How Corruption and Anti-Corruption Policies Sustain Hybrid Regimes

2.2. Core characteristics of corruption

With an increasing academic interest in the topic of corruption—from hardly any articles and panels on corruption in the 1990s to a large number of special issues and conferences dedicated to corruption less than thirty years later (Rothstein and Varraich 2017, 7)—attempts to define corruption have understandably increased.

The most common definition refers to corruption as an “abuse of entrusted power for private gain.” Researchers have highlighted several potential shortcomings inherent in this definition (Debiel and Pech 2010, 54; Gawrich and Debiel 2016, 634): First, the phrase “abuse of power” suggests a violation of formal rules. Formal rules might be adopted under corrupt influence, making them in the process corrupt as well. Second, the phrase “private gain” is problematic, since corruption might be used to gain political power, primarily but not solely for material enrichment. Finally, the phrase “entrusted power” is usually associated with public office; however, entrusted power can encompass situations where the public places its trust in an individual who is expected to make impartial judgments, similar to a referee in sporting contests. In this regard, Arnold Heidenheimer differentiates between those definitions of corruption centered on public office, and those on public trust (Heidenheimer, Johnston, and Le Vine 1989; Heidenheimer and Johnston 2002). While the first type considers public office a prerequisite to identify corruption, the second type is broader and shifts the core of corruption to the violation of public trust with or without political office.

Despite a broad critique of the definition of corruption (Olteanu 2012, 39), the phrase “abuse of entrusted power for private gain” contains the central characteristics that allow identifying corruption, differentiating it from other malpractices (Köbis and Huss 2017, 153 ff.).

The first characteristic is entrusted power, which means that both sides—public and private—are involved. In other words, an actor is exposed to corruption only if the public has placed its trust and empowered the aforementioned actor to act in the interests of the public. However, the actor needs to permanently weigh his or her public position against private interests, which leads to the second core characteristic of corruption—crossing the line between public and private interest. In this study, it is important that entrusted power results in public office, so that political corruption can be focused upon.

Thus, the second characteristic of corruption is a deviation from the rule of separation between public and private—the abuse of public trust. This characteristic is central in one of the classic definitions of corruption (Nye 1967):

Corruption is behaviour which deviates from the formal duties of a public role because of private-regarding (personal, close family, private clique) pecuniary or status gains; or violates the rules against the exercise of certain type of private regarding influence (cited in Philp 2005, 44–45).

Critical researchers increasingly point out that not all societies distinguish as strongly between public and private spheres as Western democracies do (Gephart 2009). But in support of a universal concept of corruption, Rothstein (2014) introduced the “public goods theory of corruption.” Rothstein argues that all societies produce some set of public goods and when those who are responsible for managing the public goods convert them into private goods, people generally condemn it as abuse (Rothstein 2014, 741). For this reason, “damage to public interest” by trespassing the line between public and private, which is implied in the word “abuse,” is an inevitable element of the definition, independently of varying normative context.

Should an individual entrusted with public office combine their work for the public with private interest, it should not be immediately regarded as corruption. The presence of only the two above-mentioned characteristics is not sufficient to denote corruption if a third, private advantage, for the person in power, is absent. Corruption can only be positively identified if the actor was entrusted with public power but used this position for private advantage. Private advantage is not necessarily personal but can include advantage for the members of the family or a private clique. Instead of the term “gain,” this work uses the term “advantage,” which indicates that not only monetary gain is considered, but also forms of corruption that aim to gain advantages over opponents by using public resources. Usually, this leads to another characteristic, which is the social cost of corruption to the public incurred through reduced (by monetary corruption) or mismanaged (by social corruption) public resources.

These core characteristics allow distinguishing corruption from other malpractices, like theft, collusion, nepotism, extortion, etc. All malpractices can be related to corruption or even be a form of corruption, but only in circumstances where they combine the above-mentioned characteristics.

2.3. Varieties of corruption

Alongside the definition and elaboration of core characteristics, the differentiation of varying forms of corruption allows operationalization of the term for the purposes of this study. The decision regarding which forms will be emphasized depends largely on the discipline and research foci in which the study is located. Recently, there have been a few attempts to cluster different approaches of the forms of corruption. For instance, Jennifer Bussel argues for a more explicit but pragmatic approach to typologies of corruption and states that “a diversity of typologies, rather than one primary typology, may be most analytically useful” (Bussell 2015, 22).

Together with a researcher in behavioral economics, Nils Köbis, the author of this work has developed an atlas of forms of corruption that allows better interdisciplinary communication in collaborative corruption research (Köbis and Huss 2017). Based on the three core characteristics of corruption, we elaborated several dimensions for each characteristic, so that corruption researchers from different disciplines can easily locate the form of corruption they are researching in a broader context and show how their research is related to other forms of corruption. In the context of the interdisciplinary atlas of forms of corruption, this work highlights the difference between the high political and low administrative forms of corruption, grand and petty corruption, corruption occurring on the input and output side(s) of the political processes as well as monetary and non-monetary forms of corruption.

In addition to these forms of corruption, two other characteristics that influence the researcher’s choice of definition of corruption are added: First is the difference in frequency of corrupt practices, that is, whether we are dealing with corruption in a context in which it is an exception, or in a context in which it is the rule. This difference is essential to contextualize subsequent research in this study, to be elaborated below. Second, we introduce a three-level zoom factor to contextualize the subject and actors in corruption research: the individual micro-level, the organizational meso-level, and the country and society macro-levels. In this study, the aggregation of the macro and micro levels is explored, since the focus on the country’s president means that individual behavior should be considered, alongside the context in which it takes place.

2.3.1. Distinguishing context: Corruption as an exception vs. corruption as the norm

Identifying the frequency of corruption, whether as a systemic problem or only an occasional deviation from the rules, is widely applied in existing research. In the atlas of forms of corruption, we highlighted this differentiation not as a form of corruption, but rather as a governance context in which corruption takes place (Köbis and Huss 2017, 168). The context influences the perceptions, definition, characteristics and forms of corruption, as well as problem-solving approaches. Thus, even if one uses the term “corruption,” since its core characteristics remain the same, the phenomenon has different implications and varying meanings depending on the context.