Search Results

This chapter tests the second set of hypotheses relating legislative lobbying behaviors to corruption levels. It uses data from the two country surveys; open-ended interviews; secondary sources; and the International Country Risk Guide (ICRG), Transparency International (TI), and the World Bank (WB) surveys to test whether business lobbying leads to higher political and overall corruption in India relative to Brazil and to all individual-focused countries in the sample. It also provides evidence on the conditional nature of the strength of the political links between political and overall corruption, and shows that these are stronger in party-focused India.

This chapter introduces the concepts and the structure employed by this book to address three questions on corruption: Why do some developing democracies experience much higher levels of corruption than others? How does the behavior of business interest groups relate to political corruption? How do legislative institutions governing the policy process promote or restrain corruption through the rules of engagement they provide to political and business actors? It first defines the meaning of the terms “political corruption,” “corruption,” and “lobbying”, since these terms have been used to describe a wide range of behaviors. It then discusses the problem scholars face in measuring corruption, and its ramifications for any research on the topic. The second section presents the puzzle motivating this book: the wide variation in the levels of corruption experienced by countries. It analyzes the most prominent theories that have been used to explain corruption and business lobbying. This is followed by a discussion of some of the limitations faced by current theoretical and empirical approaches in understanding these phenomena. It then previews the argument that legislative institutions drive variation in corruption levels by motivating specific patterns of behavior among special interest groups. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

The lack of confidence of citizens in their democratic institutions is not new, although the current context differs in various ways: first, the unchallenged supremacy of the two victorious paradigms of market and democracy; second, the weaker capacity of new or old democracies to deal with the new challenges they have to face; and third, the relative position of market and democracy, which has changed in favour of the market and to the detriment of democracy. The chapter first considers the nature of the democratic malaise and its manifestations; has it to do with the democratic principle itself or is it only a temporary dissatisfaction with elites, parties and political organizations? Two complementary explanations are then offered to interpret the birth and expansion of this phenomenon: the structural explanation emphasizes the tension between the constitutionalist and the popular dimension of contemporary democracies; the conjunctural explanation relates to political corruption, which became so pervasive in the 1990s and contributed to the delegitimation of representatives and of the principle of representation in many European countries, populism and populist dichotomy.

The French institutional context did not provide incentives for party cooperation, at least not between parties of the left and right camps. Similar to their British counterparts, French parties were unable to reach a consensus on the introduction of state funding in the late 1970s on account of their preference for vote-seeking strategies. The introduction of comprehensive state funding between 1988 and 1994 can be led back to two reasons. Firstly, the cohabitation which, as an exception to the bipolar institutional logic of the French polity, created incentives for cooperation across the ideological blocs. Secondly (and more importantly), an ever more intensive discourse on political corruption which was not only communicative, that is, led between the parties and the public, but also gained a coordinative element since, in the mid 1980s, all parties started to refer to the positively connoted topos of a necessary moralization of political life.

This chapter summarizes the theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions that this book makes to the understanding of corruption and lobbying in developing countries, and discusses some of its limitations. It then discusses some of the consequences of these findings for the study of corruption, institutions, interest group politics, political parties, and the impact of globalization on domestic politics. It concludes by recognizing that this is the first systematic, comparative study of the relationship between lobbying and political corruption and that a fruitful area of future research would be to develop a more unified theory that incorporates the incentives generated by both electoral and legislative institutions.

This chapter shows that, in Germany, it was predominantly institutional veto points and party goals that facilitated the parties' consensus on their state funding that evolved in the early 1960s. As regards the institutional factors, the parties' constitutional status was of particular importance because it allowed the German parties to veto the interests of other actors, namely, the Constitutional Court. The parties were thus free to autonomously opt for a consensus-oriented mode of competition, resulting in reluctance vis-à-vis vote-seeking strategies. As expected in an environment shaped by influential veto points and an aversion towards vote-seeking strategies, the coordinative discourse on political corruption was largely dominated by the political parties and played no independent role in the politics of party funding.

In Britain, neither the institutional context nor parties' strategic goals provided any incentives for cooperation in questions of party funding. In the centralized Westminster model of democracy, the opposition's view could only influence policy through commissions of enquiry without any veto power which – with one notable exception (the 1998 Neill Committee) – had no practical impact. The parties themselves had no strategic interest in cooperating in matters of their own funding; they chose to pursue vote-seeking strategies in line with the institutional environment, most notably majority rule. However, an ever more intense communicative discourse on political corruption – in which the public plays a more important role – recently facilitated a consensus on rudimentary state funding to political parties and continues to exert pressure for further reform of the British party funding regime.

This chapter begins by providing a diagnosis for the crisis of democracy based on systemic corruption. After reconstructing from the works of Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, and Niccolò Machiavelli, a notion of systemic political corruption particular to popular governments, it reviews recent neorepublican and institutionalist attempts at redefining political corruption within the current political regimes. It also underscores the lack of a proper conception of systemic corruption comparable in sophistication to the one offered by ancient and modern philosophers due to the inability to account for the role that procedures and institutions play in fostering corruption through their normal functioning. The chapter proposes a definition of systemic corruption as the oligarchization of power transpiring within a general respect for the rule of law. It describes the conception of corruption that appears as intrinsically connected to increasing socioeconomic inequality, which enables the inequality of political influence and drift toward oligarchic democracy.

The focus of this chapter is on the income structure of political parties. The chapter gives up-to-date information about the share of income parties in the four countries receive from membership dues, donations, and the different forms of state funding available. Furthermore, the transparency regulations that parties in each of the examined countries face and the levels of political corruption are assessed. As hypothesized, the party funding regimes of those countries with insignificant state funding (the United Kingdom and France up to 1988) are designed rather to regulate electoral campaigns, whereas the party funding regimes of Germany and Sweden focus more on parties' day-to-day expenses. This is an indicator of a link between vote-seeking strategies (which prompt a tighter regulation of electoral campaigns) and a preference for private funding of political parties.

The most important variable facilitating the Swedish parties' consensus on state funding was the constitutional reform of 1970. The constitutional reform strengthened the position of the bourgeois parties since it rendered minority governments (during which the centre-right opposition parties enjoyed more influence both in parliamentary committees and commissions of enquiry) more likely. Furthermore, the constitutional reform was an incentive for the bourgeois parties to cooperate more closely. Put differently, they could adopt an office-seeking strategy, which in turn facilitated a consensus on state funding to political parties. Prior to 1970, the Social Democrats electorally and organizationally dominated to an extent that allowed them to marginalize its competitors in questions of party funding. Exploiting the coordinative discourse on political corruption, the Social Democrats were able to discredit business donations to the bourgeois parties, leaving these no other choice than to agree to state funding.

This chapter defines important concepts such as ‘party funding regime’ and ‘private’, ‘public’, and ‘illegal’ sources of income of political parties. The differentiation of significant/insignificant and of public/private sources of income leads to four different cases being relevant for an examination of the politics of party funding: Germany is selected as a case where both public and private contributions play a significant role for the funding of political parties. Sweden is selected as a case where only public funding plays a significant role, whereas in Britain parties rely almost exclusively on private contributions. France is selected as a case where, at least up to 1988, neither public nor private, but illegal contributions (i.e. political corruption) were the only significant source of parties' income. The chapter concludes by analysing the conceptual problems that arise from the attempt to link highly complex phenomena such as party or party system change to developments in party funding regimes. Party funding regimes, it is argued, are a dependent rather than an independent variable.

This chapter tests the first set of hypotheses relating legislative institutions to lobbying behaviors. It begins by outlining the sampling design and sampling frame used for collecting data on lobbying, political corruption, and corruption in Brazil and India, and presents some sample characteristics. It then uses a combination of data from this survey, open-ended interviews, and process tracing of legislative bills in each country to test the hypotheses in this chapter.

This chapter examines developmental corruption in South Korea and Taiwan, with particular emphasis on the role of corruption in the formation and consolidation of pro-growth “developmental alliances” that linked the ruling party's political interests to the economic interests of big business. During the 1980s, proponents of the “developmental state” model tended to downplay the importance of corruption in East Asia. Chalmers Johnson, for example, acknowledged that extensive “structural corruption” was present in Japan but brushed it aside, arguing that corrupt politicians merely reigned while honest technocrats ruled. This chapter argues that “structural corruption,” also known as “political corruption,” was an integral part of politics, and that “dirty money” bound together and sustained the conservative, pro-business political coalitions found at the core of the so-called developmental state. It also considers structural corruption as a necessary precondition for rapid economic growth.

This book examines the extent and causes of political corruption in postwar Lebanon. Drawing on research on comparative corruption, bribery, rent-seeking, and crony capitalism, primarily in less developed countries (LDCs), the book considers high political corruption—that is, forms of corruption occurring at the top of the state's bureaucracy and its agencies (for example, among ministers, directors-general, and other senior officials) rather than those that occur at lower echelons of state bureaucracies. It also explores various manifestations of corruption, from bid rigging and influence peddling to collusion, extortion, theft of public funds, nepotism, and outright bribery. It argues that corruption in postwar Lebanon has been rampant and attributes it mainly to the high degree to which public institutions diverged from the criteria of bureaucratic organization. In turn, the limited extent to which corruption-prone public institutions in postwar Lebanon met these criteria can be blamed on the debilitating nature of the political settlement that has been evolving since the early 1990s.

This book has shown how political corruption permeated Lebanon's bureaucratic institutions throughout the post-Ta'if period. It has analyzed incidences of corruption in their immediate institutional and political contexts by focusing on the institutions' bureaucratic organization and the underlying politics of their evolution. The book concludes with a summary of its findings, first by discussing how political settlement contributed to the failure of public institutions in postwar Lebanon to meet the criteria of bureaucratic organization. It then considers why the central bank was spared from the bickering of political elites and describes the Lebanese state as a state of muhasasa, or an allotment state. It also presents some key Lebanese voices on the subject of corruption and explains why Lebanon's attempts at administrative reform to combat corruption have been widely regarded as a failure. Finally, the book assesses the implications of its findings for the comparative study of postwar recovery.