Tag Archives: direct democracy

Institutionalizing People Power: How Switzerland Overcame Systemic Corruption

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How do states escape pervasive corruption? Expanding the small set of success stories, a burgeoning line of research (see here, here, here, here, or here) seeks answers to this question through the study of polities that have achieved control of corruption before Second World War. This group of so-called “early achievers” mostly consist of Western and Northern European countries as well as territories that seceded from them. One lesson that has been drawn from the study of early achievers is that the gradual depoliticization of governance is an essential step on a society’s path to becoming free from endemic corruption. Indeed, some have suggested that transitioning to a robust democracy before building a sufficiently effective and clean state is a recipe for corruption and state capture, as political parties will organize on clientalist lines and focus mainly on capturing rents. The key to combating systemic corruption, on this account, is building a strong and professional class of civil servants and judges who are insulated from politics.

The case of Switzerland, which has received little attention so far, presents a puzzle in this regard. Now a textbook example of effective (domestic) corruption control, early nineteenth century Switzerland shared many of the klepocratic governance patterns we find in low- and middle-income countries today. Long dominated by a handful of wealthy families, from the 1830s onwards Swiss state institutions fell under the sway of a group of entrepreneurs involved in the financing and organization of railway construction. These “Railway Barons” dominated Swiss politics through a web of patronage networks and used the captured institutions of the state to assert their individual interests. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, Switzerland was free from such systemic corruption. Remarkably, and contrary to conventional thinking about early achievers, Switzerland accomplished this not by limiting democracy, but by doubling down on it. Continue reading →

Direct Democracy as the Solution to Corruption in Publicly Funded Sports Stadiums

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In 2002, billionaire Jeffrey Loria purchased the Miami Marlins, a Major League Baseball team, for $159 million. In May of 2017, Luria agreed to sell the team for reportedly $1.3 billion, earning a profit of over $1.1 billion. Some of that profit can be explained by the increased valuation of all sports franchises in the last decade, but a large reason for the eye-popping jump in value is the Marlin’s new, privately owned—but largely public funded—stadium. In 2011, Miami-Dade County agreed to contribute more than $400 million for the stadium. Including interest, the estimated total cost to the county is $2.4 billion dollars. Prior to reaching a deal for the new stadium, Mr. Loria donated various amounts to local government officials, including $40,000 to the county commission chairman in 2008, and $50,000 to Mayor Alverez.  (The SEC conducted a four-year investigation into whether Loria’s donations were unlawful bribes, but ultimately dropped the investigation.)

Such a story is common in sports stadium construction. In the past 15 years, more than $12 billion in public money has been spent on privately owned stadiums. The loans used to pay for such construction, typically tax-exempt municipal bonds, will also cost the federal government at least $4 billion in taxpayer subsidies to bond holders. There’s an ongoing debate about whether taxpayer dollars should be used to fund privately owned stadiums, but that’s not my focus here. Rather, I want to focus on how this system creates opportunities for corrupt deals between team owners and local government officials.

Before government officials vote on whether to approve public funding for a new stadium, the team’s billionaire owners often make “campaign contributions” to the responsible government officials. It is difficult to prove that these donations are unlawful bribes, as doing so would require proving a quid pro quo exchange. Yet when billionaire owners donate to local government officials, who then happen to approve hundreds of millions of dollars in public funding for the billionaire’s stadium—which directly increases the value of the owner’s assets by hundreds of millions of dollars—it looks a lot like bribery. The example of Mr. Loria making donations to Miami-Dade officials is hardly unique. Consider the following additional illustrations:  Continue reading →