Author Archives: Matthew Stephenson

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About Matthew Stephenson

Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

Guest Post: Gender Equality in Parliaments and Political Corruption

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Priya Sood, Program Advisor at the Global Organization of Parliamentarians Against Corruption (GOPAC) contributes this guest post, in honor of International Women’s Day (March 8):

Does the extra X chromosome make political leaders less likely to bribe, pilfer, and lie? Are women across the board less corrupt?  According to recent research by GOPAC’s Women in Parliament Network, the reality is far more nuanced.

GOPAC conducted research based on a ten-year analysis of trends in the proportion of women elected to national parliaments as correlated to trends in national corruption levels. Surprisingly, the findings showed no general worldwide correlation between changes in parliamentary gender balance and changes in political corruption.  However, when GOPAC examined countries which have traditionally been strongholds of parliamentary democracy, the picture changed. In countries with reasonably robust democratic systems that enforce their anticorruption laws–but only in those countries–an increase in the number of women in parliament will tend to reduce corruption.

In addition to that general finding, GOPAC’s research on legislative gender equality and corruption also suggests a number of potential reforms that would help further both gender equality and anticorruption:

  • Legislation to mandate parliamentary oversight of government use and management of state financial instruments
  • Rules within political parties that commit a party to fielding a minimum number of candidates of each gender in general elections
  • Increasing female political leaders’ capacity and understanding of financial oversight mechanisms

For a more evidence that the women’s political participation tends to reduce corruption in strong democracies, but not elsewhere, see recent research by Justin Esarey and Gina Chirillo.

Updated Anticorruption Bibliography

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An updated version of my ever-expanding bibliography on corruption and anticorruption is now available from my website, and a direct link to the pdf is here. I’m always looking for new sources to add, so if you have suggestions for additions, please send them using the Contact page.

The U4 Proxy Challenge–some quick reactions

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One of the big challenges in anticorruption work, which I suspect we will be discussing quite a bit on this blog, concerns the measurement of corruption. After all, there are a bunch of different theories about the causes and consequences of corruption, and about the best way to combat it. Testing these theories requires some way of measuring the extent of corruption (or different forms of the corruption problem). And for folks actually doing anticorruption work (donors, governments, NGOs, etc.), it would be nice to be able to assess how well programs are working. Yet all of the existing measures have significant problems.

To try to inspire some creative thinking about new ways to measure corruption, the good people at the U4 Anti-Corruption Resources Centre (affiliated with the Christian Michelsen Institute in Bergen, Norway), with the assistance of the UK’S Department for International Development (DFID), recently sponsored a competition (the “Proxy Challenge”) to come up with new proxies that would help track the progress of anticorruption reform initiatives. U4 hosted a one-day workshop last month to let the five finalists present their proxies, to choose a winner, and to promote some general discussion of the challenges of developing useful proxies for corruption in a variety of contexts. I was able to attend. I’ll try to post a some more substantive thoughts in a later post, but here are a few quick reactions. Continue reading →

Political Bias in U.S. Anticorruption Enforcement

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In my post last week, which reacted to Dani Rodrick’s discussion of the political situation in Turkey (and also to some of the commentary on recent anticorruption enforcement patterns in China), I noted the ambivalence that many people (myself included) feel about anticorruption enforcement that is simultaneously (1) legitimate (in the sense that there is evidence that the targets have indeed violated the law) and (2) politically-motivated (in the sense that the targets may have been selected not only, or not primarily, because of the alleged corruption, but also because of partisan or factional political conflict).

One thing that I should have made clearer in the post, but didn’t, is that concerns about politically-motivated anticorruption enforcement are not limited to developing countries. Indeed, there’s some fairly strong evidence of partisan political bias in anticorruption enforcement in other countries, like the United States. The strongest evidence that I know of is a terrific paper by the political scientist Sandy Gordon, which finds very strong evidence that the U.S. Department of Justice is more likely to prosecute state and local officials for various corruption offenses if those officials belong to a different political party than the one that controls the White House. (This effect was particularly strong during George W. Bush’s presidency.) Continue reading →

Reflections on the ICIJ’s Expose on Chinese Princelings’ Offshore Holdings

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For those who haven’t seen it already, last month the International Consortium for Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) released a highly detailed report on the extensive offshore holdings of China’s “princelings” (close relatives of China’s political elite), and other relatives and close associates of the leadership. It’s worth a read. I doubt anyone who follows China even slightly will be terribly surprised to learn that friends and family of the Communist Party elite have stashed billions of dollars in shell companies and offshore bank accounts, but the level of detail—and the naming of names—is impressive. And while nothing in the report directly indicates that the money is the product of corruption or other illegal activity, as the saying goes, where there’s smoke…

A few quick thoughts on the report: Continue reading →

What Does “Zero Tolerance” of Corruption Mean? A Comment on Labelle

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Rick’s last couple of posts (here and here) critiqued Bill Gates’ claim that, because corruption in development aid projects as relatively small-scale (allegedly around 2%), it’s therefore a manageable “tax” on aid. Rick asserted (correctly, in my view) that the corruption problem is much bigger, and that the 2% figure is essentially a made-up number. Over at the Huffington Post, Huguette Labelle, the Chair of Transparency International, also responds to Gates. Most of what she says is pretty standard (which doesn’t mean it’s not right). But near the end of her post, she takes a striking position that’s worth thinking about a bit more critically: She argues forcefully against “[a]ccepting low levels of corruption as a pragmatic fact of life,” and instead advocates “[z]ero-tolerance for corruption.” This is quite different from Rick’s argument; Rick pointed out that corruption in development aid projects is not in fact low-level. But Ms. Labelle’s “zero tolerance” stance implies that even if Bill Gates were right about the facts, he would still be wrong in his conclusions. “Zero tolerance” of corruption certainly sounds good. But what exactly does it mean? Continue reading →

Turkish Turmoil and Politically-Motivated Anticorruption Enforcement

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At the Project Syndicate website, Dani Rodrik had a very nice commentary last month about the recent power struggles in Turkey, which have included prominent anticorruption actions against senior government figures. These actions have been brought by prosecutors sympathetic to one faction (the Gülenists) against high-ranking figures affiliated with Prime Minister Erdoğan and his party (the AKP). For people like me, who know next to nothing about Turkey, Rodrik’s post provides a nice overview (albeit one with a strong editorial slant). In addition, one passage in Rodrik’s post caught my attention, as it seems related to a common pattern, and problem, in the world of anticorruption enforcement:

The Gülenists have dressed up their campaign against Erdoğan in the guise of a corruption probe. No one who is familiar with Turkey would be surprised to learn that there was large-scale corruption surrounding construction projects. But the corruption probe is clearly politically motivated, and Erdoğan is right to question the prosecutors’ motives. The current round of judicial activism is as much about rooting out corruption as previous rounds were about [other alleged malfeasance] – which is to say, not much at all.

This seems to be a frequently recurring pattern: (1) one party or faction launches an aggressive anticorruption probe against a rival party or faction; (2) it is almost certainly true that most or all of the targets of the corruption investigation did in fact engage in corruption—often serious corruption; yet (3) it is also often the case that those pushing the investigations are doing so not only, or even primarily, out of genuine concern about corruption, but rather as a way to damage a political rival. The most familiar manifestation of this pattern occurs when a new party or faction comes to power and launches corruption investigations against its predecessors or main rivals, as part of what may amount to a purge (or, more mildly, an effort to consolidate power). There’s a plausible argument that this is what’s happening right now in China. The Turkey situation is a bit different, in that a faction that does not currently control the government nonetheless has enough support within the justice system (police, prosecutors, judges, etc.) to launch politically-motivated corruption probes of government officials. Continue reading →

On Differing Understandings of “Corruption”

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I’m sometimes asked how my work on anticorruption (and this blog) relates to the work of my Harvard Law School colleague Larry Lessig, who is the Director of Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics (and who also has a widely-read blog). Under Larry’s leadership, the Safra Center has been focused primarily on “institutional corruption,” and Larry’s 2011 book Republic, Lost likewise focuses on how money corrupts the U.S. Congress. So, what’s the relationship between our two projects?

The short answer is that, although I respect and admire Larry’s work, our corruption projects are about very different things. By itself that’s not terribly interesting, and I wouldn’t bother posting about it except that I think the differences in our projects highlight a longstanding difficulty about the term “corruption” and its use in social science and political advocacy. I don’t want to belabor the issue—when academics run out of ideas, they argue about definitions—but maybe a few quick observations on this point are in order.

Continue reading →

Bibliography on Corruption and Anticorruption

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As part of my research on corruption and anticorruption, I’ve been compiling a bibliography of sources — articles, books, working papers, reports, etc.  The current version of the bibliography, which includes over 2,300 sources, is available on my faculty webpage.  (To link directly to the bibliography, click here.)  I try to update the bibliography every month or so.  Despite its considerable length, I’m sure I’m missing a lot of important material, and of course new stuff appears all the time.  If you have suggestions for things to add, you can send them to me through the Contact page.

Welcome to the Global Anticorruption Blog

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Welcome to the Global Anticorruption Blog. This blog is a forum for analysis and discussion of the problem of corruption, particularly (though not exclusively) public or political corruption around the world. While “corruption” has a range of different meanings, our intended focus is on a set of familiar activities — including bribery, extortion, embezzlement, nepotism, and related conduct — that entail the abuse of entrusted power for private gain. Corruption has become a high-profile, high-stakes topic in international development, and figuring out the best strategies to combat corruption is a high priority for governments, international organizations, advocacy organizations, and scholars.

The Global Anticorruption Blog is intended to facilitate interaction between the academic, policy, and advocacy communities. Such interaction is important to ensure both that policy initiatives are based on the best available research, and also to promote scholarship that is relevant to pressing real-world challenges. This blog also aims to promote the sharing of information and insights across disciplinary boundaries, so that scholars and practitioners with a range of professional backgrounds – in law, politics, economics, business, public management, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and more – can learn from one another and work together in pursuit of the common goal of promoting effective anticorruption strategies. Our goal is to foster discussion and debate that is rigorous, vigorous, and constructive.

To this end, my co-blogger Rick Messick and I, along with participants in the Harvard Law School Global Anticorruption Lab, will post our perspectives on recent articles, news stories, legal cases, policy initiatives, and other material related to global anticorruption.  We will occasionally try to be provocative, and we may often be wrong, but we hope that our posts will be able to spark productive conversations.  Thank you for visiting, and we hope you will participate in the conversations!