Tag Archives: transition

How Grand Corruption Threatens Liberal Democratic Institutions

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As regular readers may have noticed, GAB has been inactive for the past week (that is, until Rick’s post yesterday). Apologies for the lack of content – as I’m sure you can imagine, the U.S. presidential election has been consuming my attention and that of most of our regular contributors. But now that the election outcome is clear (notwithstanding President Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud and the craven complicity of his Republican Party enablers), it’s time to get back to blogging. I suspect that much (though not all) of our content over the next couple of weeks will be related to the outcome of the U.S. elections—both backward-looking evaluation of the impact of the Trump Presidency on corruption in the US and beyond, and forward-looking considerations about the anticorruption agenda under the incoming Biden Administration.

Today’s post isn’t about Trump per se, but it’s loosely inspired by both certain aspects of his presidency and his current refusal to acknowledge and accept the outcome of the election. I want to say a few words about the ways in which corruption, particularly grand corruption at the highest levels of the government, can threaten to undermine the institutions of liberal democracy (free and fair elections, formal and informal checks and balances, the rule of law, etc.). To be clear, I don’t have in mind principally the ways in which politicians might engage in corrupt conduct to help win elections (for example, vote-buying, acceptance of illegal campaign donations in exchange for favors, diverting public funds for partisan purposes, etc.), though these are of course serious and important problems. Nor do I have in mind the broader and more diffuse “institutional corruption” associated with the excessive influence of concentrated wealth, though this too is a grave concern. Rather, I want to consider how grand corruption in the highest levels of government may threaten to erode or subvert (explicitly or de facto) the basic institutional structures of liberal constitutional democracy.

Nothing of what I have to say on this topic is original; it’s all drawn from existing literature, and the arguments are likely familiar to many readers. Still, I thought it might be helpful to highlight three ways in which unchecked grand corruption may contribute to democratic backsliding: Continue reading →

Corruption and Liberalization: Two Paradoxes

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Some aspects of a comprehensive anticorruption strategy are specifically targeted at corruption itself. But sometimes it makes sense to consider how broader political or economic reforms might ameliorate or exacerbate the corruption problem. Indeed, fighting corruption is often invoked – perhaps sincerely, perhaps strategically – as a justification for more general political and economic liberalization. But the relationship between political and economic liberalization, on the one hand, and corruption, on the other, is complicated, and beset by two seeming paradoxes:

Here’s the first paradox: On the one hand, longstanding democracies seem to have lower levels of corruption than do non-democracies. However, the process of democratization – the introduction of democratic reforms, along with a general liberalization of the political system – often seems associated with a significant increase in corruption. Indeed, countries going through democratic transitions, or those that have been democratic for a shorter time, seem not only to have more corruption than established democracies, but also to have worse corruption problems, on average, than non-democracies.

The second paradox, on the economic side, is similar: Some research suggests that more open economies – with more market competition, fewer state-owned enterprises, and less central economic planning – have lower levels of corruption than more statist economies. (This should not be overstated: it’s not that more regulation always increases corruption, nor is there convincing evidence that “bigger” governments, measured by the size of the public sector relative to GNP, have more corruption. Still, the balance of the evidence suggests that more open, liberal economies have less severe corruption than more statist economies.) However, the process of economic liberalization—including privatization, deregulation, etc.—often appears associated with an increase, often a dramatic increase, in corruption.

Continue reading →