CONTEXTUAL CHOICES OF CORRUPTION CONTROL
What have we learned from chasing Moby Dick for fifteen years?
ALINA MUNGIU-PIPPIDIHERTIE SCHOOL OF GOVERNANCE [email protected]; 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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-5 0 50 = year of UNCAC ratification
ICRG Control of Corruption Score lb/ub
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?