Corruption Cycles
نویسندگان
چکیده
Political corruption has been a persistent phenomenon throughout history and across societies. It is found today in many dierent forms and degrees in all types of political systems, in developing countries as well as in Western democracies. The phenomenon is not solely or even largely the consequence of a moral fault or cultural backwardness. The root cause of corruption, in Europe as well as in Japan, Latin America and the United States, is found in the mixture of economic and political power. We take corruption to consist in the illegitimate use of public roles and resources for private bene®t, where `private' often refers to large groups such as political parties. This de®nition has the advantage of subsuming many dierent kinds of corrupt behaviour, ranging from public ocers' use of their position to maximize personal gain by dispensing public bene®ts to the implementation of policies that violate the common interest in favour of special interests, such as granting large ®rms the monopoly of their services within a particular sector. Since this de®nition of corruption is based upon legal norms, not public opinion or social norms, it has the advantage of directing our attention to the contrast between ocial and social norms that is present in most societies. The literature on corruption is a large corpus of descriptive studies, but a full ̄edged theory of corruption is yet to come. As a result, many dimensions of corruption have been left unexplored. One such problem is the life-cycle of corruption. If corruption is endemic, what are the forces that allow it to prevail? What permits it to continue? An answer to this question cannot be separated from an analysis of the political and economic eects of corruption. There has been widespread disagreement among scholars studying the phenomenon regarding the direction of its eects. The so-called Moralists maintained that corruption is harmful, as it impedes development and erodes the legitimacy of institutions. Revisionists point instead to the possible bene®ts of corruption: it
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