New Podcast, Featuring Diana Chigas and Cheyanne Scharbatke-Church

Posted on March 2, 2021 by Matthew Stephenson

A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this week’s episode, I interview Diana Chigas and Cheyanne Scharbatke-Church, who are Professors of Practice at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and affiliated with Tuft’s Henry J. Leir Institute. After describing how they came to a focus on corruption from a background in conflict resolution and peace-building, Professors Chigas and Scharbatke-Church describe the “systems analysis” approach that they use when evaluating and planning anticorruption interventions. That approach stresses understanding the social forces and social norms that sustain corrupt practices as a system, and focuses on identifying useful entry points for policy interventions. The interview moves from this general high-level analytical framework to a discussion of concrete examples of how this methodology can be used to design concrete interventions and support local efforts to promote integrity and change systems. You can also find both this episode and an archive of prior episodes at the following locations:

KickBack is a collaborative effort between GAB and the ICRN. If you like it, please subscribe/follow, and tell all your friends! And if you have suggestions for voices you’d like to hear on the podcast, just send me a message and let me know.

New Podcast Episode, Featuring Cristina Bicchieri

Posted on September 3, 2019 by Matthew Stephenson

A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this episode, Nils Köbis interviews University of Pennsylvania Professor Cristina Bicchieri about her interdisciplinary work on corruption and anticorruption, which addresses a range of questions including why corruption can be so “sticky,” the role of social norms in shaping corrupt or non-corrupt behavior, how and why perceptions and attitudes toward corruption may differ between men and women, and what the implications of social norm theory are for effective anticorruption strategy.

You can find this episode, along with links to previous podcast episodes, at the following locations:

Fighting Healthcare Corruption with Smiles and Stickers

Posted on July 29, 2019 by Ruta Mrazauskaite

Compared to other EU countries, petty bribery in Lithuanian healthcare is quite common (see here and here). Though extortion seems rare, Lithuanians frequently make informal (and illegal) payments to doctors either to get better/faster treatment or as an expression of gratitude. When describing this practice, Lithuanians use the language of “giving a gift” or “giving a little envelope,” euphemisms that imply that these payments have come to be perceived as acceptable expressions of gratitude rather than bribes, despite the fact that the Criminal Code prohibits bribery and the Civil Code prohibits giving doctors any sort of gifts outside their private lives. Though formally bribery, giving money to a doctor in Lithuania seems to have developed a different social meaning—rather than implying that you are a dishonest or corrupt person, giving extra money to your doctor has come to be understood as something that reasonable people do in recognition that doctors work hard, are underpaid, and deserve gratitude. Offering gifts or money to a doctor has also become a way to express how much you care about the health of your loved ones who are unwell. So, in Lithuania, the practice of making illegal payments to doctors seems to have become a “social norm” – a shared understanding that such behavior is permitted or even obligatory. It has become a norm both in the descriptive sense (people make these payments because they think that everyone else does so) and in the injunctive sense (making an extra payment to your doctor is an appropriate expression of gratitude). That doesn’t mean it’s good, or something we should ignore or tolerate. But it’s something we need to take into account when thinking about how to combat this form of corruption.

Once we recognize that petty bribery has become a social norm, we should ask what tools could be used to disrupt that norm. Because the problem is so extensive and multifaceted, many of the solutions will require significant institutional reforms, changes in management style, budget reallocations, and the like. Without minimizing the importance of those more fundamental changes, it’s also possible that seemingly small, inexpensive, and non-coercive interventions might help disrupt this dysfunctional social norm. Back in 2011, when I was working for Transparency International Lithuania (TI Lithuania), we piloted one such initiative in collaboration with the Lithuanian Medical Students Association. Our objective was to disrupt social norms surrounding informal healthcare payments—not through loud or aggressive actions, but with stickers and smiles. Continue reading →

Do Chinese Aid Projects in Africa Make Corruption Worse? And If So, Why?

Posted on September 21, 2018 by Jetson Leder-Luis

Development aid is a potentially powerful tool for promoting economic growth among the world’s poor. However, development aid is plagued by corruption, in no small part because many of the poorest areas are also the most susceptible to corruption. In addition to that dilemma, some research suggests that the injection of outside funds into existing corrupt societies can actually exacerbate governance problems. Is this true? And does the impact of development aid on corruption (and development) depend on the source of the aid? An important new paper by Ann-Sofie Isaksson and Andreas Kotsadam suggests that the answers are yes and yes—in particular, they find that Chinese aid projects in Africa may worsen local corruption.

To investigate the question whether Chinese aid projects affect local corruption in Africa, the authors combine data from separate sources. For data on local corruption, the authors make use of the Afrobarometer surveys, with data on nearly 100,000 respondents in 29 countries, collected over a 12 year period (2000-2012) in four separate surveys. The authors focus in particular on respondents’ answer to questions about the frequency of paying bribes to avoid problems with the police or to obtain documents or permits. The authors use the geographic location of survey respondents, together with information on the geographic location of 227 Chinese-aid-supported projects in Africa, in order to identify those respondents who live geographically close to a project supported by Chinese development aid. The results are stark: African citizens who live in areas with Chinese-sponsored projects are 4 percentage points more likely to pay a bribe to police, and 2 percentage points more likely to pay a bribe for permits or documents. Given baseline reported bribery rates of about 13-14%, this means that citizens living near a Chinese aid project are about 30% more likely to report paying a bribe to the police, and about 15% more likely to report paying a bribe for a permit or document.

The most natural explanation is that Chinese aid projects tend to stimulate more corruption. There are, of course, a number of other possible explanations, which the authors address and for the most part rule out, or at least suggest are unlikely:

Continue reading →

Guest Post: The Taxi Driver Paradox–or How Descriptive Social Norms Shape Corrupt Behavior

Posted on June 20, 2018 by Matthew Stephenson

Nils Köbis, a post-doctoral researcher at the Center for Experimental Economics and Political Decision-Making (CREED), University of Amsterdam, contributes today’s guest post:

Whenever I am traveling and take a taxi, I try to strike up a conversation with the driver. The beauty of this situation is that both sides can be really candid. The length is typically short, and chances are you will never meet again. The chat usually kicks off with some small talk about sports, weather, and food. Once warmed up, I have often asked: “What do you think is the biggest problem in your society?” So far, the most common answer has been corruption. And my taxi-driver-based anecdotal evidence is consistent with large international surveys. Notwithstanding the old canard that people who live in corrupt societies generally tolerate corruption as normal and natural, ample empirical evidence (and my taxi drivers) suggests that this is not true: People widely despise corruption, especially in countries riddled with it. Yet on several occasions the very same taxi driver who has been ranting to me about corruption has stopped by a traffic police officer—and willingly paid a bribe to avoid a ticket.

What explains this apparent paradox? The most frequent explanation for why a person outraged by corruption would nevertheless pay a bribe is that “everybody does it”—as the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie nicely puts it, “If we do something over and over again it becomes normal. If we see the same thing over and over again it becomes normal.” This notion of normality plays an important role in explaining why corruption is sometimes the exception and sometimes the rule. Scholars who research social norms differentiate between injunctive norms, which concern whether a given behavior is acceptable, and descriptive norms, which indicate whether the same behavior is common. This distinction might help to explain the taxi-driver-paradox: People might often bribe because everybody else is doing it, even though they think it’s wrong. Continue reading →

Corruption Discussion on “The Scholars’ Circle”

Posted on January 30, 2018 by Matthew Stephenson

Last summer UCLA Professor Miriam Golden and I did a radio interview on political corruption for a program called The Scholars’ Circle, hosted by Maria Armoudian. I just learned that a recording of the program is available online, and I thought it might be of interest to some readers of this blog. The recording can be found here; the discussion about corruption begins at 17:16.

The relatively brief but wide-ranging discussion, skillfully moderated by Ms. Armoudian, touches on five major issues (issues that we’ve also covered on this blog):

How should we define corruption, and how can we try to measure it? (at 18:11-26:31 on the recording)
Possible factors that might contribute to the level of corruption, including economic development, governance systems (democracy v. autocracy), social norms, and culture (26:32-32:41)
Whether and how countries can make the transition from a state of endemic corruption to a state of manageable/limited corruption—as well as the risk of backsliding (32:52-47:32)
What will the impact of the Trump Administration be on corruption, and on norms of integrity and the rule of law, in the United States? (47:42-52:02)
What are some of the main remedies that can help make a system less corrupt? (52:03-56:34)

There’s obviously a limit to how deep one can go in a format like this, and the program is geared toward a non-specialist audience, but I hope some readers find the conversation useful in stimulating more thinking on the topics we covered. Thanks for listening!

For the Love of Money: Capitalizing on Corrupt Officials’ Opulent Spending Habits to Fight Corruption

Posted on August 21, 2017 by Travis Edwards

Corruption is notoriously difficult to track and discover, not least because both sides in a corrupt exchange have strong incentives to avoid getting caught. So how can enforcement officials, journalists, and anticorruption activists catch corrupt actors? Pay close attention to flagrant and excessive spending by public officials. After all, most people who benefit from corruption, whether they are officials receiving bribes or industrialists benefitting from the government action they purchased, do it for the money. And what’s the point of taking on so much personal risk to make more money if you can’t spend it on nice things? This is why you’ll see Chinese officials wearing wristwatches worth four times their annual salary and presidents spending millions on designer clothes and shoes and other luxury goods. The additional risk of being caught seems to be outweighed by the perceived social benefits of public displays of wealth. Throwing lavish weddings and banquets seems to be a particularly common trap that captures this phenomenon. The very public nature of these events, the massive guest lists, and the attendance of well known figures all but guarantee public scrutiny. But current and former government officials just can’t seem to help themselves. For example, in the middle of India’s recent anticorruption crackdown a former government minister held a lavish wedding for his daughter at a cost of over $75 million. This is in a country where a former state chief minister and potential prime minister was recently sentenced to four years in prison, banned from politics for a decade, and fined $16 million after an investigation sparked by an astonishingly opulent wedding she hosted.

Over the past decade, the spending habits of dozens of high-ranking officials have produced a number of viral news stories and have, in some cases, led to effective enforcement actions. The fact that people are willing to spend their corruptly acquired wealth so publicly, in spite of the risks involved, provides enforcement officials and anticorruption advocates with a unique and important opportunity in three respects:

Continue reading →

Why Context Matters: The Failure of the Ugandan Revenue Authority to Curb Corruption

Posted on January 21, 2015 by Richard Messick

In his 2013 volume explaining why donor-supported reforms often go awry in developing states, Kennedy School Professor Matt Andrews lays the blame on the failure to appreciate how political imperatives, patronage networks, cultural practices, and other elements of local context affect the way reforms are implemented. While Andrews offers telling examples of how ignorance of context doomed reforms in Argentina and Malawi, the failure to stamp out corruption in Uganda’s revenue collection service provides an even more vivid illustration of the way the very different context in a developing state can cause “best practice” reforms to fail. The analysis is taken from Odd-Helge Fjeldstad’s classic account of the attempt to reform tax collection in Uganda, “Corruption in Tax Administration: Lessons from Institutional Reforms in Uganda,” chapter 17 of Susan Rose-Ackerman’s 2006 edited volume, International Handbook on the Economics of Corruption.

In 1991 revenue from taxes and customs duties in Uganda were seven percent of GDP, an astonishing low figure even on a continent where tax evasion was the norm. Under pressure from the IMF, the World Bank, and other donors the then recently installed government of Yoweri Museveni took decisive action. Following what was then considered best practice for boosting revenues and cutting corruption in a revenue service, the government made the revenue department of the Ministry of Finance into an autonomous agency. Independent agency status allowed the Uganda Revenue Authority to implement a number of reforms to reduce corruption. Salaries were raised above civil service levels and strictures on firing non-performing workers removed. As a new agency, all employees were considered new hires and had to prove themselves during a probationary period; as a result almost 250, or 15 percent, of the old revenue department staff were weeded out. In addition, “clean” expatriates were hired into senior management positions, and measures were taken to improve morale: offices were upgraded, working conditions improved, and training provided. All in all, the Uganda Revenue Authority was considered a model for how to create an efficient, non-corruption revenue collection agency.

During the first years of its existence, the authority’s performance suggested these reforms were succeeding. Revenue collection as a percentage of GDP improved and perceptions of corruption declined. These early indicators of success, however, soon began to decline. Forty-three percent of businesses surveyed in 1998 reported paying a bribe to a Uganda Revenue Authority employee; in March 2000 President Museveni termed the authority a “den of thieves,” and in 2003 its former head listed corruption as “problem number one” in the organization. A Commission of Inquiry of C corruption in the Uganda Revenue Authority was appointed in 2002, and although its report was never released, leaks suggest the commission found massive corruption in the ranks. Continue reading →

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