Caryn Peiffer

Making Government Transparent

Transparency is intended to open up the process of governance to public scrutiny and accountability. It replaces the historical practice of political elites conducting public affairs in private. Doing so restricts information about what happens within the black box of government to a limited number of insiders.

Exploiting People at the Grass Roots

This chapter shifts attention from corruption at the top of government to corruption at the grass roots, where the great mass of citizens deal with public employees face-to-face. Whereas laws and rules are enacted in the national capital, this is a long way from where most people live, including the public employees nominally acting as their agents.

Exploiting National Government

The best-known measures of political corruption are in the style of macroeconomic statistics: they are indexes that characterize national governments as a whole. The primary concern is the extent to which high-ranking policymakers in the national capital make decisions that produce big-bucks benefits for a small number of people. The primary information used to create corruption indexes consists of expert perceptions of how politicians behave when handling public money and desk-based research evaluating government institutions. The reforms that are advocated to deal with big-bucks corruption are directed at national institutions.

Getting What You Want from Governance

In the ideal-type bureaucratic state governance operates by the book. Statute books contain laws stating the conditions for supplying a specific service and public agencies have teachers, nurses or civil engineers with the expert knowledge and skills to deliver it by the book. But what do people do when the state in which they live is not staffed by bureaucratic automatons behaving strictly by the book? This challenge is of immediate relevance in most countries in the world today, where public officials do not conform to the strict Weberian ideal of the modern bureaucrat. Few officials operate with the unpredictable arbitrariness of a despot or with the commitment of a Communist or Nazi ideologue. Instead, the practice of governance offers people a choice of how they get the service they want. These choices are ignored in many studies of governance.

Explaining Who Pays Grass-Roots Bribes

Explanations of corruption are methodologically determined. Studies at the national levels usually concentrate on capital-intensive corruption, but understanding the experience of individuals at the grass roots requires a different approach.

Politicians Behaving Badly

Corruption studies evaluate behaviour by a combination of legal and normative standards. The two are mutually re-enforcing; when a public official takes a bribe, it is both illegal and wrong to do so. When social scientists write about political behaviour it is characterized in ethically neutral terms; for example, it is assumed that winning an election is better than losing an election.

Setting Standards for Good and Bad Governance

At the symbolic level, few citizens would say that they are against good governance and fewer still would endorse bad governance or corruption. However, because of their symbolic power, the terms governance and corruption are applied indiscriminately to describe what people like or dislike. Without standards for defining these terms, the result is confusion.

The Impact of Corruption on Citizens

Although corruption is a problem of governance, development economists have been the leaders in research on the impact of corruption, because it is seen as having a substantial negative effect on economic growth. Corrupt politicians who control national resources and foreign aid may abuse their political power to make sure that they take what they want for themselves. At worst, corrupt rulers have been ‘stationary bandits’, enforcing an undemocratic repressive order to maintain a flow of personal riches from the exploitation of their country’s people and resources. Macroeconomists have used the Corruption Perceptions Index to produce quantitative estimates of the loss of the full benefit of development expenditure due to the inefficiencies and ineffectiveness that national corruption may have on economic growth. Whatever methods are used, the cost of corruption is estimated to be billions of dollars annually and cumulatively tens of billions.