Why Did Trump’s Anticorruption Rhetoric Resonate? Three Hypotheses

Posted on by
3

OK, I know I said in last week’s post that I would eventually get back to blogging about topics other than Trump, but not yet. After all, Trump’s election—a political and moral crisis on so many dimensions—poses distinctive challenges for the anticorruption community, in at least two different (though related) respects. The first concerns the consequences of a Trump Administration for US anticorruption efforts, both at home and abroad, a topic I’ve already blogged about (see here and here). The second issue concerns the role that anticorruption sentiments and rhetoric played in Trump’s victory. After all, Trump positioned himself (ironically, outrageously) as an anticorruption candidate, denouncing Secretary Clinton as “crooked Hillary” and pledging to “drain the swamp” of Washington corruption.

It’s no surprise that the mainstream anticorruption community are perturbed, to put it mildly, by the effective deployment of anticorruption rhetoric by a racist xenophobic ultra-nationalist bully. While this is hardly a new phenomenon—see, for example, Katie King’s post on Hungary last year—the Trump victory has forced the anticorruption community to confront it head on. Indeed, at the International Anti-Corruption Conference (IACC) in Panama a couple of weeks back, the appropriation of anticorruption rhetoric by right-wing populists—especially though not exclusively Trump—was a constant subject of hallway conversation, even if relatively little of the IACC’s formal program dealt directly with this issue. (In fairness, many of the IACC speakers did find a way to raise some of these concerns in their presentations, and the organizers also managed to add a last-minute session, in which I was able to participate, discussing this topic.) What are we to make of this? What lessons should the anticorruption community—as well as others aghast at the success of Trump and other right-wing demagogues—take away from Trump’s successful appropriation of anticorruption rhetoric?

I wish I knew the answer to that question. I don’t, and won’t pretend to. But I do think it would be helpful to lay out what I view as the three main competing hypotheses: Continue reading →

Corruption’s Gendered Double Standard

Posted on by
7

On November 8, 2016 the United States almost elected Hillary Clinton as its first female president. But, if Donald Trump and many of his supporters were to be believed, Secretary Clinton was also one of the most corrupt politicians of all time. This argument appears to have swayed many American voters, who ended up electing Donald Trump (who might actually be the most corrupt person recently elected to the presidency, see here, here, and here). That Trump’s unprecedented accusations of corruption were leveled against the first female presidential candidate nominated by a major political party was not a coincidence.

A great deal of commentary has considered whether women (and especially female politicians and public officials) behave less corruptly than men. (For some prior discussion on this blog, see here.) But I’d like to focus on a different question: Are female politicians accused of corruption treated differently—and judged more harshly—than male politicians? Existing research suggests that they are, which in turn may explain both why allegations of corruption can be more damaging to female politicians, and why female public officials are on the whole less corrupt. Continue reading →

How Prisons Corrupt – And What To Do About It

Posted on by
1

In May 2014, Kelvin Melton orchestrated a kidnapping scheme. The perpetrators assaulted the victim with a stun gun, took him from his home, and sent texts to his family demanding ransom. Throughout this time, Melton continued to give instructions to the kidnappers via cell phone. Fortunately, law enforcement was able to thwart the plot and recuse the victim. These facts alone make for a gripping crime. But the story had an extra twist: Melton, the mastermind behind the kidnapping, was in a prison cell the entire time, serving a life sentence for assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill; the target of the kidnapping scheme was the father of the prosecutor who put Melton behind bars. Melton was able to orchestrate the crime while behind bars because he had been able to obtain a contraband cell phone from a guard.

While the facts of this case are sensational, the phenomenon of inmates corrupting prison guards in order to obtain contraband is far from unusual. In the wake of Melton’s crime, the FBI launched a new program—Operation Ghost Guard—to root out corruption by correctional officers. The first major case out of the program came in 2016, when the FBI indicted nearly 50 former and current correctional officers for accepting bribes from inmates in exchange for contraband. Over the course of a two-year undercover investigation, federal officials learned how inmates and guards in Georgia formed their own crime syndicate. Guards would bring in liquor, tobacco, and cell phones in exchange for thousands in bribe money. Inmates, in turn, would use the cell phones to commit wire fraud, money laundering, and identity theft. Outside of the prison, guards were using their badges to facilitate drug deals. The United States Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia called the levels of corruption “staggering.” And Georgia is not alone; New York state prison officials are currently under investigation by the FBI as well.

The issue of prison corruption is not unique to the U.S. Prior posts on this blog have explored how Brazilian inmates were able to bribe guards in order to facilitate large-scale drug and weapons trading within the complex, and how incarcerated drug lords in the Philippines bought off guards in order to live in comparative luxury behind bars. In the United Kingdom, the widespread practice of bribes in exchange for drugs or cell phones led the penal system to be called “institutionally corrupt” by a report issued by the country’s own Metropolitan police. How do these acts of corruption come about in the first place? And what can we do about them? In her earlier post on prison corruption in the Philippines, Bea Paterno focused on the need for better monitoring and oversight. That’s surely part of the solution, but we also need to pay attention to other aspects of the prison environment, including the guards’ working conditions and the ways in which they interact with inmates. Continue reading →

Guest Post: The Metaphysics of “Corruption” (or, The Fundamental Challenge to Comparative Corruption Measurement)

Posted on by
3

GAB is pleased to welcome back Jacob Eisler, Lecturer at Cambridge University, who contributes the following guest post:

A couple months back, Matthew Stephenson and Michael Johnston engaged in a lively debate on the question of if aggregate-level data of corruption is useful, focusing on the appropriate level of methodological skepticism that should be directed towards large-scale efforts to quantify corruption (see here, here, here, and here). While this debate touched on a number of fascinating questions regarding how to best treat data regarding corruption, it has drifted away from why Michael had a concern with overly aggressive quantification in the first place: Actually addressing corruption requires a “standard of goodness,” and the difficulty in coming up with such a standard explains why the social sciences have faced a “longstanding inability to come to a working consensus over how to define corruption.” In other words, when we talk about corruption, we are inevitably talking about something bad that suggests the vitiation or distortion of something good. It is difficult to conceptualize corruption except as a distortion of a non-objectionable political process—that is, political practice undertaken with integrity. This need not mean that there must be some shared first-order property of good governance; but it does suggest that there is a shared property to distorted or corrupted governance that must derive from some shared property of all politics.

If this idea of a “shared feature” is taken seriously, it would suggest those who argue for the value of comparative corruption metrics are making a very strong claim: that if you are comparing corruption within a country, or across countries, all the relevant polities and types of practice must have some shared feature, deviation from which counts as corruption. This shared feature in turn would be an aspect of governance. It could be any number of constants in human society – a constant feature of morality in governance, or tendencies of human anthropology. But in any case, this is a very distinctive and powerful claim, and one that requires strong assumptions or assertions regarding the nature of governance. To weave this back to the original dispute, our willingness to rely on quantitative metrics should depend on our level of commitment to our faith in this constant feature of politics that makes corruption a transferable, or, more aggressively put, “universal” thing. Our use of these homogenizing empirical metrics implies that we are committed to the robustness of the constant feature. Yet it doesn’t seem like this conceptual work has been done. Continue reading →

The Lawyers’ Role in Perpetuating Corruption in Nigeria

Posted on by
4

Nuhu Ribadu, the former head of Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, spoke to lawyers in Abuja on December 1 on his experience fighting corruption in Nigeria and the role the bar played.

Ribadu came to international attention in the mid-2000s for his audacious efforts to combat the high level corruption then rampant in the country, a fight that led to attempts on his life and ultimately his illegal removal from office despite protests from Nigerian civil society and the international community.  Although Ribadu remains active in Nigerian public life, chairing a high level commission on corruption in the Nigerian oil industry and running twice (unsuccessfully) for public office, he has been relatively silent on the obstacles he faced as head of the EFCC.  In his December 1 speech, unfortunately at this writing still not available online, he explains how some of Nigeria’s most prestigious lawyers, known as SANs or Senior Advocate Nigeria, collaborate with some of Nigeria’s most corrupt actors to frustrate the country’s effort to eradicate corruption at the highest levels of government.

For the benefit of his friends in the international community (of which this writer is one) as well as for a useful insight on one of the challenges of tackling grand corruption, below are excerpts from that speech as reported in the Nigerian press. Continue reading →

What Can Young Lawyers Do To Fight Corruption Now that Trump Is President?

Posted on by
3

I promise that eventually I’ll go back to blogging about things other than Trump, but that seems to be the most important challenge facing the anticorruption community right now. Also, I wanted to contemplate a question that a friend and recent law school graduate (who is currently working for the US government, and so cannot be identified by name) put to me in response to the “cry of despair” I posted in the immediate aftermath of the election. This young lawyer asks:

What can people do in the face of all this? Is there anything young lawyers who care about anticorruption policy can do? If we can expect a drop in enforcement and weakening of the FCPA, where can people concentrate their efforts?

This is a great set of questions, and I wish I had good answers. I don’t, but in the interests of contributing to these important conversations, let me offer a few preliminary thoughts (which are probably worth approximately what you’ve paid for them): Continue reading →

Community Development Agreements: A New Anticorruption Tool?

Posted on by
6

Projects in the extractive industries are often enormous, long-lasting, multi-billion dollar affairs. Given the disruption, potential for environmental disaster, and permanent changes in the state of the land, these projects tend to generate conflict and controversy, especially in low-income countries, where citizens may enjoy fewer legal protections. As a way to mitigate these risks, some nations require extractive firms to enter into “Community Development Agreements” (CDAs) with local communities. (CDAs—which are also sometimes known as Benefit Sharing Agreements, Impact Benefit Agreements, or Community Joint Ventures—are sometimes voluntary corporate social responsibility initiatives, but my focus here is on CDAs that are required by, and incorporated into, national regulatory frameworks.) At the most general level, CDAs are created through a process that engages local populations in important decision-making about the project and its profits. The process varies, but usually includes the following steps:

  • Identify the people who will be affected
  • Allow those identified to determine what the community could gain from the project (whether that be jobs, money, education, infrastructure, long-term benefits, etc.)
  • Write a CDA that encompasses the demands of the community and aligns with regulatory requirements
  • Provide monitoring tools to the affected population
  • Set up dispute resolution systems
  • Strategize for how to prepare the population for the end of the project’s lifespan.

This process takes time and can be expensive. But extractive projects typically last for decades, and so building a sustainable relationship with the local population is vital to the project’s success. After all, many corporations fund similar stakeholder engagement processes without being required by law to do so. That is because CDAs can be a good business decision: empowering the community allows the company to avoid violent conflict and signaling that the firm is a good corporate citizen.

For those countries that do require a CDA for extractive projects, the law also regulates the substantive terms, requiring CDA contracts to contain certain clauses–typically monitoring components, dispute resolution mechanisms, and local spending or employment quotas. However, one thing that is never included in a CDA is an anticorruption clause. The words “bribery” or “corruption” appear nowhere in the World Bank’s model CDA agreement, and the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (CCSI) is silent on the issue. Building on recent work by Abiola Makinwa and James Gathii, I posit that CDAs should include anticorruption clauses, to empower private citizens in fighting corruption in public contracts. The basic idea is to allow the recognized community members—those covered by the CDAs—as “third party beneficiaries” to the contract between the government and the extractive company. The community members would then be entitled to sue if there was corruption in the making or execution of the contract.
Continue reading →

The Crucial Role of Corporate Boards in Ensuring Corporate Integrity

Posted on by
8

Volkswagen’s diesel emissions cheat has cost the company dearly. Last October, Volkswagen reached a US$16.5 billion dollar settlement with the US government, and the value of Volkswagen’s stock today is worth about 50% of what it was before the scandal – a US$60 billion drop in the company’s valuation. Criminal charges against several senior managers, including chairman Hans Dieter Poetsch, are still pending. Countless customers are furious, while many employees fear for their jobs as Volkswagen scrambles to cut its costs. (Some background on the scandal, as well as a regularly updated timeline, can be found here.)

What started as a “simple cheat” became a slippery slope for the whole company. Volkswagen failed to create a culture of corporate integrity; the institutional checks and balances that are supposed to prevent something like this from happening were purposefully or ignorantly subverted, and the company created all the wrong incentives. As Alison Taylor has argued on this blog, these are the perfect ingredients for a corrupt corporate culture.

Who to blame for this mess (and, similarly, many other corporate messes)? Just as “a fish rots from the head down,” a company’s board of directors must take responsibility for creating or allowing a toxic corporate culture that permits cheating and other unethical and illegal behavior. Continue reading →

Guest Post: When and How Will We Learn How To Curb Corruption?

Posted on by
3

GAB is pleased to welcome Finn Heinrich, Research Director at Transparency International, who contributes the following guest post:

Listening to conversations about corruption among global policy-makers, corruption researchers, and anticorruption activists alike, I can’t help but notice that the focus of anticorruption research and policy is changing. The 1990s focused mainly on demonstrating that corruption exists and finding ways to measure it (largely through perception-based indicators), and the early 2000s were about assessing corruption risks in specific countries, sectors, or communities, and assessing the performance of anticorruption institutions. More recently, researchers (and their funders and clients) are shifting from the “Where is corruption?” question toward the “How can we fight corruption?” question. They ask: Do we know what works, when, where, and under which circumstances in curbing a specific type of corrupt behavior?

Answering such questions is extremely challenging. Corruption’s clandestine nature makes it difficult to measure, data is often of low quality or simply not available for time-series or cross-sectional analysis beyond aggregate country-level indicators. Furthermore, anticorruption interventions often lack an underlying theory of change which would be needed to design robust research evaluations to find out whether they worked and if so, how (and if not, why not). And we lack realistic but parsimonious causal models which can take account of contextual factors, which are so important to understand and tackle corruption, as corruption is an integral part of broader social and political power structures and relationships which differ across contexts. Similarly, there is a lack of exchange between micro-level approaches focusing on specific, usually local anticorruption interventions, on the one hand, and the macro-level literature on anti-corruption strategies and theories, on the other.

While we at Transparency International certainly do not have any ready-made solutions for these extremely tricky methodological and conceptual issues, we are committed to joining others in making headway on them and have therefore put the “what works” question at the heart of our organizational learning agenda by engaging in reviews of the existing evidence as well as ramping up impact reviews of some of our own key interventions. For example, we have just released a first rapid evidence review on how to curb political corruption, written by David Jackson and Daniel Salgado Moreno, which showcases some fascinating evidence from the vibrant field of political anticorruption research. We are also working with colleagues from Global Integrity on a more thorough evidence review on corruption grievance as a motivator for anti-corruption engagement and are planning further evidence reviews and impact evaluations.

As we start to get our feet wet and figure out how to best go about generating and making sense of the existing evidence on what works in anti-corruption, we are keen to engage with the broader anticorruption research community. Maybe there are others out there who have some ideas about how to go about learning about what works in fighting corruption? If so, please use the comment box on this blog or get in touch directly at acevidence@transparency.org.

Will Leaving His Business “Completely” Solve Trump’s Conflict of Interest Problems?

Posted on by
2

President-elect Trump tweeted early November 30 “that legal documents are being crafted which take me completely out of business operations.”  Will this suffice to resolve concerns about the potential conflicts of interest that could arise during his presidency?  While the answers of the anti- and pro-Trump camps are predictable (a heated, vitriolic “no” and an equally heated, vitriolic “yes” respectively) for others the answer will turn on two issues:

1) What conduct they understand the conflict of interest rules prohibit, and

2) Whether they think Trump’s removing himself “completely” from his businesses is enough to prevent it.

Media coverage about conflict of interest since Trump’s election has been so colored by opposition to Trump generally that those trying to fairly evaluate Trump’s plan are likely confused about both issues.  Herewith a guide to both to help fair-minded citizens evaluate the Trump plan.    Continue reading →