Preface
What Is Political Corruption?

The study of political corruption has been beset with definitional disputes for some time now. While people periodically speak of corruption as if it had a fixed, unchanging meaning, scholars attempting to define the term with precision repeatedly stumble on the variety of significations it can have. The exact behaviors that are considered corrupt vary depending on historical, geographic, or cultural contexts. The purchase of offices was a regular practice in the ancien régime; today it is frowned upon (or at the very least rebranded as a "public-private partnership"). Paying for a public service such as the service of a judge was once considered perfectly acceptable, but today we would balk at such user fees. Purchasing votes used to be widespread practice; now it can only be done through tax breaks and "pork" projects. Clashes between competing conceptions of corruption are not hard to find; they are particularly striking if one juxtaposes the mores of gift and market societies. And it is not merely between societies that such differences manifest themselves—the dimensions of corruption are contested within societies themselves, with people exhibiting radically opposed views of what behaviors or attitudes constitute a breach of civic integrity. Nor is it an uncontested matter whether the term "corruption" refers to behavior, character, mores, beliefs; or whether the thing corrupted refers to a "system" (as in "systemic corruption") or to the behavior or character of an individual or a group.

There are, to be sure, important commonalities that one can discern across history and geography. In many states where the conspicuous prevalence of bribery, nepotism, and clientelism might lead one to suspect that different attitudes toward these behaviors obtained, one finds that the populations nonetheless widely term these behaviors corrupt and express views quite consistent with those in countries where people rarely encounter bribery; in many different historical periods with strikingly different conceptions of political office, we encounter lamentations about corruption that appear perfectly intelligible to our late modern understanding. But though such commonalities should warn us against cultural or historical relativism, we must nonetheless remain attuned to the great difficulty of establishing a fixed, universal definition of corruption. Is it bribery of officials, nepotism, partisanship? Is it the decline in civic virtue or the loss of social rootedness? Is it the decline in piety? Is it the attendance to private interests over the public good (however defined)? Is it "duplicitous exclusion," as Mark Warren would define the democratic conception of corruption? Is it the opposite of "impartiality," as Oskar Kurer, Bo Rothstein, and Jan Teorell have proposed? Does corruption merely speak to breaches of existing laws or norms, or can there be entirely legal behaviors and relationships that are nonetheless corrupt? And how are such matters to be determined?

There is currently a small but growing literature of a philosophical nature on the subject of corruption's precise definition. Warren's work has attempted to define corruption in terms of the norms of democratic theory; Seumas Miller has sought a wide definition of "institutional corruption" capturing the great variety of abuses that come under that name. Others such as Lawrence Lessig and Zephyr Teachout have sought a definition anchored in the republican tradition of the American founding. Others yet have attempted to define the concept as a breach of impartiality, drawing on liberal political theorists such as Brian Barry. Without entering into a detailed examination of these important contributions here (we will visit some of them in the course of our study), let us merely note that in spite of these laudable efforts, the philosophical study of corruption's meaning remains relatively marginal in both the field of corruption studies and in political theory. In a recent survey of this debate, Mark Philp and Elizabeth Dávid-Barrett lament that "the absence of significant reflection in political theory on the nature, forms, and sources of corruption is a serious failing of the subdiscipline."

While there are some notable exceptions, Philp and Dávid-Barrett's lamentation is correct: discussion of corruption within political theory has tended to be sporadic. The relative absence of sustained reflection on the concept should be somewhat surprising, for not only is corruption a prevalent worry in our public culture today (for reasons I need not elaborate), but, if J. G. A. Pocock is to be believed, it was "from 1688 to 1776 (and after), the central question in Anglophone political theory." If this is the case (and, while we will have cause to revise many of Pocock's arguments, we may agree with his general claim about the centrality of corruption discourse in the "Atlantic" tradition), then the absence of corruption as a central matter of concern for political theorists today should give us pause. How could a concept so central to both contemporary public discourse and to our political-philosophical tradition have such little space in political theory today?

If political theorists have in the main not been focused upon the question, the more practically minded students of corruption have tended to downplay the philosophical problems entailed by the term. A great deal of literature begins by recognizing definitional difficulties, but attempts to settle these questions quickly in order to fix on a definition that can serve as a tool for social-scientific advancement and legislative action. Arvind Jain, for instance, writes, "Although it is difficult to agree on a precise definition, there is consensus that corruption refers to acts in which the power of public office is used for personal gain in a manner that contravenes the rules of the game." There is much to be said for this formulation, but I fear that there is no such consensus about it. An active community is studying "institutional corruption," which addresses precisely those types of corruption that do not contravene the "rules of the game" but rather are a product of poor rules. The root of Jain's definition is the phrase used most often by international organizations such as the World Bank: "Corruption is the abuse of public office for private gain." This definition has the virtue of being expansive. Of course, the definition is somewhat limited in focusing solely on governmental office (Transparency International prefers the more neutral "entrusted power"), in focusing only on behavior, and in tending toward thinking in terms of individual breaches of norms rather than structural pathologies. More important, the definition raises more questions than it answers, for how are we to understand all of these terms? The difficulty is not that "abuse," "public office," and "private gain" cannot be defined; the difficulty is that such definitions are replete with presuppositions that can become straitjackets. The way in which such terms are defined is always overladen with political and normative assumptions. Susan Rose-Ackerman, one of the most prominent economists to study corruption, begins a handbook on the subject by noting (with some regret) that there is a tendency in her field to eschew moral reflection: "Writing on corruption often stakes out a moral high ground, but economists are reluctant to sermonize on right or wrong." No doubt some discussion of corruption slips into sermonizing—that is a danger in all moral discourse—but there is, in the social-scientific wariness of moral categories, a greater danger of slipping into moral inarticulacy. From the perspective of economics, there is doubtless much to be gained by eschewing moral discussion in favor of measuring things like illicit transfers of wealth. But whatever progress...