Tag Archives: city council

Addressing the Root Causes of Municipal Corruption in U.S. Cities

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Nearly a year ago, former Los Angeles City Councilman José Huizar pleaded guilty to racketeering and tax evasion, admitting that he took over $1.5 million in bribes during his tenure. As representative for the rapidly gentrifying Boyle Heights neighborhood and Downtown Los Angeles, Huizar used his office to shape urban development in line with the interests of corrupt real estate investors. Throughout his seven years as Chair of the Planning and Land Use Management Committee, he vouched for developers who paid him bribes, received kickbacks in exchange for favorable votes, and even negotiated with labor unions who threatened to block projects from which he stood to benefit financially. The U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California called the Huizar saga one of the most “wide-ranging and brazen public corruption cases” in the city’s history.

Local-level land use decisions are frequently rife with corruption, even in developed countries such as the United States. The elaborate web of regulations that govern zoning and urban planning practices, combined with relatively weak ethical standards for municipal lawmakers, encourage powerful investors to run afoul of the law. The Huizar case stands out as but one glaring example of the corruption that inhabits the world of variances, special use permits, and environmental impact reviews. Faced with mountains of paperwork and political uncertainty, real estate developers are drawn to corruption’s easy fix. Public officials such as Huizar are well-positioned to offer simple and efficient permitting in engage for generous campaign contributions and personal gifts.

While prosecuting corrupt officials like Huizar is necessary, addressing the root causes of this sort of corruption requires significant structural reforms. Three such reforms are particularly important: a reduction in the discretionary authority of political decision-makers in specific land use decisions, the abolition of councilmanic privilege, and the adoption of a universal municipal code of ethics for local lawmakers.

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Can Political Opposition Decrease Corruption? Evidence from Brazilian Municipal Governments

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The idea that checks and balances in the government—such as legislative oversight of the executive branch—can reduce corruption is intuitive, but quantitative empirical evidence for or against this hypothesis is relatively scant. Moreover, the effect of a separation of powers on the extent of corruption may depend on whether the same political party or faction controls both branches of government, or whether different factions control the legislature and the executive. Indeed, some legal scholars have argued that the true separation of powers is not between branches of government, but rather the political parties in the government, and that the traditional view of the separation of powers—ambition counteracting ambition—only works if different branches are controlled by different political parties. But the likely effect of such partisan separation on corruption is not entirely clear: If the legislature is controlled by a party or coalition opposed to the party that controls the executive branch, this could mean increased legislative oversight and lower corruption, but alternatively, increased opposition may simply drive the executive to bribe the opposition to go along with his or her agenda, leading to more corruption.

Carlos Varjão and I investigate this the question empirically in our recent working paper, “Political Opposition, Legislative Oversight, and the Performance of the Executive Branch.” We focus on municipal governments in Brazil, which are particularly suitable for this sort of study for a number of reasons: there are many municipalities with a similar overall government structure, there’s a wealth of data on various forms of corruption (mainly embezzlement, procurement fraud, and over-invoicing) from Brazil’s public audit reports, and there’s considerable variation in both the level of corruption and the political control of the branches of the municipal governments. Our findings are striking and unambiguous: increased representation of the political opposition in the local legislature is associated with more legislative oversight of the executive, less executive branch corruption, and better public service delivery. Continue reading →