CONTEXTUAL CHOICES OF CORRUPTION CONTROL

What have we learned from chasing Moby Dick for fifteen years?

ALINA MUNGIU-PIPPIDIHERTIE SCHOOL OF GOVERNANCE pippidi@hertie-school.org; www.againstcorruption.eu

Fifteen years at it and little to show in terms of significant country or regional progress

Awareness highest than ever, but also an industry driven by its own self-perpetuation needs: spends and employs more

Public highly critical and skeptical that govt driven AC leads anywhere

An international normative and legal framework now exists, but does it make an impact?

The anticorruption impasse…

We presume that ethical universalism is a default state of governance (now in UNCAC!), so corruption must be a deviation from it

But in developing countries corruption is no deviation, but rather norm (particularism)

Consequence: norm infringing AC instruments fail to deliver norm-building

Definitional impasse

Many countries in the developing world have not yet achieved the first transformation from rural collectivist society to basic market relations based on individual property (historian Alan Macfarlane 1978) .

Consequence: but they are expected to succeed in the second transformation from particularistic to impartial government without completing the first

Historical impasse

What is presented in most anti-corruption literature as a principal-agent problem is more often than not a collective action problem, since societies reach a sub-optimal equilibrium of poor governance and no domestic agency exists to push for change

Consequence: we presume AC is a win-win policy and entrust various implausible principals with the task of controlling corruption

Scientific impasse

We study what are the shared characteristics of countries which are now free of corruption versus those which are not (‘causes’ of corruption) and presume ‘costs’ without any good counterfactuals

Consequence: we end up recommending countries to be islands, Protestants, former British colonies and old democracies and economic predators to adopt policies allowing free competition

Policy impasse

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The impact of UNCAC

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The impact of ACAs

ECE 2004-2010

Gross profit rate Romanian and foreign companies compared after 2007 EU accession

Evolution of the government

reserve fund for natural disasters

2002-2010

  2004

(SDP)

2008

(Liberals)

2010 (Democrat Liberals)

Share of funds for main govt party %

49 45 62

Share of vote in local elections of govt party %

36 16 29

1. Which one is the norm/ rule of the game (Are the majority of government transactions carried on the basis of particularism or ethical universalism?)

--- ESTABLISH THE GOVERNANCE REGIME 2. What determines the evolution from one

governance regime to another and can this be influenced by human agency in the medium term?

--- ESTABLISH WHAT CHANGES THE EQUILIBRIUM

Could we approach the problem differently? 2 research questions

We study waves of ‘achievement’ in controlling corruption

Achievers are historical (pre-modern and modern, older and more recent) and contemporary

We know what makes them different from non-achievers (many of them are regional outliers), what we do not know is WHY

Analytic narratives of transitions to good governance

To answer: ANTICORRP, the largest social science EU grant to-date (8 millions Euros and 21 partners)

Few performers…Historical achievers

Early achievers

Contemporary achievers

Partly free or not free achievers

Borderline

Belgium Australia EstoniaUnited Arab Emirates

Ghana

Austria Canada Spain Hong Kong Georgia

France New Zealand Slovenia SingaporeSan Salvador

Denmark Ireland Portugal Bhutan Czech Republic

Finland Japan St Kitts and Nevis .etc…Luxemburg Iceland Uruguay Cape Verde

Liechtenstein St LuciaMauritius

Netherlands Barbados Poland

NorwayAntigua and Barbuda

Sweden BahamasSwitzerland Chile

UKSt Vincent and the Grenadines

USA BotswanaAndorra TaiwanBavaria S. Korea

PrussiaMaltaWest Germany

Governance regimes – streamlining theory

Limited access order

Open access order(Neo)

Patrimonialism

Competitive particularism

Borderline

Power distribution

Hierarchical with monopoly of central power

Stratified with power disputed competitively

Competitive with less stratification

Citizenship. Equality

State autonomyState captured by ruler

State captured in turn by winners of elections

Archipelago of autonomy and captured ‘islands’

State autonomous from private interest (legal lobby , etc)

Public allocation (services, goods)

Particular and predicable

Particular but unpredictable

Particular and universal

Ethical universalism

Separation private-public

No No Poor Sharp

Governance regime change in historical perspective

Chile – GG first

Poland – the democracy/governance gap…

-10

-50

51

0

1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010Year

ICRG Control of Corruption (from 1 to 6)Polity Score (from -10 to 10)

Explaining contemporary achievers – main lessons

Not one single institution explains achievers cases, which present great variation across the group

None evolved on behalf of legal constraints alone; reducing resources and increasing normative constraints (press and civil society) was the main element (except Botswana)

Emulation worked better than conditionality; domestic agency with an emulation model

Main actors professional groups, parts of professional elites, media

Two European paths:

- less complex and numerous communities reached good governance already in medieval times on the basis of community participation – good designs, need size controlling

- complex larger European countries evolved thru enlightened monarchies which developed bureaucracies against challengers and reached GG prior to introduction of universal franchise; independence of judiciary was last. Models hard to reproduce, as democracy and modernization multiply resources of corruption

Explaining historical achievers – main lessons

Why did reforms work in the past? (When they worked)

Ombudsman: tool for political opposition Merit based systems introduced first in the

army/navy answering existential threats for monarchies

Control/audit systems introduced by monarchs as part of conflict with aristocracy

Normative constraints (voice of the people) responsible for extension pluralism

Media responsible for increased privilege abolition

The transition from corrupt regimes to a regime where ethical universalism is the norm is a political

and not a technical-legal process

Situation A. You have losers from corruption, of which some are autonomous enough to take some action / they are the principals and any strategy should be grounded their level

Situation B. You have losers, but not autonomous enough for action; you do no AC, but develop them into a group capable of inflicting some normative constraints in the future (civil society development)

Situation C. No significant domestic losers exist. Forget about AC except as an approach to aid distribution

To evolve out of particularism as norm= collective action strategies

To increase the impact of international norm building we need to conceive the UNCAC implementation and review as mechanisms to stir domestic collective action. The UNCAC can have an impact only if the entire society contributes to a check on the government.

But who will do it? The majority is not from ethical universalism countries

And what about the arsenal?