The Power of Corruption

Politics, one hears, is a dirty business. This dirt, one also hears, is not universally distributed across all political spaces. In the parts of the world that are variously called "global South," "Third World," or "developing countries," politics seems especially dirty. This conversation has a global/ comparative dimension wherein these countries are viewed as being more prone to corruption in public life compared to the advanced capitalist countries of the West. From everyday anecdotes to the influential rankings of Transparency International and the World Bank, one can find frequent confirmation for this view. The conversation also has a local dimension: "corruption" or "crime" is often the most prominent issue in the political sphere of these countries, overshadowing the usual suspects such as fiscal policy or security. This version of the conversation generally oscillates between the contrasting poles of righteous anger and resigned acceptance.

This cohabitation of anger and resignation point to a paradox that informs much of social scientific inquiry into the widespread phenomenon of corruption and criminality in the democracies of the global South. Corruption is widely acknowledged to be a problem, even an urgent and catastrophic one, by both local and global actors. Unlike other sociopolitical ills, it is neither ignored by powerful voices (like inequality), nor a matter of partisan contestation (like secularism or ethnic conflicts). It is constantly condemned in editorials and political campaigns, and universally lamented by presidents and pundits. Yet it persists with no discernable improvement through successive regimes. The question, then, is, How can such a widely despised phenomenon continue so untroubled by all the attention?

To view this situation as apparently paradoxical requires a couple of stable assumptions shared by most social scientists and policy makers, the first of which concerns the nature of the modern state. The state became modern by becoming both functionally distinct and delimited in its sphere of activity. The activity of making profit or material gains is meant for the "private" sphere, that of the market, while the functionaries of the state act as "public" officials. They maintain neutrality and procedural formality in their actions vis-àvis private actors, making decisions only on the basis of the "public good." Corruption is a distortion of this ideal, whereby the power of the public office is utilized to make private gains. In the process, it distorts the normal functioning of the market by illegitimately intervening in it (e.g., allocating resources based not on qualification or merit, but as a result of bribes).

The second assumption concerns the nature of democracy, which is defined as a system in which the only route to state power is through competitive and unprejudiced elections. In such a system, voters are meant to punish bad actors and reward good ones. In turn, they establish an incentive structure for politicians, whose main goal is to win elections. Since corruption is widely derided, benefitting a handful of private actors to the detriment of the majority and the "public good," a functioning democracy should take swift and robust action against corrupt behavior.

In the vast majority of the social scientific literature, the persistence of corruption in the democracies of the global South can be understood as the failure of one or both of those ideals to be realized. Either the state is insufficiently developed or the democratic system is insufficiently functional. With regard to the former, we are told that the state in the global South is still lagging in its developmental trajectory. Lacking the capacity to enforce the rule of law with the necessary degree of uniformity and neutrality, it is thereby unable to fully differentiate itself from society and its myriad group identities, patronage ties, and personal bonds. With regard to the latter, we get a similar analysis regarding the dysfunction of the democratic process, with voters being either uninformed, poor, or lacking in civic virtues to effectively hold politicians accountable.

In two recent books, Steven Pierce and Milan Vaishnav—despite their very different disciplinary backgrounds, methodological commitments, and geographical focus—complicate this more or less familiar framework for the discussion of illegality in politics. The very different ways in which they go about...