Corruption now threatens one of the oldest and most established democratic nations. In a 2024 poll, two-thirds of Britons said politics is becoming more corrupt (here), and in 2025 nearly 9 in 10 expressed concerns about potential corruption among politicians (here). Over the past year 16% reported being asked for a bribe, and 11% were asked to facilitate money laundering (here).

U.K. anticorruption fighters are taking heed. None more than Robert Barrington. In Corrupted Kingdom, out July 16 (preorder here), the former Transparency International U.K. head and Chair of T.I. International’s Council chronicles the ways corruption has begun to infect venerable U.K. institutions: from the Monarchy, where the now deflowered Prince Andrew’s flacked for a Kazakh oligarch in return for £ 3 million to Parliament, where MPs are secretly paid to question Ministers and seats in the House of Lords are on offer for hefty campaign contributions, to Scotland Yard, local governments, businesses small and large.

It is even seeping into the academy. Currently Professor of Anti-Corruption Practice at Sussex University’s Centre for the Study of Corruption, Barrington argues that the growing willingness of universities to accept dark money compromises their independence and their integrity.

British and non-British readers will both find much to recommend in the pages of Corrupted Kingdom.

British readers are likely to be most interested in the reforms Barrington advances, from beefing up “dull sounding” but important accountability institutions such as the Auditor General for Wales and the Northern Ireland Audit Office to teasing out whether the U.K. should create a formal, institutional structure, even an independent anticorruption agency, to replace the current arrangement, a patronage position in the PM’s office whose occupant has no official status and whose advice is easily, and often, ignored.

Citizens of other liberal democracies will find (reassuringly or depressingly) that theirs is not the only country where abuses stemming from large donations to political parties orchestrated by lobbyists is a front-page problem. Americans may take some solace from learning that Boris Johnson’s short-lived reign as PM approached Trumpian-levels of corruption.

Corrupted Kingdom makes a convincing case that corruption is behind the decay of British institutions public and private and thus explains Britain’s current malaise. But making corruption the through line of the ills of the British polity creates a problem as well. Several reasons Barrington cites for why British institutions are in decline have nothing to do with corruption – or at least with the way he defines it.

Corruption has no agreed definition (as GAB readers know well). Barrington’s is one he and Sussex University colleagues Rebecca Dobson Phillips and Elizabeth Dávid-Barrett selected after sifting through 117(!) alternatives (here). The search was motivated by their view that a clear, rigorous definition is essential if corruption fighters are to “address the right problems with the right tools.” What they settled on, and Corrupted Kingdom adopts, is definition much like TI’s. An action is corrupt if an actor exercises power held by virtue of a position of trust (public office, executive in private entity) exercises it in violation of duty or misuses it some way. In short, an abuse of entrusted power.

Several villains that he blames for Britain’s decline are not, by his analysis, abusing entrusted power. The chief villain, what he terms “the dark quartet,” is the combination of political party donations, lobbying, conflicts of interest, and the revolving door. While he contends the actions the quarter facilitates lie at the core of any analysis of the spread of political corruption, not only in the United Kingdom but in all liberal democracies, the actions rarely if ever meet the abuse of entrusted power test for corruption.

A second villain he spotlights is what Brits sarcastically if telling have labelled “chumocracy,” the self-perpetuating network of privately educated Oxbridge-connected politicians, business leaders, and media figures who do each other favors according to unwritten rules. (In America the same phenomenon goes by the prosaic term the “swamp.”)

Barrington might have skipped over such problems. They do not fall within the book’s writ – how corruption (framed as the abuse of entrusted power) is poisoning British society. And the book has much to say without including them. How bribery, self-dealing, and other offenses corrupt under any definition undermines British society. And what can be done to curb them.

He includes them because they constitute “staging points” on the journey to the deep-seated structural corruption that he fears Britain is headed towards. Fair enough. But what is not fair, or least not satisfying, is that he scrutinizes their causes and possible cures solely as problems of corruption. This leaves him without an answer to “polemicists” claims that the dark quartet, chumocracy and the rest are not points on the way to a wholly corrupt British society but signs that it already is, one where the system enriches the elites while leaving most people poor.

The corruption focus does offer him something to say about what to do about staging points. To silence or at least muffle the dark quartet, he recommends two remedies taken from the standard anticorruption playbook: debarments from public contracts and greater disclosure of lobbying activities. Similarly, he calls for making violations of the Nolan Principles, the U.K.’s voluntary and unenforceable ethical guidelines for civil servants and politicians, sanctionable. And naturally he cites the remedy featured on page one of every guide to curbing corruption: greater political will.

From the hedging and qualifications that accompany the discussion of how to deal with these staging points, it is clear he is not satisfied with his treatment either. Most notably when it comes to political will. Like other treatments of corruption, the analysis ends with the assertion that political will is the critical ingredient. Like them, he offers nothing about where to find it or how to build it.

Here is where he and other corruption scholars would find it helpful to look beyond the literature on corruption. The most relevant is that of students of the workings of modern, liberal democracies. Like Barrington, they have been alarmed by dark quartets, chumocracy, and other corrupt or seemingly corrupt policies that reward the few and ignore if not harm the majority. Rather than beginning from the perspective of corruption, however, their work starts from an analysis of how people act collectively, and indeed one of the canonical works is Mancur Olson’s eponymous The Logic of Collective Action.

The resulting learning teaches that there will be times when a small group will find itself able to extract large benefits from government with the costs spread among the rest of the population. Benefits are concentrated; costs are diffuse: a result that defies the original thinking about democracy. For in a system built on majority rule, one would expect, as early students of democracy like James Madison did, that the problem would be just the opposite, the majority taking advantage of a minority.

It is the logic of collection action that explains this nonintuitive outcome. A tax break is a classic example. A small, organized group, say of widget manufacturers, has a strong incentive to organize and push for large tax breaks for making widgets. If they succeed, they benefit and the rest of the taxpaying public will each pay a bit more in taxes to make up for the loss from the reduction in widget makers’ taxes. At the same time, no single taxpayer has sufficient incentive to organize the rest of the tax paying public to oppose the tax break. That is neither wrong nor evil. It is simply the logic governing collective actions.

Collective action analysis provides a rebuttal to those who claim British society is intrinsically corrupt. It makes plain that policies that benefit the few at the expense of the many are not unique to the United Kingdom. They are an unavoidable consequence of acting collectively. What separates Britain, and other liberal democracies, from authoritarian governments is that liberal democracies offer a path the many can take to overcome the logic.

It is the same path found the corruption literature describes. Rouse the many to act together to replace policies favoring the few with those that benefit the majority. Many of the techniques are the same too. Seek greater transparency in lobbying and campaign donations, promote regular exposés of blatant, outrageous cases of large, highly concentrated benefits that leave the many paying an especially steep tab and couple them with constant advocacy in the political arena. The goal is to increase the saliency of the abuses and the cost to the average citizen. Eventually, the hope is enough of the few will become sufficiently agitated that the deus ex machina of corruption remedies, political will, will appear.

One important element the collective action literature adds is the focus on the origin of political will. It shows how it starts with someone or some organization willing to bear the costs of mobilizing the many by creating a compelling reason to advocate, demonstrate, and vote for a change. It is the work of such “policy entrepreneurs,” as they are now called, that creates political will.

It is not that policy entrepreneurs are absent from the corruption world, and indeed in Sussex University working papers and a GAB post, Barrington describes how TI U.K. and other civil society groups “entrepreneured” passage of the U.K. Bribery Act. What his and other accounts of corruption campaigns leave out is analysis of how anticorruption entrepreneurs come to be, how they operate, how more might be fostered.

The political science literature takes up these issues in a variety of policy arenas. In Policy Entrepreneurs and Dynamic Change, Mintron details how entrepreneurs have employed networking, framing, and coalition to bring about policy change, and his book with Schneider and Teske analyze the conditions for entrepreneur emergence. Mining these and related works should produce more informed recommendations for generating the political will required to tackle many forms of corruption.

Th concentrated benefits/diffuse costs logic prompts thinking about ways to reduce the costs of enlisting the many to combat the corruption of the few. Opening the courts to suits for damages caused by corruption is one way. In the U.S., it costs little for an entrepreneurial law firm to bring an action on behalf of thousands or hundreds of thousands of citizens, each of whom suffered some small damage caused by corrupt acts that reaped millions for the perpetrators. In France NGOs can play a similar role for a similarly low price. In both allowing recovery in a single proceeding of the damages all victims suffered reverses the concentrated benefits/diffuse costs calculus.

The U.K. does provisions for collective or class actions. But whereas in the U.S. each claimant is automatically party to the lawsuit unless they affirmatively withdraw, “opt-out,” in the U.K. each must “opt-in,” formally agree to be part of the litigation. That raises the cost of a collective suit, high enough that it does not reverse the concentrated benefit/diffuse costs calculus for corruption actions. For U.K. corruption reformers, focusing on that calculus underlines the value of changing from an opt-in to an opt-out system. It also spurs thinking about other institutional and legal reforms that would reverse the calculus.

Nothing should delay readers from getting their hands on this book. But a note of caution for the British readers. Barrington means the book to sound the alarm about the spread of corruption in the United Kingdom. The alarm goes off, loudly. So loudly that U.K. readers will want to have a pair of noise cancelling headphones in reach.