A Publication of the Center for Democracy and the Third Sector Affirmative Representation

A number of years ago, one of Robert Putnam’s critics made the catchy observation that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols bowled together. In so doing, they created the network upon which McVeigh was later able to capitalize for help in making the bomb he set off in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Putnam incorporated the point into Bowling Alone, writing that “Networks and associated norms of reciprocity are generally good for those inside the network, but the external effects of social capital are by no means always positive.” As Putnam noted, “urban gangs, nimby (“not in my backyard”) movements, and power elites often exploit social capital to achieve ends that are antisocial from a wider perspective.” Although it is now widely acknowledged that social capital can produce social bads, research has focused almost exclusively on the social goods. These goods are considerable and important, including democracy, education, prosperity, safety, health, and even happiness. But the social bads sometimes facilitated by social capital can also be considerable, including terrorism, organized crime, clientelism, certain economic inefficiencies, rigid communities that stifle innovation and are dysfunctional within broader societies, ethnic rivalries, and unjust distributions of resources. Here I focus on just one of these social bads: political corruption, by which I shall simply mean those actions that deviate from public norms of decision-making for the sake of private gain, whether these norms are embedded in public offices, political procedures, or political culture. In the broader scheme of things, corruption is not the worst pathology of politics. It is better than extortion, violence, or war, for example. But it is the pathology that has a particular relevance to democracy, the social good of social capital that most interests me here. On the one hand, corruption is profoundly subversive of democracy, undermining the democratic principles that individuals should have equal chances to influence public judgment, and equal power to affect public decision-making. On the other hand, corruption often increases as democratic institutions develop. This is less paradoxical than it may seem. Corruption in a democracy is often an indication that those with resources can no longer use cruder means to get their way. As James Scott pointed out some time ago, the rise of machine politics a century ago in U.S. cities indicated the increasing power of the electorate, and the reduction in the effectiveness of outright force and fraud. New York’s Tammany Hall, for example, was relatively inclusive as compared to the Philadelphia machine of the time. The New York system was one of “democratic corruption” because “the public’s voting power was not diluted by fraud or coercion,” as it was in Philadelphia. In New York, votes functioned as a relatively egalitarian political resource that people could trade for access to economic resources—jobs, a bit of welfare, and the like. In A Publication of the Center for Democracy and the Third Sector