacques Rousseau identified inequality as the main cause of moral corruption (cited in Tully and Scott 2020, 185). Parallel to the earlier discussion linking the concentration of power and power imbalances to corruption, economic inequality fosters corruption by facilitating various forms of state capture, particularly at the local level (Madison 1961 [1788]; Bardhan and Mookherjee 2000), and by creating patron-clientelist relations linking the poor to the better off (Uslaner 2008, 23–24). Inequality, moreover, influences trust and forges perceptions of an unjust system, both of which correlate with higher levels of corruption (Uslaner 2008, 29; You 2005). Indeed, in their crossnational study, Eric Uslaner and Bo Rothstein (2013) found a negative correlation linking a nation’s level of education in 1870 (a proxy for inequality) to its levels of corruption 140 years later. The impact of inequality on corruption can also be seen at the macro level. Brian Fried et al. (2010) in an experimental study in Mexico City found that police are more likely to target lower-class individuals and let more affluent drivers off with warnings. Follow-up qualitative research reveals that officers associate wealth with the capacity to exact retribution whereas poorer individuals are unable to take such action. Vidriana Rios (2020) similarly shows corruption to be more prevalent in Mexico’s poorer municipalities and within social programs seeking to redistribute income and opportunities. Indeed, Przeworski (2010, 97) considered “the corruption of politics by money . . . a structural feature of democracy in economically unequal societies.” Such patterns once again illustrate the influence of the imbalances or inequality of power on corruption. Yet much of the research focusing on inequality and corruption suggests a mutual causal relationship. Not only does the massive wealth and massive poverty created by inequality create the conditions favorable to corruption, but corruption also disproportionally benefits the wealthy, thereby exacerbating the levels of inequality. Sanjeev Gupta et al. (1998), for instance, found that corruption increases poverty and deeply impacts the bottom 20 percent. While the wealthy have the wherewithal to exert corrupt influence—legally and illegally—the poor are left vulnerable and forced into corrupt acts and relationships just to survive. This inequality à corruption à inequality thus forges a Catch-22 or state of low-level equilibrium that adds to the tensions and contradictions within the capitalism/democracy dilemma. It stretches out the divisions between elite and popular views about corruption and spotlights

48

The Corruption Dilemma

the public’s perceptions of corruption and their own disempowerment. This tendency, in turn, likely feeds the periodic, cyclical rise in public attention to corruption during periods of economic crisis and/or rising economic inequality. Assailing the prevailing definitions of corruption (and the institutions, laws, and policies), many thus begin to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy, press the need for more prodemocratic reforms to limit the legal and illegal privileges enjoyed by the few, and promote popular empowerment and policies to address the needs of the people more effectively. Such democratic concerns resonated strongly within the US political campaigns of both democratic socialist senator Bernie Sanders and the victorious 2016 populist candidate, Donald Trump. Despite ideological distance, both lashed out at the influence and control of moneyed interests over the US government and its distortion of the public interest. Following years of growing inequality in the United States, such views regarding the nature and prevailing patterns of corruption in the nation have become a bit more of a mainstream challenge to the status quo establishment. Janine Wedel (2012, 489) suggests that “corruption can be accurately studied only by examining the patterns and systems of influence that underlie it.” To briefly reiterate the story thus far, the concept of corruption centers on limiting the power of the state, first, by ideologically defining the boundaries separating legitimate and illegitimate influence of money over politics and politics over money; and second, by enforcing those limits. The contradictory coupling of capitalism and democracy and capitalism’s structural power over the state play an important role in delineating these boundaries, in enforcing them, and in determining the direction of influence and forms of corruption. Consistent with the earlier discussion linking different levels of power to definitions and forms of corruption, attention now turns to the powerful influence of wealth (the economic elite). In contrast to the influence where politicians plunder the economy (Johnston 2005, 1, 9)—examined in the next chapter—this pattern finds capitalist interests leveraging their resources and exploiting the state’s dependence on capital to influence political decisions in ways that best promote and privilege their own interests—thereby downplaying the role of popular interests—in ways many scholars and theorists interpret as corruption. Once again, the previous chapter’s exploration of the definitional dilemma laid out a central component of this influence. It described

Narratives and Patterns of Corruption

The Capitalism/Democracy Dilemma

49

the role capitalist (largely business and Western) interests have played in shaping the conventional definition and approach to corruption and hence the boundaries of acceptable conduct (Makowski 2016). To reiterate, this orthodox perspective sees corruption mainly in terms of the abuse of power by state officials. It emphasizes bureaucratic and illegal forms of corruption, centers largely on states in the developing world—though it warns of the potential dangers of endowing too much power in the state generally—and even sees liberty, private property, and a strong private sector as essential checks (and balances) on the abuse of power by state officials. These views comply with the democratic narrative by stressing liberalism (individual freedom and private property) and an economic system justified as achieving the best use of resources and, hence, serving the public interest. While it trains particular attention on the forms of corruption that harm business interests, it simultaneously tends to downplay those forms of corruption that seem to most benefit those interests. This includes a lack of attention (or inclusion within the narrative) to business activity that drives corruption in developing countries, to the systemic causes of corruption within capitalism (Murphy 2011), to the various forms of what others depict as structural, institutional, and legal forms of corruption (something this narrative routinely dismisses), and even to the fiscal paradises and avenues of squandering and hiding money around the world. But for many, as pointed out earlier, this prevailing (hegemonic) narrative on corruption reflects the underlying interests of business, experts, and their representatives in the West. As such, it depicts what many observers interpret within a counterhegemonic narrative as itself a form of corruption. “The revival of interest [in corruption in the 1990s] has been driven primarily by business, and by international aid and lending institutions—groups that tend to view corruption as cause and consequence of incomplete or uneven economic liberalization. The state and politics are, often as not, seen as parts of the problem, rather than essential elements of development and reform” (Johnston 2005, 18–19). Expressing the view shared by many others, Jane MarcusDelgado (2003) contends that the focus of international financial institutions on corruption is designed to discredit the state, thus gaining support for neoliberal policies that favor the interests of business. Alina Mungiu-Pippidi (2020, 94) similarly notes how the needs of market capitalism have prompted an emphasis on reducing bureaucratic corruption and depoliticizing (professionalizing) large portions of the state. Even the creation of regulatory agencies has routinely been

50

The Corruption Dilemma

designed and administered by representatives of industry and run to protect vital sectors of the economy from political control. Before examining how corruption also helps overcome the capitalism/ democratic dilemma, analysis of corruption in the United States and Mexico helps illustrate the powerful influence of wealth (the economic elite) arising from the capitalism/democracy dilemma and the state’s structural dependence on capital. While both countries illustrate the dual directions of influence—economic interests dominating politics and politicians plundering the economy (Johnston 2005, 1, 9)—attention here centers on the former.

Corruption in the United States The United States provides perhaps the quintessential example of the influence of capitalist interests over the state in ways that many, including much of the public today, consider to be corruption. Featuring largely institutional and legal forms of corruption (Etzioni 2014, 141),4 the US pattern—referred to by Michael Johnston (2005) as market influence corruption—finds corporations asserting abundant influence over state officials and state decisionmaking primarily by way of three modes: campaign contributions, lobbying, and an interlocking network of personnel. The result is a relatively high degree of state capture by private interests, ensuring favorable policy outcomes, silencing, or controlling the influence of “outside interests” and, in turn, effectively taming or bounding the influence of democracy and popular interests. Probably the most widely noted pattern of legal corruption in the United States links business to the state via private campaign contributions. Though no clear link exists between contributions and legislative roll-call votes, private campaign contributions by outsiders and the candidates themselves are nonetheless thought to influence the selection of candidates presented to the public, the outcomes of elections,5 and the government’s agenda, policies, and programs (Lessig 2011, 123). In a nifty self-serving arrangement, elected officials allocate multiple rents to firms or groups who in turn provide campaign contributions to help them win or maintain elected office (Knott 2011, 32): a view widely shared by the public and even many within the business community (Brennan Center for Justice 2012). According to Thomas Ferguson’s (1995) investment theory, the campaign finance-to-election relationship creates an obligation or expectation of reciprocity that makes investors rather than voters the primary market for political parties. This enables “blocs of major investors to define the core of political parties and are responsible for most of the signals the party sends to the electorate” (Ferguson 1995, 22).6

The Capitalism/Democracy Dilemma

51

In addition to campaign contributions, a central thread within this pattern finds the private sector gaining privileged access and influence also by way of lobbying and consulting. This occurs at virtually all areas and access points within the highly fragmented governments in the United States. It is most often noted within the legislative arena, where organized interests not only enjoy privileged access but often actually work together to draft model pieces of legislation and meticulously work to shape the fine-line details of government laws and regulations, particularly at the state level (Suh and Tarrow 2021; Grumbach 2022). Lobbying reaches beyond the legislative branch, of course, to include the executive and upper echelons of the bureaucracy, regulatory agencies, and the judiciary. According to Amiati Etzioni (2014, 143), lobbying can dilute regulations, debilitate restrictions, and weaken penalties and enforcement, resulting in “regulators who implement laws [being] ‘captured’ by the very same interest groups that are meant to be reined in.” He points, for example, to how lobbying by the accounting industry diluted the regulations of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, how the National Rifle Association (NRA) limits the ability of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to enforce gun laws, and how the inability of the government to enforce campaign finance laws (on the lack of enforcement of campaign finance laws in recent years see ProPublica 2016) has been eroded because of the role played by Republicans on the Federal Election Commission. Other examples include the weak enforcement of money-laundering laws7 and the government’s weak response to the banking crisis in 2009—a situation that prompted Sarah Chayes (2016) to ask: “What is the definition of corruption when a bank defrauds millions of customers without losing its license?” Offering empirical confirmation of this pattern, Frank Yu and Xiaoyun Yu (2011) found that firms that lobby tend to enjoy a lower hazard rate of being detected for fraud; they evade fraud detection longer and are less likely to be detected by regulators. A final thread of the dominant US pattern of corruption relates largely to what can be seen as the glue holding the system together: a fluid and interlocking network of commercial and institutional relationships linking wealthy donors, corporations, lobbyists, consultants, politicians, bureaucrats, corporate media, think tanks, pundits, and super PACs (Nichols and McChesney 2013, 4; Ferguson 1995, 41; Thurber 2010). Effectively blurring the lines between the public and private realms, this network is often referred to in the vernacular as the “revolving door.” The organization Public Citizen (2005) points to

52

The Corruption Dilemma

three distinct modes of revolving-door influence. The first, “industryto-government revolving door,” refers to the ability of business interests to capture portions of the federal government by placing their people in temporary leadership positions on the agencies designed to regulate business interests. The second mode, “government-to-industry revolving door,” depicts how the desire of public officials to leave government service and attract lucrative employment in the private sector influences their decisionmaking ex ante and the awarding of government contracts while in office. This suggests that it is not solely campaign contributions that influence the official actions of legislators but also their concern over future employment opportunities and income in the private sector (Lessig 2011, 123). The third form, “government-tolobbyist revolving door,” entails those leaving government service working as lobbyists and consultants for private business interests and exercising influence over their former colleagues. Indeed, members of Congress have learned that if they lose reelection or decide to leave public service, they can make plenty working in think tanks, institutes, and lobbying firms (Nichols and McChesney 2013, 81). Calling Capitol Hill a “farm league” for K Street lobbyists, Lawrence Lessig (2011, 123) points out that graduating members can make three to ten times more money. Indeed, the revolving door blurs the boundaries between the two sectors.8 The privileges of corporations and the wealthy, of course, reach beyond the political system deep into the judiciary and the criminal justice system as well. At the policy level, the resources at the disposal of corporations and the wealthy enable them to identify and finance cases through the courts, seeking favorable policy changes by way of judicial rulings. Indeed, where control over politics might fail, the courts have a strong track record of blocking government encroachment and protecting corporate interests. This includes protecting the role of money in elections. In addition, corporate interests often utilize the support of the courts to pursue cases against private individuals and societal organizations threatening corporate interests and privileges.9 But even at the level of adjudication and in routine criminal proceedings, as most observers routinely recognize, money tends to bend the scales of justice. At the enforcement level, fewer state resources are dedicated to fighting white-collar and corporate crime compared to blue-collar crime. Money rewards the accused with the ability to mount a far more effective defense, delay an already slow process almost indefinitely, and assemble an army of top-shelf lawyers, making the case exceedingly costly (and less beneficial) for the state or other civil actors to pursue. Of

The Capitalism/Democracy Dilemma

53

course, as noted earlier, if the state needs and depends on your cooperation and resources to operate, it is far less likely to prosecute and much more likely to negotiate a fine without the party even having to admit guilt. The organization Equal Justice under Law clearly states unequivocally that “people who are poor are systemically treated worse than the wealthy” (https://equaljusticeunderlaw.org/overview). Or, as US Justice Arthur Goldberg observed, “Money—or the lack of it—can be the deciding factor in the courtroom” (“Equal Justice for the Poor . . .” 1964; see also Reiman and Leighton 2017). Innocent until proven guilty, or guilty until proven wealthy? In sum, corruption in the United States tends to find corporate interests and the wealthy gaining access to, and advantages within, established institutions rather than pursuing deals circumventing the legal, formal institutions (Johnston 2005, 60). Existing institutions, in short, largely favor their interests and influence. The primary direction of influence tends to find wealthy organizations influencing the state, shaping the public agenda, policies, and their application (Bartels 2008, 281). 10 Within this context, the rule of law remains relatively strong, and illegal corruption in the form of an explicit quid pro quo— clearly illegal—and even low-level bureaucratic corruption remain relatively rare: “The most significant and powerful forms of corruption today are precisely those that thrive without depending upon quid pro quos for their effectiveness” (Lessig 2011, 107). Given that Transparency International and other metrics on corruption concentrate largely on illegal forms of corruption and tend to consult the experts and business leaders who hold to the orthodox view, it is hardly surprising that the calculations suggest relatively low levels of corruption in the United States. In addition to these broad structural patterns, of course, individual capitalists at times seek to undermine one another by engaging in corrupt activities with state officials to secure rents at the expense not only of the public but also of their competitors. This can occur through both legal and, occasionally, illegal routes. The influence of the corporate private prison industry in the United States, for instance—particularly its large campaign donations to the Trump presidential election campaign—resulted in a reversal of Obama-era policies and in multimillion-dollar federal contracts. 11 The efforts by individual defense industries to finance think tanks and public media campaigns, and to place their former officials in important positions in the government— all legal—facilitates profitable contracting opportunities to specific corporations. But corruption also entails, at times, illegal efforts to

54

The Corruption Dilemma

bribe officials to favor one business over another through clandestine payments, kickbacks, and even the promise of future employment to politicians and state workers. In all such cases, of course, the direction of influence still finds capitalist interests using their wealth and power to influence the state, nudging it to act in ways many people see as corrupt, illegitimate, and contrary to the public interest.12 As noted momentarily, in some ways this pattern parallels the influence of drug trafficking organizations in Mexico. Both policies and opinion polls testify to this pattern of corruption. Studies by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page (2014) and Gilens (2012), for instance, show that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have a much greater impact on US policy than the average citizen or mass-based interest groups. A similar study by Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal (1997, cited in Lessig 2011, 152) concluded that senators are more responsive to the affluent than to middleclass constituents, and it found no relationship between the opinions of the bottom third of income earners and legislative roll-call votes. In their study of the impact of political connections of the board of directors of publicly traded companies on the allocation of procurement contracts, Eitan Goldman et al. (2013) also found that companies with boards connected to the winning (losing) party in Congress tend to experience a significant and large increase (decrease) in procurement contracts after the election. Opinion polls echo these findings. They show that when Americans refer to the high levels of corruption in the system, they seem to be referring to institutional and legal forms of corruption. In the 2013 Global Corruption Barometer, for example, 76 percent of respondents considered political parties either “corrupt” or “extremely corrupt,” while 61 percent held this view of Congress, ranking these as the first and second most corrupt institutions in the survey. In a 2012 poll conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation, 77 percent agreed that members of Congress are more likely to act in the interest of a group that spent millions to elect them than to act in the public interest (Brennan Center for Justice 2012). Paralleling the findings of the studies focusing on policy outcomes, a December 2013 YouGov poll found 53 percent believed that the government provides more to help the rich than the poor (19 percent) or the middle class (8 percent): the preferred answer across gender, age, party ID, voter registration, race, education, and region. In a 2010 poll, 85 percent of respondents felt that corporations have too much influence while 93 percent said average citizens have too little (cited in Nichols and McChesney 2013, 84;

The Capitalism/Democracy Dilemma

55

see Hart Research Associates 2010). With such views fully consistent with his definition of corruption, Mark Warren (2010, 44) contends that the public’s concern stems from the fact that the system violates the norms of political inclusion “owing to the capture of the political process by organized interests and sectarian agendas at the expense of public goods and interests and those who are unorganized, less educated, and less wealthy.”

Mexico The capitalism/democracy dilemma has played out differently in Mexico. In contrast to the United States, where business and moneyed interests have long dominated the state, the most prominent forms of corruption in Mexico have tended to involve the misuse of state power by those occupying the state (state officials), converting authority into power, exploiting their authority, and extracting rents from businesses and society. This pattern privileges the interests of those occupying the state over and above those of the public and to some extent capitalist interests. In that sense, Mexico exemplifies in certain respects corrupt influence transiting in the opposite direction of that found in the United States. This pattern, however, relates more to the political dilemma explored in Chapter 4. Even so, it is important here to highlight the growing tendency in Mexico in recent decades toward greater controls by business over state policy and personnel: a tendency that in many ways parallels the US pattern. For a range of historical and institutional reasons, many of the mechanisms of state control enjoyed by businesses in the United States have been unavailable to their weaker counterparts in Mexico. Even the overlap between entrepreneurs and politicians so common in the United States was largely absent throughout most of the twentieth century in Mexico. But things have changed in recent decades. In ways paralleling the United States, Mexico now features more of a merging of political and economic elites via a revolving door, extensive conflicts of interests, various forms of state capture, and the pursuit of state policies favorable to business interests. According to Roderic Camp (2010), while “Mexico, for most of the twentieth century, claimed only a handful of influential politicians who were successful entrepreneurs,” with the 2000 election in particular an increasing number of politicians, particularly mayors and governors and those tied to the right-wing National Action Party (PAN), have come from the ranks of business (Camp 2010, 277, 19, 99). This fusing of an economic-political elite combined during the period with the adoption of a wide range of neoliberal policies by

56

The Corruption Dilemma

the government—largely at the behest of international financial institutions, the US government, international investors, and even the anticorruption community—privileging the private interests of business, many of which are increasingly tied to former state officials now operating in the private sector. Beginning in the 1980s, this included the privatization of stateowned enterprises, which created some of the largest and most profitable corporations in Mexico today. Likeminded policies also facilitated the transfer of state resources to private industries by way of lucrative government contracts, routine cost overruns, direct and indirect subsidies, bank bailouts, and tax forgiveness schemes, among other policies. In many cases, these policies aided firms with direct ties to former or current state officials.13 Corruption facilitated and accompanied this marriage, creating what Edgar Morín (2019) describes as “capitalism of friends.” Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2017) and Arturo Rodríguez García (2019), for instance, both highlight the growing involvement of numerous former high-level state officials—including three former presidents and thirty top officials—in businesses that operate largely based on government contracts. This includes, for example, former president Felipe Calderón’s (2006–2012) affiliation with Avangrid, a subsidiary of Iberdrola, which sells energy to the state-owned electric company, CFE (Federal Electricity Commission), at highly subsidized rates; former president Ernesto Zedillo (1994–2000), who privatized railroads during his term and was contracted two months after leaving office by Union Pacific, which, together with Grupo México, founded Ferromex, the nation’s largest railroad company. Zedillo also became a board member of Alcoa and Citigroup following the approval of policies favorable to those interests under his watch. Under Enrique Peña Nieto (2012–2018), a series of companies linked to the former head of the ministry of public security under Genaro García Luna had contracts to operate federal prisons at lucrative rates. He is now under investigation (see Rodríguez Reyna et al. 2021). As Rodríguez García (2019) observes, “Based on the list of ‘principle competitive bids,’ as the CFE during the term of Enrique Peña Nieto defined the most onerous contracts, it is possible to observe that the largest beneficiaries of the contracts in the electricity sector were companies that counted among their executives former officials of the past five administrations as well as those who benefited from the privatizations during the decade of the nineties.”14 Also akin to the US pattern, Mexico exhibits various forms (legal and illegal) of state capture. This includes the legal though inconspicu-

The Capitalism/Democracy Dilemma

57

ous influence by the nation’s economic elite over policy and personnel. As reported in Oxfam’s 2015 study (Hernández 2015), billionaires Carlos Slim in the telecommunications industry, Germán Larrea and Alberto Bailleres in the mining industry, and Ricardo Salinas Pliego in the telecommunications, media, financial, and retail industries all exercise substantial influence over the government, securing special tax privileges, limiting government regulations and supervision, and helping to maintain low minimum wages. This segment of the nation’s economic elite plays particularly strong roles in capturing specialized agencies, such as the role of bankers in the Treasury Department and people with a business background, training, or worldview who populate various regulatory agencies.15 A prevalent and yet unique form of state capture by wealthy businesses in Mexico, however, involves the control exercised by organized crime: illegal forms of state capture. Integrated into the national and international capitalist economy, these enterprises control abundant resources that, owing to the illegal nature of their business, they must use to influence the state to operate. Corruption, in short, is part of their modus operandi. Fundamental to their unique business model, organized crime inserts personnel into police departments or local governments, clandestinely funds electoral campaigns, and extensively bribes police, military, municipal authorities, justice officials, and others primarily to not enforce the law (they buy or rent impunity). Though they usually pay to prevent the state from enforcing the law, at times they ply corruption to enlist the help of state officials to actively undermine their competitors. Such efforts reflect a high degree of state capture, resulting in what Edgardo Buscaglia calls an “impunity pact” (Cervantes 2006; on corruption in drug trafficking see Morris 2012; Sabet 2009; 2012). In fact, in 2010, Buscaglia estimated that 73 percent of Mexico’s cities were “captured or under the control” of organized crime (quoted in Justice in Mexico, January 2011, 9, https://justiceinmexico.org). In the state of Veracruz, where the organizations Jalisco Nueva Generación and the Zetas operate, the governor, Cuitláhuac Garciá Jiménez, described the influence this way: “The illegal organizations that try to insert themselves into the municipal structures generally offer to finance a candidate in return for, first, the post of chief of police; later, the head of public works, and then when they are deeply embedded and too deeply committed to a candidate, they give them the treasury department” (cited in Zavaleta 2021). Of course, the influence of drug trafficking goes well beyond the municipal levels to include governors, state attorney generals, federal

58

The Corruption Dilemma

police, military, justice, and other top officials.16 Indeed, over the past few decades, two of Mexico’s top police officials—General Jesús Gutierrez Rebollo, the head of Mexico’s anticorruption agency in 1997, and more recently, Genaro García Luna, the former secretary of public security under Calderón (2006–2012)—have been arrested for colluding with organized crime. In return for these privileges, of course, organized crime provides money to both poorly paid police and well-paid politicians while also facilitating, for the latter, the laundering and hiding of ill-gotten gains (money-laundering services). Given the massive resources they command (monetary and the threat and use of violence), the corrupt influence of organized crime in Mexico over the state is understandable. In this way they are somewhat like other large corporations. But unlike other capitalist enterprises, much of their influence involves illegal forms of corruption, such as bribes and money laundering, rather than legal forms of corruption. In other words, despite the massive resources at their disposal, organized crime is largely unable to engage in the institutional and legal forms of corruption pursued by large, wealthy legal businesses. This is because it is exceedingly difficult for them to justify their operations based on the broader democratic narrative. Pushing to legalize drugs,17 establishing institutions to publicly grant concessions or specific policies to secure their control and profits in an illicit market (drugs, prostitution, kidnapping, pirating, etc.), legalizing their campaign contributions, or placing top cartel bosses on the regulatory agencies of the government controlling the drug market are all difficult scenarios to envision—despite organized crime’s substantial power and wealth (though some state officials may be drawn from the ranks through a revolving door). They are, however, able to employ soft power to help their communities, provide employment, and thereby ensure a degree of protection among the population. Still, unlike legal businesses, organized crime lacks the ability to conquer the “ideological spaces on the cultural/ideological sphere” in Gramsci’s war of position (Forattini 2020, 19) or incorporate their interests within a democratic metanarrative. As in the United States, the growing influence of business interests over the state in Mexico runs parallel with their involvement in shaping policy as well as the local narrative on corruption and the anticorruption policies pursued by the state. As their influence has increased along with the neoliberal policies favorable to their interests, businesses have taken on a much more active role in organizing and financing anticorruption organizations within civil society and even mobilizing public support to fight corruption in Mexico. They also play a

The Capitalism/Democracy Dilemma

59

direct and indirect role in concentrating the attack on the corruption found within the state, particularly the forms of corruption harmful to their interests. This includes selective attacks on the corruption and anticorruption of governments that pursue policies unfavorable to private, capitalist interests or that seek to dismantle or weaken independent regulatory agencies that tend to protect their interests (see “Mexico Rising” 2020). And as occurs in the United States, such interests tend to reject the definitions and neglect the areas of corruption that most benefit them. In sum, as illustrated by the United States and Mexico, the capitalism/ democracy dilemma finds the powerful democratic narrative weakened or dampened somewhat by the state and the people’s dependence on capital. The dilemma creates institutional, legal, and even illegal forms of corruption as capitalist interests leverage that dependence to shape the narrative, the institutions, the laws, and the policies defining and policing corruption. Thus, from a broad, structural perspective, capitalism strives through the combined power of its narrative and its wealth to convert the state into an instrument of class dominance and/or the site of internal class disputes among capitalist interests. In many ways, of course, the structural patterns described here suggest more of an oligarchical than a democratic system.18 Indeed, Jeffrey Winters’s (2011) analysis of oligarchy concentrates on the ability of the wealthy historically to erect and maintain political systems designed to protect and defend their wealth. Such control, he demonstrates, is not limited to autocratic or democratic regimes, however, and may even facilitate the development of bounded forms of the rule of law. In fact, according to the counterhegemonic narrative on corruption, capitalists as a class largely control state institutions and their personnel in ways that privilege their particularistic interests over the public interest, preventing, in the process, radical, abrupt, and harmful changes. Camila Vergara (2020) similarly highlights how the institutional composition of the state, even under modern democracy—particularly the lack of institutionalized plebeian representation—tends eventually toward systemic corruption and oligarchy. Charles Beard’s (2004 [1913]) classic economic interpretation of the US Constitution, along with R. La Porta et al. (1999), Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson (2012), Sandra Joireman (2004, 317–318), and Carles Boix (2015), underscore the protection of private property, the limited state power to expropriate resources, and the promotion of productive investments as critical in the development of civil law systems and a state founded on republican principles as occurred in the United States.

60

The Corruption Dilemma

Corruption’s Role in Alleviating the Capitalism/Democracy Contradictions

The capitalism/democracy dilemma thus provides a context to understand certain aspects and forms of corruption. But corruption does not just stem from the capitalism/democracy dilemma. Perhaps more importantly, corruption also helps overcome the tensions and contradictions embedded within it, thereby facilitating the reproduction of capitalism and democracy’s “surprising” coexistence. This function is critical because the greatest threat to democracy, according to ample historical and theoretical analyses, tends to come from the wealthy (see Boix 2003; Przeworski 2010).19 The simple empirical finding that capitalism seems to be a necessary condition for democracy (Berger 1986; Dahl 1990), but not the other way around (democracy is not necessary for capitalism), as noted, suggests that for democracy to survive, it must meet some minimal conditions set by and on behalf of capitalists’ interests. If democracy oversteps those bounds using democratic collective power to undermine or threaten the interests of private property or corporations, for instance, capitalism tends to push back hard with sufficient power to overturn democracy to re-secure those interests and privileges. Often in alliance with military and foreign allies, wealthy economic interests seek solutions outside the democratic framework when they are no longer fully able to control or tame democracy or feel that the existing democracy threatens their interests. The survival of democracy thus arguably centers on capitalism’s ability to tame, control, or limit it to its standards in some way. Corruption plays a central role in this mediating task. It does so largely by providing the political means to deflect blame for the systems’ failures, while simultaneously hiding capital’s influence over politics. First, by characterizing corruption as an illegitimate (and immoral) act by individuals—the “bad apple” thesis—the dominant narrative helps take attention away from systemic problems and institutional failures by pinning the blame instead on individuals and their moral shortcomings. Corruption (as conceptualized) thus provides both a convenient explanation and real-life scapegoats. It explains, for instance, why the state fails to live up to the lofty democratic promises and even why pro-market reforms strongly recommended by the West over the past two decades have not produced the promised rewards (Brown and Cloke 2004, 273). Rather than blaming the reforms, the institutions that crafted them, or the interests they privilege, international institutions have pushed a narrative blaming venal politicians and weak state institutions (a euphemism for corrupt institutions), driving home even further the need for their anti-

The Capitalism/Democracy Dilemma

61

corruption agendas increasingly focused on good governance but benefiting capitalist interests. Second, both the prevailing narrative of corruption that ignores certain forms of corruption along with the hidden nature of illegal forms of corruption—those acts the narrative shines a light on—also help hide the influence of wealth over politics. Emphasizing largely bureaucratic and illegal forms of corruption while ignoring or dismissing institutional, structural, and legal forms of corruption as just normal quotidian politics tends to help disguise the influence of wealth. As Przeworski (2010, 97) notes in reference to this tendency: “The British learned late in the eighteenth century that ‘influence’ is nothing but a euphemism for ‘corruption,’ but contemporary political science chose to ignore this lesson.” But even for illegal forms of corruption, it remains by its very nature hidden and its effects bounded to the case and circumstances. Yet neither its illegality nor its hidden nature means that it does not furtively accommodate the interests of the wealthy. In fact, corruption’s illegitimacy uniquely helps shield the state’s authority, allowing it to continue, on the one hand, to denounce corruption and even mobilize popular support against it, while, on the other hand, blaming it for its own failures. Viewed as a component of the state’s ideological superstructure, those occupying the state can thus continuously denounce corruption as a tool to sustain popular legitimacy and their grip on authority, passing laws and designing policies and programs to fight it, while at the same time, within the details of implementation— where much of the illegal corruption occurs—allow for the formal and informal exception to the rule, favoring rather than blocking the interests of those with money. So, while they garner legitimacy by decrying corruption and promoting policies to fight it, they also manage a system that permits the wealthy to alter the details of the institutions, laws, and policies or even abides their use of corruption to illegally alter the impact of those laws, thereby stunting their impact, and thereby keeping the wealthy happy. As a result, even illegal forms of corruption allow the wealthy to protect their own interests and feel unthreatened by the laws, the rhetoric, or the ideals and practices of democracy, while the state can blame the failure of those policies on corruption, a “few bad apples,” and ritualistically offer up scapegoats for public sacrifice to help rejuvenate faith in the system (see Scott 1972 on corruption as a form of influence for illegitimate groups). Together then, corruption plays an important role in helping to tame democracy by ensuring capitalist influence and by preventing democracy (and the people) from making “certain” decisions that might

62

The Corruption Dilemma

threaten capitalist interests and undermine their support (or acquiescence for democracy). As such, it eases the tensions within the capitalism/democracy dilemma. This perspective is perhaps best captured by Eduardo Galeano’s sarcasm: “If voting served to change anything, it would be prohibited.” But in a sort of Aristotelian balance, both corruption and democracy coexist with corruption, in a sense, helping to tame democracy to facilitate capitalist and elite interests, while democracy, in some way, constrains corruption (Morris 2021b, 174). Hidden and justified behind the sanctity of individual liberties (free speech to support unlimited money in elections, the rights of private property to support capitalist interests), pluralism, and a powerful capitalist narrative on private initiative and reward, systemic, institutional, and legal forms of corruption in the United States are routinely dismissed by powerholders and others in accordance with the orthodox narrative on corruption. In the end, capitalists benefit largely from their extraordinary influence that is effectively cast as part of the everyday normal functioning of democracy. But twentieth-century Mexico provides perhaps an even better illustration of this dimension of corruption. The modern Mexican state—the product of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917), the first social revolution of the twentieth century—was founded on a fusion of revolutionary (social and economic rights) and liberal democratic ideology that was managed for and by one political party for over seven decades: the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI in Spanish) and its antecedents (PRM, PRN, etc.). Controlled by a strong president enjoying megaconstitutional powers over the state, the ruling party, and society, corruption facilitated political stability and the regime’s remarkable longevity. Indeed, corruption aided the government in sustaining and reproducing both its hold on power and its legitimizing ideology. While the Mexican state (controlled by the PRI and its allies) received the bulk of the public’s ire for its clear failures to achieve the aspirations of the revolution, targeting much of that blame on the corruption of individuals, the revolutionary party was able to continue to mobilize popular support behind the principles of the revolution, rejuvenating that faith periodically during ritualistic elections that institutionally and practically ensured continued control of the state by the political elite. Part of this pattern found incoming presidents of the incumbent party ritualistically promoting anticorruption campaigns involving controlled reforms and the public shaming and jailing of corrupt officials of the prior government. Casting corruption as owing to individual, moral failings (bad apples), corruption not only deflected blame from broader systemic and even policy

The Capitalism/Democracy Dilemma

63

failures but also allowed the wealthy a system to exercise their influence in a more hidden and indirect manner (Scott 1972, 33). Though the Mexican revolutionary state would come to enjoy immense powers vis-à-vis the nation’s rather weak domestic capitalist class and even weaker and unorganized civil society, the wealthy respected this social-political pact that required that their influence remain publicly hidden in return for stability and profits. This helped allay some of the fears among the wealthy of the power of the state and the state’s ability to undermine capitalist interests. Though this bargain resulted in a rather tense and at times conflictual relationship (particularly in the 1970s), it nonetheless functioned and operated quite successfully for decades. The state provided social stability and ensured high levels of profit for businesses (particularly by way of the policies of import substitution industrialization, by controlling salaries and encouraging strong economic growth) while the capitalist class largely stayed out of politics (until the 2000s) and allowed the state and state officials not only to operate but also to exploit their powers to maintain their control of the state and enrich themselves via various forms of corruption in the process (see Morris 1991). That system remained largely intact until the end of the century, undergoing significant changes in the years since. Placed within the capitalism/democracy dilemma, this chapter has emphasized the structural power of capitalism over the state. By way of segueing, it should be stressed that the state (whether democratic or not) also has substantial power to defend and assert itself against capitalist interests. Even if the scale is tilted, it is hardly broken. Arguably, just as the state is structurally dependent on capital, capitalism is also structurally dependent on the state—though, again, not necessarily on democracy since capitalism can survive without democracy, but not without a state. Endowed with the authority (legitimate exercise of power) to represent the collective good and recognized internationally as sovereign, the state controls a powerful narrative and tool kit that it can employ to limit the power of capitalist and corporate forces, including constraining the influence of money over politics. Despite her critical posture, Chantal Mouffe (2018, loc. 538) in fact confirms the power of the democratic state’s narrative: “It is remarkable that, after more than 200 years, the power of the democratic imaginary remains in force, encouraging the pursuit of equality and liberty in a multiplicity of new domains.” Indeed, capitalism must rely on the state to create and maintain the legal

State Power

64

The Corruption Dilemma

and physical infrastructure it needs to operate. The state erects the physical infrastructure, protects the rights of private property, upholds contracts among private parties, ensures profits accrue to inventors and authors, determines the amount industry must pay its workers and precise working conditions, grants concessions for the operation of public resources and licenses for businesses to operate, educates and disciplines the workforce, protects businesses from unfair and/or foreign competition, negotiates contracts with private businesses to supply goods and services to the state, and mandates the amount of resources that must be turned over to the state to fund its own operations, ad infinitum. Even despite a powerful liberal narrative supporting the sanctity of private property at the heart of the capitalist ideology, the state still enjoys authority—under highly restricted conditions—to confiscate private property. The state, moreover, possesses the authority to limit the role money plays in shaping political decisions and even the scope of the market itself in making societal decisions affecting the collective good: what Michael Sandel (2012) refers to as the moral limits of the market. The question, then, is basically how far the state (democratic or otherwise) will or can go in controlling the political influence of money given its structural dependence on and relative autonomy vis-àvis capital without inviting the wrath of capitalist interests. But it is more than a question of how the state can control capitalist forces. Since such state powers can be (and are often) abused, it raises the question of how, in turn, to control the immense power of the state. And while the corruption narrative employed by capitalist forces (and shaping the orthodox perspective) concentrates much of its attention on precisely that aspect of “limiting the power of the powerful” (controlling the power of those occupying the state), that is a slightly different story from the one explored in this chapter. The capitalism/democracy dilemma is not a capitalist/state dilemma per se. It pits the capitalist narrative and the interests of capitalists against the principles and ideals of democracy embedded in the state, out of which arises the concern about corruption. Chapter 4 thus turns attention to the question of the abuse of state power and how to control it through an analysis of the political dilemma.

Notes

1. Rooted in the idea that true freedom is to obey none other than oneself, the original idea of self-government as elaborated by Rousseau and Kant posits democracy as a second-best option because “people are free because everyone obeys but oneself when the people rules” (Przeworski 2010, 12). Arguably, capitalism also rests on the notion of promoting true freedom. Yet many scholars, such as Amartya Sen (2001),

The Capitalism/Democracy Dilemma

65

would suggest that material conditions make it difficult for the maximum number of individuals to enjoy true freedom and obey only the rules they apply to themselves. 2. According to Marxist theory of state autonomy, the possibilities for the state to exercise autonomy increase when the bourgeoisie admits that its own interests “dictate that it should be delivered from the danger of its own rule” (Marx and Engels 1979, 143, cited in Carnoy 1984, 53). There are therefore two levels of state autonomy according to Marx and Engels: (1) under “normal conditions” the state bureaucracy has some autonomy from the bourgeoisie, in part because of conflict within the bourgeois class, but still acts as an agent of the ruling class; and (2) a level of autonomy achieved when the class struggle is “frozen” by the inability of any class to exhibit its power over the state. This situation allows the bureaucracy to gain autonomy from class control, though it still depends on political conditions in a class society and still depends on capitalist accumulation for tax revenues and military expansion (Carnoy 1984, 54–55). 3. For many, this was not really a problem but rather a solution to control democracy. In fact, most historical treatments on the evolution of democracy lament the potential dangers of democracy and highlight how institutions were often designed to empower elites and thereby temper the influence of the people or to avoid, as James Madison (1961 [1788]) warned in Federalist, no. 51, “the tyranny of the majority.” Indeed, many have noted the importance of taming democracy for democracy’s own survival (protecting it from itself). The theory of Republicanism and elite rule both highlight the role of the elite in conditioning and filtering the demands of the people to protect the state against the “tyranny of the majority.” Accordingly, institutions are crafted in such a way as to prevent the state from pursuing “unwise” policies (see Vergara 2020). 4. Analysts of corruption in the United States have been at the forefront in the definitional debate over corruption, as illustrated in Chapter 2. 5. Nuances in studies on the influence of money in politics are important. In terms of money’s influence on elections, it is not entirely clear from existing research that campaign contributions or the financing of campaigns has an impact on the outcome of elections. According to Adam Meirowitz and Alan Wiseman (2005), candidates with greater contributor support tend to win, but causal direction remains ambiguous. Johnston (2005, 69) suggests that money usually does not determine the outcome of elections, but it nonetheless tends to flow to those candidates, usually incumbents, who are likely to win. Similarly in terms of money’s influence over government, studies draw distinctions between actual pieces of legislation, party and legislative agendas, and other forms of governmental action designed to benefit privatesector interests. In terms of the influence of campaign contributions on actual legislation, the evidence remains mixed. Frank Baumgartner and Beth Leech’s (1998, cited in Peoples 2010) meta-analysis of thirty-three works examining the impact of money on roll-call votes, for example, found thirteen studies concluding that contributions were influential, fourteen pointing to marginal influence, and six finding no impact. A few years later, Stephen Ansolabehere et al. (2003) showed that three-quarters of the thirty-six articles they reviewed found that contributions had no effect on legislative voting patterns. More recently, Iain McMenamin (2013, 11–12) concluded that “this literature is paradoxical. In the USA, business financing of politics has some clear features that seem to indicate that no benefit is sought or received and others that indicate that benefits are sought and received.” 6. Accordingly, “on all issues affecting the vital interests that major investors have in common, no party competition will take place” (Ferguson 1995, 28). As such, voters hardly matter unless they become substantial investors, thus making

66

The Corruption Dilemma

elections contests between competing oligarchic parties. As John Nichols and Robert McChesney (2013, 63) point out, campaign spending by big business and the wealthy is low compared to the returns they stand to gain by writing laws, tax codes, and regulations, and having access to government funds. 7. Consistent with this pattern, Baker’s (2005) analysis of dirty money in the global capitalist system highlights how policies favor or even hide transactions by the wealthy and the strategies of mispricing, dummy trusts, fiscal paradises, and entities concealing true ownership, protecting the role of legitimate bankers, lawyers, and accountants. He portrays all this as part of a system reflecting the interests of those benefiting from it. Indeed, leaked Suspicious Activity Reports (SAR) from the US Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) “reveal that the major banks repeatedly handled huge and highly suspicious transactions for corrupt kleptocrats, organized crime groups, terrorists, fraudsters, sanctions evaders, and others, and relatively little was done, by the government or the banks, to stop it.” As Alicia Tatone (2020) of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists puts it: “The FinCEN Files show trillions in tainted dollars flow freely through major banks, swamping a broken enforcement system.” As the investigation by BuzzFeed news stated: “The FinCEN files reveal ‘how the giants of Western banking move trillions of dollars in suspicious transactions,’ while ‘the US government, despite its vast powers, fails to stop it’” (Leopold et al. 2020; see also Stephenson 2020a, 2020b). A report by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) similarly points out how the United States largely fails to curb money laundering by shell companies. Despite robust anti–money laundering efforts aimed at antiterrorism financing, there remains “serious gaps” in law enforcement efforts that leave the system “vulnerable” to dirty money. The report classified the United States as “noncompliant,” its lowest score, in terms of its ability to determine the true owners of shell companies. The investigation further shows that officials fleeing prosecution in Colombia, China, Korea, Bolivia, and Panama found refuge in the United States, taking advantage of lax enforcement of US laws privileging business and corporate interests (see Gurney et al. 2016; Schectman and Wolf 2016). 8. See Janine Wedel (2009) on what she calls “flexians” and “flex nets,” where political entrepreneurs simultaneously serve in think tanks and as political consultants. 9. Ten years after Ecuador’s Supreme Court ordered Chevron to pay $18 billion to Amazonian Indigenous people for destroying 1,700 square miles of land, “Chevron and its allies have used the judiciary to try to attack the very idea of corporate accountability and environmental justice work.” Besides using the courts to avoid paying the damage, they have prosecuted the lawyer who helped bring the case, Steven Donzinger. In fact, the judge in the case appointed a private law firm with ties to Chevron to prosecute Donzinger after federal prosecutors declined to bring charges (“U.S. Lawyer Steven Donziger Speaks from House Arrest…” 2021). 10. Rather than money corrupting politics, Peter Schweizer (2013, 1–2) offers an alternative view, suggesting that politics is corrupting money. Rather than bribery, he counters that the United States suffers high levels of extortion whereby government officials use “coercive public power to not only stay in office but to threaten others and to extract wealth, and in the bargain, pick up private benefits for themselves, their friends, and their families.” He describes, for example, how politicians threaten to alter laws in ways that will harm business interests, thereby forcing them to contribute to their campaigns: a form of protection money. Viewed in this way, it represents more the pattern of corruption discussed in Chapter 4. 11. Two giants, GEO Group and CoreCivic, provided large donations to the Trump campaign. The GEO subsidiary gave $100,000 to pro-Trump PACs, execu-

The Capitalism/Democracy Dilemma

67

tives gave $350,000 to Trump’s and representatives’ campaigns plus $250,000 to the inauguration fund, and it hired two former aides of the incoming attorney general, Jeff Sessions. Soon after taking office, Sessions reversed the Obama decision to end the use of private prisons (Lardner 2020). 12. The Economist similarly states how cartels, monopolies, and lobbying are common ways to extract rent from the state and are part of a system of crony capitalism (“Comparing Crony Capitalism Around the World” 2016). 13. One prominent example involves the many government contracts awarded to Júan Armando Hinojosa Cantú of Grupo Higa under both the state governorship (2005–2011) and later presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012–2018). In addition to the Casa Blanca scandal, in which the company was found to have constructed and sold at highly favorable terms a residency to the president and a cabinet minister, recent investigations based on audits from the 2014 to 2018 period highlight a range of irregularities in the construction of the presidential hangar at the Mexico City airport by a subsidiary of Grupo Higa featuring cost overruns of Mex$179.3 million. Among the four charges under investigation are the Casa Blanca case and accusations by protected state witness Emilio Lozoya Austin, the former director of Pemex, who accuses Hinojosa Cantú of redistributing money in cash to Peña Nieto coming from commissions in the public contracts (see Tourliere 2021). 14. “The list of ‘principal bids,’ as defined by the CFE (state-owned electricity company) during the administration of Enrique Peña Nieto referring to the most onerous contracts, showed that the largest beneficiaries of the contracts in the electricity sector went to companies whose executives included former officials of the last five administrations, similar to those favored by the privatizations during the nineties.” On business ties to the Supreme Court minister Medina Mora, see https:// www.eluniversal.com.mx/nacion/politica/eduardo-medina-mora-empresario-la-par -de-ser-funcionario. 15. Mexico ranked sixth in The Economist index of crony capitalism in 2016. Data show that a large portion of the wealth of Mexico’s billionaires comes from crony sectors (“Comparing Crony Capitalism Around the World” 2016). 16. A handful of Mexican state governors have been convicted, imprisoned, or are under investigation in either Mexico or the United States for cooperating with drug traffickers (i.e., Mario Villanueva and Roberto Borge of Quintana Roo, Thomas Yarrington and Eugenio Hernandez of Tamaulpas, and Roberto Sandoval of Nayarit, among others). As of this writing, the former head of the federal ministry of public security under President Calderón (2006–2012), Genaro García Luna, is awaiting trial in the United States, accused of accepting payments from the Sinaloa cartel. This case rings reminiscent of the 1997 arrest and subsequent forty-year sentence in Mexico of General Jesús Gutierrez Rebollo, the head of Mexico’s antidrug efforts, for accepting payments from Amado Carrillo Fuentes. 17. There is a strong movement afoot to legalize certain drugs. But the movement and the demands do not seem to be coming from organized crime trying to go “legit.” It is likely that organized crime sees legalization as a threat to their operations, though they will likely be able to adapt and share in the fruits of legalization given their experience in the market. 18. Beyond leftist and academic circles, even former US president Jimmy Carter in a 2015 interview labeled the United States an oligarchy (Kreps 2015). 19. Boix (2003) claims that inequality makes it less likely for an authoritarian regime to transition to democracy because the elite fear redistribution. For Christian Houle (2009), inequality weakens the prospects of consolidating democracy, but does not affect efforts at democratization.

4 The Political Dilemma

The first instinct of power is the retention of power. —Antonin Scalia, US Supreme Court Justice, in McConnell v. FEC, 540 U.S. 93, 263 (2003)

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself. —James Madison, Federalist, no. 51

Whereas the capitalist/democratic dilemma of Chapter 3 concentrates on the difficulties of controlling the power of wealth and capitalist interests, the political dilemma focuses on the problems of controlling the power of the state: more specifically, those controlling the state. This dilemma resides within the state, but it bridges the state’s ideological and empirical dimensions. On the one hand, it embodies the democratic/rule-of-law ideal that dictates, at a minimum, that the state serves the public interest and that state officials abide by the law; and yet on the other hand, empirically, the state refers to the individuals and groups who occupy it and who thus embody and employ the state’s authority and control its organizational and material resources. The political dilemma arises from two interlaced problems. The first problem is the need to limit the state’s exercise of power given officials’ tendency to 69

70

The Corruption Dilemma

use their massive power to prioritize, privilege, protect, and promote their own interests to the greatest degree possible, particularly, as Justice Antonin Scalia notes, to hold on to power. The second problem—fastened to the first—pits the struggle to limit their use of power against the tendency for the state to prioritize its control over society versus efforts to control itself. While James Madison in the above epigraph certainly acknowledges the need for government to control itself (a.k.a., anticorruption), his refrain unequivocally stresses that the government’s top priority is to control the governed; controlling itself is secondary. As will be suggested in the following pages, this hierarchy nurtures a series of contradictions that help nurture corruption and render anticorruption difficult. This chapter focuses on these two dilemmas making up the broader political dilemma and their impact on the patterns and forms of corruption. Beginning with the tendency of those occupying the state to employ their massive power to promote their own particularistic interests, it examines how they use this power to shape the definition of corruption, the institutions, regulations, laws, and policies that, together, fashion various forms of institutional and legal corruption. This is followed by a discussion of their use of this power to influence the actual implementation of existing laws and policies designed specifically to check corruption. As shown, much of this power—particularly in terms of enforcement—is targeted at dampening and undermining the many counterbalancing projects and measures theoretically designed to check corruption and control the power of the powerful. In a similar manner, the section after that looks at the impact of the tendency for the state to prioritize order vis-à-vis society. It highlights not only how empowering institutions to control society facilitates corruption and weakens internal and external controls on the state, but also how corruption itself is often used as a tool to help maintain internal stability and control external threats. The chapter’s final section touches on some of the implications stemming from the political dilemma, particularly its effects on society and the broader issue of the rule of law. Throughout the analysis, examples are once again drawn from the comparative cases of Mexico and the United States to highlight key similarities and differences. As in the previous chapter, both nations illustrate the influence wielded by those occupying the state and the underlying political dilemma. The first part of the political dilemma centers on the tendency for those occupying the state to use their authority to promote and privilege their

Privileging Power

The Political Dilemma

71

own interests. It is not just personal interests, however, as the orthodox approach to corruption overly stresses, but perhaps more importantly their collective or shared political interests to protect and solidify their control over the state (and its resources): one of Niccolò Machiavelli’s main goals for the statesperson.1 Like the pursuit of economic interests by the agents of capitalism, the pursuit of particularistic interests by those occupying the state may be conscious and duplicitous, or even an unconscious conflation of their own personal, political, organizational, ethnic, or class interests with their particular perception of the public interest. Either way, the immense power enjoyed by those occupying the state gives them a disproportional role at both the ideological and empirical levels to shape and enforce the limits on state power. This includes substantial influence over both the laws on corruption and how those laws are enforced. In short, those occupying the state—to the degree possible—shape the debate; establish and run the institutions, approve the laws, regulations, and policies; and, perhaps more importantly, enforce those laws and policies in ways that best facilitate the protection and privileging of their own interests. Obviously, this makes it exceedingly difficult to effectively constrain their abuse of power. Even within electoral democracies—designed to prevent the abuse of power— those occupying the state play the dominant role in drafting, interpreting, and implementing (or not) the institutions, laws, and policies regarding elections. This power also offers them wide latitude to allow colleagues to pursue exclusively personal interests and personal gain if it fits broader political purposes such as retaining power. Such power—and the difficulties of controlling it—produces a range of institutional, legal, and illegal forms of corruption. Flowing in the opposite direction from the influence exerted by wealthy corporations over the state as described in Chapter 3, the political dilemma finds those occupying the state exploiting their power to illegitimately extract resources from society, using their resources in ways to perpetuate their hold on power, even creating and operating various forms of crony capitalism. In contrast to venal corruption, John Wallis (2006, 25) characterizes this pattern of corruption as where “politicians deliberately create rents by limiting entry into valuable economic activities, through grants of monopoly, restrictive corporate charters, tariffs, quotas, regulations, and the like. These rents bind the interests of the recipients to the politicians who create them.” More specifically, those occupying the state wield power at both the ideological level—embedded in the definitional debate—that enables them to shape institutions, laws, and policies, and at the enforcement or practical level where policies are implemented.

72

The Corruption Dilemma

The former translates into what many consider institutional and legal forms of corruption, while the practical control over enforcement relates largely to illegal forms of corruption. With their control over institutions, the political elite can embed, privilege, protect, and promote their own particularistic interests by institutionally empowering certain interests while excluding others, set institutional missions and agendas, and establish procedures and criteria for institutional decisionmaking. Together, such rules and guidelines can easily privilege their own interests and predetermine a certain range of favorable outcomes. The framers of the US Constitution, for example, clearly designed the institutions in ways that privileged certain interests over others. The simple divisions of powers and shared powers—a key part of Madison’s solution to the corruption conundrum and the government “controlling itself”—for instance, makes rapid change difficult, privileging the status quo and gradualism; staggered terms among the three (initially two) elected bodies (president, Senate, and House) complicates the identification and empowerment of a popular majority; the overrepresentation of the interests of small states in the Senate and the Electoral College, giving them essentially a veto power over legislation, the selection of the chief executive, and constitutional changes;2 and the indirect elections (initially) of both the presidency and the Senate further privileges elite rule, dampening the impact of the few citizens initially granted the right to vote. Though corruption was a major concern of the founders—particularly considering the widespread corruption (co-optation) employed by the English crown at the time, using his power to undermine and weaken parliament’s autonomy and their ability to check the power of the crown—the actions of the US founders can be seen as a clear rationalization of their interests and as facilitating certain forms of corruption. Excluding vast segments of the population and protecting the status quo from the popular will, these and other constituent institutional designs protected elite interests, particularly private property, including slavery (Beard 2004 [1913]; Przeworski 2010, 10; Teachout 2014). To be sure, the prodemocratic struggles peppering US history have, over time, won ideological battles imposing ever greater limits on the state’s authority. Facing the sheer difficulty of justifying the denial of the vote on democratic principles during the Jacksonian period, the United States (like other democracies) has significantly expanded the franchise to encompass most adult citizens, the popular selection of senators, and even party candidates (though the debate over the right to vote certainly continues). In a similar manner, most of the measures that once permitted the historic link between urban party organizations and local public

The Political Dilemma

73

officials, encompassing party machines and even the notion of “honest graft”—an arrangement that found each side helping the other by sharing insider information, channeling local government contracts, and providing jobs to party supporters in return for campaign support—have since been outlawed (Funderburk 2012). And yet amid such changes, many of those congenital institutional constraints remain. Despite popular sentiment and the repeated election of presidents who fail to win the national tally, for instance, the Electoral College remains, as does the overrepresentation of the small states in the Senate. Examples of institutional and legal forms of corruption in the United States arising from the political dilemma abound. In fact, as noted earlier, such forms of corruption constitute the primary pattern of market influence corruption found in the United States (Johnston 2005). Generally, with the clear though unspoken purpose of promoting their own interests to retain power, those occupying the state have used their power over legislation and judicial decisions to protect the elaborate campaign finance system that channels almost unlimited funds to candidates either directly or indirectly through organizations, some of which, in accordance with the regulations the elected officials erected, do not have to disclose the source of their funds: a system that tends to benefit the incumbent but also tends to make the representative more responsive to moneyed interests (see Lessig 2011).3 In his description of “dependence corruption,” for example, Lessig (2013, 15) notes that “the sin of a congressman within such a system [campaign finance system] is not that she raises campaign money. It is that she doesn’t work to change the corruption that this dependence upon a small set of funders has produced.” Elected officials benefiting from this system have also ensured a largely dysfunctional and stalemated regulatory electoral board, the Federal Electoral Commission (FEC), by creating a system with an equal number of representatives from each of the two political parties operating under majority decision rules, resulting in deadlock.4 The courts have also facilitated this elite system, perpetuating those in power through a series of rulings allowing for unlimited self-financing of campaigns, no campaign spending limits (Buckley v. Valeo, 1976), and unlimited outside spending in support of candidates and causes (Citizens United v. FEC, 2010; McCutheson v. FEC, 2014)—all, of course, in the name of protecting fundamental democratic rights such as freedom of speech, corporate rights, and the right to petition government. Similarly, the political parties occupying pinnacle portions of the state have also crafted an assortment of rules designed to protect their two-party duopoly and, at the state level, taking advantage of partisan

74

The Corruption Dilemma

control of state legislatures, to draw electoral districts (gerrymandering) to strictly limit electoral competition and decrease the prospects of losing. Though some states have shifted this power to independent agencies, the drawing of electoral districts by the party controlling the state legislatures is unquestionably done to benefit particularistic, partisan interests. In a similar manner, recognizing the changing partisan demographics of voters, in recent years Republicans have gone to great lengths to restrict voting by those less likely to vote in their favor (or to at least make such voting difficult). Though these moves are normally couched within a democratic narrative as protecting voter integrity and preventing electoral fraud (another form of corruption)—as indeed they must (what else could they argue?)—such efforts include strict voter registration laws, voter ID laws, the continued disenfranchisement of felons, and restrictions on voting by mail and early voting; yet, all such measures are clearly seen as efforts to tilt the playing field to their partisan advantage.5 They, of course, deny any particularistic gains. Coincidental to these measures, state officials have created weak internal ethics systems in Congress, basically allowing them to police (or not) their own. They have protected their ability to accept a range of high-paying positions in large companies after leaving office. Overcoming a series of ethics rules preventing lobbying for companies after leaving office, legislation has ensured loopholes, exceptions, exemptions, and avenues to get around those rules by serving as consultants and unregistered lobbyists. Indeed, while coming from the circles of business and serving business interests while in office, officials often return to the corporate world to continue to facilitate those interests or enjoy profits from their portfolios while in office, which benefit from official decisions (Wedel 2009). The use of state power, of course, goes beyond designing the rules to your benefit and/or blocking changes that are not beneficial. Even in areas where certain actions have been deemed illegitimate and hence prohibited by the law, thus constituting illegal forms of corruption, those occupying the state still employ the power to determine how, when, and whether the laws will be enforced. As such, they can strategically target enforcement and minimize the laws’ effects, thereby facilitating even illegal forms of corruption that fit their interests. I return to this in the subsequent discussion of the Mexican case.

Undermining the Constraints on State Power Although those occupying the state usually accept the limits defining their authority and even swear an oath to respect them, unfortunately

The Political Dilemma

75

they do not always do so. Efforts to effectively contain the power of the powerful, as noted in the introductory chapter, have centered largely on erecting counterbalances pitting power against power. There are many approaches, as noted, ranging from blending components of elite and popular rule (Vergara 2020), elections, the separation of power and pluralism (Madison’s solution to the second part of the problem identified in the epigraph), to detailed laws to ensure government transparency, identify conflicts of interests, outlaw specific acts of corruption, and even international anticorruption treaties. But in so many ways, those occupying the state have the inside track on overcoming or dampening these controls, thus helping them transgress the boundaries. By their very nature, identifying and/or enforcing certain limits on the use of power are exceedingly difficult. To begin with, most institutional and legal forms of corruption lay beyond the scope of enforcement because there is nothing to enforce. This leaves approaches to fighting corruption concentrating primarily on illegal forms of corruption. And yet, much of the theoretical purpose behind mixed systems, elections, and pluralism is to somehow force state officials to act based on the public interest or comply with what Mark Warren (2004) refers to as second-order norms. Focusing on the hidden and personal act of political decisionmaking, such second-order norms dictate the criteria officials should follow when making their decisions. These include the pursuit of the public interest, justice, fairness, and so on. But such underlying purposes are not only difficult or impossible to codify into law but also virtually impossible to observe. Empirically, it is excruciatingly difficult to determine the true motives or reasons why a particular decision is made. When a public official supports (or rejects) a proposal that seems to serve (or not) their own particularistic or personal interests—such as voter restrictions—not only will they claim that the decision promotes the public interest, of course—consistent with the broader democratic narrative—but that claim is largely impossible to disprove. The US Administrative Procedure Act (APA) offers one example of the struggle to deal with the often-hidden violations of secondorder norms. 6 As part of regulating the policymaking procedures of government agencies, the APA prohibits actions deemed “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion or otherwise not in accordance with law” (APA, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/706). Invoked as part of the legal argument to block President Donald Trump’s initial immigration ban in 2017, the APA has been cited to invalidate several executive actions by Trump and past presidents (Zurcher 2017).

76

The Corruption Dilemma

Echoing an aspect of the democratic narrative against corruption, the APA holds that state actions not only must follow proper form and procedure but also must be done for the right reasons (a noble boundary to limit the power of the powerful). Of course, all the court can go on is the official reason the agency gives for making the decision, though this may not be the true motive. Even after an adverse ruling, the agency can simply revise their argument, offering the court a different (and more acceptable) reason for acting. Eventually, even Trump got the argument right enough to remove the court’s order blocking his immigration ban: that does not mean his true reasoning for the decision was known or sound. Empirically, democracy correlates with low levels of corruption; but it remains unclear whether such a statistical outcome is due to the presence of elections per se—the quintessential institutional feature of democracy—or, perhaps, to other factors associated with democracy. And though democracy demands that those competing for power accept the possibility of defeat, Adam Przeworski (2010, 120) has shown that, historically, defeating incumbents has been quite rare. This, he concludes, is due largely to the illegitimate and/or illegal use of the state’s authority to perpetuate the rule of the incumbents and/or its allies. This includes: “control over legislation [that] grants incumbents an opportunity to adopt legal regulation in their favor” (Przeworski 2019, 20) as well as the fact that “elections are inextricably manipulated,” with those in power making “partisan use of public administration . . . to ensure a victory for their chosen successor” (Przeworski 2010, 118–119).7 At times, this includes ensuring that the institutions themselves provide overrepresentation of the party in power.8 Moreover, “it is more plausible,” Przeworski (2010, 122) continues, “that incumbents are able to orchestrate or simply mute the voice of the people.” Politicians will increase public spending prior to elections to signal their competence (Khemani 2004; Klein and Sakurai 2015; Rogoff 1990) and generally use public spending on government salaries as a form of patronage to gain support.9 Indeed, this pattern leads Przeworski (2010, 46) to conclude that elections constitute a weak and rather blunt instrument of accountability: “The mere fact that people vote need not mean that they have the power to elect.” “Conceding rights [to vote] did not mean conceding power.” But even when the incumbents are thrown out, little changes. As Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson (2006, 329) observe, “The iron law of oligarchy emerges when the current elite are replaced by newcomers, sometimes with a popular mandate, and yet once these newcomers are in power, they have no incentive to change the oligarchic

The Political Dilemma

77

structure, and instead use the entrenchment provided by the existing political institutions for their own benefit.” In a similar manner, loyalty to the political party, class, cause, or even to an individual can easily lead state officials to dampen many of the internal and external controls and checks and balances. Despite impeachment powers provided to the US Congress, for example, partisans of the president (or state executive) rarely vote to sanction the executive: such a move would potentially harm both the party and, in many cases, their own political interests. Since corruption is often practiced by helping others and thereby to solidify pacts of reciprocity, presidents will often adopt extreme measures to protect themselves and their allies by obstructing the efforts of others to hold them accountable, while partisans also conspire to shield the president and one another from harm. This pattern plays out at lower levels of the state as well, where officials will frequently protect their patrons, the agency, and their own wellbeing by abiding by corrupt systems, refraining from blowing the whistle, playing along, and even taking advantage of the unique opportunities (spoils) that go to the loyal. As Przeworski (2019, 177) avers, “Pace Madison (Federalist #51), checks and balances do not operate effectively when different powers of the government are controlled by the same party. As Madison himself was almost immediately to discover (Dunn 2004, 47–61), the constitutional separation of powers is vulnerable to partisan interests.” Independent regulatory agencies, generally used to freeze prevailing privileges and protect certain interests (institutional corruption), can also be summarily captured by political (state) or economic (capitalist) interests, thereby promoting rather than checking corruption (Lessig 2011, 152; Steinzor et al. 2011; “Unstacking the Deck” 2018). Even those within society (media, business, voters, civilsociety organizations) involved in vertically holding the government accountable will tend to downplay the corruption of those they support, with citizens at times even voting for corrupt leaders while at the same time exaggerating the corruption of their opponents (Anderson and Tverdova 2003; Bågenholm and Charron 2016; Bauhr and Charron 2018; Chang and Kerr 2017; López-López et al. 2016; Barros and Pereira 2014; Solaz et al. 2019).10 Many of these patterns are explored in subsequent chapters under separate dilemmas. But in other cases corruption is more difficult to hide. What Warren (2004) classifies as first-order norms refer to violations of the written law: fundamentally, those codifying the many crimes encompassed within the broad crime of corruption. But even here, those occupying the state have the power over the design and operations of the enforcement

78

The Corruption Dilemma

institutions and can thus intentionally make these enforcement institutions less effective (e.g., the FEC in the United States). Indeed, in Mexico, as Juán Pardinas (2019, 312) concludes, “The laws are horribly designed to achieve their objectives and perfectly designed to guarantee impunity.” Power over enforcement agencies allows state officials to target agency priorities and resources in other directions—such as controlling the governed rather than those inside the state (the second part of the dilemma, discussed later). Consequently, law enforcement can devote priority attention to the rule of law in society, particularly blue-collar crime rather than white-collar crime, including corruption; or it can do little to address such issues that facilitate certain political interests such as money laundering in the international banking system, the existence of fiscal paradises and tax havens, and hiding true ownership of properties and companies, as noted in Chapter 3. As will be discussed momentarily, much of this relates to the second part of the political dilemma: the state’s priority to secure internal control. In contrast to the US pattern of corruption, Mexico has a very pronounced historical pattern wherein those occupying the state have tended to (ab)use the state’s authority and use the immense resources of the state to protect and promote their own interests. This includes the systemic extraction (extortion) of resources from many businesses despite the state’s structural dependence on capitalism. With a concentration of political power in the Mexican postrevolutionary state and a further concentration of the state’s power in the presidency, those occupying the Mexican state have enjoyed wide latitude to establish the institutions, the laws, and the policies, and control their enforcement, in ways that cemented and perpetuated their domination of the system for roughly seven decades. Coincidentally, this system offered abundant opportunities for those occupying the state to satisfy their own personal interests and ambitions. Until the 1990s, for example, the PRI fully controlled the state’s institutions, including elections and the party system, in ways that legally helped it protect its own party’s dominance—despite even at times receiving a minority of the vote. PRI-affiliated politicians and administrators weakened opposition parties by denying them registration, forced them to refrain from election boycotts that threatened to undermine the state’s legitimacy, strengthened and registered satellite (allied) parties to attenuate opposition, and manipulated the vote and/or made voting for opponents difficult (Morris 1995). Through a series of popular struggles, reforms in the 1990s eventually stripped the party and the government’s control over the electoral institute that orchestrated and managed elections. But even

The Political Dilemma

79

after the creation of a more independent electoral body, various forms of electoral fraud and corruption continued, with partisan allies within the electoral institute and the courts at times helping to protect practices many considered corrupt. Accusations of fraud shadowed the 2006 presidential election of Felipe Calderón, with the autonomous electoral institute and tribunal, in the end, blocking a full recount of the votes. The subsequent presidential election in 2012 also featured substantial fraud, massive overspending, and even illegal financing from organized crime (“Cártel de Juárez, proveedor del PRI . . .” 2016). According to the report of the congressional investigating committee, the presidential campaign of the victorious Enrique Peña Nieto spent thirteen times the legally permitted amount (see “Caso Monex” 2014; “Informe Final de la Comisión de Investigación MONEX” 2015). Even the 2018 election featured an assortment of problems, though scarcely enough to prevent the defeat of the incumbent party (on irregularities in the 2018 election, see Ackerman 2018). Autonomous agencies, of course, such as Mexico’s electoral institution and tribunal, do not eliminate the impact of underlying political interest or bias; they merely transform them. Indeed, despite the changes in Mexico and much freer and fairer elections than in the past thanks to the creation of the counterpower of the autonomous electoral institute, many allege bias on their part. After all, regardless of design, someone still must appoint the leaders of the autonomous agencies and write their rules of operation, and those appointed bring with them their own viewpoints and political interests. In addition to using state power to thwart horizontal mechanisms of accountability, the Mexican state demonstrates various techniques to undermine vertical controls. The Mexican state historically has deployed state resources in neo-patrimonial fashion, usually illegally (though the lines are sometimes blurry), to promote the candidacies and elections of allies using state resources to buy or condition the vote and similar forms of clientelism (form of corruption). Carlos Salinas’s (1988–1994) featured social program, Solidaridad, for instance, assigned resources based on an electoral strategy (Estévez et al. 2002)—a pattern largely repeated at all levels of government. State resources also have often been diverted to illegally finance campaigns (Mexico has public financing of campaigns with low and strict limits on private contributions). Prominent examples include the Pemexgate scandal in the 2000 election, in which money from the state enterprise’s union filled the coffers of the PRI campaign; money from bribes by the Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht to help the campaign of

80

The Corruption Dilemma

the PRI presidential candidate Peña Nieto in 2012; and Operation Zafiro, involving seven states illegally channeling over Mex$650 million through ghost companies to the PRI in 2016 (Olmos et al. 2018). In a similar manner, the Mexican government (and certain political leaders) also has a long track record of channeling public funds to media companies, journalists, and public intellectuals to help control and massage the political narrative (see “Al Rojo Vivo” n.d.; Gillingham et al. 2018; Hughes 2006). This includes legal subsidies and contracts for the placement of government advertising and official communications as well as illegal payments (see, for example, Ahmed 2017; Freije 2020; Lauría and O’Connor 2010; Riva Palacio 1995–1996). The government can also pressure and repress the media to prevent certain coverage, including exposing corruption. Piero Stanig (2015), for example, shows how the press located in more repressive states in Mexico devote less coverage to corruption as a result. Those occupying the Mexican state have also allowed themselves and others to abuse their authority for what seems like exclusively personal gain, albeit within certain limits, to help ensure loyalty to the party or patron, or, at times, to buy their silence: in other words, personal gain corruption for a broader political purpose. Two famous Mexican political sayings help illustrate such common practices: “Yo no pido que me den, sino que me pongan donde hay” (I don’t ask that you give me anything, just put me where there are things) and “Un politico pobre es un pobre politico” (A poor politician is a politician who is poor). Indeed, with few external constraints and purposefully weak, ineffective, yet selective internal constraints, the president on down the chain often permitted a certain degree of personal corruption to help satisfy and reward supporters of the system.11 And if such personal corruption surpassed a particular limit, produced instability, or created problems for the president, or if an individual violated any of the unwritten rules of the political system (e.g., criticizing the president) (see Smith 1979), the president could then use state enforcement powers to discipline the state official by investigating and sanctioning her/him for corruption.12 State officials took advantage of the latitude provided by high-level officials, of the prostrated internal controls, the unofficial tolerance and impunity to extort bribes and kickbacks from citizens and businesses for routine bureaucratic procedures, and even other officials (kickbacks from earmarked funds to local governments). In many cases, of course, such latitude allowed officials to create and participate in elaborate corrupt networks, resulting in the massive theft of state funds and the accumulation of unbelievable riches by high-level officials.13

The Political Dilemma

81

The second strand of the political dilemma, and fastened to the first, relates to the tendency for the state—though ideologically rooted and legitimized by democratic/rule-of-law principles—to prioritize its control of society (maintain order) over its efforts to control itself. Madison in the Federalist, no. 51, is not alone in asserting this hierarchy. In fact, most observers tend to emphasize controlling society, maintaining order, and providing security as one (if not the primary) function of the state. Machiavelli, the author of the modern statespersons’ guide, for example, envisions stability (and even permanence in power) as an end more important than truth and morality; an end so sacred, he claims, that it justifies the means.14 Charles Tilly’s (1985) explanation of the rise of the European state similarly identifies protecting citizens from external and internal threats as one of the state’s basic functions—even when those threats are imaginary or the consequence of the state’s own activities. The highly influential work of Samuel Huntington (1968) equally posits state stability as essentially the sine qua non for successful political and economic development. But such a hierarchy harbors contradictions. Prioritizing the control of the governed and stability implies: (a) that the government may simply never get around to the second part of Madison’s equation (the state controlling itself), devoting all its resources, time, energy, and attention to its top priority (after all, at least from the perspective of those occupying the state, when is government sufficiently “enabled” to control the governed and thus able to focus on its latter objective?); (b) that asserting control over society and maintaining stability in pursuit of its primary objective will empower and equip the institutions of control with such vast amounts of power that they cannot possibly be controlled or constrained; (c) in a combination of these two, that the power of the institutions, laws, and agencies focusing primarily on controlling the governed will tend to outpace those devoted to Madison’s second and subsequent task, the government controlling itself, resulting in a severe power imbalance; and, finally, (d) the potential contradictions between the two tasks themselves.15 What happens, in short, particularly if the ends justify the means, when controlling society requires the government not to control itself: when the violation of the rule of law by state officials, and even corruption, are deemed necessary in order to fulfill the primary objective? Even when we extend the Madisonian framework of the government “controlling itself” to include the mobilization and use of societal forces to help (or “oblige”) the state to control itself, the state’s efforts will remain limited to those efforts that will not jeopardize

Prioritizing the Control of the Governed

82

The Corruption Dilemma

the state’s control over society (or the officials’ control over the state). As such, control (maintaining power/authority) becomes virtually the sine qua non of everything else. At one level, this hierarchy relates simply to opportunity costs: the government tends to devote more of its attention and scarce resources to controlling society than to “controlling itself.” This is consistent with the framework presented earlier about power inequities. Francis Fukuyama’s (2014) notion of institutional inequality, for instance, notes how the institutions of social control generally surpass and minimize the institutions of accountability. But at a more concerning level, perhaps, is how the two tasks sometimes collide, facilitating different varieties of corruption. This occurs when the needs of controlling society prompt officials to exceed the boundaries and violate certain operational rules—a form of corruption in that it serves the interests of the state and/or a specific institution or political party: when governments turn a blind eye to corruption within law enforcement agencies or the military, or even when state officials employ corruption to help facilitate societal controls. In his historical analysis of transparency in the Netherlands, for example, Albert Meijer (2015) notes how transparency suffered setbacks during times of external threat to the nation’s security. Again, both the United States and Mexico offer multiple examples of this dilemma and its impact. In the United States, for instance, security agencies such as the police, border patrol, and their unions have long protected and made difficult the sanctioning of officials for violating operational rules and practices. While most forms of blatant police corruption are not condoned, there are informal codes of silence, qualified immunity,16 and weak enforcement mechanisms that allow it to exist. It is usually only when scandals erupt revealing deep-seated and systemic police corruption that commissions are empowered to study the situation and propose reforms. Such reforms, however, tend to be effective only for a brief period, until the next scandal erupts, resulting in yet another round of police commissions and reforms. Other violations of procedure that are considered good for the organization and effective in pursuing its mission, however, are rarely investigated or punished. This includes the excessive use of force, racial profiling, petty forms of corruption, the manipulation of evidence, and “testilying” to obtain convictions.17 The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) similarly has a long and storied history of being deployed for chiefly political purposes. These include investigating the senator in 1924 who blew the whistle on bribes being paid for access to government oil reserves; collecting the names of people who wrote anti-war or isolationist letters to the White House; jailing

The Political Dilemma

83

those who objected to the pursuit of people of Japanese descent during World War II; and intimidating Martin Luther King Jr. and investigating “Black nationalist” groups during the civil rights era. During the time of Eugene McCarthy’s witch hunt or Richard Nixon, the FBI became a tool of one political party. Longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover “also used his bureau to compile dossiers on people in government he thought might be security risks” (Elving 2018; see also North-Best 2018). Curt Gentry (1991) shows how, despite being appointed to clean up the corruption within the bureau, “Hoover’s ambition, paranoia, and self-righteousness gradually corrupted the FBI, leading it to threaten the lawful order” (cited in Schmautz 1992, 1812). As with the police and the FBI, the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency in the United States and its union also have a long history of both corruption and blocking reform efforts designed to hold them more accountable (see Magaram 2021). At higher levels in the justice system as well, attorneys for the state tend to devote more time and resources to cases involving societal illegalities, particularly crimes committed by the poor, over those committed by white-collar criminals or corporate or state officials. Even the courts have generally backed an extremely narrow interpretation of corruption as involving an explicit quid pro quo, while providing much greater latitude to law enforcement in fighting everyday street crime.18 Throughout, codes of silence within bureaucratic organizations work to both protect the reputation of the organization and shield members from harm. As Sarah Chayes (2020, 14) notes, “In the United States, serious and damaging public corruption is not getting punished. That means, by default, that we deem it to be just fine.” Corruption within US foreign policy is also illustrative of this tendency to prioritize security over internal controls. The United States not only employs corruption as a tool of foreign policy but has also done so in opaque ways that thwart internal controls. Though fewer laws restrict US behavior abroad, the United States nonetheless has bribed officials abroad to abstain from elections, and even paid off leaders and warlords to stop attacking US interests. The Iran-Contra scandal, for instance, revealed the establishment of obscure and unaccountable agencies within the government, secret transfers of weapons and funds around the world, lying to Congress, and cover-ups all in the name of national security. Subsequent governments similarly have engaged in torture and rendition, twisting definitions and interpretations of the law at will to facilitate their own actions performed in the name of national security. Highlighting the Catch-22, Chayes (2015) illustrates how the US emphasis on security abroad has led to widespread corruption in such

84

The Corruption Dilemma

places as Iraq and Afghanistan that, in turn, worsens the security situation in those nations. This paradoxically leads people to rise up against the corruption, which, in turn, is perceived as a threat to internal security and US national interests, thus perpetuating a vicious cycle. Owing perhaps to its history of instability and the violent Mexican Revolution of the early twentieth century, Mexico provides multiple examples of the use of corruption as a transactional tool of the government to ensure stability both inside the state and within society. Corruption with impunity, for example, has long cemented elite alliances by essentially allowing allies to take advantage of the opportunities for “illicit” wealth in patrimonial fashion while protecting them from sanction in return for their loyalty, political support, and respect for the unwritten “informal” rules of the political system.19 Early on following the revolution, this included direct payoffs to regional military leaders (caudillos). President Alvaro Obregon (1920–1928), for instance, is credited with the saying “No Mexican general can resist a cannon barrage of 50,000 pesos.” But even after seventy years of one-party hegemony, these trade-offs persisted. President Vicente Fox (2000–2006), for instance, felt compelled to accept a deal with the then still powerful PRI that, in the name of governability, largely crippled his promised fight against entrenched interests and corruption (Morris 2009). Indeed, years later the same government engaged in a series of corrupt undertakings to do whatever was necessary to prevent the left from coming to power (see Salmerón Sanginés 2017).20 In a similar pattern taking place outside the state, the government has long tolerated and employed corruption with key social institutions such as powerful labor unions, transactionally, “as long as they preserve peace and/or distribute resources, in exchange for the vote that preserves the status quo” (Camacho Beltran and Garcia Gonzalez 2019, 1349). This includes allowing leaders to exploit their dues-paying members, enjoy the spoils of sweetheart contracts with the government, and partake in government protection against prodemocracy rivals within the union. In addition, this gives them impunity in exchange for their loyalty and support. In return, state officials and societal leaders respected certain limits on their power, supported what was commonly referred to as the PRI-gobierno, particularly the president, and mobilized the vote for the PRI during periodic and ritualistic elections. While such tactics failed to ensure social rights or the rule of law, they did help pacify the leaders of these organizations. Even when threats to stability emerged from below, the government tended to use various means to incorporate key leaders, using corruption and opportunities for corruption as a strategic device to assuage the threats to stability and control. Seemingly when all this failed, they then resorted to repression (Morris 1991).

The Political Dilemma

85

Facing widespread violence from organized crime in recent years, Mexico’s prioritizing of security has unleashed empowered police and security forces, and an easing of internal and external controls has facilitated abuses and corruption. Not only have Mexican military, police, and security forces routinely engaged in low-level forms of extortion, planted evidence, tortured, committed extrajudicial killings and other human rights abuses, and obstructed justice, but few have ever been tried or sanctioned for such practices.21 And despite years of promised reforms and capacity tests, little headway has been made in controlling those forces responsible for enforcing the law.22 The organization Fundar (2018, 34) notes how Mexico’s new internal security law was built on the paradigm of national security, which is much closer to an authoritarian regime than a democratic one. The law establishes the protection of the state and state institutions rather than the protection of the people as the policy’s primary objective. In practical terms, this facilitates the arbitrary use of power without transparency, accountability, and checks, and few mechanisms to protect human rights. One egregious example of how officials in Mexico use their authority, the threat of and the use of force with impunity to essentially confiscate property or convince owners to sell involves the governor of the state of Nayarit, Roberto Sandoval. In this case, the governor used the state’s attorney general and state police to detain, threaten, and torture individuals, all with the authority of the state and complete impunity, to acquire land and property from citizens for his own personal benefit (see Dávila 2021a). In the end, the relatively weak citizen has limited recourse under such circumstances. While such examples do not necessarily involve corruption solely for personal gain, in many cases, like the governor of Nayarit, they do. Even so, they all represent clear transgressions of the established limits on power for political purpose and gain. In the strategic use of and/or overlooking of corruption, there is a greater tendency to protect corruption that facilitates political or organizational interests over strictly personal interest, particularly when the latter undermines or collides with the political or organizational interests. According to the adage purportedly attributed to a former minister of the Rousseff government in Brazil, “You can steal for the party, but not for yourself.”23 But even so, eliminating or pulling back on the checks certainly sets the stage for personal gain corruption. Though the two strands underlying the political dilemma are often tightly interwoven and difficult to disentangle, they are, of course, distinct. The first strand centers on the priority of promoting the political (particularistic) interests of those in power—largely to maintain their grip

86

The Corruption Dilemma

on power—while the second strand prioritizes the state’s interest in maintaining control over society. Generally, however, those occupying the state will not only tend to conflate protecting their own power and privilege with the public interest but will also tend to conflate those interests with the state’s objective of maintaining stability and controlling society. Indeed, the state often sees opposition as illegitimate and threatening, despite the democratic narrative legitimizing competition and a “loyal opposition.” As Richard Hofstadter (1969, 7, cited in Przeworski 2019, 166) observed: “The normal view of governments about organized opposition is that it is intrinsically subversive and illegitimate.” Thus, threats to their own power will often be interpreted as undermining the state’s ability to maintain order, just as threats to the state’s control of the governed will tend to be perceived as a threat to their own political interests. And yet, acknowledging the fact that the state (and those occupying it) is not monolithic but, instead, represents different groups, institutions, and actors, at times these internal state interests may also diverge. In some cases, those prioritizing the state’s control over society may see those occupying other parts of the state who desperately seek to maintain their own power as a threat to stability. Reportedly, Hoover at the FBI kept tabs on public officials, for example. Where internal divisions pit the military (charged with order) against an abusive executive seeking to maintain power at all costs, for instance, the military may stage a coup, overthrowing the executive to establish stability. Here again, the institutions designed to ensure stability and order tend to prioritize the violation of rules by overthrowing the government above the violation of rules by the abusive executive. There are two important implications of the political dilemma that deserve mention; both reflect important differences in the patterns of corruption found in Mexico and the United States. The first relates to the effectiveness of certain controls over state institutions, particularly the bureaucracy. Where capitalist forces exert significant influence over the state, as depicted in the more prominent pattern of corruption found in the United States, the institutions of the state and the rule of law tend to be stronger than when those occupying the state enjoy greater influence and control. In describing the syndrome of corruption in the United States, for example, Michael Johnston (2005) specifically emphasizes the existence of strong institutions, the rule of law, and generally the absence of illegal forms of corruption. This is logical since the gains enjoyed by institutional and legal forms of corruption favoring capitalist interests generally require that the state professionally and loyally administer and abide by the law. This includes an economic policy that is implemented and enforced fairly, free from the intervention of

The Political Dilemma

87

partisan actors (North and Weingast 1989), and the establishment of more independent regulatory agencies and judiciary that also tend to protect those interests (Andrews and Montinola 2004). This is one means of exerting outside control of the state. Where political interests enjoy disproportional power, however, as in Mexico, the bureaucracy tends to be controlled more by political interests and is thus far more politicized, becoming a tool for both personal gain and the maintenance of political power.24 Abuse of the state’s authority by those occupying the state for particularistic interests tends to require greater political controls over the state bureaucracy and the flexibility provided by weaker institutions and the weak rule of law, than when capitalists exert control from the outside. This results not only in more illegal forms of corruption but, given the state’s control over enforcement, a far greater degree of impunity as well. Part of the reciprocity of working together to leverage the authority and the powers of the state is to share the spoils and enjoy the impunity. Indeed, despite efforts to create and broaden the scope of Mexico’s civil service system since its creation in 2003, most upper- and mid-level positions still tend to be political appointments, while the union of state workers controls the lower reins of the bureaucracy, giving it certain leverage. With limited internal protections or professionalism, loyalty thus continues to be a driving force. Generally, this loyalty is trained upward to patrons who are able to determine a client’s future prospects for advancement or open up other opportunities within the government. Consequently, loyalty to the institution, the written rules, and regulations remains rather weak and selective. This allows top-level bureaucrats the opportunity to bend state power to enjoy the rents provided by a largely neo-patrimonial state (Collins 2011). A second implication of the political dilemma relates to its repercussions throughout society. Regardless of whether the people perceive corruption in its institutional, legal, or illegal form, a deep sense that the system and the laws are tools used by those in power to promote their own interests resonates quite strongly.25 In a 2005 survey in Mexico, for example, only 16 percent of respondents believed that in Mexico the laws serve to protect the interests of society and 19 percent that the laws promote justice, whereas 33 percent said the law is used to defend the interests of those in power and 26 percent saw the law as being used by officials to act arbitrarily (Encuesta Nacional de Cultural Política 2005). A 2007 survey conducted among sixty thousand teachers in Mexico’s teachers’ union, SNTE (the largest labor union in the hemisphere), found that 98 percent believed that the priority of their union leaders was to enrich themselves and garner power, that 97 percent were unaware of any mechanisms of

88

The Corruption Dilemma

accountability, and 87 percent believed that their union dues remain in the hands of the union leaders or are used to buy support. Strikingly similar views are expressed in the United States. Some polls demonstrating this were noted earlier. In Transparency International’s 2013 Global Corruption Barometer, for instance, 76 percent of respondents in the United States considered political parties “corrupt/extremely corrupt” and 61 percent felt similarly toward the legislature. In a survey by Hart Research Associates (2010), 85 percent expressed the view that corporations have too much influence over the government while 93 percent claimed that citizens had too little. Indeed, various polls by Rasmussen.com show that 54 percent believe that their representatives change their votes in Congress for money, 67 percent think that big business and government collude to create rules that prejudice the consumer, and 82 percent feel that the directors of regulatory agencies take advantage of their position to promote their own agenda and impose their standards on the country (cited in Nichols and McChesney 2013, 12; and Reich 2020, 68). Indeed, according to TI’s 2013 Global Corruption Barometer, 62 percent and 64 percent of respondents in Mexico and the United States, respectively, felt that the government served the interests of the few rather than the public interest. Beyond the impact such views have on government legitimacy and voting, in Mexico, where the patterns of corruption include higher-profile illegal forms of corruption, such illegalities within the state also arguably socialize members of society to emulate state officials and to use and manipulate the law or engage in corruption to evade the law. As such, it tends to promote a lack of respect for the rule of law, a culture focused on personal advancement at any cost, and even the use of corruption as a form of resistance. As US Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1928) once noted in a dissenting opinion, “Crime is contagious. . . . If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law.” Indeed, among the factors Stephen Holmes (2006) associates with the public’s obedience to the law is when governments abide by the law. After all, if the perception exists that state officials do not abide by the rule of law and instead use (and abuse) their power for personal gain, then the individual will tend to learn the lesson. It is in this sense that crime, the informal market, and corruption are widespread in Mexico as state illegalities essentially feed societal illegalities. More broadly, organized crime takes advantage of the weak rule of law within state institutions to operate, using payoffs as part of its business model (see Sabet 2009; 2012). But even the citizen responds at times in a similar manner. After all, why pay taxes if one is convinced that state officials are going to pocket the money? Paradoxically, of course, the state all too often per-

The Political Dilemma

89

ceives opposition and the lack of respect for the rule of law within society as a threat to its control and to stability, further feeding its emphasis on control, the empowerment of control institutions, and even the use of corruption to maintain authority (Morris 2011). Combined, these perceptions tend to nurture a certain anti-state bias that interestingly can be discerned in both Mexico and the United States. This includes not only the tendency to see the state as failing to fulfill its function of representing and serving the public interest but also a belief that the state itself and those occupying the state are incapable, inefficient, incompetent, and cannot be trusted (Rosanvallon 2008). But while both countries embrace a certain anti-state perspective, their views differ. Generally, the Mexican perspective depicts state officials as inherently corrupt (automatically suspect) whereas the US narrative does not necessarily consider state officials corrupt per se but rather sees the government itself as simply inefficient, wasteful, and incompetent, particularly in comparison to the private sector.26 Consequently, only in the United States do you find large segments of the population believing that government should operate like a business, and that business leaders turned politicians possess the skills and experiences needed to make government function properly. In fact, one of two major parties seems strongly committed to the philosophy, as Ronald Reagan put it during his first inaugural address in 1981, that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

Notes

1. Aristotle’s recommendation for rotation in office—that everyone would rule and be ruled in turn—was “intended to prevent entrenchment by the incumbents” (Przeworski 2010, 31). 2. In the 50-50 divided Senate in 2021, for instance, the Democrats represent roughly 40 million more people than the Republicans. 3. Daniela Piccio et al. (2014, 190) point out how comparative research shows that the lack of public finance relates to corporations and the wealthy capturing the state policymaking capabilities (see also Smilov and Toplak 2007). 4. On case law related to campaign finance, see Issacharoff 2010, Raban 2011, and Teachout 2014. 5. In arguments before the Supreme Court over voter restrictions, however, a lawyer for the Arizona Republican Party when asked by Justice Barret, “What’s the interest of the Arizona RNC in keeping, say, the out-of-precinct ballot disqualification rules on the books?,” replied, “Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats” (Clawson 2021). 6. The APA is designed to require agencies to keep the public informed of their organization, procedures, and rules; provide for public participation in the rulemaking process, for instance, through public commenting; establish uniform standards for the conduct of formal rulemaking and adjudication; and define the scope of judicial review.

90

The Corruption Dilemma

7. Adam Przeworski (2010, 118) notes that in the entire history of Latin America up to the mid-2000s, only three incumbent presidents who presented themselves for reelection ever lost. Because of what analysts refer to as continuismo, many Latin American countries had prohibited reelection until late into the twentieth century or early part of the twenty-first century. But even since then, reelection has been common and incumbents rarely lose. 8. Similar to how the US electoral system stacks representation in favor of small rural states, in Mexico the electoral system tends to overrepresent the party in power. Though since 1996 the law stipulates that no party can have more than 8 percent of the seats in proportion to its percentage of the overall vote, through coalitions and party-shifting techniques, the majority coalition has been able to overcome that rule for a number of elections since then, including in 2018. Based on decisions by the electoral court, the INE changed the rules so as to reduce the level of overrepresentation during the 2021 election. 9. A number of studies use state personnel spending as a proxy for patronage in local government, which is widely associated in the literature with poor public administration, discretion on the part of public officials, and weakened accountability (Gervasoni 2018; Giraudy 2015). Edward Gibson (2013) and Agustina Giraudy (2015) show that expanding public sector payrolls increases the likelihood of bribes, relates to patronage and clientelism, and increases popular perceptions of corruption. 10. The media faces a dilemma in covering public officials that tends to work to the advantage of the public official. Media needs access and largely relies on the goodwill of public officials for such access. Unfavorable treatment of public officials by the media, however, can jeopardize access. Journalists therefore tread carefully to balance truthful reporting of interest to the public and their privileged access to public officials. This is distinct from the more clearly corrupt practices of buying off the media, as often occurs in Mexico (see “Al Rojo Vivo” n.d.; Gillingham et al. 2018; Hughes 2006), or the questionable practices of sponsored stories in US television news shows. 11. Like how inequality fosters corruption, in Mexico corruption is more common in programs focused on social programs attending to the needs of the poor and in poorer regions. According to an Oxfam study by Vidriana Rios (2020) using data from the national auditing agency (ASF), 53 percent of unclarified spending relates to social development programs. Similarly, she finds corruption more common in poor municipalities: “Public money destined to the poorest ‘disappears’ almost three times more than money destined to the richest” (Rios 2020, 6). This tends to reflect the extreme power imbalances between the state and the poor. It also undermines the potential redistributive effects of social programs and exacerbates the inequality at the core of corruption. 12. One conundrum involving the Mexican president during the long reign of one-party rule centered on the issue of how to square the idea of extreme presidentialism (a powerful president) with corruption. Simply stated, either the all-powerful president orchestrated or acquiesced to the corruption surrounding him or he was not as all-powerful as assumed and was unable to control others occupying the state. 13. Such systems have become more elaborate in recent years as transparency and anticorruption efforts in Mexico have grown exponentially. Taking advantage of loopholes created by state officials, recent scandals point to the widespread use of ghost companies to triangulate the transfer of public funds. In the massive Estafa Maestra case, the federal government signed contracts with state universities— which are not subject to much oversight or competitive bidding—for services. The universities then subcontracted with companies that either existed only on paper or failed to provide the service. Much of the diverted funds then went to support elec-

The Political Dilemma

91

toral campaigns. But despite the revelations, few officials to date have been prosecuted. The case was originally brought to light by the investigative journalist group Animal Politico and the civil-society organization Mexicanos Contra la Corrupción y la Impunidad (MCCI) (see “El gobierno contrata empresas fantasma y desvía más de 3.4 mil millones de pesos” n.d.). 14. In contrast to Aristotle and Cicero’s emphasis on promoting the common interest, Machiavelli and Hobbes provide a sort of philosophical foundation for the political uses of corruption. Removing morality from politics, both were concerned more about power and preventing chaos and warfare than promoting justice and the truth. In fact, for Hobbes’s social contract, the sovereign stands above the law (cited in Mungiu-Pippidi 2020, 91). 15. This aspect of the dilemma can be illustrated by the conundrum within Huntington’s (1968) popular theory. Defining stability, the state’s quintessential priority, as keeping popular demands and participation below the capacity of state institutions to handle them fails to recognize that those institutions are crafted and controlled by those occupying the state who will tend to repress popular demands seen as threatening stability rather than expanding the capacity of the institutions to accommodate them. So, rather than provoking the expansion of state capacity, the uncontrolled popular demands and participation will be perceived as a threat to public order. This raises the question about the conditions needed to expand the capacity rather than use that capacity to repress. 16. Qualified immunity is a judicial doctrine (Pierson v. Ray, 1967) that shields public officials from being held personally responsible for constitutional violations. Harlow v. Fitzgerald (1982) created the doctrine of “qualified immunity” for police, though Taylor v. Rojas (2020) may have begun loosening the requirement needed to overcome qualified immunity. 17. On police corruption in the United States, see, for example, Goldstein (2018); Lindberg 1998; Palmiotto 2000; and Slobogin 1996. On the power of the police in the United States and police unions in blocking accountability, see the chapter entitled “The Cruelty of the Code of Silence” in Serwer 2021. 18. See Teachout 2014. In the case of McDonnell v. US (2015), for instance, the court overturned the bribery conviction of the Virginia governor by determining that setting up a meeting, talking to another official, or organizing an event on behalf of a donor does not fit the definition of an “official act” under the anti-bribery law (18 USC 201). The decision, according to Fred Wertheimer (2016), “substantially weakens the government’s ability to prevent corruption and protect citizens”; or as Sarah Chayes (2020, 12) notes, “McDonnell means the prosecutors’ job is harder.” Chayes attributes the subsequent acquittal in 2017 of Rep. Robert Menendez on multiple counts of bribery (18 USC 201), honest services fraud (18 USC 1341, 1343, 1346), and making false statements in his financial disclosure statement (18 USC 1001), among other allegations, to the McDonnell ruling (Chayes 2020, 11). Such cases blur the distinction between regular politics and corruption—a key dimension within the definitional dilemma. 19. A recent example involves the governor of the state of San Luis Potosi elected in 2021. Though the attorney general had thirteen months prior to the election to investigate the sixty-six-page complaint against Ricardo Gallardo Cardona that had been filed by Mexico’s Financial Intelligence Unit (UIF) alleging corruption involving Mex$724 million, no action was taken. Once installed as governor, however, Gallardo once again enjoyed official immunity against prosecution. Running as part of the coalition of parties with the ruling Morena party, the nomination was seen as a reward for Gallardo’s departure from the PRD and the green party’s (PVEM) loyalty to the ruling alliance (see Hernández López 2021).

92

The Corruption Dilemma

20. This included the attempt in 2005 to use the failure of then-mayor of Mexico City and future president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to abide a court injunction to disqualify him from running for president as well as secretive government payments to the media to characterize the leftist leader as a danger to Mexico. 21. On the use of torture in Mexico, see for instance Amnesty International 2015. On the absence of controls over the Mexican military coupled with the tendency to an increase in their power and responsibilities under López Obrador, see Dávila 2021b. Indeed, López Obrador even sees the increased reliance on the military as part of fighting corruption. 22. As of November 2021, fewer than 50 percent of police throughout the country had been evaluated to determine if they were qualified to occupy their position, despite a four-year-old mandate to certify the nation’s police (see https://www .animalpolitico.com/2021/03/mexico-incumple-con-certificacion-de-policias-mas -del-40-no-estan-evaluados/). 23. Interview with Fernanda Odilla, June 10, 2020. 24. Much of the difference in the direction of corrupt influence between Mexico and the United States can be seen in the recruitment and enrichment patterns. In the United States, future job and income opportunities for state officials center largely in the private sector, particularly among firms that tend to benefit from state policies. Officials exiting government may take a position lobbying their prior colleagues, consulting for businesses contracting with the government, or working for think tanks financed by corporate interests promoting particular policies. In Mexico, by contrast, the future of state officials hinges largely on fellow politicians, party leaders, and other high-ranking state officials. This includes not only future opportunities somewhere in government but also continued impunity (on impunity, see Scherer Ibarra 2009). In the moches scandal, for instance, Mexican legislators, facing the need to secure future employment beyond the three- (Chamber of Deputies) or six- (Senate) year term, rationally sought to curry favor with other state officials as opposed to private businesses. This difference is also reflected within the enrichment patterns. In the United States, a politician’s wealth is rarely seen as a product of their career in government. It is usually acquired prior to entering public office—and, given the expenses involved in running for office, may be considered a prerequisite for doing so—with great opportunities for income enjoyed upon leaving public service. Yet in Mexico wealth is often the product of a career working for the state. This can be seen during those times when the enormous property holdings of politicians and state officials are exposed. 25. Sarah Muir (2016) highlights the impact of corruption in Argentina on individuals’ perceptions of society and self. Not only do the people come to see politicians and institutions as corrupt, but they also see society and themselves as corrupt. People criticize the selfishness not only of politicians but of themselves. According to Muir, this undermines personal relationships. In the age of “total corruption,” corruption consumes everything and prevents Argentina from becoming a better country, particularly among the middle class. “Because corrupt practices imitated legitimate ones, they had penetrated the social world and consumed it from the inside out” (Muir 2016, 134). 26. The historical differences in state formation may help account for these differences between Mexico and the United States. Whereas Mexican anti-state sentiments seem to reflect the exploitation experienced at the hands of what Acemoglu and Robinson (2012) characterize as an extractive and exclusive state, the US antistate feelings seem to correspond more to the fear and suspicion toward the use and abuse of state power that existed at the time the state was created, which influenced its formation as an inclusive state.

5 The Anticorruption Dilemma

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts . . . perhaps the fear of a loss of power. —John Steinbeck

Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. —Eric Hoffer

Like corruption, anticorruption is a political construct, but it is arguably more important. Anticorruption is—again like corruption—subsumed within the democratic/rule-of-law metanarrative and is considered, by definition, desirable: fundamental to the ongoing struggle to achieve the ideals of democracy and the rule of law. As a result, anticorruption constitutes an exceedingly powerful political narrative and set of tools that can easily be (ab)used to privilege, protect, promote, and disguise particularistic interests. Fighting corruption serves as a salient campaign issue not just for the voters but also for those seeking to maintain or wrestle control of the state. Empirically expressed within institutions, the law, and public policy, anticorruption represents a powerful political weapon that can be (ab)used by those occupying the state to consolidate their grip on power, cripple opponents, and even secure their control over corrupt systems. Coincidentally, anticorruption can be used strategically by outsiders to denounce state officials and push for policies that serve their own particularistic interests. Disguising underlying political intent and interests, 93

94

The Corruption Dilemma

what some may see or tout as anticorruption paradoxically too often comes to be seen by others as but another form of corruption. This chapter begins by elaborating briefly on the setting for anticorruption. It highlights politicization, polarization, and the role of group identity in coloring the perceptions of the protagonists. It then lays out a series of dilemmas all filed here under the anticorruption dilemma. Some stem from the very nature of corruption and the politics of reform, complicating the quest to fight corruption. But much of the anticorruption dilemma arises from the existence of competing narratives set within a highly politicized, polarized, and often toxic context. With anticorruption brandished strategically to protect and pursue particularistic interests, the anticorruption dilemma pits protagonists occupying the state against itself, against out-of-power opponents plotting to gain control of the state, and against members of society. Following the discussion of the aspects of the anticorruption dilemma, the subsequent section draws on regional examples of the dilemmas. That section borrows heavily from Morris (2021c, chapter 6) on the politicization of corruption and anticorruption. The concluding section caps the discussion by briefly describing the impact of the anticorruption dilemma on society and on the task of fighting corruption itself. While some aspects of the anticorruption dilemma relate to the nature of corruption and reform (described momentarily), much of the dilemma rests on four interrelated contextual factors: anticorruption as a political construct, politicization, polarization, and group identity. First, like corruption, anticorruption is a political construct that is highly contested and dynamic. The nature of the debate and the political stakes involved in defining corruption as described in the definitional dilemma earlier apply as much if not more to defining anticorruption. This is a political debate that is generally difficult to disentangle. From an anthropological perspective, corruption and anticorruption are seen as one phenomenon locked in a dialectic (Muir and Gupta 2018). A second factor setting the stage is politicization: giving an activity or an event a political character or framing. This means interpreting such events in terms of the broader competition for political power, often through the lens of partisan and ideological competition over control of the state. In the current context of anticorruption, this includes imputing underlying (and sometimes unknowable) political motives behind the deployment of anticorruption measures to advance a certain political or

Politicization, Polarization, and Group Identity

The Anticorruption Dilemma

95

partisan agenda or merely personal interests rather than the stated and purported reasons for the action. It both builds on and contributes to the lack of trust in institutions, politicians, and the elite. Even claims to promote or prefer a depoliticized reading of corruption and anticorruption likely harbors underlying interests and biases. In many ways, this means that the issue of anticorruption often reaches well beyond a given case or even the problem of corruption. The construction of scandal, for example, frequently involves much more than simply a focus on corruption or illegalities, as Aaron Ansell’s (2018) study of the impeachment of Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff shows. Though Rousseff was actually charged with minor offenses, the movement to oust her combined, as the author notes, “a peculiar blend of neoliberalism, Evangelical conservatism, sexism, racism and authoritarianism.” In addition to standing up to and fighting corruption, the anticorruption narrative of the social movement also mobilized a religious-ontological narrative questioning Rousseff’s and, by extension, the left’s morality. Polarization, in turn, refers to both the existence of extreme divergence of opinions on a broad range of political issues and the process of a deepening of the opposition and a widening of these differences over time (DiMaggio et al. 1996; see also Abramowitz 2010; Brown et al. 2011). Given the stakes in the struggle to define corruption and establish and police the limits on power, these differences tend to be conflated and incorporated into broader ideological divisions over the nature of democracy and political economy as expressed by political parties and viewed through political and ideological lenses (Mouffe 2005; Morris 2021c). Though political competition is generally regarded as critical in the fight against corruption—competition (political and via pluralism) to control the power of the powerful—many see polarization as challenging the struggle against corruption and weakening democracy itself. The concluding section returns to this important point. A final yet crucial underlying ingredient setting up the anticorruption dilemma—one that also tends to magnify the politicization and polarization—stems from the effects of group identity (party, supporters, opponents, insiders, outsiders, etc.). Though explored in greater detail within the personal dilemma in Chapter 6, social identity theory holds that people’s sense of belonging and identity not only leads them to stress (or prioritize) intergroup differences while downplaying intragroup differences (Tajfel 1974) but also facilitates binary forms of thinking, 1 selective interpretation of information, and a tendency to ignore, accept, or show greater leniency to the corruption committed by in-group members, particularly if the corruption serves in-group interests,

96

The Corruption Dilemma

while overly emphasizing the corruption of outsiders (Anderson and Tverdova 2003; Bågenholm and Charron 2016; Barros and Pereira 2014; Bauhr and Charron 2018; Chang and Kerr 2017; López-López et al. 2016; Solaz et al. 2019). This tendency helps solidify political groupings, deepen their perspectives, and cast corruption and anticorruption in moralistic terms. Fighting corruption confronts several challenges classified here under the broader notion of the anticorruption dilemma. At one level, fighting corruption encompasses roadblocks that stem from the very nature of corruption and reform. First, though somewhat poorly understood, the techniques and practices of corruption tend to respond to the existing institutional, legal, and political context. Actors exploit the hidden avenues and loopholes for illicit gain. This influences changes in the patterns of corruption, as Borge Bakken and Jasmine Wang (2021) show in the case of China. Unfortunately, this means that anticorruption efforts invariably lag corruption, reacting to new techniques, patterns, and methods. Corruption, in short, evolves and diversifies rapidly; yet the countermeasures of anticorruption tend to adapt slowly. Seemingly by the time reformists can close certain windows of corrupt opportunities, those engaging in corruption have developed new techniques and are exploiting new windows. This tends to give the appearance of a never-ending cycle or, perhaps, in Mexican slang, gatopardismo (change in order to remain the same). As anthropologists Sarah Muir and Akhil Gupta (2018) describe it, corruption and anticorruption are in constant movement, as each anticorruption action transforms the logic of corruption, and each corrupt practice calls for new anticorruption measures. Second, anticorruption efforts confront the dilemma that fighting corruption in one area may trigger or exacerbate corruption in another area. At the simplest level, devoting resources to fight corruption in a particular sector may simply take away from the attention and resources needed to address corruption in another sector. As a result, while it may curb corruption in the one area, it may unintentionally increase or restore it in the other. At a more complicated level, changing the institutional framework and rules to address the causes of corruption in one area may simply generate different forms of corruption. Daniel Gingerich’s (2013) study of corruption in electoral systems, for instance, shows how open versus closed list systems facilitate distinct forms of corruption, so that moving from one to another merely alters the pattern of corruption.

An Assortment of Dilemmas Wrapped Up in One

The Anticorruption Dilemma

97

Finally, in pursuing reforms to fight corruption, state officials—like members of society, a point noted later—face a collective action dilemma, what Barbara Geddes (1991, 1994) denotes as the “politician’s dilemma.” As she describes it, while reforming patronage and clientelism, and implementing a professional bureaucracy, would theoretically benefit all, early adopters run the risk of facing defeat and losing power to those who do not engage in reform and continue to enjoy the gains of clientelism. Likewise, US politicians who fail to partake of corporate cash to mount their campaign must still face candidates who do. This dilemma tends to weaken or even cripple internal support for reforms (Morris 2021a, 36). In addition to these challenges, a variety of dilemmas arise from the politicized and polarized setting. These dilemmas find those occupying the state, out-of-power groups vying to wrestle control of the state, and even civil-society actors all using anticorruption strategically to protect and promote their own particularistic interests, limited only by the broader democratic narrative. Focusing first on those occupying the state, anticorruption provides a widely accepted narrative—fastened to the state’s legitimacy—that they can use to help gain and maintain their own legitimacy and support, thus contributing to their hold on power. Couching any political move as part of the broader struggle against corruption steeps it with legitimacy and potentially handicaps opponents since it is ideologically difficult to oppose the fight against corruption. At one level, the mere use of anticorruption as a device to maintain or bolster legitimacy influences the nature of the anticorruption efforts. Given their rather limited time horizon, politicians tend to prefer highimpact actions with short-term gain: this applies to anticorruption as much as any other area. That effective anticorruption may require longterm, gradual, and low-profile changes thus often pales in comparison to its more practical political and even public relations purposes. But anticorruption is much more than an effective rhetorical device or public relations strategy. Beyond elaborate public campaigns denouncing corruption and lofty promises to tackle it head-on (once and for all!), anticorruption also seeks to curb corruption through some combination of an assortment of preventive measures (conflict of interest laws, transparency, declarations of property holdings, professional civil service, autonomous organizations, more checks and balances, etc.) and reactive measures (audits, investigations, prosecutions, sanctions, whistleblower protections, etc.). All such measures involve a wide range of legal, institutional, and policy reforms. And yet, as the political dilemma shows, those occupying the state have substantial control

98

The Corruption Dilemma

over all these levers—the institutions, the laws, the policies, and their implementation: a power they tend to use in ways that best protect and promote their own interests, particularly their hold on power. Obviously, this includes substantial control over the design and implementation of anticorruption measures.2 Such controls result, first, in a dilemma that finds the state’s anticorruption measures potentially being (ab)used in such a way as to consolidate power, neutralize internal and external enemies, and secure or even open other opportunities for corrupt gain, while simultaneously publicly touting such efforts to bolster their own anticorruption (and prodemocratic) credentials. This includes, and is perhaps best illustrated by, the idea of “lawfare,” where even the law is strategically (ab)used for political purposes.3 Such measures will be publicly touted as part of the promised effort to fight corruption (helping build legitimacy) and may even curb certain forms of corruption; but underlying these, the measures tend to reflect and promote broader political interests by discrediting and delegitimizing political opponents. But even when state officials legitimately target corruption and go after the corrupt (as they are supposed to), their anticorruption efforts still run into other dilemmas. Simply because of resource scarcity, state officials must make choices in their fight against corruption. After all, it is impossible to do everything all at once. As Michael Johnston and Scott Fritzen (2021) stress, to have any chance at success, reforms must be carefully designed, implemented, and sequenced. Even prosecutions of corruption must by necessity be selective and thus based on some rationale. This means state officials must make choices, choosing strategically (attempting to kill the most birds with the fewest stones) by considering factors beyond the problem of corruption itself. Consequently, officials will tend to focus anticorruption measures on areas deemed to have the greatest political returns and that are considered the least threatening to their own political or personal interests. Many such reforms—for example, the prosecution and sanctioning of corrupt officials—as noted, are often pursued more for their public relations impact than for their impact on corruption. This overall tendency, however, fosters a dilemma by opening even supposedly legitimate reforms or prosecutions to attack by claims by opponents as being politically motivated and guided by political interests. But even when state officials legitimately target corruption—and despite the fact that they may be selective in prioritizing the corruption that undermines their own interests or their political opponents—they also face the dilemma of provoking a reaction by those threatened by

The Anticorruption Dilemma

99

the anticorruption measures. This occurs when the state attacks itself. When you fight corruption, as David Arellano-Gault (2020, 210) insists, it fights back. Since corruption derives from power and authority to begin with, even state efforts to upset the corrupt status quo confronts significant pushback from state officials and/or outside interests who resent the attack on their privileges and feel such actions unjustified or even a form of political persecution. Even if the state can strip or check the power of the powerful by creating new state agencies, there is the possibility that the corrupt interests will then strive to capture the new agencies policing corruption or pursue strategies designed to circumvent the new rules and/or at least weaken the blow. Again, as ArellanoGault (2020, 149) notes, there is a “high likelihood that a corrupt political system that creates an anticorruption agency will end up manipulating and sabotaging it.” But once again, even when state officials legitimately target corruption—and despite the fact that they may be selective in prioritizing the corruption that undermines their own interests and may produce pushback from those threatened—they will face the added dilemma of trying to gain much-needed public cooperation in the fight against corruption amid a highly skeptical public that has learned from years of entrenched corruption and periodic and ritualistic anticorruption promises and campaigns not to trust state officials. This dilemma creates a sort of Catch-22: systemic corruption breeds a political culture of distrust, and yet effective anticorruption, at least according to much of the mainstream literature, requires active public participation, which this distrust undermines. The resulting failure to garner public cooperation and weakening of efforts to address corruption, in turn, fortifies these views within the political culture, reaffirming the lack of trust and the perceptions of corruption. Generally, distinguishing legitimate reforms from those used in a sense “corruptly” to serve the political objectives of state officials, gain legitimacy, consolidate power, or undermine their opponents is no easy task.4 But in many ways, that task is really more academic than political because just like state officials, out-of-power political opponents—those vying for power—will also use anticorruption strategically to help promote, protect, and pursue their own interests. Like those occupying the state, they too will seek to dominate the debate and employ the fight against corruption to try to delegitimize those occupying the state, color them as corrupt, and remove them from power or, at least, limit their power to gain concessions. Consequently, opponents will exploit the vulnerabilities embedded within the dilemmas already noted. They will

100

The Corruption Dilemma

tend to dismiss and discredit the state’s anticorruption efforts as mere public relations designed to gain public support, insist that the government’s efforts disguise their true political intentions, or argue that the anticorruption efforts merely justify their political maneuverings. They will stress how the anticorruption measures are selective and (ab)used to consolidate the power of those occupying the state by selectively targeting their enemies or removing institutional obstacles and other checks on their power. As Fernando Forattini (2020, 20) notes, the perception of endemic corruption is brought forth and “selectively exacerbated whenever political-economic interests or moral demands from part of the population so require.” Contestation (and politicization) becomes even more acute when the state targets institutional and legal forms of corruption since such efforts often involve tinkering with what many see as the fundamental institutional pillars of democracy. Paradoxically, while existing institutions may exhibit institutional and legal forms of corruption and effectively freeze or lock into place certain advantages and privileges for a particular group or interest, attacking autonomous agencies such as the national bank, the electoral council, freedom of information council, the judiciary, or even tackling the campaign finance system to overturn entrenched interests and rescue portions of the state from capture potentially opens state officials to claims by opponents that they are seeking to eliminate the system’s checks and balances, concentrate power, and destroy democracy. Opponents will (and must) adamantly defend existing institutions that benefit their own interests by characterizing the attacks on these institutions as antidemocratic and a sign of creeping authoritarianism. In fact, to contest the pro-justice, prodemocratic, anticorruption narrative employed by state officials, opponents will tend to portray the measures as, in fact, the exact opposite: as a form of corruption and the abuse of power by state officials. Given the democratic metanarrative, they are also likely to strategically attack even legitimate efforts to curb those forms of corruption they benefit from—corruption fighting back— by using the same pro-justice, prodemocratic narrative framing. Rather than seeing the measures as attacking illegitimate privileges enjoyed by a particular group, if they are the target, they will, by necessity, couch their opposition in terms of corruption and the underlying political interests behind the anticorruption measures. After all, it is rather futile to defend my interests by arguing that the existing institutions or laws benefit me personally. Consequently, opposition must deploy the democratic and rule-of-law narrative to argue against such changes. As Sávio Cavalcante (2018, 105, cited in Forattini 2020, 23) puts it, “The discourse

The Anticorruption Dilemma

101

against corruption is seen as a generic and moralizing foundation that aims to hide the real interests of this class in the political dispute against a project that served popular interests.” Despite a growing consciousness about the problems of corruption and increasing popular demands for accountability, a host of dilemmas also attach to the problems facing society in its efforts to assert its democratic interests against corruption. First, and perhaps more pronounced than for the politicians, a collective action dilemma seriously complicates efforts to independently come together to pressure the state for change (see Carson and Mota Prado 2016; Johnston 2014, ch. 1; Olson 1965; Marquette and Peiffer 2015; Mungiu-Pippidi and Johnston 2017; Persson et al. 2013; Zapata 2018). In so many ways, society and citizen organizations tend to represent the weaker actor in this entire political scenario—despite their numbers and their votes—largely because of the difficulties in organizing such diffuse interests. Even so, civil-society organizations—like capitalist interests and those occupying the state— also have their own particularistic interests and pursue strategic alliances to help achieve them. This may mean cooperating with those occupying the state or their opponents or even trying to publicly adopt a sort of nonpartisan course. But even the latter approach does not mean that societal organizations will not embrace a certain definition of corruption or ideologically ally with capitalist and business interests or internationally with the prevailing anticorruption organizations when joining the struggle. As such, though the weaker actor in the scenario, civil society is also a participant in the ideological debate and the struggle over the limits on power and how to enforce them.5 Closely aligned with the collective action dilemma, society also faces the dilemma of how to sustain anticorruption pressures. Johnston (2014) and Johnston and Fritzen (2021) highlight this aspect of the anticorruption dilemma, noting the difficulties of maintaining popular participation and vigilance over long periods of time. Even successful public campaigns that force the state to pass anticorruption legislation or construct new anticorruption institutions have only won the first part of the struggle. Getting those laws properly enforced or those institutions to work as designed requires a different strategy and a different set of resources. But maintaining those public pressures is difficult given the abstractness of good governance and the growing attractiveness of free riding (McDevitt and Zinnbauer 2021). Over time, corrupt systems often reassert themselves as public attention and popular pressures fall off. Third, society also faces the dilemma of its reliance on the government to get much done. Even if it overcomes the collective action

102

The Corruption Dilemma

dilemma and mobilizes to force (or in James Madison’s formulation “oblige”) the state to abide by the limits on its power, citizens and civil society can only do so much. They (particularly the press) can expose wrongdoing, but they cannot conduct criminal investigations, prosecute, or try cases; they can identify problems and even draft proposals for legislation, but they cannot pass the reforms; they can work to provide oversight and increase the likelihood of exposing wrongdoing, but they have limited control over what happens afterward. Even when society forces open the door to forge co-government arrangements, as in the international Open Government Alliance, the government nonetheless retains a high level of influence over the agenda, the procedures, and the outcomes. This gives the government a means to at best slow down and manage the process in accordance with its own interests. This often has the effect of watering down, delaying, and stalling reforms—despite the example of co-governance and working together to battle corruption— producing a sort of simulation. Finally, embedded within this, society faces the dilemma of whether to work with the government or not, to attack the status quo or to pursue a strategy of change through cooperation. Along the way, it confronts the potential dangers of being co-opted or captured by state and/or outside actors. As noted, when attacking corruption, those enjoying its benefits will tend to fight back. One strategy of fighting back, of course, is to capture or co-opt societal organizations, substituting or influencing its own political interests and strategies for those of the organization. In sum, incorporating a range of dilemmas, the anticorruption dilemma reflects the fact that neither corruption nor anticorruption operate in a political vacuum. Fighting corruption is not the only objective state leaders, their opponents, or members of society entertain. In strategically engaging in the fight against corruption, anticorruption forces will often consider certain anticorruption measures (or certain interests) too costly to their interests. Just as the political dilemma illustrates how corruption can be used to gain loyalty or support for other reforms or policies, so too can anticorruption be reserved and shaped for the same reasons.6 In many cases, as noted in the prior chapter, state leaders will often consider other objectives more important than fighting corruption, making anticorruption somewhat transactional. This may include supporting corrupt officials to bolster the control of the political party or using corruption to gain support for legislation.7 This logic essentially applies to opponents and members of society as well. Those vying for power similarly will pursue anticorruption strategically to help delegitimize the existing government—even to the point of characterizing their

The Anticorruption Dilemma

103

anticorruption efforts as “disguised” corruption or as facilitating authoritarianism—while refraining from highlighting those forms of corruption that facilitate their own interests. And just like those vying for state power and those wielding it, societal groups also have their own political and strategic interests to consider. They too must therefore balance competing interests and objectives and engage in strategic and tactical trade-offs. The massive social mobilization behind the impeachment of Brazilian president Rousseff noted earlier points to the complex linkage of political and economic interests behind a societal anticorruption effort. Even so, the movement still played an important role in pushing much-needed anticorruption reforms. Many examples taken from America (the region—America is not a country) help illustrate various aspects of the anticorruption dilemma. They are included here in a separate section rather than woven in with the prior theoretical discussion because they tend to illustrate more than one dilemma at a time. Many reveal how those occupying the state have employed their power over institutions, laws, and policies to weaponize anticorruption by prioritizing certain cases over others, designing reforms to simultaneously promote other political objectives, engaging in the practices of “lawfare,” torturing to gain “confessions” for political purposes, and staging or planting evidence to trap rivals.8 This includes, in particular, the “selective enforcement” of anticorruption laws. As Daniel Brinks et al. (2020, 16) note: “For decades in Latin America, anticorruption laws tended to snare government rivals or former government officials rather than those currently in office.” The political use of anticorruption can be seen in Venezuela, for instance, where Transparencia Venezuela (2018; 2020) points to hundreds of members of the opposition-led National Assembly being detained, harassed, or denied legal immunity, the multiple decisions by the Supreme Court crippling congressional oversight, ten states of exceptions used to block the congressional body, and the closure of various independent media. In some cases, impunity is simply a reflection of the power of the targeted institution, as with the lack of prosecution of the many abuses by the military in Mexico;9 but in other cases it is part of a broader political calculation. Such politicized calculation is usually put into particularly sharp relief when presidents themselves and their allies face allegations and charges of corruption. Of course, opponents frame the attacks (and even their supportive comments) on the government to highlight both the real or

Regional Examples of the Anticorruption Dilemma

104

The Corruption Dilemma

simply imagined underlying political (ulterior) motives, the hypocrisy, the inconsistencies, and the “what-about-isms.” The (ab)use of anticorruption by those occupying the state can, of course, move in opposing directions depending on the underlying political objectives or imputed motives. In a sense, this is part of the prerogatives of authority. Anticorruption mechanisms can be (or can be seen as being) used by the government to go after adversaries or ignored, weakened, or dismantled to prevent investigations into themselves and their allies. Roberto Simon and Emilie Sweigart (2020), for example, allege the political use of the financial intelligence units in both Mexico and Brazil, but for different purposes. They contend that in Mexico the highprofile UIF targets former officials of the government while neglecting President López Obrador’s allies; yet in Brazil, with COAF (Council for Control of Financial Activities) investigations implicating President Jair Bolsonaro’s son, the government and its allies seek to stall and obstruct the investigations. While the Brazilian government fired the head of the COAF and later struggled with the National Congress over who should control the agency, the Supreme Court froze virtually all of COAF’s activities for violating the “right to privacy.” Brazil also emerges as a good example of both the real and the perceived politicization and polarization of anticorruption prosecutions and the involvement of the public. First, the impeachment of President Rousseff in 2016 for the relatively minor offense of misusing statistical information on the economy pivoted more, according to many observers, on promoting a right-wing agenda, discrediting the long-ruling labor party (PT), and gaining political power than on actually fighting corruption or securing justice. As Ansell (2018) notes, the Fora Dilma mass demonstrations of 2015 were coordinated largely by social movements who besides proclaiming the fight against corruption also identified secondary objectives associated with the right—with some by libertarian think tanks backed by US interests—and that many of those voting in the National Congress to impeach the president dedicated their vote to “God and family” or, as in the case of then deputy Jair Bolsonaro, the military coup of 1964. But according to Ansell (2018) the anti-Rousseff protestors were less concerned about what Rousseff did (corruption) than about what she was (lesbian, communist). In what the author (Ansell 2018, 321) denotes as ontological corruption, opponents made the various “failings” homologous, thereby equating the PT with the lack of morality, corruption, and communism. But as attention turned a few years later to Brazil’s former president Luiz Lula de Silva—Rousseff’s popular predecessor—the PT, now on

The Anticorruption Dilemma

105

the outside following the impeachment, saw the legal prosecution by the state against the former president as also part of a right-wing move designed primarily to prevent Lula from competing in the 2018 presidential election while further discrediting the once-dominant PT. Subsequent revelations (leaked recorded conversations) of improper communication (collusion) between the judge (and future justice minister for a time under Bolsonaro) and the prosecution provided even more ammunition for the opposition’s claims of underlying political motives. The leaks between Judge Sergio Moro and prosecutors “reinforced fears that many investigations have been plagued by political bias and a hypocritical disregard for ethics and the law” (Winter 2019). Indeed, on March 8, 2021, the Brazilian Supreme Court annulled Lula’s graft convictions, thereby facilitating his return to politics. Of course, the weaponization of anticorruption swings both ways and can be used by either state officials or opponents. According to Mexico’s attorney general for electoral matters, it is common practice during campaigns to file charges against opponents for violations of campaign/electoral laws for knowingly weak or nonexistent violations in an effort to delegitimize an opponent (in accordance with the old adage, “lo que no daña, mancha [that which does not damage, still stains]).” Indeed, José Ortiz Pinchetti (2021) notes that from September 2020 to April 2021, of the over four hundred charges filed, 78 percent appear to have been based on unfounded information. In striking contrast to the politically fruitful investigations and prosecutions of opponents from the prior administration or even current opponents, things tend to be quite different when it comes to allegations and cases against the sitting president or her/his allies. Here, governments tend to defend those within their own ranks, even to the point of intentionally obstructing or dismantling investigations or even weakening and undermining anticorruption institutions. In many cases, corruption scandals involving members of the government, including presidents, family members, and close allies, are initially denied and contested by the government. In Brazil, though initially used politically by the PT in the National Congress to gain points, once the mensalao investigations came to focus on the PT, they backed off and aligned with the center to block the investigations.10 In the case of Argentina, as Alberto Fernández (2017, par. 68) avers: “Official leadership preferred to defend the accused with sofismas [falsehoods] before eventually recognizing that they were responsible, believing that in this way they prevented the allegations from being ‘functional.’” In the United States, Donald Trump, meanwhile, labeled all such allegations of corruption

106

The Corruption Dilemma

against his government as politically motivated hoaxes perpetuated by elements of the corrupt “deep state” and promoted by “fake news.” One major effect of scandals involving the president and his allies occupying the state—and what are cast as machinations of the government to shield its own, even by weakening anticorruption agencies—is that it severely undermines the government’s credibility in fighting corruption and often results in backtracking. In the face of multiple allegations of corruption against herself and her government, as Fernández (2017, par. 64) notes, “The Argentina of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was a place in which the controls [against corruption] were relaxed to the point of becoming mere formalities.” In Mexico, even though the Peña Nieto government tried to introduce some executive reforms in the wake of the Casa Blanca scandal and the disappearance of the forty-three students in Ayotzinapa in 2014, these and a host of scandals involving numerous PRI governors largely crippled Peña Nieto’s control over the anticorruption agenda, despite early fanfare and promises to fight corruption. In Brazil, even though Lula initially sought to block investigations into members of his own party and administration during the mensalao case, Sérgio Praca and Matthew Taylor (2014, 39, 40) contend that “the [mensalao] scandal led the executive branch [Lula] to decrease its emphasis on accountability reforms”; its “emphasis on accountability that was such a hallmark of Lula’s first term appeared to fall by the wayside.”11 Allegations against Jair Bolsonaro (2018– ) and his sons similarly prompted administration-led efforts to debilitate the Brazilian government’s fight against corruption. Observers point to the president’s intervention in the Federal Police (FP), the Federal Revenue Service, and the Public Prosecutors Office (Franco 2019a). Claiming “that Brazil’s anti-corruption environment is facing an unprecedented backlash,” for instance, Roberto Simon (2019) points out how “Bolsonaro is . . . trying to curtail the autonomy of the Federal Police and the Federal Customs Agency, pushing for a broad leadership change and overruling decisions by his justice minister, Sergio Moro.” It is also widely believed that the president’s efforts to remove the superintendent of the Federal Police in Rio and later the director of the FP—telling his justice minister that he wanted to be able to get confidential information directly from the director on ongoing investigations—were directly related to the investigations targeting his sons for money laundering and illicit ties to organized crime and militias (Vigna 2020). Bolsonaro has also engaged in aggressive rhetoric and unfounded allegations against civil-society organizations and the press. Though he was unsuccessful

The Anticorruption Dilemma

107

in his effort to gain sweeping powers to monitor civil-society organizations (CSOs), he was able to bar them from participation in public policy councils (Franco 2019b). Of course, as Guilherme Franco (2019a) notes, many such setbacks under Bolsonaro are not due to the president but to the National Congress and the Supreme Court, wary of corruption investigations striking too close to home. Eventually, in response to the Lava Jato case, a broad alliance of those occupying the state assembled behind efforts to end the investigation: an alliance Bolsonaro joined to help protect the corruption of family members from investigation. Similarly in both Guatemala and Honduras, as investigations into wrongdoing came to focus on members of the first family, the presidents orchestrated the withdrawal of the international anti-impunity/ anticorruption commissions. Outsider Jimmy Morales in Guatemala had been elected on the promise of fighting corruption, but in early 2017 when his brother and son were indicted for falsifying receipts to defraud the national property registry and later in the year when the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) attempted to launch an investigation into the incumbent FCN party for undisclosed campaign contributions, the government accused the international agency of engaging in personal attacks (Schwartz 2019). Seeking to fragment what at the time was a strong pro-CICIG coalition and mobilize opposition, the government, business, and congressional leaders lobbied to oust the CICIG as well as the US ambassador and CICIG backer, Todd Robinson. Efforts to get the US government, by this time under President Trump, to back away from its prior support initially prompted UN ambassador Nikki Haley to urge the CICIG to go about its job “more quietly” (Phillips 2019). In April 2018, following false accusations that the commission was acting on behalf of Russian president Vladimir Putin to persecute a family of Russian dissidents in Guatemala, congressional Republicans froze US assistance to the commission. Though the claims were unsubstantiated and the suspension of aid was short-lived, the damage to US backing lingered. In the end, citing CICIG’s alleged participation in illegal acts and abuse of authority, in January 2019 Morales terminated the agreement with the United Nations. And even though that decision was initially rejected by the UN and overturned by Guatemala’s Supreme Court, the commission’s term nonetheless ended in September of the same year and was not renewed (Phillips 2019). Honduras played a similar score. Though the Mission to Support the Fight against Corruption and Impunity in Honduras (MACCIH), established in 2016, led to multiple prosecutions and strengthened the nation’s

108

The Corruption Dilemma

capacity to combat corruption and impunity, numerous allegations and investigations into the president’s illegal use of funds embezzled from the social security agency during his election campaign, allegations of links to drug trafficking, the conviction of his brother in New York for conspiring to import cocaine, illicit weapons possession, and lying to US authorities, and investigations by the MACCIH of congressional allies all conspired to undermine the government’s commitment to fighting corruption. Consequently, in late 2019, the Honduran congress voted to recommend that the MACCIH be discontinued, “claiming that the mission had exceeded its powers and had violated the constitution. Several members of congress who voted in favor of disbanding the Mission, it should be noted, were at the time under investigation by the Attorney General’s Office with assistance from the MACCIH” (Silva Ávalos and Robbins 2020). Accusing the commission of “excesses,” in 2020 the government failed to reach agreement with the Organization of American States (OAS) to extend MACCIH’s mandate. In this case, the Honduran congress played an important role in the backlash against anticorruption efforts and the MACCIH. In February 2018 it passed a reform to the general budget law that effectively blocked the attorney general’s office from pursuing corruption-related cases for up to three years while the Superior Accounts Tribunal conducted audits of misspending of public funds. Described by the head of the MACCIH as an “impunity pact,” the measure followed the opening of an investigation into possible embezzlement involving sixty members of congress (Clavel 2018). Incorporated into the 2020 reform to the penal code, the changes also reduced the sentences for corruption, effectively, according to critics, protecting the corrupt (González 2020). This offers a good example of how, when fighting corruption, it usually fights back. Moreover, in both Guatemala and Honduras, international politics also played a critical role, demonstrating how the anticorruption dilemma extends beyond a nation’s borders. It also highlights the central role played by political trade-offs. Initially, Guatemala and Honduras accepted the CICIG and MACCIH in part because of the pressures applied by the Obama administration in the United States and the granting of US economic aid to support the commissions’ work (bribe?). US support was also critical to the operation and success of the commissions, despite the domestic problems and controversies. Under the Trump administration, however, this commitment faded, setting the stage for the attacks and eventual withdrawals of the commissions described above. More pointedly, however, US support for the commissions and the fight against corruption was bargained away in return for

The Anticorruption Dilemma

109

the governments of Guatemala and Honduras signing safe third-party agreements on immigration with the United States. The end of US support effectively sealed the fate of the two commissions and helped dismantle the fight against corruption and impunity, though Trump successfully achieved an important foreign policy objective (Silva Ávalos and Robbins 2020; see also Arellano-Gault 2020). Such reactions by government to allegations of corruption within their own camp usually open the government up to pointed criticism from its opponents, thereby putting into sharp relief key aspects of the anticorruption dilemma. During these occasions, opponents and outsiders are quick to accuse the government of abandoning its anticorruption promises and of weakening rather than strengthening anticorruption institutions and/or independent agencies charged with curbing corruption. Such a narrative relates both to the specific scandals rocking the administration and to a range of government actions and reforms portrayed as part of a hidden agenda designed not to fight corruption, but rather to centralize power (dictatorial power). The official report “El estado del estado—Argentina” (Government of Argentina 2015, 31) by the incoming Macri government, for example, makes this point explicit: “The institutions of the republic, instead of controlling management and preventing acts of corruption, were employed on occasions as an instrument in the political struggle favoring officials and were dismantled when they became a threat to those occupying the government.” Indeed, José Natanson (2017) specifically highlights the politicization of the judiciary in Argentina under the Kirchners as designed above all to block investigations of corruption of those in the government and to hasten the centralization of power in the executive (though Nestor Kirchner’s Decree No. 222/03 limited his own power to designate members of the Supreme Court): “Executive power lobbying of judges and tribunals and the frequent changes in the composition or increasing the number of members of the supreme court are demonstrations of the will (or desire) to condition the processes and win weight in the judicial decisions.” In like manner, he interprets Mauricio Macri’s controversial “commission” appointments to fill two vacancies on the Supreme Court, bypassing Senate approval, as an effort on his part to control the judiciary (Natanson 2017). In Mexico, critics vehemently attack the López Obrador government’s anticorruption program, pointing to the continued use of direct, no-bid contracts, the failure to make key appointments to the National Anticorruption System (SNA), the lack of trials and sentencing of corrupt officials and the selective application of anticorruption sanctions,

110

The Corruption Dilemma

and the tendency to eliminate whole state entities and programs in the name of fighting corruption rather than reforming them. According to Agustín Basave (2020, 48), the government “assumes that the only way to end corruption in entities more or less corrupted that are in his [the president’s] way is to eliminate them,” while those that are part of his preferred policies and programs, such as those tied to the military, are not eliminated for corruption. Indeed, many critics accuse López Obrador of using anticorruption (and austerity) to consolidate and centralize power. The opening line in a piece by Luis Rubio (2019), a prominent think-tank intellectual on the right, could hardly be any more explicit: “The excuse is the corruption; the reality is total control.” Such allegations/interpretations go beyond corruption, of course, to describe (or impute) the overall intention and potential outcome. In another piece, Rubio (2020) notes: The evidence demonstrates that the real project is not development, but control: not only is everything focused in this direction, but that they do not even pretend to construct the guiding capacity that characterized stabilizing development. But the objective of control comes accompanied with the neutralization not only of the (supposed) checks and balances of presidential power, but also the elimination of all the successful factors that characterized the period of what the president calls “neoliberal.”

Echoing this narrative, prominent anticorruption academic and activist Mauricio Merino (2020) contends that everything the government does is justified by political reasons or objectives. One example unfolding as I write involves accusations against the governor of the northeastern state of Tamaulipas, Francisco García Cabeza de Vaca. Spearheaded by the UIF (financial intelligence), an investigation by the semi-autonomous attorney general’s office and strongly and publicly pushed by the president, the ruling Morena party in the federal congress stripped the governor of his immunity in an effort to remove him from office for illicit enrichment of more than Mex$951 million and the triangulation of funds of Mex$42 million through a ghost company (“FGR solicita juicio de procedencia contra gobernador de Tamaulipas” 2021). In reaction, on March 2, 2021, the opposition-controlled state legislature pushed back, approving a measure declaring that only local deputies (not the federal congress) have the power to decide whether to proceed. They based their move on Article 111 of the constitution that says that for federal crimes, the congress must refer to the states. Seeing the López Obrador government’s request for the governor’s impeachment as polit-

The Anticorruption Dilemma

111

ically focused on the upcoming midterm elections in June 2021, the opposition pointed to the weaknesses of the accusations—despite the fact of widespread influence of organized crime in Tamaulipas, the conviction of former governors for corruption, and the fact that the current governor is also under investigation by the US Justice Department. One report notes that despite high-profile press reports alleging money laundering and racketeering, the only charge in the file presented to members of the federal congress was the failure to pay taxes despite the fact that a high-profile protected state witness, Emilio Lozoya Austin (the former head of Pemex), alleged that García Cabeza de Vaca accepted a bribe during his term as a federal representative in return for supporting Peña Nieto’s energy reforms (see Cediollo 2021; Juarez 2021). Raising questions about the political timing of all of this, Anabel Hernández (2021) notes that criminal charges against the governor for corruption actually date back to June 2020, yet the government not only waited until the campaign period to proceed, but the charges prompting the congressional removal of impunity did not include the earlier investigation. While the governor, of course, rejects the charges, the constitutional question regarding whether the federal or state congress has the power to remove the governor remained open for some time. Following the elections, the case essentially died down. But just as the opposition accuses the state of weaponizing anticorruption to target opponents, consolidate power, or gain legitimacy, the government may similarly (and paradoxically) cast allegations at and investigations into its own people by actors and institutions beyond its control as politically motivated, even to the point of characterizing it as a form of corruption. In the United States, the Trump administration consistently cast the FBI-led investigation into the 2016 campaign’s collusion with Russia as well as the impeachment hearings in Congress over abuse of authority as politically motivated and part of a plot orchestrated by the “deep state” to undermine the president and even overturn the results of the 2016 election (see Greenwald 2020). Trump also sought to use executive power to block investigations, firing inspector generals, bypassing senatorial confirmation of top officials, and mobilizing congressional support from his own party by raising campaign funds and threatening to fund opponents in primary elections. According to Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (2018), Trump undermined two critical informal institutions that for so long had successfully checked the abuse of power in the United States: forbearance (refraining from using authority to the degree permitted by law) and the acceptance of the legitimacy of one’s opponents.

112

The Corruption Dilemma

Though created and cast as a check on electoral corruption, Mexico’s autonomous National Electoral Institute also faces allegations of selective enforcement and bias. In reaction to a series of INE rulings against the ruling Morena party of the López Obrador government in 2021, for example, critics pointed out the failures of the entity to properly investigate and sanction the origins and use of financing during the 2012 and 2018 presidential contests that resulted in the loss of López Obrador. John Ackerman (2021), for instance, notes the lack of investigation into the “Berlin Operation” financed by business leaders, the millions of dark propaganda robot calls during the 2018 electoral campaign, or the campaign violations in 2012 as revealed by state witness and former Pemex director Lozoya, who channeled US$5 million into the campaign of Peña Nieto, or the Monex case documented by a congressional commission showing that the campaign overspent the legal limit by a factor of fourteen. He also notes violations at the state level including the gubernatorial elections in 2010 in Veracruz, in 2016 in Chihuahua, and in 2017 in Coahuila and the state of Mexico. Yet, despite such allegations and evidence, the INE has failed to investigate and/or sanction these cases. Similarly, in what some see as overstepping its legal mandate, the INE questioned the veracity of candidates within Morena (introducing the concept of “effective affiliation”) and the question of whether there was a precampaign in the selection of their candidates for state office. Like the government, INE cannot physically investigate all cases or allegations, setting it up for accusations of biased or selective enforcement. A perhaps more extreme example of weakening of oversight institutions designed to provide checks and balances and prevent corruption, paradoxically, in the name of fighting corruption involves President Martín Vizcarra’s closing of the Peruvian congress in September 2019. Though permitted under the nation’s constitution, the move followed a year-long battle over the government’s anticorruption measures that were hitting close to home. With the president claiming that the Popular Force party, the opposition majority party led by jailed former presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori, was using democratic institutions for personal gain (corruption) and blocking its efforts to fight corruption, “opposition representatives cried ‘Dictator.’” According to reports, the “last straw” for the president was when congress appointed a new member to the constitutional tribunal: the likely referee in a legal dispute between the two branches of government (see Cornejo 2020; “Peru’s Vizcarra Closes Congress” 2019; McClintock 2020). In typical pot-kettle interaction, of course, critics

The Anticorruption Dilemma

113

have charged Vizcarra with “pervasive judicialization” of politics (Sosa Villagarcia 2020). In conjunction to weakening the government’s anticorruption standing, scandals against current government officials also tend to place corruption/anticorruption high atop the national agenda. Rooted in part in a strengthening of the role of the media and civil-society organizations in investigating and exposing corruption, it also sets the stage for opposition leaders and particularly civil society to mobilize efforts to promote important anticorruption reforms. As a result, either despite the lack of a strong anticorruption drive by the government crippled by internal scandals or because of it, citizen mobilizations often generate important and significant changes in the anticorruption arena. In the case of Brazil, for instance, despite (or because of) the government’s weakening due to the mensalao scandal, civil society mobilized to gain support and eventual approval of the Clean Record law, referred to by Brazil expert Timothy Powers as “the biggest single advance against corruption that Brazil has ever had” (Clausen 2012, 110). The law bars candidates from running for public office for eight years if they have been convicted of a serious crime, lost their political positions due to corruption, or resigned to avoid impeachment. Similarly in Mexico, despite (or because of) the scandal-riddled government of Peña Nieto, CSOs played a pivotal role in getting a series of laws and constitutional reforms passed from 2014 to 2017 to create the National Anticorruption System. The process helped strengthen existing autonomous oversight agencies, created a secretariat office, institutionalized state-society cooperation, and set a path toward institutional changes at the subnational level. Yet, at least in the case of Mexico, the now stronger and more legitimate government under López Obrador has delayed the implementation through a combination of foot-dragging, proposed reforms, rhetorical attacks on the autonomous agencies, and threats to eliminate them, among other measures. Of course, as noted, such tactics are denounced as part of the president’s efforts to centralize power and facilitate its abuse. The proliferation of CSOs focusing on fighting corruption—many supported by international organizations such as the UN Development Program, aid agencies such as USAID, and businesses—has clearly changed the corruption/anticorruption equation. Nominally, CSOs are nonpartisan, and their activities strive to espouse a state/society narrative with citizens fighting corruption within the state regardless of the party in power. This is also seen as part of a professional narrative often embraced by journalists. But just as all parties, political interests,

114

The Corruption Dilemma

incumbents, and opponents contend that their positions reflect objective reality and not narrow self-interests, so too within civil society: the media, businesses, and civil-society organizations. But nonpartisan is not the same as apolitical. Not only do media and CSOs have their own corporate interests, but they also embrace a certain understanding of corruption, believe in certain tools to fight it, and harbor certain ideological beliefs that tend to align them with affiliated interests in the broader political struggle. Some, of course, may align with the government, supporting the official line; some may even benefit materially from certain government policies that incorporate, empower, and/or subsidize the organizations. But like political parties and in-power and out-of-power groups, CSOs also tend to employ a narrative that coincides with their interests, thus reflecting and contributing to the politicization/polarization of corruption/anticorruption. In Argentina, for example, the quasi-monopolistic media, which strongly supported and represented the opposition during the Kirchner period, weaponized corruption in their reports to hit their leftist opponents in the government while downplaying other forms of corruption among their allies: “Although corruption, which is in essence an exchange, involves the private sector as much as public officials, the media tend to focus on the latter [thus pushing] judicial powers to pursue them [public officials] with greater energy than businessmen” (Natanson 2017, par. 33). Teun Van Dijk (2017, 200) explains the impeachment of Brazil’s Rousseff by pointing to the “biased coverage and misrepresentation” by the nation’s conservative mainstream media. In Mexico, the civil society–led move to reform the nation’s anticorruption architecture in 2015 and 2016 was pushed in part by business-led or -supported organizations such as the Movement against Corruption and Impunity (MCCI) and the Mexican Institute of Competitiveness (IMCO) (Ackerman 2019). According to Miguel Badillo (2021a), MCCI investigated corruption under Peña Nieto largely out of vengeance because the government had opened thirty audits of companies owned by the head of MCCI (see also Badillo 2021b). Thus, for political reasons, many of these groups and the media have become critical of the current administration. In a similar manner, Glenn Greenwald (2020) highlights the tendency among journalists in the United States to disregard journalistic standards and even promote conspiracy theories, playing into and feeding the politicization/polarization of corruption and anticorruption. According to Ben Smith (2020) of the New York Times: “We are living in an era of conspiracies and dangerous untruths— many pushed by President Trump, but others hyped by his enemies—that

The Anticorruption Dilemma

115

have lured ordinary Americans into passionately believing wild and unfounded theories and fiercely rejecting evidence to the contrary.” As noted, a particularly acute problem is when the state targets institutional and legal forms of corruption. Though many institutions of government and state-society co-governance arrangements exist fully or in part to check the abuse of power (horizontal and vertical mechanisms of accountability)—checks and balances—such institutions can, paradoxically, also embody powers that seek to protect embedded privileges and block reforms designed to curb corruption: key components of systemic and institutional corruption. After all, even independent, professional bureaucrats have particularistic interests that might collide with political interests. In the Peruvian example noted earlier, Vizcarra claimed that congress—the epitome of institutional checks and balances—facilitated corruption and blocked his efforts to fight it, despite its democratic role in promoting accountability. The Honduras congress similarly used legislation to weaken anticorruption measures and institutions—again despite the centrality of separate institutions to offer checks and balances. Labeling obstructionism from opponents as a form of corruption (to protect privileges or corrupt opportunities or putting the interests of the party and party officials above the public interest), the state may seek to consolidate power in order to implement its proposed anticorruption policies. Whereas from the state’s perspective the centralization of power may help overcome the obstructions and tackle what it casts as corruption, such moves will nonetheless be framed by opponents as undermining the institutional checks and balances that help prevent corruption and thus represent a dismantling of democracy. This polarizing tendency is how investigations and prosecutions for corruption are framed. In the end, each side tries to depict the other as protecting, engaging in, or promoting corruption directly or indirectly by weakening anticorruption institutions. Viewed from either angle, however, anticorruption is thus cast, paradoxically, as just another form of corruption.12 In summary, anticorruption is constructed and contested amid intense partisan and ideological polarization. The struggle leans toward a sort of zero-sum framing—“we” versus “them”—with the in-group considered righteous and virtuous, the out-group misguided, corrupt, and immoral. Cast within this politicized/polarized setting, the battle to set and enforce limits on the use of authority find both those occupying the state and opponents using anticorruption strategically to protect, privilege, promote, and disguise their own particularistic interests. So, while state officials—despite their claims to the contrary—may use

116

The Corruption Dilemma

anticorruption to help consolidate or centralize power and overcome opposition or institutional obstacles, including anticorruption laws, outof-power opponents frame the state’s anticorruption efforts as insincere, as mere simulation designed to augur legitimacy, undermine opponents, and even disguise corruption. As with all the dilemmas examined in this book, the many dilemmas encompassed here within the anticorruption dilemma greatly complicate matters. For one, they further exacerbate the politicization of corruption and anticorruption and the polarization of society. They too often prevent at least certain forms of corruption—illegal, administrative corruption—from being seen and treated in less partisan or politicized terms. In addition, within a highly politicized and polarized setting, decisions regarding corruption and anticorruption tend to concentrate more on elected officials than on professionals operating within the state. Basically, by definition, the more depoliticized anticorruption becomes, the more matters are handled by professional bureaucrats who are more likely to recognize and be guided by international professional ethical standards rather than following a political logic or abiding by informal political institutions. This does not mean, however, that these institutions, even if run professionally, can ever be considered completely nonpolitical or unbiased, as noted earlier (Mouffe 2005, 97). In addition, the various dilemmas have a deeper impact on society, reaching beyond the issue of corruption. Most critically, they tend to undermine support for democracy and democratic institutions. By raising questions about legitimacy, the dynamics of anticorruption tend to exaggerate or at least exacerbate the sense among many that all institutions, public officials, and even members of society are corrupt (Muir 2016). In Peru, for example, anticorruption efforts weakened both the left in 2016–2017 (e.g., President Ollanta Humala and former Lima mayor Susana Villaran) and in 2018 the right (President Pedro Kuczynski and presidential candidate Fujimori), feeding the view that all institutions and political parties are corrupt (Nureña and Helfgott 2019; Sosa Villagarcia 2020). In Brazil, according to one account, “Others worry the seemingly never-ending gusher of scandals is paralyzing economies and causing citizens to lose faith in democracy itself” (Winter 2019). In the case of Argentina, Muir (2016, 134) notes how corruption “had penetrated the social world and consumed it from the inside out,” impacting the people’s perceptions not just of their government but of them-

The Impact of the Anticorruption Dilemma

The Anticorruption Dilemma

117

selves, fostering the notion of national failure. Moreover, such an impact may feed the rise of populist leaders and inexperienced outsiders promising an end to the corruption and the malaise. A related effect is how the dilemmas make the fight against corruption even more problematic. Matthew Taylor (2018, 65), for example, suggests that anticorruption efforts applied selectively and with political motivations tend not to have lasting effects. Indeed, politicization and polarization tend to feed confusion, uncertainty, fake news, exaggerated and simplified claims, conspiracy theories, fears of the rise of dictators and the decline of democracy, and perceptions that all institutions and society itself are corrupt: a setting hardly conducive to fighting corruption. In a politicized/polarized climate, anticorruption efforts by an untrusted government are routinely dismissed by opponents and others as being political, while the government, in turn, dismisses the claims of opponents as designed to undermine the government. Such a setting cripples the likelihood of establishing much cooperation or enlisting the involvement of citizens in the fight against corruption, as noted earlier. With a lack of trust across multiple lines and allegations (often exaggerated and unfounded) of corruption and even immorality poisoning the relationship, it becomes excruciatingly difficult for parties and citizens to work together to address corruption. In many ways, this helps explain the poor performance of most countries in fighting corruption. Empirical analysis in Morris (2021c) sustains this conclusion. And yet, such evidence of the pernicious effects of anticorruption nonetheless departs somewhat from several studies. In fact, some research suggests that political competition and even polarization helps produce the conditions needed to curtail corruption. At the macro level, this includes most of the competitive features of democracy (elections, checks and balances, accountability, pluralism, etc.) (see Enste and Heldman 2017; Pellegata 2013; Rock 2009; Treisman 2007) and the number of veto players (Andrews and Montinola 2004). Even at the local level, Alexander Poulsen and Carlos Varjao (2019) show how partisan competition bolsters the investigation and exposure of corruption in Brazilian municipalities. And while competition is not the same as polarization, cross-national empirical analysis by David Brown et al. (2011) finds higher levels of polarization related to better control of corruption. The authors explain this finding by noting how ideological opponents are more likely to be critical and expose corruption of government when there is little likelihood of forming a future coalition: that “ideologically opposed groups have greater incentives to reveal malfeasance than ideologically similar parties”; that executive parties will

118

The Corruption Dilemma

refrain from corruption because they recognize opposition’s incentive to report it; and that legislative gridlock that blocks reforms may strengthen institutions that constrain corruption (Brown et al. 2011, 1517–1518). Even so, Manuel Balán (2011) argues that scandals are linked more to intragovernment and intracoalition competition than competition between parties. And yet, the degree of politicization and polarization of corruption/anticorruption today seems to be qualitatively different, preventing rather than promoting a reduction in corruption. Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018), for example, contend that the politicization/polarization gripping US politics, the decline of traditional gatekeepers, and Trump’s violations of many of the existing informal institutional norms threaten US democracy. The 2019 democracy report by the University of Gothenburg (“Democracy Facing Global Challenges” 2019, 5, 19) similarly spotlights the danger of polarization to democracy, claiming that “the division of society into distrustful, antagonistic camps,” combined with a lack of respect for opponents, the increasing use of hate speech, and the decline in factual reasoning and engagement in society, constitute a threat to democracy, cutting “deep into the social fabric of society.” Adam Przeworski’s (2019) analysis of the crisis of democracy similarly highlights the dangers of intense ideological divisions to democracy: “When political parties are highly ideological, when they believe that essential issues or values are at stake, they see their opponents as enemies who must be prevented from coming to office by any means” (21). He later adds: “When deeply ideological parties come to office seeking to remove institutional obstacles in order to solidify their political advantage and gain discretion in making policies, democracy deteriorates, or ‘backslides’” (143). The anticorruption dilemma described here highlights the challenges and pitfalls of fighting corruption that reflect the political nature of corruption and its antithesis. Like corruption, anticorruption is a contested political concept. As rhetoric and policy, anticorruption represents a political tool that can be (ab)used by state officials to pursue, protect, privilege, and disguise particularistic interests, particularly their quest to hold onto power, while opponents similarly deploy anticorruption to discredit those controlling the state. Cast within a politicized and polarized setting, anticorruption is reduced to the political struggles for power with often-crippling effects on the fight against

Conclusion

The Anticorruption Dilemma

119

corruption and trust and support for the system. More so than the other dilemmas addressed in this book, the anticorruption dilemma captures the underlying political nature of corruption and the difficulties of separating corruption and anticorruption from the battle between political groups and interests.

Notes

1. This tendency makes it difficult, for instance, as Eduardo Bohórquez notes, to recognize that the “good guys” have problems or that the “bad guys” can do good things. 2. Politicians will also often seek to normalize corruption by blaming it on the culture. Such a position tends to diminish popular expectations of change (noted by Eduardo Bohórquez during class presentation on May 14, 2021). 3. Lawfare is defined by Dale Stephens (2011, 327) as the “use or misuse of law as a substitute for traditional military means to achieve military objectives.” Though initially referring to international affairs, the concept has been used increasingly to refer to domestic politics and the politicized use of the law and the judiciary (see Dunlap 2001; Lewis 2008; Stephens 2011). On the use of lawfare in the case of Brazil, see Fortes 2019. 4. A derivative of the anticorruption dilemma is a troubling epistemological dilemma (Morris 2011). It relates to the difficulties of ascertaining the truth within this politicized and polarized setting. Just as the state on many (most?) occasions faithfully exercises its authority to investigate and prosecute corruption, it also, at other times, does so unfaithfully. Similarly, while the accused and opponents may believe and claim that investigations and prosecutions are politically motivated, pointing to what they see as political bias and hypocrisy, they too may be mistaken. But differentiating the two—discerning the truth—is hardly straightforward. It is hard to know, in part, because determining the truth often relies on interpreting motive and hence the trust one has in the persons or institutions proffering these views or findings. Mexico, for example, is replete with allegations, investigations, and judicial cases that seem, at one point in time, to offer solid, incontrovertible evidence of corruption, despite the routine denials by the accused or accusations by opponents that the charges are politically motivated. And yet, years later, courts, now operating under a different political setting, overturn the initial findings, sometimes wholly dismissing the evidence and the charges. Though arguably one of the two sets of actions was likely political—since both cannot be true—it remains difficult to determine which one. The charges against Raul Salinas, the brother of former president Carlos Salinas (1988–1994) arrested under the Zedillo presidency (1994–2000) but released and exonerated under the subsequent Fox presidency (2000–2006), stands as perhaps the most iconic example. Despite detailed evidence of hidden millions in bank accounts in Switzerland and the United States as well as a handful of false passports, even the Swiss in the end were unable to show wrongdoing, eventually releasing the confiscated funds. Of course, how a mid-level bureaucrat could acquire or save hundreds of millions of dollars stashed in numerous international accounts remains a bit of a mystery. This dilemma enshrouds many other cases in Mexico. 5. As in politics, divisions within society are normally rooted in competing views of democracy and the proper role of the state that are embedded and reflected within ideological and partisan divisions. Such divisions also encompass competing views on corruption and anticorruption (Morris 2021c).

120

The Corruption Dilemma

6. Many observers blame the failure of the state’s anticorruption efforts on the lack of political will (e.g., Ankamah and Khoda 2018; Brinkerhoff 2010; Makowski 2016; Mungiu-Pippidi and Johnston 2017; Rotberg 2020). Yet even if the political commitment is important, political will fundamentally reflects the political pressures that shape the strategic choices of state leaders. As Brinks et al. (2020, 17) note, even if lacking the capacity to enforce the law, in the “long-run state enforcement capacities are shaped by political choices.” 7. Paying legislators to gain support for legislation has occurred most often in Brazil. Such corruption is considered structural because of how Brazil’s electoral system produces governments without majorities in the legislature (see Fogel 2019; Rose-Ackerman and Mattos Pimenta 2020). But even in Mexico, according to the testimony of Emilio Lozoya Austin, the former director of Pemex, to the attorney general, the administration of former president Peña Nieto allegedly paid legislators for their support of the energy reforms (see Angel 2021). 8. Unfortunately, examples of the use of torture in Mexico to gain confessions and prosecute the innocent are all too common. Human rights organizations have long identified torture and corruption as tools of criminal investigation in Mexico (see Amnesty International 2015; World Justice Project 2019). In the case of the missing students in Ayotzinapa in 2014, evidence eventually emerged that the government tortured suspects to obtain confessions that corroborated the government’s version of events, also known as “the historical truth” (“U.N. Accuses Mexico of Torture, Cover-up in Case of 43 Missing Students” 2018). This version of events has since been discredited, the product of state fabrication for political reasons. 9. On the lack of investigations and prosecutions of abuses committed by the military in Mexico, see Comisión Mexicana de Defensa y Promoción de los Derechos Humanos 2020; Suárez-Enríquez 2017. 10. Interview with Brazilian corruption expert Fernanda Odilla, June 10, 2020. 11. Franco (2019b), however, claims that despite the scandal, Lula nonetheless allowed the further strengthening of the capacity and autonomy of the federal police and the comptroller office during his term. 12. This problem would seem to be particularly relevant for the left, who are more likely to envision the status quo as privileging capitalist interests through institutional design and institutional corruption (Thompson 2018). In other words, while the right, consistent with its discourse on democracy, is seemingly more likely to characterize the existing institutional structure of checks and balances and shared powers as critical to fighting corruption, these same institutions also tend to protect embedded interests of property owners and the capitalist system. Consequently, when the left seeks to overcome these same structures and institutions that the right sees as part of the checks and balances of anticorruption, the right accuses the left of hastening the concentration of power, undermining democracy, and promoting rather than curbing corruption. And yet in a somewhat parallel manner, the right, which tends to associate corruption with unchecked state power and seeks, as a result, to limit the power of the state and particularly its role in the economy, is often seen by the left as facilitating corruption by failing to check the abuses of the private sector and by permitting greater private-sector influence over public policies. As such, the left’s desire for more state controls over the economy is inherently suspect, cast by the right as setting the stage for corruption by powerful state officials, while the right’s dismantling of the state is inherently seen by the left as setting the stage for corruption by the private sector and their capture of the state for particularistic purposes (see Morris 2021c).

6 The Personal Dilemma

Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will. —Jawaharlal Nehru

Morality and behavior, selflessness and selfishness cloak corruption. To help ground the preceding aerial discussions of ideology, structure, and politics at the level of the individual, the personal dilemma envelopes the choices individuals face with regard to corruption, the factors that shape those choices, criteria for choosing, and, indeed, whether they have a choice at all. Enriching corruption studies with insights from behavioral and experimental economics, behavioral ethics, integrity and organizational studies, and social psychology— many focusing on ethical decisionmaking, cheating, fraud, and whitecollar and corporate crime rather than corruption—this chapter explores the microlevel factors that influence peoples’ perceptions about and participation in corruption. Studies exploring the individual generally highlight a cocktail of personal and environmental determinants. Individual-based factors feature a person’s ethics, beliefs, justifications, motives, capacity, power, wealth, gender, and education, among others. Environmental factors, in turn, point to the social setting such as the immediate organizational context, its systems of control, vigilance and punishment, 121

122

The Corruption Dilemma

and the organizational culture as well as broader societal norms and even the legal system. Environmental factors shaping individual choice even encompass the perceptions and the prevalence of corruption in society: factors touched on in prior chapters. Of course, a pivotal component of the personal dilemma involves the complexities of the relative and interactive impact of individual versus environmental factors. Differentiating here between perceptions about corruption and participation in corruption, the chapter focuses first on perceptions. It explores the normative-empirical dualism found in the public’s views on corruption, highlights the impact of socioeconomic position and gender on perceptions of the meaning and understanding of corruption, briefly outlines many of the individual factors that influence a person’s perceptions about the level of corruption in society and evaluations of anticorruption efforts, and, finally, notes the impact of group identity in coloring our perceptions of corruption. Turning to participation in corruption, the subsequent section reviews the empirical corruption studies as well as the results of a series of experimental studies and statements by those accused of fraud that detail the impact of such variables as socioeconomic status, perceptions of self and other, and moral identity. Discussion then explores the immediate organizational factors shaping individual behavior and the broader societal factors that influence personal decisions and involvement in corruption. The chapter concludes by discussing the nature of the personal dilemma, specifically the complex interaction and relative influence of individual versus environmental factors and the question of moral choice. Corruption encompasses both morality and behavior, and the publics’ perceptions of corruption reflect this fundamental dualism. This means individuals recognize and can readily distinguish between normative or prescriptive values, on the one hand, and the empirical or descriptive aspects of corruption, on the other hand. While a normative, prescriptive, or injunctive value dictates how an individual should behave, Robert Cialdini et al. (1991) define descriptive values as an individual’s perceptions of what is commonly done in specific situations, without assigning judgment. As illustrated in a variety of polls in Mexico over the years, large majorities hold that corruption is both wrong yet frequent. At the prescriptive level, 83 percent agreed that “politicians should be held accountable” (Encuesta Valores: Diagnóstico axiológico México 2010); 77 percent said that “the law should apply equally to all”

Individual Perceptions About Corruption

The Personal Dilemma

123

(Encuesta Nacional de Cultural Constitucional [ENCC] 2011); 73 percent felt that a bribe is never justified (World Values Survey 2012); and 53 percent confirmed that “the law should always be obeyed” (ENCC 2007). Ranking the corruptness of twenty-one different acts, for instance, an average of 75 percent of respondents fully disapproved of all twentyone (Índice Nacional de Corrupción y Buen Gobierno [INCBG] 2005). In fact, 62 percent even disagreed with the popular Mexican saying “El que no transa, no avanza” (He who does not cheat, does not advance) (INCBG 2005). Moreover, a majority (54 percent) disagreed with the idea that “an official can take advantage of his position as long as he does good things,” and 55 percent preferred “a mayor that knows and always applies the law” over one who “gets results although he does not abide by the law” (Encuesta Nacional de Cultural Política [ENCUP] 2012). And yet, coincidental to these normative and moral viewpoints, 87 percent believed that corruption is frequent within their state (Encuesta Nacional de Calidad e Impacto Gubernamental [ENCIG] 2019); 80 percent said people are not protected against the abuse of authority (ENCC 2011); 78 percent claimed politicians are corrupt (INCBG 2007); 59 percent asserted that the law is used to protect the interests of those in power (ENCUP 2005); and 53 percent claimed that authority is used arbitrarily (Encuesta Valores: Diagnóstico axiológico México 2010). Asked to rate the level of corruption in the government on a scale of 1 (low) to 10 (high), 50.2 percent selected the highest possible rating (10), and 29 percent chose the rankings of 8 or 9 (INCBG 2005). Mexicans also harbor a lack of confidence that things are improving, that the government can tackle corruption, or that things will change in the future, despite lofty promises to the contrary. And yet, when asked to rank themselves on a scale of 1 (very corrupt) to 10 (very clean), the average rating was around 8 (INCBG 2001, 2003, 2005). In short, despite acknowledging traits of the system and even their involvement in corruption, they nonetheless tend to see themselves as moral, more victim than perpetrator of corruption. Such dualism is not unique to Mexico. As Rasma Karklins (2005, cited in Rothstein 2009, 8) points out, “ordinary people” in corrupt systems do not internalize corrupt practices as morally legitimate acts. Instead, they usually condemn corruption as morally wrong and put the blame on “the system” for forcing them to take part in it. The findings in the case of Mexico echo those from W. Miller’s (2006, 378) study of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Ukraine: “The real problem of petty corruption is that so many citizens and officials who genuinely condemn it are pressured or tempted into practicing it.” This

124

The Corruption Dilemma

dualism suggests that Mexicans clearly distinguish between right and wrong, between legal and illegal, and between how the system should operate and how it operates. Yet despite this mixture, as few as 5 percent denounce an act of corruption, largely because of the belief that doing so clashes with the notion that it is either futile or could lead to repercussions. In short, corruption is behavior that is expected but not accepted, condemned but not reported. Within the personal dilemma, this dualism offers individuals two different sets of attitudes that in turn arguably provide the foundation for personal motivation to interact with the state. Whereas some may anchor their views and behavior in the prescriptive norms and work to hold the state accountable, battling corruption and promoting change even from within, others, reflecting a clear and practical reading of reality, likely envision the state as an opportunity for personal advancement based on the arbitrary use of power and corruption.1 The state and public service, in short, likely attracts both classes of individuals—a point I return to later. Beyond the prescriptive-descriptive dualism, a range of individuallevel factors seem to shape an individual’s perceptions about corruption. Harking back to the definitional dilemma discussed in Chapter 2 and the competing notions of what constitutes corruption, this includes their understanding of the meaning of the term itself. In this area, a handful of studies suggest that power, wealth, education, position, and gender all influence the way an individual defines or thinks about corruption. Using US voter exit polls, David Redlawsk and James McCann (2005), for instance, show that individuals with higher levels of income and education tend to harbor a much more restricted, so-called Madisonian definition of corruption (one centered narrowly on the law) while others tend to embrace a more expansive view of corruption. Reinforcing this finding, Shaun Bowler and Todd Donovan (2016, 273) conclude that “many Americans seem to have a different sense of corruption” than the standard definitions shaped by experts and the elite. In contrast to the elite view—the orthodox perspective—the public tends to equate corruption more with political exclusion, disempowerment, the lack of representation, the denial of justice, and the perceived failure of the state to pursue the public interest: a view more in line with a counterhegemonic narrative of corruption (Morris 2018; Nichols and McChesney 2013; Razafindrakoto and Roubaud 2010; Rusciano 2014; Uslaner 2008; Rothstein 2011). In a similar manner, Eric Uslaner (2008) suggests that the public is more concerned about the corruption that benefits the privileged classes and not low-level, petty corruption

The Personal Dilemma

125

that they often see as necessary for survival. Research also shows that women tend to think of corruption somewhat differently than men. According to Monika Bauhr and Nicholas Charron (2020), men tend to focus more on what Bauhr (2017) denotes as greed corruption (extralegal payments to gain special illicit advantages) while women tend to associate corruption with need corruption (extralegal payments made to gain access to fair treatment). In addition to shaping an individual’s idea of the meaning or nature of corruption, a range of microlevel factors seem to influence a person’s perception about the degree of corruption within society and related views such as corruption’s importance as a national problem, recent and future changes, and assessments of the government’s anticorruption efforts. Though findings vary, schematically, a person’s perception of the level of corruption seems to correlate with their own participation in corrupt acts (+), evaluation of the current president (–), support for the ruling party (–), positive assessment of the provision of government services (–), and levels of institutional and interpersonal trust (–) (Anderson and Tverdova 2003; Bohn 2012; Canache and Allison 2005; Olken 2009; Razafindrakoto and Roubaud 2010; Rose and Mishler 2007; Rusciano 2014; Seligson 2002, 2006; Smith 2008). Dilyan Donchev and Gergely Ujhelyi (2014), for instance, find a positive link between perceptions of corruption and education and income levels, and a negative correlation to age and the size of the community. Yet Jerg Gutmann et al. (2020) find education to have no impact on perceptions. Damarys Canache and Michael Allison (2005), in turn, find that women and older respondents tend to perceive higher levels of corruption (in contrast to Donchev and Ujhelyi 2014), and that those with greater political interest and information are more likely to perceive a level of corruption comparable to those expressed by country experts. Using data from a series of polls in Mexico, I (Morris 2009) too found males perceived higher levels of corruption than females (in contrast to Canache and Allison 2005) but detected no statistically significant differences across age, income, or education groups, though respondents with higher incomes were slightly more likely to predict a reduction in corruption in the near future.2 Group identity theory helps explain some of these findings. As noted in the previous chapter, group identity colors one’s perceptions about corruption. This can be seen in the impact of the evaluation of the current president and support for the ruling party on perceptions. In a study of eighteen sub-Saharan African democracies, Eric Chang and Nicholas Kerr (2017) show that partisan and ethnic insiders are more likely to turn a blind eye to corruption. Hector Solaz et al. (2019) similarly find that

126

The Corruption Dilemma

in-group loyalty undermines the punishment of corruption and that ingroup loyalty based on partisanship weakens the tendency to withdraw support from a corrupt incumbent even when no instrumental benefits are provided. Taking it a bit further, Andreas Bågenholm and Nicholas Charron’s (2016) study based on surveys of eighty-five thousand citizens in twenty-four European countries reveals that the relationship between tolerance for corruption (e.g., willingness to continue voting for one’s preferred party despite a corruption scandal) and voter ideology is “Ushaped” because voters on the ideological extremes (far left, far right) have fewer alternatives from which to choose and thus are more inclined to stay with their preferred party, despite their involvement with political corruption. As Lucio Barros and Carlos Pereira (2014) note, when voters and the candidate share ideological preferences, they are less likely to consider the candidate’s misbehavior corrupt than when they have different ideological preferences. In a similar sense, J. Kennedy and C. Anderson (2017, cited in OECD 2018, 46) also show how those occupying a higher position within an organization tend to identify more with their organization, which, in turn, weakens their ability to identify an integrity breach among their own colleagues.

Participation in Corruption Individual Factors Turning to actual participation3 in corruption, many have grappled with the thorny question of why people engage in corruption (morally questionable behavior) or lie. Generally, such studies differentiate between a wide range of individual and environmental-level factors. Among the many factors influencing participation in corruption are a person’s ethical views, greed, ambition, pride, arrogance, risk aversion, short-termism, temporal inconsistency, status quo bias,4 the internalized strength of social norms, reciprocity, optimism, justification, capacity, insecurity, the “sucker mentality,”5 and perceptions about the naturalness of inequality. These are all factors that we possess and express to different degrees. Environmental factors, in turn, encompass organizational factors, peer pressure, opportunity, the value of the potential gain, the level of regulations, the risk of detection, and the penalty or cost if caught (Cressey 1953; Holmes 2015, ch. 4; Rabl and Kuhlmann 2008; Wolfe and Hermanson 2004). Environmental factors also extend beyond the organizational context to include broad societal factors such as religion, colonial experience, trust, and even perceptions of corruption

The Personal Dilemma

127

within society (Holmes 2015). For some, participation is largely induced by these environmental factors, making corruption a strategy of survival, turning an unwilling victim of the abuse of power into a participant; others, it seems, have choices. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to examine so many variables in detail. Instead, insight is gained from a review of several studies employing different methods. Using opinion polls that ask citizens directly about their participation in corrupt acts (paying a bribe and/or being asked for a bribe for routine public services), a number of studies have found that males, younger individuals, those with higher levels of income and education, and individuals living in large urban areas are more likely to participate in corrupt acts than their counterparts (Gutmann et al. 2020; Lavena 2013; Melgar et al. 2010; Mocan 2004; Morris 2009; Guerrero and Rodríguez-Oreggia 2008; Rivas 2013; Seligson 2006; Swamy et al. 2001). Exploring the case of Mexico, Manuel Guerrero and Eduardo Rodríguez-Oreggia (2008) also find participation (bribery) to be inversely related to an individual’s perception of the state’s institutional strength. Mitchell Seligson (2006, 398), who labels participation “victimization” of corruption, accounts for much of these findings by noting that “those who use the public sector more frequently are more likely to be victimized by it.” Beyond the use of public opinion research, other studies gain insights by analyzing the cases, statements, and accounts of offenders of corruption and fraud. While I will return to many of these momentarily, it is important here to highlight certain microlevel factors uncovered by these studies. B. Bannenberg’s (2002, cited in Rabl and Kuhlmann 2008, 478) analysis of a series of German court cases, for example, finds that offenders of corruption tend to be male, ambitious social climbers with power and decision scope in their position—traits also identified among white-collar offenders (Coleman 1998; Simon and Hagan 1999). Tanja Rabl and Torsten Kuhlmann (2008) similarly identify three traits among offenders, coupling individual and environmental components: the individual’s ethical attitude toward corruption (more tolerant), the subjective norm (whether other people think one should accept the bribe offer, including family and friends), and the perceived behavioral controls (whether the person anticipates negative consequences to a corrupt act and the importance of secrecy). Still other studies rely on social psychological experimentation. A prominent experimental tool used to determine the degree and conditions of lying simply asks participants to roll a die and report the results. This widely used method shows quite clearly that people tend to

128

The Corruption Dilemma

lie if there is a benefit in doing so, and if no one is watching.6 In addition to the pivotal factor of not being observed (or held accountable), such studies also show that people are more likely to cheat under certain environmental conditions, such as when they consider the victim in abstract rather than real terms. In other words, they are less likely to cheat when the money the person gains through lying is taken from a specific other. Even if the proceeds of lying will go to charity, the degree of lying depends on whether it is a charity the person in fact likes or not. In a similar manner, people are more likely to cheat when they see it as helping someone else in addition to or instead of helping themselves since such a situation tends to assuage the person’s moral and ethical responsibility. In fact, when coupled with a partner, people also tend to cooperatively cheat, resulting in what Shaul Shalvi (2019) denotes as ethical free riding.7 Such experiments, moreover, demonstrate that to protect their own moral vision of themselves, people tend not to cheat to the greatest extent possible. Rather than claiming multiple sixes on repeated rolls of the die, for instance, they will mix in some fives, fours, and other results. In a sense, they will—in their own perception, at least—bend rather than break the rules. This points to the role of justification and the importance of protecting one’s own moral self-perception (Shalvi 2019). The tendency to cheat when no one is watching certainly affirms the importance of transparency to help hold people accountable: a key gadget in the anticorruption tool kit. It also lends support to the orthodox assumption embedded within most corruption studies that people will engage in corruption if given the chance to do so, and to its corollary that sees anticorruption largely in terms of monitoring behavior. But more interestingly, perhaps, is how this simple finding relates differently to the violation of first-order versus second-order norms in corruption (Warren 2004). To be sure, monitoring the rolls of the die greatly reduces cheating. Yet, the violation of what Mark Warren (2004) labels in his analysis of corruption as second-order norms—such as fairness or promoting the public good, criteria that should be used to make political decisions—are not open to empirical observation, as alluded to in an earlier chapter. Not only is transparency ill-suited to the task of dealing with such forms of corruption—since individual decisionmaking is not open to observation—but personal justifications and rationalizations are also much easier to employ to disguise such corrupt acts and protect one’s own sense of morality. Given a degree of discretionary authority, politicians, bureaucrats, judges, police, and so on can readily claim that their decision regarding a contract or a vote on a bill

The Personal Dilemma

129

or a decision about a regulation or the appointment of an official or a ruling or an arrest faithfully reflects the public interest and was properly arrived at based on the appropriate criteria for making the decision rather than reflecting their own personal or political interests or biases, despite whatever coincidences of outcome might exist. People, after all, tend to be biased in a self-serving way, which quite often is not deliberate, since people like to appear moral to others (OECD 2018, 23). Of course, given the subjective nature of decisionmaking, it is virtually impossible to empirically prove what their “true intentions” really were, or to disprove their rationalizations or stated justifications. Other experimental studies tend to confirm the initial part of Lord Acton’s assertion regarding the link between power and corruption, found in the epigraph of Chapter 1. These studies show that those with higher wealth/status/power tend to harbor a lower level of compassion toward others, a higher regard for self-interest, and a greater propensity to engage in cheating, rule-breaking, and corruption. In some experiments this is not entirely based on socioeconomic reality since power and wealth are assigned at random at the beginning of the experiment (Keltner 2016). A rigged Monopoly game, for instance, shows richer and advantaged players exhibiting signs of dominance, attributing success to their own qualities and talent; in the Ultimatum game, people with lower incomes tend to cooperate more with other participants than do those with higher incomes; experiments on cheating find richer participants more likely to cheat; a study on whether drivers of more expensive or less expensive cars stop for pedestrians in crosswalks discover that the wealthier cars are less likely to stop; while yet another study shows that the wealthy are more likely to endorse a product for personal gain (Piff 2014). Based on a meta-analysis of over a hundred such experimental studies, Dacher Keltner (2016, 130), concludes that “it is the wealthy and powerful who don’t play by the rules.”8 Even so, some research shows that power can enhance the tendency to adopt the perspective of the other and emphasize the needs of others. According to Katherine DeCelles et al. (2012, 682) this tendency may be a function of the individual’s “moral identity.” Here, experiments show that power will make those with a high moral identity more likely to recognize the moral implications of a given situation, while those with low moral identity are less aware of the moral implications. Some insight into individual decisions to engage in corruption can also be gleaned from the personal justifications or rationalizations of corrupt conduct: how individuals interpret their own behavior both before and afterward. “People do not like to be confronted with their

130

The Corruption Dilemma

own unethical behaviour. Instead, they may apply justifications to make the dissonance between their moral standards and their actual behaviour appear less grave” (Barkan et al. 2015, cited in OECD 2018, 12). As with lying and cheating, studies show that people with power tend to judge their own integrity breaches more leniently than others (Barkan et al. 2015, cited OECD 2018, 46). Many of those involved in white-collar crime and corruption employ various tropes and linguistic euphemisms to justify their behavior. Examples include reinterpreting the benefits from corruption as a well-deserved reward for good efforts (metaphor of the ledger); a denial of a victim, injury, or responsibility; emphasizing the act’s technical legality or the unfairness of the law that prohibits it; reframing an ethical decision as merely an economic one; and noting that “others do it” or “I was just following orders” (OECD 2018, 17–18). Much of this centers on the technique of “neutralization,” in which a person basically exempts her/himself from existing norms, therefore relieving themselves of any sense of moral responsibility for their acts (Sykes and Matza 1957; Granovetter 2004). Keltner (2016, 101) emphasizes how power itself nurtures the notion that the rules do not apply to the individual. Power, he avers, leads to “empathy deficits and diminished moral sentiments,” “selfserving impulsivity,” “incivility and disrespect,” and “narratives of exceptionalism” (on the corrupting influence of wealth and power, see Costa-Lopes et al. 2013; Keltner 2012; Keltner and Gruenfield 2003; Keltner and Lerner 2010; Kipnis 1972, 1976; Kraus et al. 2010; Lammers et al. 2010; Lerner 1980; Rind and Kipnis 1999; Stellar et al. 2012; Wang and Murnighan 2014). The narrative of exceptionalism refers to the tendency for those with power and wealth to justify their success based on their own unique abilities rather than external circumstances or luck (Keltner 2016, 102–103). Consequently, “Power makes us blind to our own moral missteps but outraged at the same missteps taken by others” (Keltner 2016, 131). Indeed, Bannenberg’s (2002) analysis of German court cases noted earlier found that offenders tended to deny any personal responsibility and remained largely unaware of their own illegal behavior. Accounts, in turn, are interpersonal stories developed afterward to excuse or justify corrupt behavior. In stark contrast to an apology, which involves admitting to violating a rule, accepting the validity of the rule, and expressing embarrassment and anger at oneself, accounts (justification and excuses) are the offender’s way of not seeing themselves as a criminal. In one such study, Michael Benson (1985) examines the accounts among a sample of convicted white-collar offenders. Akin to

The Personal Dilemma

131

the neutralization technique, perpetrators justified and excused their own actions according to the nature of the crime itself. Antitrust violators, for example, tend to dismiss their own conduct as merely carrying out the instructions of their superiors or as consistent with other higher laws or values such as the principles of the free market or that the regulations violated run counter to societal values and goals (588). Here, Benson refers to the distinction offered by John Searle (1969, 33–41) between the regulative rule and the constitutive rule, and the notion that you must violate the regulative rule in order to conform to the more basic and higher-order constitutive rule. In the case of the private sector, profit is considered a constitutive rule, while the laws governing how one is allowed to make a profit are regulative rules. “The informal structure may define as moral and ‘legal’ certain actions that the formal legal structure defines as immoral and ‘illegal’” (Benson 1985, 593). Tax violators, in turn, dismiss criminality by claiming that everyone else does it, while those caught embezzling funds point to the extraordinary circumstances in their life, such as trying to impress their wife or the need for money. They also point to their own restraint—the fact that they did not take as much as possible; a factor pointed to earlier. Those accused of fraud or providing false statements, in turn, tend to deny criminality by claiming that they were set up by their associates and thus wrongly convicted: a.k.a., the scapegoat strategy. Given the importance of criminal intent in trials, such accounts strive to deny that they themselves are bad people (presumably, like other criminals). In many cases, violators emphasize not only the fact that the one incident does not characterize or define who they are as a person—something the courts are also likely to agree with given their wealth and power9—but that the media, the prosecutor, or their own colleagues are acting unfairly. Reminiscent of the anticorruption dilemma of Chapter 5, the accused often impute political or personal motives to the prosecutors rather than accepting their own wrongdoing.10 Another line of research focuses on the impact of sex (biological) and gender (sociological) differences on corruption. As noted already, women tend to conceive corruption somewhat differently, perceive higher levels of corruption, and yet are less likely to participate in corruption than men. In addition to acknowledging that certain forms of corruption are highly gendered (e.g., sextortion) and that corruption is largely an androcentric concept (Jurecic et al. 2016; Merkle et al. 2017), other studies show women tend to be less tolerant of corruption than men (Swamy et al. 2001; see Harris et al. 2006; Dollar et al. 2001). While Seligson (2006, 398), as noted, and Anne Marie Goetz (2007) see

132

The Corruption Dilemma

many of these differences rooted in the gendered nature of access to politics and public life that shapes corrupt opportunities, others attribute these tendencies to evidence showing women to be less selfish; more trustworthy, empathetic, compassionate, charitable, public-spirited, and altruistic; more risk averse; more honest; and more ethical than men (Boehm 2015). Ariana Guevara Gómez and Andrés Santana (2021), for instance, show that compared to men, women exhibit a greater aversion toward risk, a greater respect for the rule of law and civic duty, more social confidence, and yet less support for democracy and less confidence in institutions than men. Rachel Croson and Uri Gneezy (2009, cited in Boehm 2015) also find women to be more risk averse (except for female managers), and also more sensitive to social cues, less competitive, more altruistic, and more inclined to cooperate, but they also are generally less trusting and show more flexible ethical standards. G. D. Sherman et al. (2015), in turn, show that women consider inequality to be less natural and, consequently, demonstrate greater empathy toward others. As mothers (who tend to take on more unpaid domestic work), women are often considered to be driven by values and norms reaching beyond simple personal material gain and, therefore, are seemingly less prone to dishonest and selfish behavior. Guevara Gómez and Santana (2021), in turn, attribute the greater risk aversion of women to the socialization of gender roles: that women are educated to be more cautious than men. The many efforts to link such differences to biological differences (sex) as opposed to sociological differences (gender) rest on rather weak empirical grounds and remain highly disputed (Fine 2010). Even so, Leonard Shlain (1998, loc. 6352, ch. 29) provides one example, linking women to the “right-brain values of love, kindness, equality, respect for nature, nurturing small children, protecting the meek and weak, and common sense”: qualities and values that clearly impinge on ethics and corruption.

Environmental Factors Most anticorruption measures, rooted in an economic rationality model, center on oversight, enforcement, and punishment. They start from the assumption—supported by the die-rolling experiments—that everyone engages in corruption if given the opportunity. The integrity approach in the study of corruption, however, posits that people act ethically and seek to make moral decisions. After all, people follow the rules not because of fear of punishment, but because of a commitment to the values those rules imply (Hodgson and Jiang 2007, 1053). People see themselves as moral and ethical (OECD 2018). Yet, the integrity approach

The Personal Dilemma

133

acknowledges that ethical choices are not made in isolation but are arrived at within a social context (OECD 2018, 26). This leads to an exploration of key environmental factors and how they limit and shape the role of individual factors in determining individual choices. Justifications and accounts from those accused of corruption and fraud, though subjective, bleed nicely into a discussion of the many environmental factors thought to contribute to individual decisions about whether to engage in corruption. Consideration of environmental factors starts from the assumption that individual beliefs and traits neither exist nor operate within a vacuum. Integrity represents an ethical choice based on individual moral reflection but is influenced by social dynamics (peers, colleagues, and society) (OECD 2018, 7). In short, “People orient their actions in accordance with their perception of acceptable behavior within their social context” (OECD 2018, 26). Environmental factors build on the anthropological understanding of corruption as part of social relationships rooted largely in reciprocity, or as a means of personal survival (Coronado 2008, 3; Gupta 1995; Marquette and Peiffer 2015; Muir and Gupta 2018; Zaloznaya 2014). As such, corruption reflects the reality of how things operate and the informal rules about how to get things done and survive within an existing organization or system (ArellanoGault 2020). Instead of being rooted solely in an individual’s effort to maximize utility, individual adherence to social rules is tied to ethical values and practices that exist within organizations and groups. Rules and culture within a business or state organization play an important role in shaping individual ethics (see Arellano-Gault 2017, 2020; Breit et al. 2015; Jávor and Jancscics 2013).11 Organizations provide individuals with a moral reference point or model to help guide their actions (OECD 2018, 12). Lawrence Cockcroft and Anne-Christine Wegener (2017, 61), for instance, highlight four such elements in most big corporate corruption scandals: the aim of the company was to win big government contracts; bribes were paid through intermediaries and agents; corruption was deeply engrained in the company’s way of doing business and those at the top knew; and the companies had weakly supervised anticorruption and bribery compliance programs. As such, the organizational environment encouraged rather than discouraged the corrupt acts. Such an organizational culture and the corruption, after all, usually exist before the individual arrives to the organization and are learned through socialization (Bratsis 2003, 17). This leads Rabl and Kuhlmann (2008, 490) to the rather fundamental conclusion that to create a corruption-aversive subjective norm, employees must be shown that corruption is not tolerated within the organization.

134

The Corruption Dilemma

Such organizational-level factors and processes of socialization similarly exist within state organizations. Just as in a business, the prevailing culture within state agencies—what Robert Klitgaard (2011) calls the institutional culture—influences the nature and levels of corruption. Such institutional culture includes the presence and effectiveness of codes of conduct and ethical guides, internal control mechanisms, the strength of informal norms, the explicit and implicit dangers of whistleblowing, the need to display and reward loyalty to superiors rather than the formal rules, moral reference points, and role models. In the case of Mexico, it includes the many informal rules marking the long PRI-government era as identified years ago by Peter Smith (1979). Among these informal rules was to view the formal rules as obstacles that must be overcome, the primacy of personal relationships and political loyalty to superiors, and deference to superiors in making decisions. In Mexico and other countries, it includes the widespread use of what in Mexico is referred to as the palanca: the leveraging of personal relationships rooted in the principle of reciprocity to get things done and to advance personally and politically (Arellano-Gault 2020). Polls and accounts from municipal police in the Guadalajara area and among state police in Mexico offer some insight into the role of institutional culture in shaping corruption in Mexico (Causa Común 2017, 2018; Moloeznik et al. 2009; Tamez Guajardo 2016). While acknowledging the existence of corruption within the organization, as many as 45 percent of the respondents from the Guadalajara metropolitan area disagreed that mechanisms to investigate corruption even existed, 47 percent believed that there were many police who tolerated corruption, and 31 percent considered it acceptable to violate the law in order to capture a suspect. Many police located the source of the corruption at higher levels (68 percent in Guadalajara) or within the upper and mid-level ranks of the organization (36 percent upper level and 21 percent at the mid-level in the Moloeznik et al. 2009 study). Reflecting one of Smith’s (1979) earlier insights, one police officer commented that if you do not comply with the boss’s order—which might include nonofficial duties—“they will bother you until you quit” (Causa Común 2017). Indeed, more than 60 percent of the police from the Guadalajara metro area indicated that promotion decisions were unjust and unclear, decided based on personal connections (Moloeznik et al. 2009). The detailed “tell-all” account by the former chief of the Zapopan, Jalisco, police (part of the Guadalajara metro area) further underscores the embedded pattern of influence trafficking within the organization. This includes the ability of politicians to dismantle or direct police investi-

The Personal Dilemma

135

gations, even to the point of having suspects freed (Tamez Guajardo 2016). In an earlier account, Macedonio Tamez Guajardo (2008, cited in Sabet 2012, 147) notes: “I see around me irresponsible politicians who name and maintain police commanders who have gone to the other side [becoming corrupt] in full view of others, and they always hide and protect them as long as they maintain order and do not cause problems with public opinion.”12 As many of the studies of the personal accounts of offenders and organizational factors suggest, a significant amount of corruption, as noted in earlier chapters, promotes the interests of the organization, not solely personal gain. For the business, despite the illegalities, fraud and corruption usually promotes profits; for the state, it facilitates the flow of political favors or is allowed if it advances other objectives such as maintaining order, supporting higher-ups, or stability. This sort of corruption contrasts corruption involving solely private gain that might occur at the expense of the organization: an act that likely “undermines the capacity of the organization to fulfill its own objectives” (Hodgson and Jiang 2007, 1054). Obviously, the organization is far more likely to do more to condemn, discourage, and prevent this form of personal corruption than corruption consistent with its organizational objectives. Beyond identifying the various features of the organization that influence individual decisionmaking, environmental factors also encompass broader aspects of society. This includes the economic and political systems, the political culture, and even the levels of corruption within society. Capitalism, for example, clearly plays a major role in shaping an individual’s values, beliefs, and attitudes. As highlighted in Chapter 3, ideologically, capitalism emphasizes private initiative, private property, and private responsibility. Not only does it legitimize and celebrate self-serving behavior (utility maximization), defining the characteristics of personal success in the process, but it also provides a convenient means to redirect or displace any individual concerns for the well-being of others onto the impersonal market and not the individual. In short, it shields and justifies a powerful emphasis on personal gain, while establishing the constitutive rules described by Searle (1969, 33–41). At the same time, the ideology of capitalism tends to cast the state as a threat to individual freedom, influencing antistate perspectives and many of the prevailing views on corruption. Such influence thus finds individuals prioritizing personal (or business) gain—to the point of praising and rewarding ruthless behavior, bending rules, taking advantage of opportunities, and even corruption—while seemingly downplaying fraud particularly against the state because of

136

The Corruption Dilemma

the state’s diminished ideological standing. Stealing from the state is viewed, in a sense, like robbing a thief. Various characteristics of the state, such as the “strength of the law and its applications,” also represent key environmental components that shape an individual’s decisionmaking regarding corruption (Cockcroft and Wegener 2017, 202). Systemic corruption (as a result of the political dilemma) not only molds organizational factors and the institutional culture but, as alluded to in Chapter 4, also affects the broader political culture, creating popular expectations of corruption and a clear understanding of how the system actually operates and how the game is played. Formal models by J. C. Andvig and K. O. Moene (1990), Ajit Mishra (2006), and Jean Tirole (1996) all show how the pervasiveness of corruption within society contributes to its persistence despite the prevalence of normative views to the contrary. In such settings, according to Mishra (2006, 350), “Those who comply with the law or social standards often become victims of harassment, extortion, and alleged corrupt behavior”: something akin to the “sucker mentality” (Finckenauer and Waring 1998). S. Gächter and J. F. Schulz’s (2016) die-rolling experiment involving over twenty-five hundred participants from twenty-three countries similarly underscores the role of broad societal factors in shaping individual decisionmaking. They found that residents of countries with higher levels of rule violations (tax evasion, corruption, and political fraud) were more likely to lie than residents from low-violating countries. Such a finding also echoes those of Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel’s (2008) famous study showing diplomats from high-corruption countries more likely to park illegally (partaking of their diplomatic immunity) than those from low-corruption countries. Indeed, noting how weak institutions and cultural legacies generate rule violations and impair individual intrinsic honesty—that if cheating is prevalent within society and goes unpunished, then people view dishonesty as justifiable in everyday affairs—prompts Shalvi (2016) to conclude quite simply that “corruption corrupts.” But it seems that we have now come full circle. Departing from an emphasis on individual and personal ethics, we arrive back at how ideological, systemic, and societal factors condition individual decisionmaking and choices. This raises a much thornier question: do people really have a choice? Even though most studies acknowledge some blend of individual and environmental factors, couched within the analysis of the organizational and environmental factors resides the notion of individuals as unwilling victims of corruption, essentially forced by external circumstances to participate. Indeed, many individu-

The Personal Dilemma

137

als, particularly anthropologists, tend to see corruption as a form of everyday survival (Coronado 2008, 3; Gupta 1995; Marquette and Peiffer 2015; Muir and Gupta 2018; Zaloznaya 2014). Extortive forms of corruption, or what Syed Alatas (1990, ch. 1, cited in Heywood 1997, 425–426) refers to as defensive corruption, for example, entails an individual basically forced by a state official to pay a bribe. This can involve anything from the entirely rational payment to traffic police to ignore a real or imagined traffic violation, to signing over property under torture or threats to one’s family by government officials. Again, as highlighted in Chapter 4, the state’s authority and the resources given to those occupying the state are extremely powerful tools that they can (ab)use—including the threat or use of violence with impunity—to promote their own particularistic, organizational, and/or personal interests. But it can also go in the opposite direction as well, as noted in Chapter 3. Police officials or mayors themselves are often forced by drug traffickers to agree to the terms of a corrupt arrangement actively or even passively: the infamous plomo o plata dilemma. In sum, examples of corruption as a means of survival point to the limited role of individual morality or ethical decisionmaking at least under certain circumstances. Two interrelated perennial debates underlie the personal dilemma. The first relates to the philosophical issue of whether humans are intrinsically moral and honest (Schulze and Frank 2003) or innately corrupt (Calvin 1936). While Rousseau famously considered humans to be moral and corrupted by society—“Man is born pure, it is society that corrupts” (https://www.the-philosophy.com/rousseau-quotes)—others, including many religions, posit the opposite: that humans are born corrupted and can be saved through institutions.13 But while recognizing the fallacy and futility of even considering humans’ basic nature, this question largely translates into the search for understanding how and under what conditions humans pursue the good of others, solely their own personal interest, or some combination of the two.14 Closely aligned to this issue is how the promotion of particularistic and personal interests basically assumed throughout this book and in most studies on corruption can coexist within the personal dilemma featuring individual choice. Indeed, utility maximization theory in economics and rational choice theory in political science both tend to deterministically emphasize personal interest as a universal constant supporting a deductive-based theory explaining human behavior. But

The Personal Dilemma

138

The Corruption Dilemma

clearly, such individual decisionmaking is bounded. Just as the promotion of political interests must fit within the broader democratic narrative, personal decisions must also fit within some broader moral context: people strive to act morally, to see their actions in a moral light, and to have others see them in this way. We struggle to maintain our moral standing in our mind’s eyes and in those of others. And yet from a different angle, this question centers on how morality and personal interests tend to align. Friedrich Nietzsche, in On the Genealogy of Morality (1994 [1887]), notes how morality has more to do with utility than with morality itself because it comes from the need to control man’s natural instincts and to ensure the survival of the community—even the idea of “good” is not innocent because it inevitably translates within a social context into the good of one of the castes that society is divided into—thus “one moral for the lords and another one for the servants” (cited in Brioschi 2017, 198–199). Indeed, few people imagine or dream of a political system in which they and their interests would not fit. We think morally and want to be and appear moral, but our morality usually encompasses our interests and justifies the pursuit of those interests. The second underlying issue here is the perennial debate over individual versus environmental factors shaping human action: perhaps the social sciences’ version of the natural sciences’ chicken-andegg riddle. On the one hand, there is a long historical and philosophical tradition emphasizing the autonomy (free will) of the individual to decide and shape their environment; of agents shaping structure. This perspective points not only to the role of ethical decisionmaking and even morality but also to individual factors and, most importantly, to individual choices (free will) no matter how narrowly the environment may circumscribe those choices. Yet, on the other hand, another school stresses the supremacy of environmental factors molding individual ethics, beliefs, and behavior; of the structure shaping the agent. Michel Foucault, for instance, famously suggests that the subject constitutes himself through ethical “practices of the self” that are not of his making but come from models that he finds in the culture and that are imposed on him from without (cited in Ailon 2015). Louis Althusser’s structuralism similarly rejects the notion that humans are the subject or agents of history and instead are the “supports” of the structural relations in which they are located (Carnoy 1984, 90). As “Marx succinctly put it, ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered,

The Personal Dilemma

139

given and transmitted from the past” (Marx and Engels 1962, vol. 1: 247, cited in Lukes 2017, 26). Of course, as with most questions, it is likely not a question of either/or. Even if we accept some complex blend mixing individual/environment (agent/structure) factors, there is no reason to believe that this mix is the same for everyone in every circumstance, period, or society. The mere notion of corruption as a survival strategy that often finds everyday citizens, business owners, and even state officials forced by circumstances and, more specifically, an unfavorable imbalance of power, to participate in corrupt acts suggests—at one extreme—that environmental factors can, at times, play a decisive and determinant role. And yet, at the other extreme, citizens, business leaders, and officials, particularly those who enjoy greater power over others, do seem to have choices, and that in such cases corruption is more than mere survival. Arguably, this allows some room for their values, beliefs, and ethics to guide their decisions to engage in corruption and partake in the spoils of power and impunity or opt for the ethical path even to the point of blowing the whistle or cooperating with investigators, despite having to pay the costs in terms of inconvenience, loss of a business opportunity, being passed over for a promotion, or worse. Obviously, endless midpoints populate the space between these two extremes, mixing different blends of individual and environmental factors. Within these midpoints, individuals seem to confront options of whether to participate in corruption; to “go along to get along”; to take advantage of the personal opportunities presented to advance personal, family, or group interests; or, in contrast, to act morally and buck the existing system, fight corruption, refuse to participate, and blow the whistle. Indeed, the mere dualistic coexistence of the normative and empirical perceptions about corruption as noted earlier offers individuals different sets of motivations and ideals. There are many throughout the state and society who are nobly motivated by the moral principles of defending and deepening democracy, fighting corruption, and helping their fellow citizens. They seek to surmount the weight of the environmental conditions and pressures, refusing to participate in corruption. Many of these people operate businesses and refuse to pay bribes; others enter government with the desire to do things right and change the system from the inside. Of course, this does not rule out the possibility that as their environmental circumstances change and they become more socialized into the organizations or move up, their perceptions, attitudes, and behavior may also change. But these people exist and serve as important societal models to others.

140

The Corruption Dilemma

In fact, a handful of studies empirically explore the motivations of aspiring bureaucrats to seek office: whether they are driven by selfenrichment or altruism. Whereas Sebastian Barfort et al. (2019) find aspiring civil servants in Denmark (a low-corruption country) motivated by altruism, studies in India (a high-corruption country) by Ritwik Banerjee et al. (2015) and Rema Hanna and Shing-Yi Wang (2017) find that university students “aspiring to a career in the civil service are more likely to cheat.” Focusing on Russia and using the die-rolling experiment, Jordan Gans-Morse et al. (2021) “find evidence that individuals in Russia with a propensity to act dishonestly or corruptly self-select out of public service and into the private sector, particularly into sectors such as finance” (emphasis in the original). As such, it appears that environmental factors shape the types of persons who enter public service. In a similar manner, while the environmental factors in some societies severely complicate the realm of individual moral decisionmaking— “corrupt societies corrupt”—other societies’ environmental conditions seem to facilitate moral considerations and ethical behavior better. Societies with lower levels of corruption, such as Denmark, are more likely to stress and/or teach civic duty and responsibility, balancing an emphasis on personal interest and personal success. In such societies, even upholding the public interest is considered an act of “indirect reciprocity,” trusting that others will do the same, rooted in the belief that the public interest benefits all (OECD 2018, 7). But again, are these societies less corrupt because the people act or can act more morally with greater respect for others, or vice versa? Do the lessons we learn about morality stick or find greater expression because we see and enjoy its rewards? Accepting that in vast areas between the two extremes individuals do confront choices and thresholds, the personal dilemma thus involves the difficulties for an individual to maintain their sense of morality and act morally while negotiating a system where corruption is common and too often rewarded rather than punished. It involves the struggle to decide whether to go along and remain quiet about wrongdoing within the organization, supporting your colleagues and group for personal or broader organizational interests while projecting ethical responsibility onto others—ethically free-ride—or blow the whistle and report corrupt activity. The personal dilemma reflects the tensions between one’s moral and normative understanding of how the system should work versus the sober understanding of how it operates and the difficulties that dualism presents. Just as some people enter public service motivated by the normative or prescriptive values, noted earlier, others, based on an understanding of reality, may choose to become involved

The Personal Dilemma

141

to partake in the spoils of power, using and abusing the state’s authority and tools to exploit the opportunities for personal gain, protecting oneself and others in the process. Similarly, in operating a business, some individuals may take advantage of the existing system and its informal rules to get things done, using corruption to advance their own and/or their organization’s interests.15 But, as indicated here, the personal dilemma also centers on the clear tendency for those with wealth and power—including those largely in control of the political and economic systems—to entertain a narrower perception of what constitutes corruption, to cheat, lie, and engage in corruption, and to justify even their own corrupt acts as either not criminal, wrong, or consistent with higher values and norms. The personal dilemma stresses that many of the environmental factors shaping the individual’s decision to engage in corruption are products of the power exerted by those with wealth and power, controlling and shaping the organizational and broader setting. Those with wealth and power have significant influence over the definition of corruption (the institutions, laws, and policies) and are thus able to create a system that excludes or fails to police much of their own behavior. Such orthodox definitions, as noted, tend to exclude institutional and legal forms of corruption: forms of corruption reflected more in nonelite perspectives and among the public. But if environmental factors play an important role in shaping individual decisions to engage in corruption, then this paradoxically means that those occupying the state engage in corruption in part because of the conditions they play a fundamental role in shaping. Even illegal forms of corruption must be policed and enforced by those controlling the state. Yet organizationally, they use corruption and anticorruption strategically to promote and protect their own interests. And even when caught, they will tend to dismiss the criminality as being politically motivated (anticorruption dilemma), that everyone does it, or that the rules do not really apply to them.

Notes

1. Some evidence suggests that perceptions of corruption also differ between public officials and the public, particularly with regard to perceived causes of corruption. While a large segment of the public seems to blame politicians or both politicians and the public for corruption, public officials often blame the citizens (Uildriks 2010). 2. Attention here centers on microlevel factors. Cross-national studies also indicate that societal factors such as colonialism, ethnolinguistic fragmentation, Protestantism, democracy, and media coverage shape perceptions of corruption (Bohn 2012; Donchev and Ujhelyi 2014; Petersen 2020; Rock 2009).

142

The Corruption Dilemma

3. Though both perception and participation have been used to measure corruption, conceptually, of course, the two are not the same: one refers to actual behavior, the other to general beliefs about the nature of the political system and the behavior of others. Owing in part to this difference, the two metrics seem to draw on or tap different dimensions of corruption and reflect distinct levels of specificity. Whereas questions relating to participation are quite specific, referring to very concrete acts and times, questions regarding perceptions are more broadly gauged and ambiguous, drawing therefore on a wide range of experiences, time periods, and settings. It is relatively clear whether one has paid a bribe or not when obtaining, say, a driver’s license; but criteria used to determine an individual’s perception of whether corruption is widespread or generalized within the government or even a particular institution are far from clear. Moreover, the two measures seem to relate to different levels of the political system, though again the levels of specificity differ. Questions regarding participation relate clearly to areas where the citizen regularly interacts with state officials: the points of contact involving lower levels of the bureaucracy. For general questions used to assess perception, however, it is difficult to know what the respondent might have in mind when responding, whether interactions with bureaucrats or the police or politics in a much more amorphous and abstract sense reach beyond the scope of normal everyday interactions. They may just be echoing recent press coverage (Morris 2008; see also Donchev and Ujhelyi 2014). 4. Status-quo bias refers to the tendency to prefer to maintain the current state of affairs. Considering the status quo as a point of reference, change invokes a sense of loss (see Kahneman et al. 1991). 5. The “sucker mentality,” identified by James Finckenauer and Elin Waring (1998), avers that if a person is treated by the dominant value system as an outsider, then they would be foolish to live by the system’s values and that they would therefore take advantage of the system that takes advantage of them (cited in Holmes 2015, 57). In a sense, not only does this suggest “playing along to get along,” but that bucking the system based on moral standards creates problems for the individual. 6. Essentially the die-rolling experiment offers the participants money based on the number they roll. Though subjects self-report and no one knows the truth, researchers are easily able to determine if participants are lying using simple statistics. Repeated trials then alter various factors to gauge their impact on the level of cheating (Shalvi 2019). 7. The notion of ethical free-riding centers on a brand of justification in which one is able to free themselves from the ethical issue by attributing the decision to the ethics of others. This way, the person enjoys the benefits of corruption without feeling personally guilty or ethically responsible for the decision. One die-rolling experiment gives participants in partnerships the option to switch partners. Though, as expected, a dishonest person wants to link up with another dishonest person, not all honest people partnered with a dishonest person wanted to switch partners. Some honest people thus ethically free-ride, cooperating with a dishonest person to enjoy the benefits and skirt responsibility. This is similar to when the performance of a company is considered “too good to be true,” but few want to risk blowing the whistle to risk the loss of rewards. Instead, they enjoy the benefits without shouldering the ethical responsibility (Shalvi 2019). 8. G. D. Sherman et al. (2015) find that in addition to structural power, one’s perception of the naturalness of inequality shapes the intensity of empathy. Among the managers in the study, those who consider inequality natural are less likely to feel empathy toward others.

The Personal Dilemma

143

9. Stanton Wheeler et al. (1982) found that white-collar criminals who came from good backgrounds were less likely to be incarcerated or were incarcerated for shorter periods (see also Mann et al. 1980). John Conklin (1977, cited in Benson 1985) attributes this leniency to the ability of white-collar criminals to evoke the sympathy of judges by highlighting their accomplishments and contributions to society. Similar racial and class background likely facilitate such evocations. 10. Galit Ailon (2015) examines the media discourse prior to and after the fall of Enron to underscore how media constructs notions of ethical and unethical behavior. He notes how the press attributed the success of Enron executives to their individual moral goodness, yet afterward hailed the market’s ability to discipline their bad behavior. As such, in the end, the media portrays honesty in pursuing the interest of shareholders as the only way to succeed in capitalism and casts Enron as a market lesson not to trust anyone except the market. Such views clearly foment the capitalist narrative. 11. Despite the importance of controls to prevent corruption, integrity studies show how sometimes the controls imposed have the opposite effect by undermining people’s intrinsic motivation for honesty (Schulze and Frank 2003; OECD 2018, 19). 12. This echoes one of the central informal rules in Mexican politics, according to Smith (1979). Providing insight into the mechanics of corruption, officials were allowed to exploit their position (corruption) as long as they maintained stability and prevented problems from reaching the president’s desk. 13. In the view of Rousseau, “Corruption and progress are not innate to man any more than language or sociability” (Kroupa 2013, 16). Yet some religious interpretations point to man’s innate corrupt tendencies. Rooted in the Augustinian notion of original sin, for example, John Calvin stated: “Man is so entirely alienated from the righteousness of God that he cannot conceive, desire or design anything but what is wicked, distorted, foul, impure, and iniquitous; that his heart is so thoroughly envenomed by sin that it can breathe out nothing but corruption and rottenness” (Calvin 1936, vol. 1, Book 2, ch. 5, 19: 291, cited in Shlain 1998, loc. 6554, ch. 30). 14. Regardless of what it is (or whether it indeed exists), humans’ basic nature represents a constant, not a variable. It is therefore unhelpful in explaining behavior that varies. Even if humans by nature are corrupt, that not only fails to explain why the levels of corruption vary among people and societies, but it really begs the question of why such variation even exists. 15. This view regarding the factors influencing choices is rather simplistic and static. Even after entering public service, changes in outlook and behavior occur. More importantly, in what Keltner (2016) refers to as the power paradox, a person gains power by focusing on the needs of others and working to make a difference; yet once power is achieved, the powerful tend to neglect a concern for others, focus on their own needs, and abuse that power. This further reinforces Lord Acton’s notion that power corrupts.

7 Resolving the Corruption Dilemma?

Power doesn’t corrupt people, people corrupt power. —William Gaddis

This book has highlighted the political nature of corruption, the corrupt nature of politics, and the many challenges of controlling the power of the powerful. My purpose has not been to offer a solution to the problem of corruption but to provide a better understanding of corruption, its persistence, and the challenges and the dynamics of fighting it. Even so, this final chapter grapples briefly with the conundrum of resolving the dilemma and whether it is even possible to do so. After all, if corruption resides as a fundamental component of politics, then eliminating corruption is as unlikely as eliminating politics. If all agents pursue their own interests based on their own biased and subjective perceptions of the world—an assumption of rational choice (RC) theory—then politics without corruption (or accusations of corruption) would be nearly impossible. But just as corruption may, to some degree, be inevitable, so too is anticorruption: the struggles to control the power of the powerful. Enveloped within the struggle for democracy and justice, anticorruption constantly pushes along both the ideological and empirical boundaries to redraw the limits on power, recalibrate the balances of power, revise institutions of transparency and accountability, and pressure governments to better ensure that the laws and policies contest and constrain the power of the powerful. 145

146

The Corruption Dilemma

I begin by recapping the prior discussion focusing on the difficulties of addressing the dilemma: what may seem like the inevitability of corruption. This captures the perhaps pessimistic tone resonating from the earlier chapters. But with such an intense and exclusive focus on corruption, the problem may appear much bigger and more formidable than it really is. Shifting perspective and tone, the subsequent section highlights the multiple gains that have been made and continue to be made in the struggle to limit power and fight corruption. Such progress—political development—not only points to the possibility of alleviating/altering/curbing the dilemma but also pinpoints many of the crucial factors and processes required to do so. The concluding section thus builds on this to focus more squarely on the issue of fighting corruption and mitigating the fundamental dilemma of controlling the power of the powerful. It does not offer any type of bullet, silver or otherwise, nor does it offer specific courses of action, policy blueprints, sequencing maps, or shortcuts. Maintaining a broad political perspective, it instead emphasizes the importance of focusing on the many different forms of corruption (and disagreements over definition) and locates the anticorruption struggle within the ongoing efforts to expand and deepen democracy (Johnston 2014). At the same time, it points to the importance of disaggregating the concept of corruption itself to better understand and address it. Earlier chapters suggest that because it is embedded within politics, corruption is largely unavoidable. Obviously, this handicaps any efforts or visions to reduce it. Such inevitability can be viewed from various angles. Though firmly grounded in the ideas of democracy and the rule of law, the meaning of corruption and where to draw the limits to power are contentious and always under construction. And in the absence of any objective criteria to determine the appropriate limits on power or, more critically, who should do so, the clashing perspectives are seen as relative and inseparable from underlying particularistic interests. In the end, such disputes will tend to find those adversely affected pointing to the injustices of those benefiting or empowered by existing limits, utilizing a corruption-based narrative to make their case. In addition to how the lack of any objective criteria on how to limit power, or who gets to make that call, makes corruption an inevitable and contentious component of politics lies the deeper dilemma underscored here: that those with power—the power we seek to control—enjoy an

The Challenges of Addressing the Dilemma

Resolving the Corruption Dilemma?

147

advantage in the debate, design, and enforcement of those limits on power. This too points to a certain almost inevitable tendency toward various forms of corruption: the abuse of power by those with it and the perception of the abuse of power by those without it. In some ways, this strikes reminiscent of Robert Michels’s (1915) iron law of oligarchy. Perhaps a vote for the ideal of anarchism as a solution to the problem of power imbalances, over a century ago Michels pointed to the natural tendency for the emergence of and control by an elite within any organization owing to the practical, technical, and tactical needs of the organization. This means the organization’s elite will invariably privilege the interests and objectives of the organization as they perceive and understand them, ranking their own interests and those of the organization above those of the rank-and-file, above the formal rules and guidelines they may tacitly acknowledge, and/or above the interests of the broader public. This also has the effect of entrenching certain interests and individuals in power. As a result, threats to the organization and/or to themselves—which are normally conflated, as noted in Chapter 4—will tend to be viewed as threatening to the elite’s interests and opposed or carefully managed, even if those threats represent the broader interests of the members of the organization or the public. In many ways, the political dilemma rests then on the coupling of the collective action theory driving the lack of contestation with the iron law of oligarchy: the organized political interests controlling the state prioritize their control, their interests, their understanding of the challenges, and the state’s control of society, as noted in Chapter 4. In that such concerns tend to take precedence over the internal efforts to control itself (fight corruption), this will inevitably sustain a certain level of corruption. Adding further to the lack of an objective determination of the limits on power and the iron law of oligarchy, a final component behind the seeming inevitability of corruption relates to how corruption is shaped by the many trade-offs people routinely negotiate when making decisions. Since neither corruption nor anticorruption takes place in a vacuum, establishing, enforcing, and respecting the limits on power often clash with other more important values and objectives, such as protecting individual freedoms such as free speech, promoting economic growth and material well-being, controlling society and maintaining order, ensuring organizational efficiency and effectiveness, and balancing the needs of the many against the needs of the few or the one. As noted on various occasions, gaining strategically needed legitimacy, support, cooperation, and resources from key actors—historically provided to the state in return for it respecting certain limits on the use of power—

148

The Corruption Dilemma

may require the state to reciprocate by downplaying the other’s transgressions or officially, through law and policy, privileging those transgressions. Prioritizing political stability and state control of the governed, for instance, may at times mean turning a blind eye to the corruption committed by those controlling the state. Allowing private and corporate money to play a dominant role in elections—what many see as institutional and legal corruption—may be the unsavory outcome of the objective of protecting free speech or balancing free speech with voting, while also recognizing the pivotal role of securing investments and jobs for economic well-being. Even restricting the vote of some citizens may be the cost certain individuals are willing to pay in exchange for protecting the integrity of elections.1 At the level of the citizen, supporting a corrupt politician may be deemed part of the bargain one makes to obtain client benefits, stop their “evil” opponent, or even get things accomplished: or as Matthew Winters and Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro (2013) put it, by supporting “corrupt but competent” politicians. Indeed, Carlos Pereira and Marcus Melo (2015) empirically show that public spending can weaken the impact of corruption on reelection and that voters have more favorable evaluations when corrupt politicians competently deliver public works.2 Pragmatism and transactionalism, in short, mean sacrificing certain values and principles. In no way, of course, does this mean that the effort to fight corruption is futile. Far from it. It may mean that it is impossible to eliminate corruption since it is a part of the contentious nature of politics and will always be part of the political debate; it may imply that the cards are stacked against fighting corruption, especially those forms that benefit powerful actors who control the levers of government either from within or without; and it may suggest that fighting corruption is hard, as shown quite clearly by the experiences of the vast majority of countries in recent years. It also means that like corruption itself, approaches to fighting corruption harbor trade-offs among competing objectives, as noted earlier. This includes not just the pernicious effects of revolutionary efforts to eliminate inequality that too often empower a formidable and unchecked and seemingly monolithic state or the imagined impact of anarchism on societal order, but also the aftereffects of the far more extensive reformist efforts. Institutionally incorporating everyone into the decisionmaking process (by adding plebian institutions, for example; see Vergara 2020), or further dividing power way beyond the three traditional branches to encompass an army of autonomous state institutions, or adding more veto points, or creating a strong civil soci-

Resolving the Corruption Dilemma?

149

ety, or depoliticizing the bureaucracy, or erecting more checks and balances across and within institutions, or sharpening vigilance and oversight, or demanding endless reports and disclosures to ensure accountability, or making everything transparent, and so on, all have political side effects and economic costs. To say the least, such efforts may in fact jeopardize or complicate governance, rendering difficult political decisionmaking, producing gridlock, and making change difficult, further privileging the status quo (the correlation of forces and interests of the past). Cracking down on certain forms of institutional and legal forms of corruption, particularly the influence of the capitalist sectors over the state and public policy, may threaten investment and economic growth and even their pivotal support for democracy. The dismantling or weakening of the state to tame the corruption of those occupying the state may make it more difficult for the state to promote the common good and avoid capture by more powerful actors, while strengthening state autonomy and capacity to prevent state capture risks creating too much autonomy and a weakening of the checks on the state’s power. And, of course, both corruption and anticorruption cost scarce resources, impacting the levels of governmental efficiency and efficacy. Indeed, Frank Anechiarico and James Jacobs (1996) go to great lengths to show how proliferating regulations and oversight mechanisms designed to prevent or root out corruption seriously undermine the ability to govern. The issue, of course, is not about eliminating corruption—“zero tolerance”—but rather containing, limiting, and managing it. But this too requires difficult trade-offs. It raises the issue of how much corruption we are willing to accept—perhaps via some sort of sophisticated but never truly objective cost/benefit analysis—and, more critically, what forms of corruption we are willing to accept, to whose benefit, and most importantly, who gets to decide. As indicated earlier, experts and the public tend to disagree on what forms of corruption they consider the most problematic, as do those on the left and the right (Morris 2021c). But this is not cause to throw up one’s hands in frustration and surrender in the face of such implacable odds. While it is certainly crucial to better understand the political nature of the problem and the many challenges, it is equally important to underscore the remarkable strides that have been made throughout history and in the contemporary period to

Progress in Addressing the Dilemma

150

The Corruption Dilemma

establish democracy’s legitimacy, to broaden its meaning, to deepen it, and to limit the power of the powerful. With such an intense and exclusive focus on the problem of corruption, we often lose sight of the fact that there are vast areas where it does not exist (or at least arguments of its existence ring unconvincing)—where the power of the powerful is effectively limited—and evidence of incremental changes that expand the limits on power and assert ever greater controls on corruption. That the level of corruption continues to plague most countries throughout the world does not mean that progress has not been made. It may fail to meet the lofty goals of the anticorruption warriors and practitioners struggling politically to draw attention to the problem, push for needed legal and institutional reforms, and even raise the bar on what is considered acceptable conduct. Because the bar defining the limits on power is not static, but instead is constantly in flux and under construction, this tends to obscure the progress that is in fact being made. Politically, of course, we not only expect more than ever before in terms of accountability, but we should. First, despite disagreement over the precise meaning and what should be included or excluded within the concept of corruption, there is still a large consensus on what acts constitute corruption. To cite a recent blog by Matthew Stephenson (2021): The term has different meanings in different contexts, but as used in the relevant community (modern-day international development practitioners, domestic good-governance reformers, the activist community represented by Transparency International and similar organizations), “corruption” means something like “the abuse of entrusted power for private gain.” While that definition has several built-in ambiguities (What counts as “abuse”? What is “private gain”?), there’s a rough general consensus on the sorts of things people have in mind when they talk about “corruption” in this context: bribery, embezzlement, nepotism, etc.

Concerted focus on what is widely recognized as corruption—normally the illegal forms of corruption—has produced important legal and institutional changes that make once-hidden and even accepted practices far more difficult to employ. Within that context, most countries today ideologically denounce many if not most forms of corruption, accept the basic premise of limiting power, have layers of laws against corruption, and design institutions in ways that seek to guard against it. Even authoritarian regimes tend to anchor their legitimacy in serving and prioritizing societal interests and thus seek to control the power of their own officials. In addition, today, there is a much greater

Resolving the Corruption Dilemma?

151

understanding and concern about the problem of corruption and its pernicious effects than ever before. From the international to the local, citizens and businesses now take as a given that the government should operate transparently, and that its actions and operations should be subject to review and scrutiny. Today, more people than ever seek to raise the ideological bar to impose ever greater limits on the exercise of power or work to refine the more technical aspects and bureaucratic levers designed to prevent, detect, and sanction the crimes of corruption. In fact, transparency and accountability are rapidly becoming accepted as fundamental human rights, as well as part of the modernday language of politics. Not all uses of power are corrupt, as previously noted. In fact, authority tends to stay within bounds, and such compliance has broadened and deepened with time. Accompanying this heightened attention to addressing corruption is also ample evidence of desirable outcomes. If anything, as Michael Johnston once noted, we should be surprised that there is not more corruption than there actually is.3 Arguably, those occupying the state no longer enjoy the wide latitudes of operation, opacity, and privileges they once enjoyed. Routine political practices of the past have been overcome. The state certainly maintains its authority, but that authority is much more circumscribed today than in years past. Despite the emphasis on corruption, not all politicians or police are corrupt. In fact, most are not. Substantial power is exercised in ways deemed appropriate, staying within their boundaries. Many if not most people act or at least strive to act nobly, internalizing and respecting the limits on their authority and dedicating their lives to pursue the public good and serve others. While some (still too many) do take advantage of their power and privilege to shape the rules and procedures or break the rules to favor their own interests, it is arguably not as widespread as the corruption literature might lead us to believe. Even in Mexico, where according to INEGI’s national survey of the quality of government (ENCIG 2019) roughly 16 percent of citizens paid a bribe when acquiring a public service—a startling fact—that still means that 84 percent did not. And despite the difficulties of empirically demonstrating such progress, most experts recognize that things in Mexico today are in many ways different than they were three decades ago (see Chapter 1, endnote 2). Finally, the perspective of anticorruption failure is probably somewhat overstated. Though the problem of corruption clearly persists, practitioners have made remarkable progress in a rather short period of time that tends to escape our rather crude empirical tools. As noted,

152

The Corruption Dilemma

transparency and accountability have become part of the modern language of politics. Through various anticorruption treaties, such as the 2003 UN Anti-corruption Convention, and international programs such as the Open Government Partnership, governments publicly commit themselves to work to identify, define, and fight corruption. Such initiatives are just part of the efforts of anticorruption practitioners.4 Conceptually rooted in the basic principles of democracy and the rule of law that, like anticorruption, seek to limit power by dictating how power is to be used and to what ends, corruption arises from the imbalances of power. But while power may facilitate its abuse—exceeding the outer limits of authority—it also inevitably breeds resistance. As Foucault (1980, 95, cited in Lukes 2017, 95) put it, “Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power.” Fighting corruption is thus part of this historical resistance to power and parallels democracy’s historic and ongoing struggle to tame power and guide its use. Sharing with democracy this notion of limiting power, corruption, by definition, undermines and weakens democracy by diminishing the state’s ability to fulfill its primary and overriding democratic purpose: to serve the interests of the people. On the one hand, democratic gains have historically been tied to the rise of groups within society who are able to counter the power of others and equalize power. Power, as noted, is never monolithic. The rise of the bourgeoisie helped create the initial ideals of democracy by countering the power of the crown, while the rise of the working class years later further enhanced and expanded democracy by constraining the bourgeoisie’s power (Prados 2021). Likewise, the decline of democracy is often attributed to the concentration of power, the abuse of power, and hence to the rise of corruption. Like others in recent years, Adam Przeworski (2019) outlines the growing challenges to democracy, the so-called crisis of democracy affecting even advanced, stable democracies such as the United States (see also Foa and Mounk 2016; Fukuyama 2018; Howell and Moe 2021; Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018). Such democratic declines clearly parallel and nurture the growing sense of corruption among the population. From this perspective, addressing the central dilemma fundamentally centers on addressing those imbalances of power that drive corruption, based on the principles of democracy and the rule of law. In short,

Approaches to Resolving the Dilemma

Resolving the Corruption Dilemma?

153

addressing the dilemma encompasses efforts to curtail the inequalities of power by broadening and deepening democracy (Johnston 2014). Critically, this takes place at both the ideological and empirical levels. At the ideological level, the focus is on raising normative questions about what the state should do, how it should do it, where power should be limited, and how to balance power. As such, it strives to broaden the denotation and expand the reach of such concepts as the common good, democracy, fairness, equality, justice, and corruption. The ideological struggle includes efforts to alter the choices made in the trade-offs currently being made between different rights and freedoms, such as the freedom of speech of campaign donations versus the right to have a government not beholden to moneyed interests; to recalibrate and balance the interests of capitalist forces, the state, and society; to change the law to help close off avenues of influence that disproportionally privilege certain interests over others; and to craft institutions in such a way as to broaden the level of representation, avoid duplicitous exclusion, and ensure that the outcome of the institutions truly addresses the public interest (constitutional materialism). It also requires a better or more equitable balancing of state institutions to better monitor and control those dedicated to controlling society while strengthening those focused on controlling the state; and it demands perhaps a heightened sense of solidarity and the concern for the collective good versus individualism and selfishness among the people.5 At the more practical level in this two-level game, the democraticinspired and -guided struggle against corruption simultaneously seeks to reform and engineer institutions to narrow the gap between purpose and result, between law and practice (Vergara 2020). As such, it seeks to diminish the degree to which institutions prejudice a given course of action. It strives to alter laws or create new ones to better ensure that policy is decided (more) fairly, that those affected by the institution and the laws are involved in the decisionmaking process, and that the laws and rules are implemented in a way that truly achieves their objectives. It focuses on creating, overseeing, and fine-tuning anticorruption institutions, laws, procedures, and policies that maximize transparency, oversight, and accountability, and locates ways to make sure that such laws are appropriately calibrated to prevent the abuse of power. Above all, these struggles in the trenches focus on strengthening the institutions charged with oversight, auditing, and investigation of corruption and sanctioning wrongdoing while also respecting the moral aspects of the subjects (see the contributions from behavioral economics in OECD 2018). The massive and noble anticorruption army spanning nations and

154

The Corruption Dilemma

their dedication to the quest are matched only perhaps by the formidable challenges they face. At the broadest level, resolving the dilemma requires not only attention to both levels of the political struggle but also an acknowledgment of the vast array of the many different forms of corruption. This means that in addition to focusing reformist attention on preventing, investigating, and sanctioning illegal forms of corruption—largely the focus of much if not most of the global anticorruption industry—it is also necessary to raise the bar limiting power by focusing more attention on systemic, institutional, structural, and legal forms of corruption. This means pushing for changes in the law, as has been done historically, to make legal forms of corruption illegal, address institutional forms of corruption that privilege certain interests over others and prejudice certain outcomes, and, perhaps most crucially, target corruption characterized by the abuse of authority for political and not just personal gain. In short, the focus must be broad enough to incorporate the many versions or meanings of corruption, all to make the state both more representative of the interests of the people and more effective at serving those interests. After all, there is no reason to believe that illegal forms of corruption are more problematic or pernicious than other forms merely because they are easier to recognize or measure or that they enjoy broader definitional agreement. Evidence suggests that the people do not think so. While the anticorruption warriors within government, civil society, and the international community tend to focus on illegal forms of corruption, the people tend to entertain a broader understanding of and concern about corruption that reaches beyond the mere illegal variety. Believing that government fails to represent and serve their interests and instead serves the interests of the few—that the system is “rigged”—the public tends to envision and be more concerned about systemic forms of corruption. Even if we disagree and think that their understanding of corruption is misguided, we still may nonetheless recognize that even the “appearance” of corruption, as the Buckley v. Valeo (1976) decision noted, breeds distrust and undermines democracy (Teachout 2014, 207). In addition to focusing on the many different forms of corruption, including legal, institutional, and systemic corruption, history also suggests an approach not centered on corruption per se but rather on everything from broad democratic reforms and improving representation to the more practical focus on the functioning of government and the delivery of services. Historical examples of fighting corruption in currently developed countries show that many of the gains came from reformist movements focused on efforts to simply improve government

Resolving the Corruption Dilemma?

155

(e.g., Cuellar and Stephenson 2020; Grindle 2012; Johnston 2014; Johnston and Fritzen 2021; Mungiu-Pippidi 2013; Mungiu-Pippidi and Johnston 2017). Looking at historical anticorruption in England and the United States, for example, Michael Johnston (2014) shows how limits to power arose from contention over issues other than corruption. It is also unrealistic to expect those seeking to limit the power of the powerful to do so based solely on altruistic motivations of pursuing the collective good under the banner of anticorruption. Historically, the limits on power have emerged from the clashes of power, wherein political interests pursue their own interests and, in the process, agree to limits. The limits thus arise from the stalemate: power balancing power. As such, Johnston (2014) shows how fighting corruption does not demand that people give up the pursuit of their own interests. In fact, he contends, many of the limits on power emerged from factions fighting for their own interests. As many scholars have noted, much depends on civil society. While it is often weak, divided, vulnerable to manipulation from above, and facing severe collective-action problems (Mungiu-Pippidi and Johnston 2017, 261), most agree that an organized and active civil society is a necessary ingredient in the fight against corruption. Indeed, challenging the powerful to circumscribe their use of power demands focused and sustained societal pressures. Societal participation includes collective demands to pressure the government to conduct its business in the open, to be accountable for their actions, and to sanction public officials and citizens for wrongdoing. An active civil society engages in all components of the anticorruption agenda. Civil-society organizations conduct oversight, provide independent (nongovernmental) sources of information to fact-check the accuracy of government-provided information, expose corruption, and blow the whistle and pull the fire alarms to prompt governmental action against corruption. With a focus on institutions, civil society also participates in co-governance arrangements to ensure greater representation in the decisionmaking process and greater accountability during the implementation phase, helping to address institutional forms of corruption. As noted earlier, not all uses of power constitute corruption. Even within the systems rooted in ideology and institutions that privilege men over women (androcentrism, patriarchy) and Whites over non-Whites (racism and White supremacy), abuses of power occur. But, as in corruption, things change. The #MeToo movement shifted the boundaries a bit, making behavior that was once silenced now trigger denouncement, bringing at least shame and loss of status for the abusers. In a similar

156

The Corruption Dilemma

way, the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States shifted the boundaries somewhat, shining light on long-ignored White privilege and its expression through societal institutions. Such shifts were brought about largely by public outrage and the mobilization of that outrage to demand change. In similar ways, the public can take a more active role in denouncing corruption, exerting ever greater demands on those privileged by the institutions and abusing their authority. Such means political controversy and a challenging of the status quo. Finally, historical analyses also tell us that controlling corruption is a slow, gradual, and uneven process, and that there are different paths to that end (Cuellar and Stephenson 2020; Mungiu-Pippidi 2013). Controlling corruption reflects the gradual deepening of democracy beyond the ballot box, the broadening of participation and avenues of representation, the professionalization of parts of the state, and the strengthening of civil societies. Yet just as our understanding of fighting corruption faces many challenges (Johnston and Fritzen 2021; Rothstein 2021a), deciphering causality or recognizing spurious relationships based on the history of fighting corruption remains difficult. Even though countries with robust control of corruption tend to have democratic elections and strong civil societies, all these may be the outcome of deeper, long-term trends and events (Mungiu-Pippidi and Johnston 2017, 262).6 The study of corruption has made tremendous strides in a relatively short period of time. But despite the growing awareness, concern, and understanding of corruption, some scholars see the track record in fighting corruption as rather grim. Despite reforms and reformists, organizations, and resources, corruption seems to stubbornly persist. Michael Johnston and Scott Fritzen (2021) and Bo Rothstein (2021a) highlight a series of problems in the orthodox understanding and approach to fighting corruption to explain the disappointing outcomes. They also challenge all of us to rethink certain principles, grapple with difficult questions, and reconsider ideas and approaches. Adding to that perspective, it is crucial that the study of corruption work to disaggregate this overly broad concept to focus more succinctly on the causes, consequences, and reforms of specific types of corruption. At the same time, however, it is also important to capture the big picture. Though, like the concept of illness, corruption encapsules an exceedingly wide range of both institutional and systemic phenomena and individual forms of behavior, at heart it embodies the quest to con-

Conclusion

Resolving the Corruption Dilemma?

157

trol the power of the powerful; to prevent the abuses of power and to direct and control the exercise of power in ways and for the reasons we collectively deem appropriate. Focus on the corruption dilemma helps capture that broader picture and understand the dynamic political nature of corruption, and vice versa. It helps locate corruption within a democratic/rule-of-law framework and place the fight against corruption within the ideological and empirical spheres, and it highlights the political difficulties and paradoxes involved in seeking to control the power of the powerful. Though limiting corruption is hampered by the corruption dilemma, the democratic-inspired effort to limit power is as much a part of politics as is the abuse of power. In the final analysis, fighting corruption is a fundamental part of the struggle to establish, deepen, and democratize democracy.

Notes

1. During a recent speech against a bill promoted by Republicans to ensure election integrity, Georgia state legislator David Lucas highlighted a historic tradeoff of great significance. “The Civil War ended in 1865 with federal troops deployed to southern states to protect the new rights, including voting rights, of formerly enslaved Black people. Troops remained in the South for more than a decade later until [President] Hayes, who was losing the presidential race at the time, went to a Black man’s hotel in Washington, D.C., to cut a deal with the southern states,” Lucas stated. “Simply to win an election, Hayes promised to pull federal troops out of the last remaining Confederate state where they were deployed. He sacrificed safety and the voting rights of Black southerners for political gain” (see https:// www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/2/24/2017915/—Folks-got-lynched-Georgia-senator -presses-GOP-on-what-its-willing-to-sacrifice-to-suppress-voters?detail=emaildkre). For some, such political horse-trading may have been the normal part of politics; for others, it was a form of corruption that put Hayes’s personal and political interests above those of others. 2. Carlos Pereira et al. (2011) find a negative relationship between socioeconomic level and tolerance of corrupt politicians who deliver public works. 3. Comment during a talk to a group of students at the University of South Alabama many years ago. 4. An interesting exchange over the failure of anticorruption measures was initiated by Bo Rothstein (2021b) (based on Rothstein 2021a) and followed by a critique by Matthew Stephenson (2021), a response by Rothstein (2021c), and capped by an excellent contribution by Robert Barrington (2021), an anticorruption practitioner. 5. Merliee Grindle’s (2012) historical analysis shows how reformers dealt with constraints but pushed during unusual moments of crisis in a process that is historically grounded and politically contested. She also highlights, based on historical institutionalism theory, that due to the strong impediments to change, changes will more likely be a logical progression of the existing rules and structures—path dependence—though at times major external events cause significant institutional changes via “punctuated equilibria” (Grindle 2012, 24).

158

The Corruption Dilemma

6. I have left off two areas that are often part of the anticorruption conversation: political will and political culture. I do so because I consider both largely tautological. Political will is, as Alina Mungiu-Pippidi and Michael Johnston (2017, 260) point out, an “empty cliché” and impossible to validate since its presence or absence hinges on the outcome it seeks to explain. When viewed from an RC perspective, as these authors do, few will devote the attention and the resources to fighting corruption until the costs of not doing so outweigh the benefits. State officials will pursue measures that are most compatible to promoting their own political and personal interests. But state officials do not have total control over the nature and likelihood of the potential costs and benefits that enter their rational calculations. Those are determined by the interests and actions of others and the institutions. In short, political will is not so much a function of the individual but rather reflects the structural and institutional setting. Political will entails the “expectations and demand flowing from major segments of society itself” and elites that heed those demands (Mungiu-Pippidi and Johnston 2017, 261). It is also rather common to attribute corruption or the failure to adequately address it to political culture. But like the absence of political will, political culture arguably is shaped by and a product of the political system itself, including systemic corruption. Entrenched corruption creates our understanding of how the system operates and how to operate the system. Citizens and state officials both learn how to survive within the system and what to expect. Even though they may be opposed to the corruption within it, they nonetheless must survive and learn to play the game to get ahead. Rather than the culture creating corruption, corruption breeds a political culture that is untrusting of the state and state officials, anticipates, expects, and even imagines corruption throughout the system, and knows the costs and benefits of partaking in that system. The culture encompasses the euphemisms and the mechanisms of corruption. But just because culture may not be the cause of corruption, it still greatly matters. Such a culture produced by systemic corruption severely complicates efforts to fight corruption. Though recognizing the need to address corruption, the lack of trust prevents many from cooperating with the most recent efforts by government to fight corruption. Their vision of how the system functions weighs against societal efforts to work to curb corruption, breeding cynical views on progress. As with the weaponization of corruption and anticorruption discussed in Chapter 6, citizens will often assume that the fight against corruption is a disguised effort to consolidate power or hide corruption (Morris 2021d).

References

Abramowitz, Alan I. 2010. The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy. Yale University Press. Acemoglu, Daron, and James A. Robinson. 2006. “De Facto Political Power and Institutional Persistence.” AEA Papers and Proceedings 96, no. 2: 325–330. ——— . 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Crown Business. Ackerman, John M. 2006. “Introducción: Más allá del acceso a la información.” In Más allá del acceso a la información. John M. Ackerman, ed. México: Siglo XXI, pp. 11–24. ———, ed. 2018. “Claroscuros de las elecciones de 2018: Un informe universitario sobre el proceso electoral.” PUEDJS. https://puedjs.unam.mx/informe/. ———. 2019. “De la transición a la transformación.” La Jornada, February 12. ———. 2021. “INE: Arbitro vendido.” La Jornada, March 29. Ahmed, Azam. 2017. “Using Billions in Government Cash, Mexico Controls News Media.” New York Times, December 25. Ailon, Galit. 2015. “From Superstars to Devils: The Ethical Discourse on Managerial Figures Involved in Corporate Scandal.” Organization 22, no. 1: 78–99. Alatas, Syed Hussein. 1990. Corruption: Its Nature, Causes and Consequences. Brookfield, Vermont: Aldershot, Avebury. Alemann, Ulrich Von. 2004. “The Unknown Depths of Political Theory: The Case for a Multidimensional Concept of Corruption.” Crime, Law, and Social Change 42: 25–34. Alexander, Gerard. 2002. “Institutionalized Uncertainty, the Rule of Law, and the Sources of Democratic Stability.” Comparative Political Studies 35 (December): 1145–1170. Almond, Gabriel A. 1991. “Capitalism and Democracy.” PS: Political Science and Politics 24, no. 3: 467–474. “Al Rojo Vivo: Medios ‘molestos’ porque AMLO bajó 70% al gasto de publicidad oficial.” n.d. SinLinea.Mx. http://sinlineamx.com/al-rojo-vivo-medios-molestos-porque-amlo-bajo -70-al-gasto-de-publicidad-oficial/. Alvarez, Mike, Jose Antonio Cheibub, Fernando Limongi, and Adam Przeworski. 1996. “Classifying Political Regimes.” Studies in Comparative International Development 31, nos. 2–3: 3–36. Amnesty International. 2015. “Torture in Mexico Is Out of Control.” https://www.amnesty.org /en/latest/campaigns/2015/10/stop-torture-mexico/.

159

160

References

Anderson, Christopher J., and Yuliya V. Tverdova. 2003. “Corruption, Political Allegiances, and Attitudes Toward Government in Contemporary Democracies.” American Journal of Political Science 47, no. 1: 91–210. Andersson, Staffan, and Paul M. Heywood. 2009. “The Politics of Perception: Use and Abuse of Transparency International’s Approach to Measuring Corruption.” Political Studies 57: 746–767. Andrews, Josephine, and Gabriella Montinola. 2004. “Veto Players and the Rule of Law in Emerging Democracies.” Comparative Political Studies 37, no. 1: 55–87. Andvig, J. C., and K. O. Moene. 1990. “How Corruption May Corrupt.” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 13: 63–76. Anechiarico, Frank, and James B. Jacobs. 1996. The Pursuit of Absolute Integrity: How Corruption Control Makes Government Ineffective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ang, Yuen Yuen. 2020. China’s Gilded Age: The Paradox of Economic Boom and Vast Corruption. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Angel, Arturo. 2021. “Caso Odebrecht: FGR va contra implicados por tres delitos; proceso de Lozoya será suspendido.” Animal Político, January 20. https://www.animalpolitico.com /2021/01/proceso-lozoya-odebrecht-se-suspendera-fgr-implicados/. Ankamah, Samuel Siebie, and S. M. Manzoor E. Khoda. 2018. “Political Will and Government Anti-Corruption Efforts: What Does the Evidence Say?” Public Administration and Development 38: 3–14. Ansell, Aaron. 2018. “Impeaching Dilma Rousseff: The Double Life of Corruption Allegations on Brazil’s Political Right.” Culture, Theory, and Critique 59, no. 4: 312–331. Ansolabehere, Stephen, John M. de Figueiredo, and James M. Snyder, Jr. 2003. “Why Is There So Little Money in U.S. Politics?” NBER Working Paper, no. 9409 (December). Arellano-Gault, David. 2017. “Corrupción como proceso organizacional: comprendiendo la lógica de la desnormalización de la corrupción.” Contaduria y Administracion 62: 810–826. ———. 2020. Corruption in Latin America. New York: Routledge. Ariely, Gal, and Eric M. Uslaner. 2017. “Corruption, Fairness and Inequality.” International Political Science Review 38, no. 3: 349–362. Aristotle. 1996. The Politics and the Constitution of Athens. Stephen Everson, ed. New York: Cambridge University Press. Bachrach, P., and M. S. Baratz. 1970. Power and Poverty: Theory and Practice. New York: Oxford University Press. Badillo, Miguel. 2021a. “Mexicanos contra la corrupción transfiere 6.3 millones a tres cuentas en Suiza.” Contralinea 798: 22–31. ———. 2021b. “La Partida Secreta que se Robó Salinas de Gortari.” Contralinea 738: 4–8. Bågenholm, Andreas, and Nicholas Charron. 2016. “Ideology, Party Systems and Corruption Voting in European Democracies.” Electoral Studies 41: 35–49. Baker, Raymond W. 2005. Capitalism’s Achilles Heel: Dirty Money and How to Renew the Free-Market System. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley and Sons. Bakken, Borge, and Jasmine Wang. 2021. “The Changing Forms of Corruption in China.” Crime, Law, and Social Change 75, no. 3: 247–265. Balán, Manuel. 2011. “Competition by Denunciation: The Political Dynamics of Corruption Scandals in Argentina and Chile.” Comparative Politics 43, no. 4: 459–478. Banerjee, Ritwik, Tushi Baul, and Tanya Rosenblat. 2015. “On Self Selection of the Corrupt into the Public Sector.” Economics Letters 127: 43–46. Bannenberg, B. 2002. Korruption in Deutschland und ihre strafrechtliche Kontrolle. Luchterhand, Neuwied. Bardhan, Pranab, and Dilip Mookherjee. 2000. “Capture and Governance at Local and National Levels.” The American Economic Review 90, no. 2: 135–139. Barfort, Sebastian, Nikolaj A. Harmon, Frederik Hjorth, and Asmus Leth Olsen. 2019. “Sustaining Honesty in Public Service: The Role of Selection.” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 11, no. 4: 96–123. Barkan, Rachel, Shahar Ayal, and Dan Ariely. 2015. “Ethical Dissonance, Justifications, and Moral Behavior.” Current Opinion in Psychology 6: 157–161. Barrington, Robert. 2021. “Guest Post: Contesting the Narrative of Anticorruption Failure.” GAB: The Global Anticorruption Blog, October 18. https://globalanticorruptionblog.com/2021/10 /18/guest-post-contesting-the-narrative-of-anticorruption-failure/#more-19056.

References

161

Barros, Lucio, and Carlos Pereira. 2014. “Tolerance of Corruption or Ideological Blindness?” Paper presented at the Conference on Accountability and Public Goods Provision, Brown University, December 5–6. Bartels, Larry M. 2008. Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age. New York and Princeton, NJ: Russell Sage Foundation and Princeton University Press. Basave, Agustín. 2020. “La trampa maximalista.” Proceso 2296 (November 1): 48–49. Bauhr, Monika. 2017. “Need or Greed? Conditions for Collective Action Against Corruption.” Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions 30, no. 4: 561–581. Bauhr, Monika, and Nicholas Charron. 2018. “Insider or Outsider? Grand Corruption and Electoral Accountability.” Comparative Political Studies 51, no. 4: 415–446. ———. 2020. “Do Men and Women Perceive Corruption Differently? Gender Differences in Perception of Need and Greed Corruption.” Politics and Governance 8, no. 2: 92–102. Baumgartner, Frank R., and Beth L. Leech. 1998. Basic Interests: The Importance of Groups in Politics and in Political Science. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Beard, Charles A. 2004 [1913]. An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. Mineola, NY: Dover. Bedirhanoglu, Pinar. 2007. “The Neoliberal Discourse on Corruption as a Means of Consent Building: Reflections from Post-crisis Turkey.” Third World Quarterly 28, no. 7: 1239– 1254. Benson, Michael L. 1985. “Denying the Guilty Mind: Accounting for Involvement in a WhiteCollar Crime.” Criminology 23, no. 4: 583–607. Berger, Peter L. 1986. The Capitalist Revolution: Fifty Propositions About Prosperity, Equality and Liberty. New York: Basic Books. Bingham, Tom. 2010. The Rule of Law. London: Allen Lane. Boehm, Frédéric. 2015. “Are Men and Women Equally Corrupt?” Chr. Michelsen Institute, U4 Brief 2015:6. https://www.cmi.no/publications/5851-are-men-and-women-equally-corrupt. Bohn, Simone R. 2012. “Corruption in Latin America: Understanding the Perception Exposure Gap.” Journal of Politics in Latin America 4, no. 3: 67–95. Boix, Carles. 2003. Democracy and Redistribution. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2015. Political Order and Inequality: Their Foundations and Their Consequences for Human Welfare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boix, Carles, Michael Miller, and Sebastian Rosato. 2012. “A Complete Data Set of Political Regimes, 1800-2007,” Comparative Political Studies 46, no. 12: 1523–1554. Bollen, Kenneth A. 1980. “Issues in the Comparative Measurement of Political Democracy.” American Sociological Review 45: 370–390. ———. 1993. “Liberal Democracy: Validity and Method Factors in Cross-National Measures,” American Journal of Political Science 37: 1207–1230. Bowler, Shaun, and Todd Donovan. 2016. “Campaign Money, Congress, and Perceptions of Corruption.” American Politics Research 44, no. 2: 272–295. Brandeis, Luis D. 1928. Olmstead v. United States (dissenting opinion). https://www.azquotes .com/quote/593197?ref=power-and-corruption. Bratsis, Peter. 2003. “The Construction of Corruption, or Rules of Separation and Illusions of Purity in Bourgeois Societies.” Social Text 77 21, no. 4: 9–33. Breit, Eric. 2010. “On the (Re)Construction of Corruption in the Media: A Critical Discursive Approach.” Journal of Business Ethics 92: 619–635. Breit, Eric, Thomas Taro Lennefors, and Lena Olaison. 2015. “Critiquing Corruption: A Turn to Theory.” Ephemera 15, no. 2: 319–336. Brennan Center for Justice. 2012. “National Survey: Super PACs, Corruption, and Democracy: Americans’ Attitudes About the Influence of Super PAC Spending on Government and the Implications for our Democracy.” New York University School of Law. https://www .brennancenter.org/analysis/national-survey-super-pacs-corruption-and-democracy. Brinkerhoff, Derick W. 2010. “Unpacking the Concept of Political Will to Confront Corruption.” CMI, U4 Brief, May, no. 1. Brinks, Daniel M., Steven Levitsky, and Maria Victoria Murillo, eds. 2020. The Politics of Institutional Weakness in Latin America. New York: Cambridge University Press. Brioschi, Carlo Alberto. 2017. Corruption: A Short History. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

162

References

Brown, David S., Michael Touchton, and Andrew Whitford. 2011. “Political Polarization as a Constraint on Corruption: A Cross-National Comparison.” World Development 39, no. 9: 1516–1529. Brown, Ed, and Jonathan Cloke. 2004. “Neoliberal Reform, Governance and Corruption in the South: Assessing the International Anti-corruption Crusade.” Antipode 36, no. 2: 272–294. ———. 2011. “Critical Perspective on Corruption: An Overview.” Critical Perspectives on International Business 7, no. 2: 116–124. Bukovansky, Mlada. 2002. “Corruption Is Bad: Normative Dimensions of the Anti-corruption Movement.” Working Paper 2002/5. Department of International Relations, Australian National University. ———. 2006. “The Hollowness of Anti-corruption Discourse.” Review of International Political Economy 13, no. 2: 181–209. Calvin, John. 1936. Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. 1, Book 2, chap. 5, 19: 291, cited in Shlain 1998, loc. 6554, chap. 30. Camacho Beltran, Enrique and Francisco Garcia Gonzalez. 2019. “When Corruption Is Cultural: Exploring Moral, Institutional and Rule-Based Concepts of Corruption.” Boletin Mexicano de Derecho Comparado LI: 1325–1360. Camp, Roderic Ai. 2010. The Metamorphosis of Leaderships in a Democratic Mexico. New York: Oxford University Press. Canache, Damarys, and Michael E. Allison. 2005. “Perceptions of Political Corruption in Latin American Democracies.” Latin American Politics and Society 47, no. 3: 91–111. Carnoy, Martin. 1984. The State and Political Theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Carson, Lindsey D., and Mariana Mota Prado. 2016. “Using Institutional Multiplicity to Address Corruption as a Collective Action Problem: Lessons from the Brazilian Case.” Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance 62: 56–65. “Cártel de Juárez, proveedor del PRI y financiador en la campaña de Peña Nieto (Reportaje especial).” 2016. Aristegui Noticias, March 16. https://aristeguinoticias.com/1603/mexico /cartel-de-juarez-proveedor-del-pri-y-financiador-en-la-campana-de-pena-nieto/. Casas-Zamora, Kevin, and Miguel Carter. 2017. “Beyond the Scandals: The Changing Context of Corruption in Latin America.” Rule of Law Report. Washington, DC: Inter-American Dialogue. “Caso Monex: PRI gastó más de 4 mil 500 millones de pesos en campaña de 2012.” 2014. Aristegui Noticias, March 12. https://aristeguinoticias.com/1203/mexico/caso-monex -pri-gasto-mas-de-4-mil-500-millones-de-pesos-en-campana-de-2012/. Causa Común. 2017. “¿Que piensa la policía?” http://causaencomun.org.mx/beta/wp-content /uploads/2018/03/Presentaci%C3%B3n_encuesta.pdf. ———. 2018. “¿Que piensa la policía?” http://causaencomun.org.mx/beta/wp-content/uploads /2018/12/Presentaci%C3%B3n-Encuesta-2018.pdf. Cavalcante, Sávio. 2018. “Classe média, meritocracia e corrupção.” Crítica Marxista 46: 103–125. Cediollo, Juan Alberto. 2021. “Caso Cabeza de Vaca: El ruido mediático, le gana a la sustancia jurídica.” Proceso 2316 (March 21): 23–25. Cervantes, Jesusa. 2006 “Un ‘pacto de impunidad’ protege a las empresas del capo,” Proceso 2047 (January 24): 10–14. Chang, Eric C. C., and Nicholas Kerr. 2017. “An Insider-Outsider Theory of Popular Tolerance for Corrupt Politicians.” Governance 30, no. 1: 67–84. Chayes, Sarah. 2015. Thieves of the State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security. New York: W.W. Norton. ———. 2016. “It was a Corruption Election. It’s Time We Realized It.” Foreign Policy, December 6. ———. 2020. On Corruption in America and What Is at Stake. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Choo, Freddie, and Kim Tan. 2007. “An ‘American Dream’ Theory of Corporate Executive Fraud.” Accounting Forum 31: 203–215. Cialdini, Robert B., Carl A. Kallgren, and Raymond R. Reno. 1991. “A Focus Theory of Normative Conduct: A Theoretical Refinement and Reevaluation of the Role of Norms in Human Behavior.” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 24: 201–234. Clausen, Michael. 2012. “Corruption and Democracy in Brazil: An Interview with Prof. Dr. Timothy Power.” Brasiliana – Journal for Brazilian Studies 1, no. 1: 107–120.

References

163

Clavel, Tristan. 2018. “Honduras Attorney General, Civil Society Challenge ‘Impunity Pact.’” Insight Crime, February 5. https://www.insightcrime.org/news/brief/honduras-attorney -general-civil-society-challenge-impunity-pact/. Clawson, Laura. 2021. “Republican Lawyer Explains in One Sentence Why His Party Wants to Make It Harder to Vote.” Daily Kos, March 3. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021 /3/3/2019058/-One-party-is-trying-to-expand-voting-rights-One-party-is-frantically-trying -to-limit-them?detail=emaildkre. Cockcroft, Lawrence, and Anne-Christine Wegener. 2017. Unmasked: Corruption in the West. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Coleman, James William. 1998. The Criminal Elite. Understanding White-Collar Crime, 4th ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Collins, Randall. 2011. “Patrimonial Alliances and Failures of State Penetration: A Historical Dynamic of Crime, Corruption, Gangs, and Mafias.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, July. Comisión Mexicana de Defensa y Promoción de los Derechos Humanos. 2020. “Informe Anual.” https://cmdpdh.org/project/informe-anual-cmdpdh-2020/. “Comparing Crony Capitalism Around the World.” 2016. The Economist. March 15. http:// www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/05/daily-chart-2. Conklin, John E. 1977. Illegal but not Criminal: Business Crime in America. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Cornejo, Cristina. 2020. “Dissolving Congress to Combat Corruption: Why a Short-Term Anticorruption Victory in Peru Isn’t Worth the Long-Term Cost.” GAB: The Global Anticorruption Blog, May 11. https://globalanticorruptionblog.com/2020/05/11/dissolving-congress -to-combat-corruption-why-a-short-term-anticorruption-victory-in-peru-isnt-worth-the-long -term-cost/. Coronado, Gabriela. 2008. “Discourses of Anti-corruption in Mexico: Culture of Corruption or Corruption of Culture?” Portal: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 5, no. 1: 1–23. “Corrupción, capitalismo y democracia.” 2020. El Torito, no. 46 (August). Costa-Lopes, R., J. F. Dovidio, C. R. Pereira, and J. T. Jost. 2013. “Social Psychological Perspectives on the Legitimation of Social Inequality: Past, Present, Future.” European Journal of Social Psychology 43: 229–237. Cressey, D. R. 1953. Other People’s Money: A Study in the Social Psychology of Embezzlement. Glencoe: The Free Press. Croson, Rachel, and Uri Gneezy. 2009. “Gender Differences in Preferences.” Journal of Economic Literature 47, no. 2: 448–474. Cuellar, Mariano-Florentino, and Matthew C. Stephenson. 2020. “Taming Systemic Corruption: The American Experience and Its Implications for Contemporary Debates.” Harvard Public Law Working Paper No. 20-29. Dahl, Robert A. 1957. “The Concept of Power.” Behavioral Science 2: 201–215. ———. 1990. After the Revolution? Authority in a Good Society. Yale University Press. Dávila, Patricia. 2021a. “Más poder…sin rendir cuentas.” Proceso 2317 (March 28): 6–10. ———. 2021b. “Se acumulan los testimonies contra exgobernador nayarita, Roberto Sandoval.” Proceso 2314 (March 7): 18–20. DeCelles, Katherine A., Joshua D. Margolis, D. Scott De Rue, and Tara L. Ceranic. 2012. “Does Power Corrupt or Enable? When and Why Power Facilitates Self-Interested Behavior.” Journal of Applied Psychology 97, no. 3: 681–689. De Graaf, G., P. Wagemar, and M. Hoenderboom. 2010. “Constructing Corruption.” In The Good Cause: Theoretical Perspectives on Corruption. De Graaf, Wagemar, and Hoenderboom, eds. Opladen, Germany: Barbar Budrch Press, pp. 98–114. De Maria, Bill. 2008. “Neo-colonialism Through Measurement: A Critique of the Corruption Perception Index.” Critical Perspectives in International Business 4, no. 23: 184– 202. “Democracy Facing Global Challenges: V-Dem Annual Democracy Report 2019.” 2019. University of Gothenburg, Sweden. https://www.v-dem.net/media/filer_public/99/de/99dedd73 -f8bc-484c-8b91-44ba601b6e6b/v-dem_democracy_report_2019.pdf. DiMaggio, Paul, John Evans, and Bethany Bryson. 1996. “Have American’s Social Attitudes Become More Polarized?” American Journal of Sociology 102, no. 3: 690–755.

164

References

Dincer, Oguzhan, and Michael Johnston. 2014. “Measuring Illegal and Legal Corruption in American States: Some Results from the Corruption in America Survey.” Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University, December 1. Dobel, J. Patrick. 1978. “The Corruption of a State.” American Political Science Review 72, no. 3: 958–973. Dollar, David, Raymond Fishman, and Roberta Gatti. 2001. “Are Women Really the ‘Fairer’ Sex? Corruption and Women in Government.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 46, no. 4: 423–429. Donchev, Dilyan, and Gergely Ujhelyi. 2014. “What Do Corruption Indices Measure?” Economics and Politics 26, no. 2: 309–331. Dunlap, Charles J., Jr. 2001. “Law and Military Interventions: Preserving Humanitarian Values in 21st Century Conflicts.” Working Paper, Carr Center for Human Rights, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Dunn, Susan. 2004. Jefferson’s Second Revolution: The Election Crisis of 1800 and the Triumph of Republicanism. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Dupuy, Kendra, and Siri Neset. 2018. “The Cognitive Psychology of Corruption: Micro-level Explanations for Unethical Behaviour.” U4 Anti-corruption Resource Center, U4 Issue 2018: 2. “El gobierno contrata empresas fantasma y desvía más de 3.4 mil millones de pesos.” n.d. Animal Político. ND. https://www.animalpolitico.com/estafa-maestra/estafa-maestra-gobierno -contrata-empresas-fantasma.html. Elving, Ron. 2018. “The Massive Case of Collective Amnesia: The FBI Has Been Political from the Start.” NPR, January 26. https://www.npr.org/2018/01/26/580677742/the-massive -case-of-collective-amnesia-the-fbi-has-been-political-from-the-start. Encuesta Nacional de Calidad e Impacto Gubernamental (ENCIG). 2019. INEGI. https://www .inegi.org.mx/contenidos/programas/encig/2019/doc/encig2019_principales_resultados.pdf. Encuesta Nacional de Cultural Constitucional (ENCC), Instituto Nacional Electoral and Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas, UNAM, 2007, 2011. https://constitucion1917.gob.mx /work/models/Constitucion1917/Resource/1073/1/images/EncuestaConstitucion_UNAM _2011.pdf. Encuesta Nacional de Cultural Política (ENCUP). 2005, 2012. INEGI. https://www.inegi .org.mx/programas/encup/2012/. Encuesta Valores: Diagnóstico axiológico México. 2010. CIDAC. http://cidac.org/encuesta -de-valores-mexico-diagnostico-axiologico/. Enste, Dominik, and Christina Heldman. 2017. “Causes and Consequences of Corruption: An Overview of Empirical Results.” Cologne Institute for Economic Research. IW-Report 2/2017. “Equal Justice for the Poor, Too; Far Too Often, Money—or the Lack of It—Can Be the Deciding Factor in the Courtroom, Says Justice Goldberg, Who Calls for a Program to Insure Justice for all Americans.” 1964. New York Times, March 15. https://www .nytimes.com/1964/03/15/archives/equal-justice-for-the-poor-too-far-too-often-moneyor -the-lack-of.html. Estévez, Federico, Beatriz Magaloni, and Alberto Diaz-Cayeros. 2002. “The Erosion of OneParty Rule: Clientelism, Portfolio Diversification and Electoral Strategy.” American Political Science Association. Boston, August 29–September 2. Etzioni, Amiati. 2014. “Political Corruption in the United States: A Design Draft.” PS: Political Science and Politics, January: 141–144. Ferguson, Thomas. 1995. Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fernández, Alberto. 2017. “Los dilemas éticos del progresismo Latinoamericano.” In Claroscuro de los Gobiernos Progresistas (Kindle edition). Carlos Ominami, ed. Santiago, Chile: Catalonia. Ferrero, Guillermo. 1992. “Los genios invisibles.” Tecnos. “FGR solicita juicio de procedencia contra gobernador de Tamaulipas.” 2021. La Jornada, February 23. https://www.jornada.com.mx/notas/2021/02/23/politica/fgr-pide-juicio-de -procedencia-contra-cabeza-de-vaca-para-desaforarlo/.

References

165

Figgis, John Neville, and Reginald Vere Laurence, eds. 1907. Historical Essays and Studies by John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton. London: Macmillan. Finckenauer, James O., and Elin J. Waring. 1998. Russian Mafia in America: Immigration, Culture, and Crime. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Fine, Cordelia. 2010. Delusions of Gender: How our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference. New York and London: W.W. Norton. Fisman, Raymond, and Edward Miguel. 2008. Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations. NJ: Princeton University Press. Flores, Imer B., and Kenneth Einar Himma, eds. 2013. Law, Liberty and the Rule of Law. New York: Springer. Foa, Roberto Stefan, and Yascha Mounk. 2016. “The Danger of Deconsolidation: The Democratic Disconnect.” Journal of Democracy 27, no. 3: 5–17. Fogel, Benjamin. 2019. “Brazil: Corruption as a Mode of Rule.” NACLA Report on the Americas 51, no. 2: 153–158. Forattini, Fernando Miramontes. 2020. “For a Better Understanding of the Concept of ‘Corruption’ and the Strength of Anti-Corruption Discourse.” In Corruption: What It Is, How It Affects Us, and Ways to Fight It. Forattinni, ed. Curitba, Brazil: Editora Brazil Publishing, pp. 11–28. Fortes, Alexandre. 2019. “Lawfare Unmasked in Brazil.” NACLA, July 1. https://nacla.org /news/2019/07/01/lawfare-unmasked-brazil. Foucault, Michael. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–77. Brighton: Harvester. Franco, Guilherme. 2019a. “Brazil Annual Review 2019.” Transparency International–Brazil. https://issuu.com/transparencyinternational/docs/brazil_annual_review_2019. ———. 2019b. “Brazil: Setbacks in the Legal and Institutional Anti-corruption Frameworks.” Transparency International–Brazil. https://www.transparency.org/en/publications/brazil -setbacks-in-the-legal-and-institutional-anti-corruption-frameworks. Freije, Vanessa. 2020. Citizens of Scandal: Journalism, Secrecy, and the Politics of Reckoning in Mexico. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fried, Brian J., Paul Lagunes, and Atheendar Venkataramani. 2010. “Corruption and Inequality at the Crossroad: A Multimethod Study of Bribery and Discrimination in Latin America.” Latin American Research Review 45, no. 1: 76–97. Fukuyama, Francis. 2014. Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ———. 2018. “Against Identity Politics: The New Tribalism and the Crisis of Democracy.” Foreign Affairs 97, no. 5: 90–114. Fundar. 2018. “Fue un mal año. No menos como seis.” México. https://fundar.org.mx/wp -content/uploads/2018/11/Fue_un_mal_completo.pdf. Funderburk, Charles. 2012. “Corruption in the United States: The Access Market.” In Political Corruption in Comparative Perspective: Sources, Status and Prospects, Charles Funderburk, ed. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, pp. 19–40. Gächter, S., and J. F. Schulz. 2016. “Intrinsic Honesty and the Prevalence of Rule Violations Across Societies.” Nature 531: 496–499. Gallup. 2013. http://gallup.com/poll/172019/americas-less-satisfied-freedom.aspx. Gans-Morse, Jordan, Alexander Kalgin, Andrei Klimenko, Dmitriy Vorobyev, and Andrei Yakovlev. 2021. “Self-Selection into Public Service When Corruption Is Widespread: The Anomalous Russian Case.” Comparative Political Studies 54, no. 6: 1086–1128. García, Carina. 2021. “En San Lázaro, Morena y sus candidatos van por la mayoría . . . aunque sea artificial.” Proceso 2320 (April 18): 23–25. Gaventa, J. 2012. Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence & Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Geddes, Barbara. 1991. “A Game Theoretic Model of Reform in Latin American Democracies.” American Political Science Review 85, no. 2: 371–392. ———. 1994. Politician’s Dilemma: Building State Capacity in Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gentry, Curt. 1991. J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets. New York: W.W. Norton.

166

References

Gephart, Malte. 2012. “Contested Meanings of Corruption: International and Local Narratives in the Case of Paraguay.” GIGA Research Programme: Power, Norms and Governance in International Relations 191 (April). Gervasoni, Carlos. 2018. Hybrid Regimes Within Democracies: Fiscal Federalism and Subnational Rentier States. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Gibson, Edward L. 2013. Boundary Control: Subnational Authoritarianism in Federal Democracies. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Gilens, Martin. 2012. Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gilens, Martin, and Benjamin I. Page. 2014. “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens.” Perspectives in Politics 12, no. 3: 564–581. Gillingham, Paul, Michael Lettieri, and Benjamin T. Smith. 2018. Journalism, Satire, and Censorship in Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Gingerich, Daniel. 2013. Political Institutions and Party-Directed Corruption in South America: Stealing for the Team. Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Giraudy, Agustina. 2015. Democrats and Autocrats: Pathways of Subnational Undemocratic Regime Continuity Within Democratic Countries. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gleaser, E., J. Scheinkman, and A. Shleifer. 2003. “The Injustice and Inequality.” Journal of Monetary Economics 50, no. 1: 199–222. Goetz, Anne Marie. 2007. “Political Cleaners: Women as the New Anti-Corruption Force?” Development and Change 38, no. 1: 87–105. Goldman, Eitan, Jorg Rocholl, and Jongil So. 2013. “Politically Connected Boards of Directors and the Allocation of Procurement Contracts.” Review of Finance 17: 1617–1648. Goldstein, Joseph. 2018. “‘Testilying’ by Police: A Stubborn Problem.” New York Times, March 18. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/18/nyregion/testilying-police-perjury-new-york.html. González, Marlon. 2020. “Honduras’ New Penal Code Lightens Sentences for Corruption.” AP News, June 25. https://apnews.com/article/1efbd7e8a44f6c2458fb6a15c2950642. Government of Argentina. 2015. “El estado del estado–Argentina.” Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. New York, International Publishers. Granovetter, Mark. 2004. “Social Construction of Corruption.” Paper presented at the conference “The Norms, Beliefs, and Institutions of 21st Century Capitalism: Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.” Cornell University, October 8–9. Green, Penny, and Tony Ward. 2004. State Crime: Governments, Violence and Corruption. London: Pluto Press. Greenwald, Glenn. 2020. “New Documents from the Sham Prosecution of Gen. Michael Flynn also Reveal Broad Corruption in the Russiagate Investigations.” The Intercept, May 14. https://theintercept.com/2020/05/14/new-documents-from-the-sham-prosecution-of-gen -michael-flynn-also-reveal-broad-corruption-in-the-russiagate-investigations/. Grindle, Merilee S. 2012. Jobs for the Boys: Patronage and the State in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Grumbach, Jacob M. 2022. Laboratories Against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Guerrero, Manuel Alejandro, and Eduardo Rodríguez-Oreggia. 2008. “On the Individual Decisions to Commit Corruption: A Methodological Complement.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 65, no. 2: 357–372. Guevara Gómez, Ariana, and Andrés Santana. 2021. “¿Por qué las mujeres toleran menos la corrupción que los hombres?” El Imparcial, January 27. https://www.elimparcial.com/estilos /Por-que-las-mujeres-toleran-menos-la-corrupcion-que-los-hombres-20210127-0143.html. Gupta, Akhil. 1995. “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State.” American Ethnologist 22, no. 2: 375–402. Gupta, Sanjeev, Hamid Davoodi, and Rosa Alonso-Terme. 1998. “Does Corruption Affect Income Inequality and Poverty?” IMF Working Paper, 98/76. Gurney, Kyra, Anjali Tsui, David Iaconangelo, and Selina Cheng. 2016. “Suspected of Corruption at Home, Powerful Foreigners Find Refuge in the U.S.” Pro-Publica, December 9.

References

167

Gutmann, Jerg, Fabio Padovano, and Stefan Voigt. 2020. “Perception vs. Experience: Explaining Differences in Corruption Measures Using Nicrodata.” European Journal of Political Economy 65, 101925. Hajer, Maarten. 2005. “Coalitions, Practices, and Meaning in Environmental Politics: From Acid Rain to BSE.” In Discourse Theory in European Politics. Identity, Policy and Governance. David Howarth and Jacob Torfing, eds. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 297–315. Hall, David. 1999. “Privatisation, Multinationals, and Corruption.” Development in Practice 9, no. 5: 539–556. Hampton, Jean. 1994. “Democracy and the Rule of Law.” In The Rule of Law. Ian Shapiro, ed. New York University Press, pp. 13–44. Hanna, Rema, and Shing-Yi Wang. 2017. “Dishonesty and Selection into Public Service: Evidence from India.” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 9, no. 3: 262–290. Harris, Christine R., Michael Jenkins, and Dale Glaser. 2006. “Gender Differences in Risk Assessment: Why do Women Take Fewer Risks than Men?” Judgment and Decision Making 1, no. 1: 48–63. Hart Research Associates. 2010. “Protecting Democracy from Unlimited Corporate Spending.” June 6–7. Hayek, Frederich A. 1978. The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heidenheimer, Arnold J., ed. 1970. Political Corruption: Readings in Comparative Analysis. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Heidenheimer, Arnold J., and Michael Johnston, eds. 2002. Political Corruption: Concepts and Contexts, 3rd ed. New Jersey: Transaction. Hernández, Anabel. 2021. Interview with Julio Astillero (#AstilleroInforma | AMLO: ni tapadera ni hazmerreír en caso Cabeza de Vaca”), May 20. https://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=DTsfG_X2C-k. Hernández, Gerardo Esquivel. 2015. “Extreme Inequality in Mexico: Concentration of Economic and Political Power.” Oxfam México. Hernández López, Julio. 2021. “Astillero.” La Jornada, September 27. https://www.jornada.com .mx/2021/09/27/opinion/012o1pol. Heywood, Paul M. 1997. “Political Corruption: Problems and Perspectives.” Political Studies XLV: 417–435. ———. 2017. “Rethinking Corruption: Hocus-Pocus, Locus and Focus.” Slavonic and East European Review 95, no. 1: 21–48. Heywood, Paul M., and Jonathan Rose. 2014. “‘Close but No Cigar’: The Measurement of Corruption.” Journal of Public Policy 34, no. 3: 507–529. Hodgson, Geoffrey M., and Shuxia Jiang. 2007. “The Economics of Corruption and the Corruption of Economics: An Institutionalist Perspective.” Journal of Economic Issues XLI, no. 4: 1043–1061. Hofstadter, Richard. 1969. The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840. Berkeley: University of California Press. Holmes, Leslie. 2015. Corruption: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. Holmes, Stephen. 2003. “Lineages of the Rule of Law.” In Democracy and the Rule of Law, Jose Marfa Maravall and Adam Przeworski, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 19–61. ———. 2006. “Linajes del Estado de Derecho.” In Más Allá del Acceso a la Información. John M. Ackerman, ed. México: UNAM, pp. 33–88. Houle, Christian. 2009. “Inequality and Democracy: Why Inequality Harms Consolidation but Does Not Affect Democratization.” World Politics 61, no. 4: 589–622. Howell, William G., and Terry M. Moe. 2021. “America’s Crisis of Democracy.” Political Science Quarterly 136, no. 1: 105–127. Hughes, Sallie. 2006. Newsrooms in Conflict: Journalism and the Democratization of Mexico. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pitt Latin American Series. Huntington, Samuel P. 1968. Political Order in Changing Societies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hurwitz, Agnes, and Kaysie Studdard. 2005. “Rule of Law Programs in Peace Operations.” Policy Paper of the International Peace Academy (August).

168

References

Husted, Bryan W. 1999. “Wealth, Culture, and Corruption.” Journal of International Business Studies 30, no. 2: 339–360. Índice Nacional de Corrupción y Buen Gobierno (INCBG). 2001, 2005, 2007. Transparencia Mexicana. https://www.tm.org.mx/indice-nacional-de-corrupcion-y-buen-gobierno-incbg/. “Informe Final de la Comisión de Investigación MONEX.” 2015. http://www.rmalc.org /ANIT2015INFORMEFINALMONEX.pdf. Issacharoff, Samuel. 2010. “On Political Corruption,” Harvard Law Review 124: 118–142. Jain, Arvind K. 2001. “Corruption: A Review.” Journal of Economic Surveys 15, no. 1: 71–120. Jávor, István, and David Jancscics. 2013. “The Role of Power in Organizational Corruption: An Empirical Study.” Administration and Society, December 11. Johnston, Michael. 1996. “The Search for Definitions: The Vitality of Politics and the Issue of Corruption.” International Social Science Journal 149: 321–336. ———. 2004. “Keeping the Answers, Changing the Questions: Corruption Definitions Revisited.” https://www.researchgate.net/publication/253981715_Keeping_the_Answers _Changing_the_Questions_Corruption_Definitions_Revisited. ———. 2005. Syndromes of Corruption. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2014. Corruption, Contention and Reform: The Power of Deep Democratization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnston, Michael, and Scott A. Fritzen. 2021. The Conundrum of Corruption. London and New York: Routledge Corruption and Anti-Corruption Studies. Joireman, Sandra F. 2004. “Colonization and the Rule of Law: Comparing the Effectiveness of Common Law and Civil Law Countries.” Constitutional Political Economy 15: 315–338. Juarez, Carlos Manuel. 2021. “EU investiga a Francisco García Cabeza de Vaca, sus hermanos y suegro.” Animal Politico, May 11. https://www.animalpolitico.com/2021/05/eu-investiga -francisco-garcia-cabeza-vaca-hermanos-suegros/. Jurecic, Quinta, Clara Spera, Benjamin Wittes, and Cody Poplin. 2016. “Sextortion: The Problem and Solutions.” The Brookings Institute, May 11. https://www.brookings.edu/blog /techtank/2016/05/11/sextortion-the-problem-and-solutions/. Kahneman, D., J. L. Knetsch, and R. H. Thaler. 1991. “Anomalies: The Endowment Effect, Loss Aversion, and Status Quo Bias.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 5, no. 1: 193–206. Karklins, Rasma. 2005. The System Made Me Do It: Corruption in Post-Communist Societies. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Kaufmann, Daniel E., and Pedro C. Vicente. 2011. “Legal Corruption.” Economics and Politics 23, no. 2: 195–219. Keltner, Dacher. 2012. “Class and Compassion: Socioeconomic Factors Predict Responses to Suffering.” Emotion 12: 449–459. ———. 2016. The Power Paradox: How to Gain and Lose Influence. New York: Penguin. Keltner, Dacher, and Deborah H. Gruenfield. 2003. “Power, Approach, and Inhibition.” Psychological Review 110, no. 2: 265–284. Keltner, Dacher, and J. Lerner. 2010. “Emotion.” In The Handbook of Social Psychology. S. Fiske and D. Gilbert, eds. New York: McGraw-Hill. Kennedy, J., and C. Anderson. 2017. “Hierarchical Rank and Principled Dissent: How Holding Higher Rank Suppresses Objection to Unethical Practices.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 139: 30–49. Khemani, Stuti. 2004. “Political Cycles in a Developing Economy: Effect of Elections in the Indian States.” Journal of Development Economics 73, no. 1: 125–154. Kipnis, David. 1972. “Does Power Corrupt?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 24, no. 1: 33–41. ———. 1976. The Powerholders. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Klein, Fabio Alvim, and Sergio Naruhiko Sakurai. 2015. “Term Limits and Political Budget Cycles at the Local Level: Evidence from a Young Democracy.” European Journal of Political Economy 37: 21–36. Klitgaard, Robert. 1988. Controlling Corruption. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2011. “Fighting Corruption.” CESifo Dice Report 9, no. 2. Knott, Jack H. 2011. “Federalist No. 10: Are Factions the Problem in Creating Democratic Accountability in the Public Interest?” Public Administration Review, December: 29–36.

References

169

Kraus, Michael W., Stephane Cote, and Dacher Keltner. 2010. “Social Class, Contextualism, and Empathic Accuracy.” Psychological Studies 21: 1716–1723. Kreps, Daniel. 2015. “Jimmy Carter: U.S. Is an ‘Oligarchy with Unlimited Political Bribery.’” Rolling Stone, July 31. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/jimmy-carter -u-s-is-an-oligarchy-with-unlimited-political-bribery-63262/. Kroupa, Gregor. 2013. “History Gone Wrong: Rousseau on Corruption.” Filozofija i Drustvo XXIV, no. 1: 5–20. Kurer, Oskar. 2005. “Corruption: An Alternative Approach to Its Definition and Measurement.” Political Studies 53: 222–239. Lammers, J., D. A. Stapel, and Adam Galinsky. 2010. “Power Increases Hypocrisy: Moralizing in Reasoning, Immorality in Behavior.” Psychological Studies 21: 737–754. La Porta, R., F. Lopez-de-Silanes, A. Shleifer, and R. W. Vishny. 1999. “The Quality of Government.” Journal of Economics, Law & Organization 15, no. 1: 222–279. Lardner, Jim. 2020. “Mapping Corruption: Donald Trump’s Executive Branch.” https:// prospect.org/power/mapping-corruption-donald-trump-executive-branch. Lauría, C., and M. O’Connor. 2010. Silence or Death in Mexico’s Press: Crime, Violence and Corruption Are Destroying the Country’s Journalism. New York: Committee to Protect Journalists. https://www.cpj.org/reports/cpj_mexico_english.pdf. Lavena, Cecilia F. 2013. “What Determines Permissiveness Toward Corruption? A Study of Attitudes in Latin America.” Public Integrity 15, no. 4: 345–366. Lenin, V. I. 1965 [1917]. The State and Revolution. Peking: Foreign Language Press. Leopold, Jason, et al. 2020. “The Fincen Files: Thousands of Secret Suspicious Activity Reports Offer a Never-Before-Seen Picture of Corruption and Complicity—and How the Government Lets It Flourish.” Buzzfeed News, September 20. https://www.buzzfeednews .com/article/jasonleopold/fincen-files-financial-scandal-criminal-networks. Lerner, Melvin J. 1980. The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Decision. New York: Penguin Press. Lessig, Lawrence. 2011. Republic Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It. New York: Twelve. ———. 2013. “Institutional Corruption.” Edmond J. Safra Working Papers No. 1, Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University, March. Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. 2018. How Democracies Die. New York: Broadway Books. Lewis, Michael W. 2008. “International Myopia: Hamdan’s Shortcut to ‘Victory.’” University of Richmond Law Review 42: 687. Lindberg, Richard C. 1998. To Serve and Collect: Chicago Politics and Police Corruption from the Lager Beer Riot to the Summerdale Scandal, 1855–1960. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Lindblom, Charles E. 1977. Politics and Markets: The World’s Political Economy Systems. New York: Basic Books. López-López, Wilson, Diana Roa, María Alejandra Roa, Andrea Correa-Chica, Claudia PérezDurán, and Claudia Pineda-Marín. 2016. “El rol de la filiación política en las creencias y discursos legitimadores de la corrupción.” Psychosocial Intervention 25: 179–186. López Obrador, Andrés Manuel. 2017. La salida: Decadencia y renacimiento de México. México: Planeta. Lukes, Steven. 2017. Power: A Radical View. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Luxemburg, Rosa. 1970. Reform or Revolution. New York: Pathfinder. Madison, James. 1961 [1788]. The Federalist Papers. Clinton Rossiter, ed. New York: New American Library. Magaram, Sam. 2021. “To Fix the Unites States’ Corrupt Border Agency, Defeat Its Union.” GAB: The Global Anticorruption Blog, April 5. https://globalanticorruptionblog.com/2021 /04/05/to-fix-the-united-states-corrupt-border-agency-defeat-its-union/#more-17937. Makowski, Grzegorz. 2016. “Anti-corruption Agencies—Silver Bullet Against Corruption or Fifth Wheel to a Coach? Analysis from the Perspective of the Constructivist Theory of Social Problems.” Studia z Polityki Publicznej 3, no. 11: 55–77. Mann, Kenneth, Stanton Wheeler, and Austin Sarat. 1980. “Sentencing the White-Collar Offender.” American Criminal Law Review 17: 479–500.

170

References

Manriquez, Omar Elí. 2019. “Participación Ciudadana y lucha anticorrupción en América Latina.” Unpublished. Marcus-Delgado, Jane. 2003. “Trust, Corruption, and the Globalization Tango.” Social Text 77 21, no. 4: 139–153. Marquette, Heather, and Caryn Peiffer. 2015. “Corruption and Collective Action.” Development Leadership Program Research Paper 32. U4 Anti-corruption Resources Centre, Bergen, Norway. Marx, Karl, and Frederich Engels. 1962. Collected Works. London: Lawrence & Wishart. McClintock, Cynthia. 2020. “Corruption in Peru in the Twenty-First Century: A Tsunami of Scandals, a Tsunami of Prosecutions.” Paper presented at the International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, May 13–16 (virtual). McDevitt, Andrew, and Deiter Zinnbauer. 2021. “Making Citizen-Centered Accountability Last: Time, Money, Partners, Motivation.” Integrity Action, March. https://integrityaction .org/media/16126/making-citizen-centred-accountability-last-integrity-action-research -report.pdf. McMenamin, Iain. 2013. If Money Talks, What Does It Say? Corruption and Business Financing of Political Parties. New York: Oxford University Press. Meijer, Albert. 2015. “Government Transparency in Historical Perspective: From the Ancient Regime to Open Data in the Netherlands.” International Journal of Public Administration 38, no. 3: 189–199. Meirowitz, Adam, and Alan E. Wiseman. 2005. “Contributions and Elections with Network Externalities.” Economics and Politics 17, no. 1: 77–110. Mejía Madrid, Fabrizio. 2017. “Los genios invisibles.” Proceso 2097 (January 8): 52–53. Melgar, Natalia, Rossi, Máximo, and Tom W. Smith. 2010. “The Perception of Corruption in a Cross-Country Perspective: Why Are Some Individuals More Perceptive Than Others?” Economia Aplicada 14, no. 2: 183–198. Mendilow, Jonathan, and Ilan Peleg, eds. 2014. Corruption in the Contemporary World: Theory, Practice, and Hotspots. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books. ——, eds. 2016. Corruption and Governmental Legitimacy: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Merino, Mauricio. 2020. “Temporada de Pesca.” El Universal, July 27. https://www.eluniversal .com.mx/opinion/mauricio-merino/temporada-de-pesca. Merkle, Ortrun, Julia Reinold, and Melissa Siegel. 2017. “A Gender Perspective on Corruption Encountered During Forced and Irregular Migration.” GIZ. https://i.unu.edu/media/migration .unu.edu/attachment/4665/A-Gender-Perspective-on-Corruption-Encountered-during-Forced -and-Irregular-Migration.pdf. “Mexico Rising: Atlanticist Media-Hate Overdrive as AMLO Drains the Swamp.” 2020. Covert Geopolitics, October 3. https://geopolitics.co/2020/10/03/mexico-rising-atlanticist -media-hate-overdrive-as-amlo-drains-the-swamp/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter. Michels, Robert. 1915. Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy. Translated into English by Eden Paul and Cedar Paul. New York: The Free Press. Miliband, Ralph. 1969. The State in Capitalist Society. New York: Basic Books. Miller, Seumas. 2010. The Moral Foundations of Social Institutions: A Philosophical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miller, W. 2006. “Perceptions, Experience and Lies: What Measures Corruption and What Do Corruption Measures Measure?” In Measuring Corruption. C. Sampford, A. Shacklock, C. Connors, and F. Galtung, eds. Hampshire, England: Ashgate Publishing. Mishra, Ajit. 2006. “Persistence of Corruption: Some Theoretical Perspectives.” World Development 34, no. 2: 349–358. Mocan, Naci. 2004. “What Determines Corruption? International Evidence from Micro Data.” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 10460. Moloeznik, Pablo, David A. Shirk, and Marcos María Eugenia Suárez de Garay, eds. 2009. “Justiciabarómetro: Reporte Global, Resultados de la encuesta a la policía municipal preventiva de la Zona Metropolitana de Guadalajara.” Trans-Border Institute. Morín, Edgar. 2019. Crímenes del Cuello Blanco: El Capitalismo de Amigotes y las Redes en la Mafia del Poder. México: Grijalbo.

References

171

Morris, Stephen D. 1991. Corruption and Politics in Contemporary Mexico. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. ———. 1995. Political Reformism in Mexico: An Overview of Contemporary Mexican Politics. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. ———. 2008. “Disaggregating Corruption: A Comparison of Participation and Perceptions in Latin America with Special Focus on Mexico.” Bulletin of Latin American Research 27, no. 3: 388–409. ———. 2009. Political Corruption in Mexico: The Impact of Democratization. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. ———. 2011. “Mexico’s Political Culture, the Unrule of Law, and Corruption as a Form of Resistance.” Mexican Law Review 3, no. 2: 327–342. ———. 2012. “Corruption, Drug Trafficking, and Violence in Mexico.” The Brown Journal of World Affairs 18, no. 11: 29–43. ———. 2018. “Variations on a Theme: Corruption in Mexico and the U.S.” Canadian Social Science Journal 14, no. 12: 13–25. ———. 2021a. “Desigualdad, corrupción y Lord Acton.” Gestión y política pública. Volumen Temático: 9–36. ———. 2021b. “Corruption, Rule of Law and Democracy: Concepts, Boundaries and Oxymora: Research Note.” Mexican Law Review 13, no. 2: 153–174. ———. 2021c. The Corruption Debates: Left vs. Right—and Does It Matter—in the Americas. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. ———. 2021d. “Lo que la corrupción rindió: Corrupción y culturas,” Encrucijada: Revista Electrónica del Centro de Estudios en Administración Pública (UNAM), 37 (EneroAbril): 24–44. Mouffe, Chantal. 2005. The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso. ———. 2018. For a Left Populism. London: Verso. Muir, Sarah. 2016. “On Historical Exhaustion: Argentine Critique in an Era of ‘Total Corruption.’” Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 58, no. 1: 129–158. Muir, Sarah, and Akhil Gupta. 2018. “Rethinking the Anthropology of Corruption: An Introduction to Supplement 18.” Current Anthropology 59, supplement no. 18: S4–S15. Mungiu-Pippidi, Alina. 2013. “Becoming Denmark: Historical Paths to Control of Corruption.” Social Research 80, no. 4: 1259–1286. ———. 2020. “The Rise and Fall of Good Governance Promotion.” Journal of Democracy 31, no. 1: 88–102. Mungiu-Pippidi, Alina, and Michael Johnston. 2017. Transitions to Good Governance: Creating Virtuous Circles of Anti-corruption. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Murphy, Jonathan. 2011. “Capitalism and Transparency.” Critical Perspectives on International Business 7, no. 2: 125–141. Natanson, José. 2017. “Corrupción, medios y justicia: El triángulo de las Bermudas de la política Latinoamericana.” In Claroscuro de los gobiernos progresistas (Kindle edition). Carlos Ominami, ed. Santiago, Chile: Catalonia. Nichols, John, and Robert W. McChesney. 2013. Dollarocracy: How the Money-and-Media Election Complex Is Destroying America. New York: Nation Books. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1994 [1887]. On the Genealogy of Morality. Keith Ansell-Pearson and Carol Diethe, eds. Cambridge University Press. North, Douglass C. and Barry R. Weingast. 1989. “Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England,” The Journal of Economic History 49, no. 4: 803–832. North-Best, Emma. 2018. “After Retiring, CIA’s First Director Warned J. Edgar Hoover of Agency’s ‘Corruption.’” Muckrock, August 29. https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives /2018/aug/29/Hillenkoetter-hoover/. Nureña, Cesar R., and Federico Helfgott. 2019. “Rings of Corruption in Peru.” NACLA Report on the Americas 51, no. 2: 167–173. Nye, Joseph S. 1967. “Corruption and Political Development: A Cost-Benefit Analysis.” American Political Science Review 61, no. 2: 417–427. O’Donnell, Guillermo. 2004. “Why the Rule of Law Matters.” Journal of Democracy 15, no. 4: 32–46.

172

References

——— . 2010. Democracy, Agency and the State: Theory with Comparative Intent. New York: Oxford University Press. OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). 2018. Behavioural Insights for Public Integrity: Harnessing the Human Factor to Counter Corruption. OECD Public Governance Review. Offe, Claus. 1975. “The Capitalist State and the Problem of Policy Formulation.” In Stress and Contradiction in Modern Capitalism. Leon Lindberg, ed. Lexington: Lexington Books. Olken, Benjamin A. 2009. “Corruption Perceptions vs. Corruption Reality.” Journal of Public Economics 93, nos. 7–8: 950–964. Olmos, Raúl, Valeria Durán, and Ricardo Alvarado. 2018. “Operación Safiro: 7 estados desviaron $650 millones a empresas fantasma ligadas al PRI.” MCCI, November 21. https:// contralacorrupcion.mx/operacionsafiro/. Olson, Mamcur. 1965. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ortiz Pinchetti, José Agustín. 2021. “Despertar en la IV República: Denuncias y Calumnias.” La Jornada, April 25. https://www.jornada.com.mx/2021/04/25/opinion/016o1pol. Palmiotto, Michael. 2000. Police Misconduct: A Reader for the 21st Century. Pearson. Pardinas, Juán. 2019. “Instituto Mexicano para la Competitividad.” In La sociedad civil vs. La corrupción. Alejandra Lajous, ed. México: Grijalbo. Pashukanis, Evgeny. 2017. The General Theory of Law and Marxism. London: Routledge. Pellegata, Alledandro. 2013. “Constraining Political Corruption: An Empirical Analysis of the Impact of Democracy.” Democratization 20, no. 7: 1195–1218. Peoples, Clayton D. 2010. “Contributor Influence in Congress: Social Ties and PAC Effects on US House Policymaking,” The Sociological Quarterly 51, no. 4: 649–677. Pereira, Carlos, and Marcus André Melo. 2015. “Reelecting Corrupt Incumbents in Exchange for Public Goods: Rouba mas faz in Brazil.” Latin American Research Review 50, no. 4: 88–115. Pereira, Carlos, Lucio Rennó, and David Samuels. 2011. Corruption and Democracy in Brazil: The Struggle for Accountability. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 80–99. Persson, Anna, Bo Rothstein, and Jan Teorell. 2013. “Why Anticorruption Reforms Fail—Systemic Corruption as a Collective Action Problem.” Governance 26, no. 3: 449–471. “Peru’s Vizcarra Closes Congress, but Rebel Lawmakers Refuse to Leave.” 2019. CNBC, October 1. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/01/peru-vizcarra-closes-congress-but-rebel -lawmakers-refuse-to-leave.html. Petersen, German. 2020. “Early Democratization, Corruption Scandals and Perceptions of Corruption: Evidence from Mexico.” Democratization. Published online September 25. Philip, Mark. 1997. “Defining Political Corruption.” Political Studies 45: 436–462. Phillips, Tom. 2019. “Guatemalan President Condemned After Ejecting UN Anti-corruption Group.” The Guardian, January 8. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/08 /guatemalan-president-condemned-after-ejecting-un-anti-corruption-group. Piccio, Daniela R., Fabrizio Di Mascio, and Alessandro Natalini. 2014. “Tackling Corruption, Finally? How Domestic and Supranational Factors Have Led to Incremental Policy Change in Italy.” In Corruption in the Contemporary World: Theory, Practice, and Hotspots. Jonathan Mendilow and Ilan Peleg, eds. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, pp. 173–195. Pierson, Paul. 2000. “Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics.” American Political Science Review 94, no. 2: 251–267. Piff, Paul. 2014. “The Money Paradox.” NPR: Ted Radio Hour, April 4. https://www.npr .org/programs/ted-radio-hour/295260995/the-money-paradox. Poole, Keith T., and Howard Rosenthal. 1997. Congress: A Political Economic History of Rollcall Voting. New York: Oxford University Press. Poulsen, Alexander, and Carlos Varjao. 2019. “Political Opposition, Legislative Oversight, and the Performance of the Executive Branch.” https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm ?abstract_id=3304209. Praca, Sérgio, and Matthew M. Taylor. 2014. “Inching Toward Accountability: The Evolution of Brazil’s Anticorruption Institutions.” Latin American Politics and Society 56, no. 2: 27–48. Prados, Adrian Bleifuss. 2021. “How Big Law Became Big.” Jacobin 41: 21–23. ProPublica. 2016. “Pro-Trump Group Blew by Basic Campaign Finance Laws.” December 9.

References

173

Przeworski, Adam. 2010. Democracy and the Limits of Self-Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2019. Crises of Democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Przeworski, Adam, and Michael Wallerstein. 1988. “Structural Dependence of the State on Capital.” American Political Science Review 82, no. 1: 11–29. Public Citizen. 2005. “Revolving Door.” http://www.citizen.org/congress/govt_reform/revolving/. Raban, Ofer. 2011. “Constitutionalizing Corruption: Citizens United...” University of San Francisco Law Review 46: 359–382. Rabl, Tanja, and Torsten M. Kuhlmann. 2008. “Understanding Corruption in Organizations: Development and Empirical Assessment of an Action Model.” Journal of Business Ethics 82, no. 2: 477–495. Raz, Joseph. 1979. The Authority of Law. Oxford: Clarendon. Razafindrakoto, Mireille, and Francois Roubaud. 2010. “Are International Databases on Corruption Reliable? A Comparison of Expert Opinion Surveys and Household Surveys in Sub-Saharan Africa.” World Development 38, no. 8: 1057–1069. Redlawsk, David P., and James A. McCann. 2005. “Popular Interpretations of ‘Corruption’ and Their Partisan Consequences.” Political Behavior 27, no. 3: 261–283. Reich, Robert B. 2020. The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Reiman, Jeffrey, and Paul Leighton. 2017. The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison: Ideology, Class, and Criminal Justice, 11th ed. New York: Routledge. Rind, Bruce, and David Kipnis. 1999. “Changes in Self-perceptions as a Result of Successfully Persuading Others.” Journal of Social Issues 55: 141–156. Rios, Vidriana. 2020. “La [Otra] Mafia del Poder: Corrupción y desigualdad en México.” Oxfam México. Riva Palacio, Raymundo. 1995–1996. “La prensa en México: Una aproximación crítica.” Comunicación y sociedad 25–26 (September and April): 11–33. Rivas, M. Fernanda. 2013. “An Experiment on Corruption and Gender.” Bulletin of Economic Research 65, no. 1: 10–42. Rock, Michael T. 2009. “Corruption and Democracy.” Journal of Development Studies 45, no. 1: 55–75. Rodríguez García, Arturo. 2019. “Siete gasoductos no operan, pero benefician a empresarios, políticos y funcionarios.” Proceso 2207 (February 16): 22–24. Rodríguez Reyna, Ignacio, Miriam Ramirez, and Andres Villareal. 2021. “Los nexo de García Luna con el Grupo Arhe.” Proceso 2319 (April 11): 28–31 Rogoff, Kenneth. 1990. “Equilibrium Political Budget Cycles,” The American Economic Review 80, no. 1: 21–36. Rosanvallon, Pierra. 2008. Counter-Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust. Arthur Goldhammer, trans. UK: Cambridge University Press. Rose, Richard, and William Mishler. 2007. “The Gap Between Experience and Perception of Corruption: An Empirical Analysis.” Paper presented at the General Conference of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), September. Rose-Ackerman, Susan. 1999. Corruption and Government: Causes, Consequences, and Reform. Cambridge University Press. ——— . 2018. “Corruption and Purity.” Daedalus 147, no. 3: 98–110. Rose-Ackerman, Susan, and Raquel de Mattos Pimenta. 2020. “Corruption in Brazil: Beyond the Criminal Law.” In Corruption and the Lava Jato Scandal in Latin America. Paul F. Lagunes and Jan Svejnar, eds. London: Routledge, pp. 199–212. Rotberg, Robert I. 2020. Anticorruption. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rothstein, Bo. 2009. “Anti-corruption: A Big Bang Theory.” Quality of Government Working Paper Series 2007: 3. ———. 2011. The Quality of Government: Corruption, Social Trust, and Inequality in International Perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2021a. Controlling Corruption: The Social Contract Approach. London: Oxford University Press. ———. 2021b. “Three Reasons Anti-Corruption Programs Fail.” CJL, September 21. https:// www.corruptionjusticeandlegitimacy.org/post/three-reasons-anti-corruption-programs-fail.

174

References

———. 2021c. “Three Things Matthew Stephenson Got Wrong.” CJL, October 10. https://www .corruptionjusticeandlegitimacy.org/post/three-things-matthew-stephenson-got-wrong. Rothstein, Bo, and Jan Teorell. 2008. “What Is Quality of Government? A Theory of Impartial Political Institutions.” Governance 21, no. 2: 165–190. Rubio, Luis. 2019. “Paso a paso.” México evalúa, October 14. https://www.mexicoevalua.org /2019/10/14/paso-a-paso/. ———. 2020. “Oportunismo.” México evalúa, May 25. https://www.mexicoevalua.org /oportunismo/. Runciman, David. 2008. Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond. Princeton University Press. Rusciano, Frank Louis. 2014. “The Meaning of Corruption in World Opinion.” In Corruption in the Contemporary World: Theory, Practice, and Hotspots. Jonathan Mendilow and Ilan Peleg, eds. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington, pp. 27–45. Sabet, Daniel M. 2009. “Confrontation, Collusion and Tolerance: The Relationship Between Law Enforcement and Organized Crime in Tijuana.” Mexican Law Review 2, no. 2: 3–29. ——— . 2012. Police Reform in Mexico: Informal Politics and the Challenge of Institutional Change. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Salmerón Sanginés, Pedro. 2017. “Fox, traidor a la democracia.” La Jornada, July 11. https:// www.jornada.com.mx/2017/07/11/opinion/014a2pol?partner=rss. Sampson, Steven. 2010. “The Anti-corruption Industry: From Movement to Institution.” Global Crime 11, no. 2: 261–278. Sandel, Michael J. 2012. What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sandoval-Ballesteros, Irma Eréndira. 2013. “From ‘Institutional’ to ‘Structural’ Corruption: Rethinking Accountability in a World of Public-Private Partnerships.” Edmund J. Safra Working Papers No. 33. Harvard University. Schattschneider, E. E. 1960. The Semi-Sovereign People: A Realist’s View of Democracy in America. New York: Holt, Rhinehart & Winston. Schectman, Joel, and Brett Wolf. 2016. “US Failing to Curb Money Laundering by Shell Companies: Task Force Report.” Reuters (online), December 1. www.mobile.reuters.com/article /businessNews/idUSKBN13Q4R1. Scherer Ibarra, Julio. 2009. Impunidad: La quiebra de la ley. México: Grijalbo. Schmautz, Kurt A. 1992. “J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets.” Michigan Law Review 90, no. 6: 1812–1818. Schulze, G., and B. Frank. 2003. “Deterrence Versus Intrinsic Motivation: Experimental Evidence on the Determinants of Corruptibility.” Economics of Governance 4: 143–160. Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1942. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. New York: Harper. Schwartz, Rachel A. 2019. “Guatemala’s Anti-corruption Struggle Teeters on the Edge.” NACLA Report on the Americas 51, no. 2: 200–205. Schweizer, Peter. 2013. Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Scott, James C. 1972. Comparative Political Corruption. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. ———. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Searle, John R. 1969. Speech Acts. Cambridge University Press. Selds, Barry. 2014. “The Shifting Landscape of Corruption in the United States: Legal Corruption, Systemic Corruption, or a New Norm?” In Corruption in the Contemporary World: Theory, Practice, and Hotspots. Jonathan Mendilow and Ilan Peleg, eds. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, pp. 47–68. Seligson, Mitchell A. 2002. “The Impact of Corruption on Regime Legitimacy: A Comparative Study of Four Latin American Countries.” Journal of Politics 64, no. 2: 408–433. ———. 2006. “The Measurement and Impact of Corruption Victimization: Survey Evidence from Latin America.” World Development 34, no. 2: 381–404. Sen, Amartya. 2001. Development as Freedom. Oxford University Press. Serwer, Adam. 2021. The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump’s America. New York: One World.

References

175

Shalvi, Shaul. 2016. “Corruption Corrupts.” Nature 531: 456–457. ——— . 2019. Interview on the podcast Kickback: The Global Anticorruption Podcast, episode 17. October 28. Sherman, G. D., J. S. Lerner, J. Renshon, C. Ma-Kellams, and S. Joel. 2015. “Perceiving Others’ Feelings: The Importance of Personality and Social Structure.” Social Psychological and Personality Science 6, no. 5: 559–569. Shlain, Leonard. 1998. The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image. New York: Penguin. Silva Ávalos, Héctor, and Seth Robbins. 2020. “A Death Foretold: MACCIH Shuts Down in Honduras.” Insight Crime, January 22. https://www.insightcrime.org/news/analysis/a -death-foretold-maccih-shuts-down-in-honduras/. Simon, David R., and Frank E. Hagan. 1999. White-Collar Deviance. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Simon, Roberto. 2019. “Bolsonaro’s Siege Against Law Enforcement Agencies.” Americas Quarterly, September 12. https://www.americasquarterly.org/content/bolsonaros-siege -against-law-enforcement-agencies. Simon, Roberto, and Emilie Sweigart. 2020. “The Risky Politics of Anti-money Laundering.” Americas Quarterly, April 27. https://www.americasquarterly.org/article/the-risky-politics -of-anti-money-laundering/. Slobogin, Christopher. 1996. “Testilying: Police Perjury and What to Do About It.” 67 University of Colorado Law Review 1037. Smilov, Daniel M., and Juri Toplak. 2007. Political Finance and Corruption in Eastern Europe: The Transition Period. Aldershot: Ashgate. Smith, Ben. 2020. “Is Ronan Farrow Too Good to Be True?” New York Times, May 17. https:// www.nytimes.com/2020/05/17/business/media/ronan-farrow.html?smid=tw-share. Smith, Michael L. 2008. “Explaining Corruption Perceptions: A Cross-National Analysis of 15 Countries.” Presented at the meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago. Smith, Peter. 1979. Labyrinths of Power: Political Recruitment in Twentieth-Century Mexico. Princeton University Press. Solaz, Hector, Catherine E. De Vries, and Roosmarijn A. de Geus. 2019. “In-Group Loyalty and the Punishment of Corruption.” Comparative Political Studies 52, no. 6: 896–926. Sosa Villagarcia, Paolo André. 2020. “El modelo no se Mancha: The Effects of the Lava Jato Scandal on Peruvian Politics.” Paper presented at the International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, May 13–16 (virtual). Stanig, Piero. 2015. “Regulation of Speech and Media Coverage of Corruption: An Empirical Analysis of the Mexican Press.” American Journal of Political Science 59, no. 1: 175–193. Steinzor, Rena, Michael Patoka, and James Goodwin. 2011. “Behind Closed Doors at the White House: How Politics Trumps Protection of Public Health, Worker Safety, and the Environment.” Center for Progressive Reform White Paper No. 1111. Stellar, J. E., V. M. Manzo, Michael William Kraus, and Dacher Keltner. 2012. “Class and Compassion: Socioeconomic Factors Predict Responses to Suffering.” Emotion 12: 449–459. Stephens, Dale. 2011. “The Age of Lawfare.” International Law Studies 87: 327–357. https:// digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1085&context=ils. Stephenson, Matthew. 2020a. “The FinCEN Files: Some Scattered Preliminary Thoughts.” GAB: The Global Anticorruption Blog, September 29. https://globalanticorruptionblog .com/2020/09/29/the-fincen-files-some-scattered-preliminary-thoughts/. ———. 2020b. “Reforming the US AML System: Some Proposals Inspired by the FinCEN Files.” GAB: The Global Anticorruption Blog, October 8. https://globalanticorruptionblog .com/2020/10/08/reforming-the-us-aml-system-some-proposals-inspired-by-the-fincen -files/#more-16759. ———. 2021. “Three Reasons Anticorruption Academics Fail: A Commentary on Rothstein.” GAB: The Global Anticorruption Blog, September 29. https://globalanticorruptionblog.com /2021/09/29/three-reasons-anticorruption-academics-fail-a-commentary-on-rothstein /#more-18965. Suárez-Enríquez, Ximena. 2017. “Justicia Olvidada: La impunidad de las violaciones a derechos humanos cometidas por soldados en México.” WOLA. https://www.wola.org/wp -content/uploads/2017/11/WOLA_MILITARY-CRIMES_RPT_SPANISH.pdf.

176

References

Suh, Chan S., and Sidney G. Tarrow. 2021. “Suppression by Stealth: The Partisan Response to Protest in State Legislatures.” Politics & Society online first: 1–30. Sun, Yan. 1999. “Reform, State, and Corruption: Is Corruption Less Destructive in China Than in Russia?” Comparative Politics 32, no. 1: 1–20. Sun, Yan, and Michael Johnston. 2009. “Does Democracy Check Corruption? Insights from China and India.” Comparative Politics 42, no. 1: 1–19. Swamy, Anand, Stephen Knack, Young Lee, and Omar Azfar. 2001. “Gender and Corruption.” Journal of Development Economics 64: 25–55. Sykes, Gresham, and David Matza. 1957. “Techniques of Neutralization: A Theory of Delinquency.” American Sociological Review 22: 664–670. Tajfel, Henri. 1974. “Social Identity and Intergroup Behavior.” Social Science Information 13, no. 2: 65–93. Tamanaha, Brian Z. 2004. On the Rule of Law: History, Politics, Theory. Cambridge University Press. Tamez Guajardo, Macedonio. 2008. “Reflexiones sobre la corrupción entre policías, ministerios públicos y jueces mexicanos.” Milenio, August 9. ———. 2016. Política y Corrupción: La Crisis de Inseguridad en México. México: Planeta Mexicana. Tanenhaus, Sam. 2017. “The Architect of the Radical Right: How the Nobel Prize-Winning Economist James M. Buchanan Shaped Today’s Antigovernment Politics.” The Atlantic, July/August. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/the-architect-of-the -radical-right/528672/. Tanzler, Dirk, Konstadinos Maras, Angelos Giannakopoulos, and Ralf Rogowski. 2016. “The Social Construction of Corruption: Theoretical Reflections.” In The Social Construction of Corruption in Europe. Tanzler et al., eds. Famham, UK: Ashgate, pp. 13–29. Tatone, Alicia. 2020. “Global Banks Defy U.S. Crackdowns by Serving Oligarchs, Criminals and Terrorists.” International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, September 20. https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/global-banks-defy-u-s-crackdowns-by -serving-oligarchs-criminals-and-terrorists/. Taylor, Matthew M. 2018. “Getting to Accountability: A Framework for Planning and Implementing Anticorruption Strategies.” Daedalus 147, no. 3: 63–82. Teachout, Zephyr. 2014. Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thompson, Dennis F. 2013. “Two Concepts of Corruption.” Working Papers No. 16 (August 1), Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University. ———. 2018. “Theories of Institutional Corruption.” Annual Review of Political Science 21: 495–513. Thurber, James A. 2010. “Changing the Way Washington Works? President Obama’s Battle with Lobbyists.” Presented at the Conference on The Early Obama Presidency, London. Tilly, Charles. 1985. “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.” In Bringing the State Back In. Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds. Cambridge University Press, pp. 169–186. Tirole, Jean. 1996. “A Theory of Collective Reputations with Applications to the Persistence of Corruption and to Firm Quality.” Review of Economic Studies 63: 1–22. Tourliere, Mathieu. 2021. “Hinojosa Cantú, amigo de Peña Nieto, en la mira de la 4T.” Proceso 2316 (March 21): 20–23. Transparencia Venezuela. 2018. “Cambios para no cambiar contraloría general de la republica.” Informe corrupción 2018. https://transparencia.org.ve/wp-content/uploads/2019 /05/Cambios-para-no-cambiar-Contralori%CC%81a-General-de-la-Repu%CC%81blica-1 .pdf. ———. 2020. “The Pattern of Great Corruption in Venezuela.” March. https://transparencia .org.ve/project/the-pattern-of-great-corruption-in-venezuela/. Treisman, Daniel. 2007. “What Have We Learned About the Causes of Corruption from Ten Years of Cross-National Empirical Research?” Annual Review of Political Science 10, no. 1: 211–244. Tully, Kendra A., and John T. Scott. 2020. “Rousseau’s Observations on Inequality and the Causes of Moral Corruption.” Political Research Quarterly 73, no. 1: 184–195.

References

177

Uildriks, Niels. 2010. Mexico’s Unrule of Law: Implementing Human Rights in Police and Judicial Reform Under Democratization. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. “U.N. Accuses Mexico of Torture, Cover-up in Case of 43 Missing Students.” 2018. Reuters, March 15. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-rights/u-n-accuses-mexico-of-torture -cover-up-in-case-of-43-missing-students-idUSKCN1GR18V. “Unstacking the Deck: A New Agenda to Tame Corruption in Washington.” 2018. Roosevelt Institute, The Great Democracy Initiative, May. https://greatdemocracyinitiative.org/wp -content/uploads/2018/05/Unstacked.pdf. Uslaner, Eric M. 2008. Corruption, Inequality, and the Rule of Law. New York: Cambridge University Press. Uslaner, Eric M., and Bo Rothstein. 2013. “The Roots of Corruption: Mass Education, Economic Inequality and State Building.” American Political Science Association. “U.S. Lawyer Steven Donziger Speaks from House Arrest in NYC After Suing Chevron for Amazon Oil Spills.” Democracy Now, March 15. https://www.democracynow.org/2021/3 /15/steven_donziger_house_arrest_chevron. Van Dijk, Teun A. 2017. “How Globo Media Manipulated the Impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.” Discourse and Communication 11, no. 2: 199–229. Vergara, Camila. 2020. Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-oligarchic Republic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vigna, Anne. 2020. “Bolsonaro se ahoga en una crisis política.” Proceso 2272 (May 17): 54–56. Villoria, Manuel, Fenrando Jiminez, and Aana Revuelta. 2014. “Corruption Perception and Collective Action: The Case of Spain.” In Corruption in the Contemporary World: Theory, Practice, and Hotspots. Jonathan Mendilow and Ilan Peleg, eds. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, pp. 197–222. Wallis, John Joseph. 2006. “The Concept of Systematic Corruption in American History.” In Corruption and Reform: Lessons from America’s Economic History. Edward L. Glaeser and Claudia Goldin, eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 23–62. Walton, Grant. 2015. “Defining Corruption Where the State Is Weak: The Case of Papua New Guinea.” Journal of Development Studies 51, no. 1: 15–31. Wang, Long, and J. Keith Murnighan. 2014. “Money, Emotions, and Ethics Across Individuals and Countries.” Journal of Business Ethics 125, no. 1: 163–176. Warren, Mark E. 2004. “What Does Corruption Mean in a Democracy?” American Journal of Political Science 48, no. 2: 328–343. ———. 2006. “Political Corruption as Duplicitous Exclusion.” PS: Political Science and Politics 39, no. 4: 803–807. ———. 2010. “Is Low Trust in Democratic Institutions a Problem of Corruption?” In Corruption and American Politics. Michael A. Genovese and Victoria A. Farrar-Myers, eds. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, pp. 37–64. Wathne, Cecilie, and Matthew C. Stephenson. 2021. “The Credibility of Corruption Statistics: A Critical Review of Ten Global Estimates.” CMI, U4 Issue 2021:4. Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. G. Roth and C. Wittich, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wedel, Janine. 2009. The Shadow Elite. New York: Basic Books. ——— . 2012. “Rethinking Corruption in the Age of Ambiguity.” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 8: 453–498. Wertheimer, Fred. 2016. “Symposium: McDonnell Decision Substantially Weakens the Government’s Ability to Prevent Corruption and Protect Citizens.” SCOTUS Blog, June 28. https://www.scotusblog.com/2016/06/symposium-mcdonnell-decision-substantially -weakens-the-governments-bbility-to-prevent-corruption-and-protect-citizens/. Wheeler, Stanton, David Weisburd, and Nancy Bode. 1982. “Sentencing the White-Collar Offender: Rhetoric and Reality.” American Sociological Review 47: 641–659. Williams, Robert F. 1999. State Constitutional Law: Cases and Materials. Charlottesville, VA: Lexis Law Publishing. Winter, Brian. 2019. “What Latin America’s ‘Corruption Busters’ Got Right—and Wrong.” Americas Quarterly, July 11. https://www.americasquarterly.org/article/what-latin-americas -corruption-busters-got-right-and-wrong/.

178

References

Winters, Jeffrey A. 2011. Oligarchy. Cambridge University Press. Winters, Matthew S., and Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro. 2013. “Lacking Information or Condoning Corruption: When Do Voters Support Corrupt Politicians?” Comparative Politics 45, no. 4: 418–436. Wolfe, David T., and Dana R. Hermanson. 2004. “The Diamond of Fraud: Considering the Four Elements of Fraud.” The CPA Journal 74, no. 12: 38–42. Wolin, Sheldon S. 2008. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Princeton University Press. World Justice Project. 2019. “Failed Justice: Prevalence of Torture in Mexico’s Criminal Justice System.” https://worldjusticeproject.mx/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/GIZ-Report _Failed-Justice.pdf. World Values Survey. 2012. Wave 6. https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSDocumentationWV6 .jsp. You, Jong-sung. 2005. “Corruption and Inequality as Correlates of Social Trust: Fairness Matters More Than Similarity.” The Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations and the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Working Paper No. 29. You, Jong-sung, and Sanjeev Khagram. 2005. “A Comparative Study of Inequality and Corruption.” American Sociological Review 70: 136–157. Yu, Frank, and Xiaoyun Yu. 2011. “Corporate Lobbying and Fraud Detection.” Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis 46, no. 6: 1865–1891. Zaloznaya, Marina. 2014. “The Social Psychology of Corruption: Why It Does Not Exist and Why It Should.” Sociology Compass 8, no. 2: 187–202. Zapata, Martin. 2018. “Collective Action Theory Applied to Anticorruption Practice: A Bolivian Case Study.” IACA Research Paper Series No. 7. Zavaleta, Noé. 2021. “Veracruz, un circo electoral en medio de la tragedia.” Proceso 2315 (March 14): 43–45. Zurcher, Anthony. 2017. “Is Trump’s Immigration Order Legal?” BBC News. February 6. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38766364.

Index

accountability, 35, 87, 101, 106, 115, 145, 149–152, 155; and elections, 76; the Klitgaard formula, 7; rule of law and democracy, 24–25, 43, 117; undermining, 79, 82, 85, 90–91; See also checks and balances accounts (justification and excuses for corporate crimes), 130. See also neutralization Acton (Lord), 1, 9, 11, 17, 24, 129, 143 Administrative Procedure Act (APA) (United States), 75, 89 Afghanistan, 84 altruism, 7, 140. See also selflessness ambition, 7, 126 anticorruption: to consolidate power 98; as narrative, 93–94, 97; selective enforcement of, 103 anticorruption dilemma, 4, 94, 96, 103, 109; impact on society, 116 anti-developing country bias, 33 anti-state bias, 33, 89, 135 Argentina, 92, 105–106, 109, 114, 116 Aristotle, 7, 19, 25, 28–29, 31, 89, 91 authoritarian regimes, 25, 38, 150 authority: definition 22 Ayotzinapa (Mexico), 106

banking crisis, 2009 (United States), 51

behavioral economics, 121, 153, 163 Bolsonaro, Jair (Brazil), 104–107 Brazil, 85, 104–106, 113–114, 116, 119– 120 bribe/bribery, 13, 54, 90, 108; by businesses, 127, 133, 139; in a definition of corruption, 12, 39, 150; factors associated with paying, 127, 142; in public opinion polls, 123, 142, 151; for survival 137; by organized crime, 56–58; in Mexico, 79–80; US anti-bribery law, 40, 91 Buckley v. Valeo, 16, 39, 73, 154 Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), 51 bureaucracy: autonomy, 65; controls over, 86–87; in Mexico, 87; corruption, 12, 49, 53

Calderón, Felipe (Mexico), 56, 58, 67, 79 Calvin, John, 143 campaigns: contributions/finances, 3, 12–13, 30, 50–51, 73, 89, 100; influence of, 65; spending, 66; illegal use of public resources, 79 capitalism: relationship to democracy, 42–44; shaping individual values, 135; in Mexico, 55; narrative, 46; and imperialism, 34;

179

180

Index

capitalism/democracy dilemma, 3, 41– 43, 47, 50, 59–60, 62–63, 66; role of corruption in alleviating, 60–63 centralizing/consolidating power, 4, 98, 111; in Mexico, 110 cheating, 128–130, 136, 142 checks and balances, 7, 77, 97, 100, 110, 112, 115, 117, 120, 149 Chevron, 66 Citizens United v. FEC, 16, 40, 73 civic virtue, 44 civil society: actors and civil society organizations, 36, 77, 97, 101, 106– 107, 113–114, 155 Clean Record law (Brazil), 113 clientelism, 36, 79, 90, 97 collective action dilemma/theory, 97, 101, 147, 155 conspiracy theories, 114, 117 constitutional materialism, 28, 153 constructivism, 35, 41 corporations, 3, 8, 50–54, 56, 58, 60, 71, 88–89, 149 corruption: definition, 15, 20, 27–28, 150; as individual behavior, 28; normative vs. descriptive perceptions of corruption, 122, 124; for private gain, 29–30; to promote profits, 135; for survival, 125, 127, 133, 137, 139; systemic perspective, 28 corruption dilemma, 2, 4, 8–9, 29, 157 cultural hegemony, 16 culture, 9, 34, 88, 99, 119, 122, 133–136, 138, 158; institutional, 134, 136; within organizations, 133

definitional dilemma, 2, 5, 20–23, 37, 42, 48, 91, 94, 124 democracy, 3–5, 8, 20, 35, 42, 93, 150; bourgeois, 38, 45; and capitalism, 43; challenges/crisis/decline of, 95, 100, 115–120, 152, 154; corruption within a definition of, 39–40; relationship to corruption, 141; deepening of, 5, 7, 139, 153, 156–157; in Europe and Western–style, 14, 33, 38; impact on corruption, 76; and inequality, 67; Lincoln’s description of, 38; nature of, 21, 24–26, 42, 64, 95, 100, 119, 152; structural dependence on capitalism, 45–47; support for, 116,

132, 149; survival of, 60, 65; taming of, 3, 50, 60–62, 65. See also democracy/rule of law narrative; capitalism/democracy dilemma democracy/rule of law narrative, 11, 21, 26–27, 32, 42, 93 Denmark, 140 drug trafficking. See organized crime

economic growth, 8, 63, 147, 149 elections: in democracy, 30, 38, 43, 45, 50, 52, 62, 65–66, 73, 78–79, 83–84, 90, 111–112, 117, 148, 156; electoral system, 90; as limitation on power, 25, 43, 71–72, 75–76. See also campaigns electoral fraud, 20, 39, 74, 79 empirical or operational level debate on limits on power, 7–8, 10 environmental factors associated with perception and participation in corruption, 122, 126–127, 132–133, 135–136, 138–141 epistemological dilemma, 119 European state, 14 exceptionalism, 5, 130

FBI (United States), 82–83, 86, 111 Federal Election Commission (FEC) (United States), 51, 73 Fernández de Kirchner, Cristina (Argentina), 106 financial intelligence units in Brazil and Mexico, 104 first order norms, 77, 128 fiscal paradise, 49, 66, 78 Foucault, Michel, 9, 138, 152 Fox, Vicente (Mexico), 84, 119 freedom of speech, 11, 13, 62, 147–148

García Cabeza de Vaca, Francisco (Mexico),110 García Luna, Genero (Mexico), 56, 58, 67 gatopardismo, 96 gender, 24, 54; androcentrism/patriarchy, 38, 155; differences in perceptions and participation in corruption, 124– 125, 131–132 Germany, 127, 130 gerrymandering, 12, 74

Index global anticorruption industry, 21, 32, 33, 154 Gramsci, Antonio, 9, 10, 16–17, 22, 27, 35, 58 group identity theory, 94–95, 125 Guadalajara, Mexico, 134 Guatemala, 107–109 Gutiérrez Rebollo, José de Jesús (Mexico), 58

Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 91 Hobbes, Thomas, 10, 17, 91 Honduras, 107–109, 115 Hoover, J. Edgar (United States), 83, 86

ideological debate on limits of power, 6, 8, 10 illegal forms of corruption, 2, 9, 13–14, 37, 42, 49, 53, 58–59, 61, 71–72, 74– 75, 86–88, 150, 154 imbalances/inequalities of power, 2, 5–6, 810, 13–14, 17, 37, 47, 82, 90, 139, 152–153 impunity, 12–13, 23, 26, 39, 92, 103, 137, 139; in Guatemala, 107, 109; in Honduras, 107–109; in Mexico, 4, 36, 57, 78, 80, 84–85, 87, 108, 111, 114 inequality, 8, 12, 15–17, 34, 42, 45–48, 67, 82, 90, 126, 132, 142, 148; link to corruption, 9, 46–47; link to capitalism, 46 institutional corruption, 12, 14, 28, 31, 39, 73, 77, 115, 120 Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) (Mexico), 62, 78–80, 84, 106, 134 International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), 107 Iraq, 84 iron law of oligarchy, 76, 147

justice, 25–26, 58, 75, 85, 87, 100, 124, 145, 153

Kant, Immanuel, 64 Kirchner, Nestor (Argentina), 109, 114

law enforcement. See police lawfare, 98, 103, 119. See also weaponization of anticorruption legal corruption, 12, 28, 31, 39–40, 42, 50, 70, 73, 148

181

legitimacy, 7–8, 13–14, 17, 21, 26, 28, 37, 61, 78, 88, 97–99, 111, 116, 147, 150 Lenin, Vladimir, 25 liberties/freedoms, 8, 24–25, 38, 43–44, 49, 62, 64–65, 73, 100, 135, 147, 153 lobbying, 3, 12, 50–52, 67, 74, 92 López Obrador, Andrés Manuel (Mexico), 4, 56, 92, 104, 109–110, 112–113 loyalty: 77, 80, 84; in-group loyalty, 126. See also group identity theory Lozoya Austin, Emilio (Mexico) 67, 111–112, 120 Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio (Brazil), 104– 106, 120

Machiavelli, Niccolò, 71, 81, 91 Macri, Mauricio (Argentina), 109 Madison, James (United States), 7, 47, 65, 69–70, 72, 75, 77, 81, 102 market influence corruption, 3, 50 Marx/Marxism, 17, 25–26, 44–45, 65, 138–139 McCutheson v. FEC, 73 McDonnel v. U.S, 19, 91 media, 3, 16, 51, 53, 57, 77, 80, 90, 92, 103, 113–114, 131, 141, 143 mensalao scandal (Brazil), 105–106, 113 Mexican Institute of Competitiveness (IMCO), 114 Mexicanos Contra la Corrupción e Impunidad (MCCI), 91 Mexico: anticorruption in, 4, 104–106, 109, 112–114, 119–120; anticorruption by civil society, 36, 113–114; anti–state bias, 89; and the capitalism/democracy dilemma, 50, 55–59; corruption in, 12, 16, 47, 62, 67, 78–80, 84–92, 134; perceptions of and participation in corruption, 19, 122–123, 125, 127, 134, 143, 151. See also epistemological dilemma, and gatopardismo mobilizational bias, 23, 35. monarchy, 7, 10, 14, 23–24, 46, 72, 152 Monex scandal (Mexico), 112 money laundering, 51, 58, 66, 78, 106, 111. See also fiscal paradise Montesquieu, 7 Morales, Jimmy (Guatemala), 107

182

Index

morality, 10, 44, 60, 62, 81, 121–123, 128–134, 137–140, 143, 153; moral corruption, 47 Morena party (Mexico), 91, 110, 112 Moro, Sergio (Brazil), 106 Movement against Corruption and Impunity (MCCI), 114

National Action Party (PAN) (Mexico), 55 National Anticorruption System (SNA) (Mexico), 36, 109, 113 National Electoral Institute (INE) (Mexico), 79, 112 National Rifle Association (NRA) (United States), 51 neoliberal policies, 33–34, 55, 58, 95, 110 neutralization, 130–131 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 138

Odebrecht scandal (Latin America), 79 oligarchy, 7, 31, 59, 66–67; iron law of, 76, 147 Open Government Alliance/Partnership, 102, 152 opposition, as perceived threat, 86 order, maintaining, 8, 81, 135, 147 Organization of American States (OAS), 108 organized crime, 12, 57–58, 66–67, 79, 85, 88, 106, 111 orthodox perspective on corruption, 11, 21, 28, 32–34, 41, 49, 64, 72, 124; questioning the, 31, 36 out-of-power groups, 37, 97, 99, 114

PACs (United States), 51, 66 participation in corruption, factors associated with, 126–132 path dependency, 35, 157, 172 patronage, 36, 76–77, 90, 97, 166; patron–clientelism, 47; loyalty to patron, 77, 80, 87 Pemexgate (Mexico), 79 Peña Nieto, Enrique (Mexico), 56, 67, 79–80, 106, 111–114, 120 perceptions of corruption: differences between public officials and the public, 141; factors associated with, 122, 124–125

personal dilemma, 5, 37, 95, 121–122, 124, 137, 140–141 Peru, 112, 115–116 Pierson v. Ray, 91 Plato, 25 pluralism, 62, 75, 95, 117 polarization, 94–95, 104, 114–118 police corruption, 23, 57–58, 78, 82–83, 120, 128, 137, 142, 151; in Brazil, 106, 120; in Mexico, 47, 57–58, 82, 85, 92, 134–135; in the United States, 82–83, 91 political culture. See culture political dilemma, 3, 37, 69, 70–71, 73, 78, 81, 85–87, 102 political will, 120, 158 politician’s dilemma, 97 politicization, 94–95, 100, 104, 109, 114, 117–118; of corruption and anticorruption, 4–5, 116 power: absolute, 1, 9, 11, 17; definition, 9, 22; hegemonic, 9–11, 16–17, 22, 27, 34, 40, 47; pitting power against power, 14, 44, 75. See also imbalances of power prescriptive-descriptive dualism, 124 principal-agent approach, 29, 32 private prison industry (United States), 53 professionalizing the bureaucracy, 49 prosecution and sanctioning of corrupt officials, 98 PT (Brazilian Workers Party), 104, 105 public good, 25, 26, 128, 151 public interest, 54, 59, 75, 115, 129, 140; in definition of corruption, 29–31, 37, 40; as democratic ideal, 3, 26, 38–39, 43, 49; and capitalism, 44–45, 54; perceptions of, 71, 86; and the state, 69, 89, 124 153 public opinion: to define corruption, 31; surveys on corruption, 54, 87–88, 151. See also perceptions of corruption Putin, Vladimir, 107

rational choice theory, 14, 28, 30, 137, 145, 158 revolving door, 3, 12, 51, 52, 55, 58 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 47, 64, 137, 143 Rousseff, Dilma (Brazil), 85, 95, 103– 104, 114

Index Rove, Karl, 10 rule of law, 17, 21, 24, 29, 35, 38–40, 78, 81; definition of, 24; and patterns of corruption, 53, 86–88; and oligarchy, 59. See also democracy/rule of law narrative Russia, 140

Saint Augustine, City of Gods, 21 Salinas de Gortari, Carlos (Mexico), 16, 79 Salinas de Gortari, Raul (Mexico), 119 Sanders, Bernie (United States), 48 Sandoval, Roberto (Mexico), 85 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, 51 Scalia, Justice Antonin (United States), 4 scandal, 118; construction of, 95; against current government officials, 113 scapegoats, 60–61, 131 second order norms, 12, 25, 75, 128 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) (United States), 51 security versus internal state controls, 81–85 selective enforcement, 103, 112 selfishness, 8, 92, 121, 153 selflessness, 8, 121 Senate (United States), 89 separation of powers, 43, 75, 77 social identity theory. See group identity theory social psychological experimentation, 127–130, 136 society, problems in fighting corruption, 101 Solidaridad (Mexico), 79 stability, 62–63, 70, 81, 84, 86, 89, 91, 135, 143, 148 state: definition, 3; autonomy, 65 state capture, 3, 47, 50, 55–57, 149 state/society narrative, 113 structural corruption, 7, 9–12, 28, 154, 174 structuralism, 138 sucker mentality, 126, 136, 142

183

superstructure, 17, 45, 61. See also Marxism Supreme Court (United States), 1, 4, 19, 39–40, 66–67, 69, 88–89, 107

Taylor v. Rojas, 91 torture, 83, 85, 92, 120, 137 tradeoffs, 8, 16, 84, 103, 108, 147–149, 153 transactionalism, 148 Transparency International, 19, 33, 53, 88, 150 Trump, Donald (United States), 4, 20, 48, 53, 66– 67, 75–76, 105, 107–109, 111, 114, 118; collusion with Russia, 111 two-level game/debate on corruption, 13, 153. See also empirical debate, ideological debate UN Anti-corruption Convention, 152 unions, 82, 84, 91 United States, 16, 19, 38, 40, 42, 48, 50– 51, 53–59, 62, 65–67, 69–70, 72–73, 78, 82–84, 86, 88–89, 90–92, 104– 105, 107–109, 111, 114, 118–119, 124, 152, 155–156; Congress, 77; anti-state bias in, 89; history of limiting corruption, 155; Constitution, 72; polls on corruption, 124

Venezuela, 103 vertical controls: techniques to undermine, 79 Vizcarra, Martín (Peru), 112

weaponization of anticorruption, 4, 105, 111, 114. See also lawfare Western interests, 32–35, 41, 45, 49, 66 whistleblowing, 97, 134 white-collar crime, 78, 130, 143 Wittgenstein/Wittgensteinian 11, 35, 41 women and corruption. See gender

Zafiro, Operation, scandal (Mexico), 80 Zedillo, Ernesto (Mexico), 56, 119

About the Book

CONTINUING HIS DEEP STUDY OF THE NATURE OF POLITICAL CORRUPtion, in his new book Stephen Morris confronts a fundamental dilemma: How can we control power, when power essentially determines what we can, and cannot, control? More specifically, how can we control the power of those actors who use that very power to influence our understanding of corruption and shape our efforts to fight it, all in accordance with their own interests? As he unpacks the inherent contradictions that handicap the critical quest to limit the power of the powerful, Morris highlights the challenges of fighting corruption and contributes significantly to our understanding of its politicization and persistence.

Stephen D. Morris is professor of political science and international

relations at Middle Tennessee State University. He is also adjoint professor in the Center for Latin American Studies at Vanderbilt University.

185