Corruption corrodes all facets of the world’s political and corporate life, yet until now there was no one book that explained how best to battle it. The Corruption Cure puts some thirty-five countries under an anticorruption microscope to show exactly how to beat back the forces of sleaze and graft. Robert Rotberg defines corruption in its many forms, describes the available remedies, and examines how we identify and measure corruption’s presence. He demonstrates how determined past and contemporary leaders changed their wildly corrupt countries—even the Nordics—into paragons of virtue, and how leadership is making a significant difference in stimulating political anticorruption movements in places like India, Croatia, Botswana, and Rwanda. Rotberg looks at corporate corruption and how it can be checked, and also offers an innovative fourteen-step plan for nations that are ready to end corruption. Tougher laws and better prosecutions are not enough. This book enables us to rethink the problem completely—and to solve it once and for all.
Corruption corrodes all facets of the world’s political and corporate life, yet until now there was no one book that explained how best to battle it. The Corruption Cure puts some thirty-five countries under an anticorruption microscope to show exactly how to beat back the forces of sleaze and graft. Robert Rotberg defines corruption in its many forms, describes the available remedies, and examines how we identify and measure corruption’s presence. He demonstrates how determined past and contemporary leaders changed their wildly corrupt countries—even the Nordics—into paragons of virtue, and how leadership is making a significant difference in stimulating political anticorruption movements in places like India, Croatia, Botswana, and Rwanda. Rotberg looks at corporate corruption and how it can be checked, and also offers an innovative fourteen-step plan for nations that are ready to end corruption. Tougher laws and better prosecutions are not enough. This book enables us to rethink the problem completely—and to solve it once and for all.
The Corruption Cure: How Citizens and Leaders Can Combat Graft
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The Corruption Cure: How Citizens and Leaders Can Combat Graft
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Overview
Corruption corrodes all facets of the world’s political and corporate life, yet until now there was no one book that explained how best to battle it. The Corruption Cure puts some thirty-five countries under an anticorruption microscope to show exactly how to beat back the forces of sleaze and graft. Robert Rotberg defines corruption in its many forms, describes the available remedies, and examines how we identify and measure corruption’s presence. He demonstrates how determined past and contemporary leaders changed their wildly corrupt countries—even the Nordics—into paragons of virtue, and how leadership is making a significant difference in stimulating political anticorruption movements in places like India, Croatia, Botswana, and Rwanda. Rotberg looks at corporate corruption and how it can be checked, and also offers an innovative fourteen-step plan for nations that are ready to end corruption. Tougher laws and better prosecutions are not enough. This book enables us to rethink the problem completely—and to solve it once and for all.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691191577 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/06/2019 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 400 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.70(w) x 8.80(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Corruption Cure
How Citizens and Leaders Can Combat Graft
By Robert I. Rotberg
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-16890-6
CHAPTER 1
The Nature of Corruption
Greed and taking advantage — self-interest — are hardwired into the human condition. Corrupt acts flow from a natural (rational) desire to improve one's position and one's earning potential. Both the giver and the taker of corrupt exchanges fundamentally attempt to better their position/situation/claim, calculating the extent to which direct or indirect responsibilities and results will flow from an exchange of gratuities, an acknowledgment of influence, and the creation of obligation. All corruption, even the most venal, is fundamentally based on reciprocity, cultivation, and an oiling of whatever wheels permit the vehicle of life to roll faster, roll securely, roll in the right direction, or roll at all. Corruption is a method of allocating scarce resources and of minimizing disadvantages based on status or class.
Corruption, after all, is an ancient phenomenon, known at least from Mesopotamian times. Public notables abused their offices even then for personal gain. Well-born and common citizens have long sought advantage — as citizens, as factions, as participants in business endeavors — by corrupting those holding power or controlling access to permits, perquisites, rulers, and the like. Any exercise of discretion, especially forms of discretion that facilitate or bar entry to opportunity, offers a magnetic opportunity to abuse or take advantage of that power. The privilege of being a gatekeeper under auspicious conditions can reap bountiful returns, especially if the opportunities in question are potentially zero-sum in their impact on individuals or classes of individuals. It is an immutable law of human endeavor that those who seek advantage will approach authorities for recognition or gain and that those who are in positions of authority — those who have it in their office or their function to favor one claim over another — will appreciate the strength of their positions and welcome forms of persuasion to fulfill their responsibilities.
Until avarice and ambition cease being human traits — until integrity triumphs — corruption will flourish. Responding to the pulse of self-interest, favor will be offered and sought. Merit alone will determine outcomes and advancement in only a minority of situations and in a minority of nations. The current of corruption will therefore continue to exist as an undertow even in the most upright and abstemious of nations and societies. Receiving entitlements rightfully, and in a timely manner, will continue to be the global exception rather than the everyday norm. Almost everywhere there will continue to be the presumption, sadly, that the most desirable and beneficial outcomes will be secured through illicitly pressed influence (from connections) or via hard-bought gains — not necessarily from honest attainment.
We see this recognition of the presence of corruption — especially in political life but also in the interactions of citizen and state in the nineteenth century — in the novels of Charles Dickens, especially Little Dorrit (1855), and in George Eliot's Felix Holt, The Radical (1866), in which Eliot bemoans the fact that British parliamentarians were unashamed "to make public questions which concern the welfare of millions a mere screen for their own petty private ends." Corruption was not felt to be a "damning disgrace" by such figures, and Eliot used the word "corruption" explicitly.
Following Plato, Aristotle, Ibn Khaldun, Hobbes, and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century journalists and authors, this book asserts that corruption is common everywhere, even in traditional societies; that almost no nation-states and few leaders are immune from the temptations of corruption; that we now know more than ever about the mechanisms and the impact of corruption; that corrupt practices are more odious and more disruptive in the world's newer nations than in older ones (which experienced their corrupt eras in times past); and that worldwide corruption is now a pernicious threat to fragile national orders and, as Secretary of State John Kerry and Prime Minister David Cameron both said in 2016, to world order itself.
President Theodore Roosevelt declared that corruption "obliterated" the government of the people. Because corruption is so destructive to the accomplishment of good governance in much of today's world, because corrupt practices deter improved health outcomes and educational opportunities throughout wide swaths of the globe, because corrupt behavior leads indirectly and sometimes directly to loss of life (in Kathmandu, Tianjin, Istanbul, Lagos, and far beyond), because the wages of corruption often lead to civil conflict (as in large sections of sub-Saharan Africa such as Mali, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Central African Republic), and because the attractiveness of corruptly acquired benefits undermines the national interest (trading it for personal and special group interests) in one fragile nation after another, the need for a comprehensive and effective anticorruption strategy is more urgent and more imperative than ever before.
Corruption Defined
The standard definition of a corrupt act is some less or more elaborated formula of "the abuse of public office for private gain." In part, that definition, consciously refusing to moralize or to treat corruption merely as a disregard of ethical norms, draws on Nye's key early, still useful but rather cumbersome formulation: "Corruption is behavior which deviates from the formal duties of a public role because of private-regarding (person, close family, private clique) pecuniary or status gains; or violates rules against the exercise of certain types of private-regarding influence." Nye helpfully subdivided corruption into bribery (the "use of a reward to pervert the judgment of a person in a position of trust"), nepotism (a "bestowal of patronage by reason of ascriptive relationship rather than merit"), and misappropriation (illegal appropriation of public resources for private-regarding uses). His definition excluded considerations of whether corruption might, in certain circumstances, be in the public interest, and avoided evaluating whether differing Western and non-Western notions of corruption exist.
Huntington follows Nye in suggesting that corruption is the deviation by public officials from accepted norms to serve private ends. Rapid modernization generates corruption, he asserts, and reflects societal backwardness and the lack of "effective political institutionalization." Scott indicates that corruption is "a deviation from certain standards of behavior." That is, corruption is an undermining of a proper pursuit of the public interest by persons of authority whose roles implicitly commit them to be accountable and to act with integrity.
Corrupt acts are willful "transactions in which one party exchanges wealth," or kinship or friendship, "for influence over the decisions of government." As Scott points out, matter of factly, "were it not ... that ... government decisions represent valuable commodities to some citizens, there would be little corruption." Nor would there be much corruption if governments simply auctioned their valuable "things," such as jobs, access to education, and hospital treatment. Noonan, agreeing, says that a bribe is "an inducement improperly influencing the performance of a public function meant to be gratuitously exercised." Moreover, a bribe in classical times was any act that "perverted judgment." A bribe is universally shameful, never acknowledged publicly, and illegal in every jurisdiction.
Bribery is distinguishable from extortion. Bribes, monetary or otherwise, are tendered to gain something — a good or a service. They are given freely, whether intended to hasten or ensure the delivery of documents or services to which the bribe-proffering individuals are legally entitled, or whether intended to deprive someone else illicitly of benefits, services, or property. But payments that are demanded or exacted by officials from persons who would prefer not to pay extra for, say, a notionally free public service, are extorted. Some measure of coercion, often heavy-handed, is involved. Kickbacks qualify as extortion. So do shakedowns, blackmail, and any payments made because of physical or similar threats. The victims of extortion usually include the public interest. Graft is the unscrupulous misdirection of a public good into a private pocket. Embezzlement is theft, from the inside, and usually by virtue of employment in, or the holding of, public office.
Rose-Ackerman began her many important, skillful published contributions to the study of corruption by limiting its expression essentially to bribery by third parties of agents who put their own interests before those of their principals. All payments that were "not passed on to superiors" by agents, and were illegal, were deemed corrupt. She excluded nepotism and embezzlement. Subsequently, she settled on "the misuse of public power for private or political gain" as a working definition. Corruption, she said, is "a symptom that something has gone wrong" in the management of a state. Instead of delivering public services, its institutions are employed for personal enrichment, thus undermining a state's legitimacy as a neutral service provider. Much later, Rose-Ackerman implicitly expanded her definitional universe to include a variety of additional corrupt incentives that appear in any developing state, particularly in postconflict, transitional polities.
Klitgaard agrees that corruption happens when public servants disregard their obligations to perform properly and instead make special arrangements for private profit. For him (and originally for Cicero and many other classical authors), corruption is a question of fidelity, of agents being faithful to the public interest — the key regard of principals; corruption then appears as a divergence between the rational interests of principals acting on behalf of the public and agents maximizing their private interests on behalf of themselves or their families and relations. Corruption occurs when an agent betrays the public interest. Brasz says that corruption is the stealthy exercise of derived power by agents on behalf of principals against the public interest under the pretense that such an exercise is legitimate. He also reminds us that corruption means "the treacherous venom of deceit" — professing loyalty to the public interest while actually benefiting oneself or third parties. Williams believes that corruption is a subversion of the public interest, a notion that accords well with the earlier definitions in this paragraph and is both descriptive and normative.
Harris is quintessentially cynical: Obviously, he says, political corruption is the "exploitation of elected public office for private gain." But that formulation simply describes "normal political behavior." He continues: "Most politicians exploit public office for private gain when given legitimate opportunities to do so. ... How many decline to benefit personally from office by generous interpretation of perquisites available to them?"
Underkuffler asserts that corruption is "a moral evil." She worries that some corrupt acts may not be illegal, per se, and that all illegal behaviors may not be equally corrupt. She is also concerned that thinking of corruption as an intentional "breach of duty" — as omitted or committed acts, with anticipated private gain — is too narrow, excluding as it does serious ethical and moral lapses. For her, corruption is a special kind of betrayal of trust. Additionally, corruption is more than an act antithetical to the public interest, because such a definition begs the question: who defines the "public interest?" It can include too much and too little. For all of these reasons, Underkuffler prefers a defining concept close to Johnson's eighteenth-century assertion that corruption is "[w]ickedness; perversion of principles," decadence, degeneracy, and decay — the transgression of deeply held universal norms. Heywood and Rose align themselves somewhat with Underkuffler by suggesting that the central issue is not corruption, but a lack of sufficient integrity. Rules-based systems are no substitute for personal integrity. Indeed, corruption is a symptom, the absence of integrity the disease.
Those formulations fit well with Jordan Smith's suggestion that "moral outrage" is much more common in public discourse than some "technical" formulation. The public — especially the Nigerians whom he interviewed at length and observed closely — know that everyone who takes bribes, cheats, extorts, pillages, fails to perform, and contributes to moral decay flagrantly disregards widely accepted notions of equity and fairness. Myrdal essentially agreed that in South Asia, although corrupt practices had preserved the "soft state" and assisted in the persistence of irrationality, such behavior was well known to be wrong and was decried by aroused publics.
Leys, well before Underkuffler, contended that the "rules of private morality," not "public morality," defined corruption, but that those rules were conditioned and modified by rapid social and economic change. The incentive to corrupt, he also reminded us, is especially great in conditions of extreme inequality and considerable poverty. Further, in the new states it is easy to conceal corruption because of poor enforcement and traditions of gift-giving. "The chicken" becomes the "pound note." Or, as Mair wryly notes, "Good men do not practise ... industry ... where this would lead to a reduction in piece-rates."
Leys did not excuse corrupt behavior, but he wanted readers to be aware that in developing countries corruption sometimes offered a functional benefit, a position with which Scott agreed. Hoselitz argued that corruption in Asia and Africa was nothing more than a reflection of the "non-rational norms" that regulate official governmental proceedings on those continents. Riggs, too, suggested that group solidarity, poly-communalism, hereditary succession, and other reciprocative practices in developing societies overrode or out-competed Western notions of morality and appropriate behavior.
Johnston argues along with classical authors that a nation-state that has retreated from "goodness" is corrupt. He also says that corruption is "the abuse of a trust, generally involving public power, for private benefit which often, but by no means always, comes in the form of money." But he also believes that corruption may be a term employed generally to describe a range of acts that transcend precise or clear societal limits. Further, for him, the distinctions between private and public corruption are "difficult to draw." It is the absence of an ability to participate in "open, competitive, and fair political and economic processes," and a failure to prevent excesses, that characterize a corrupt society.
Rothstein, Teorell, and Kurer offer the concept of "partiality" as the offense of corruption. Rothstein contends that setting "impartiality" as a specific norm for public officials to abide by enables those who breach the norm for private gain to be held accountable both legally and ethically. For Rothstein and others, the underlying principle, "non-discrimination in the exercise of public authority," is fully in accord with normative theories of justice and democracy.
Kurer believes that states "ought to treat equally those who deserve equally." His impartiality principle demands "rule-bound administration," thus underpinning a "public office definition of corruption with arguments of distributional justice." Public officials therefore act corruptly when they "violate non-discrimination norms that regulate the allocation of a polity's rights and duties in order to derive a personal advantage."
Lee Kuan Yew asserts that fairness is critical. There "must be a level playing field for all. ... You must have a society that people believe is fair." Lee could have added that legitimacy was also essential. To be regarded by citizens as truly legitimate, a regime has to be viewed as fully fair, as well as transparent, accountable, and honest.
Uslaner thinks the Kurer, Rothstein, and Teorell prescriptions focus too narrowly on governmental corruption. The private sector makes important contributions to corruption, he contends. Instead of fairness or impartiality, Uslaner focuses on transparency and follows Warren in arguing that "political corruption attacks democracy by excluding people from decisions that affect them." Warren makes a powerful case that corruption is particularly problematic in democracies, nominal and otherwise. Democracies by definition are intended to be fair and inclusive. Yet, the corrupt practices that permeate so many "democracies" depend on unfairly excluding groups and individuals — on privileging access to state services to some groups and individuals over others. For Warren, corruption is hypocritical, covert, and duplicitous. So corruption is the absence of transparency and the antithesis of ideal democratic practice. Corruption, Uslaner declares, stems mostly from inequality rather than a simple lack of fair treatment, especially perceptions of economic and social disparities, and from low generalized societal trust. Improvements in institutional structure, especially more democracy and better rule of law instruments, do not diminish corruption if inequality persists. Uslaner's aggregate analysis indicates that "inequality and especially uneven economic development ... lead to low levels of out-group trust and then to high levels of malfeasance."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Corruption Cure by Robert I. Rotberg. Copyright © 2017 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Beating Back the Varieties of Brigandage 1
I The Nature of Corruption 16
II Measuring and Assessing Corrupt Behavior 50
III Strong Laws and Other Watchdogs 78
IV The Virtue of Anticorruption Investigative Commissions: Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia 109
V African Investigative Commissions: From Integrity to Interference 130
VI The Most Improved: Results 176
VII Nordic, Antipodean, and Other Exceptionalism: How Did Anticorruption Take Root? 197
VIII The Gift of Political Will and Leadership 223
IX People Power, Social Media, and Corporate Rigor 257
X Curing Corruption: Lessons, Methods, and Best Practices 290
XI What Works: The Anticorruption Program 310
A Research Note and Acknowledgments 313
Notes 319
Select Bibliography: Essential Readings on Corruption and Anticorruption 351
Index 365
What People are Saying About This
“An exhaustive description of the current state of corruption. . . . The strength of [Rotberg’s] book is its focus on change.”—Paul Collier, Times Literary Supplement
“A veritable tour de force, both intellectually and in scope. Rotberg is one of the most knowledgeable researchers in this field, and he also has impressive experience from practical efforts and policies for reducing corruption. I am convinced that The Corruption Cure will become a standard reference for a long time.”—Bo Rothstein, author of The Quality of Government
“As we renew the effort towards progress . . . we need a clear sense of where we have been. The Corruption Cure provides that sort of foundation, and will be a key starting-point for debates and actions to come.”—Michael Johnston, International Affairs