Bureaucratic corruption, myth or reality? - Oxford Abstracts

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“Bureaucratic corruption, myth or reality?

Confronting subjective and objective data“

Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, Hertie School of Governance, [email protected]

Presented by Merian Ayachi, Hertie School, [email protected]

One of the oldest distinctions in corruption studies is the one between petty or bureaucratic corruption

on one hand and grand corruption, on the other. But do sound theory and empirical evidence both

validate this distinction? Do petty and grand corruption occur as distinct and unrelated phenomena, and

therefore do countries present distinct pathologies in this regard? Furthermore, what are the

mechanisms underpinning the distinctiveness (or lack of it) within government corruption types? Using

both subjective (Global Corruption Barometer 2017) and objective indicators (Index of public integrity)

this paper seeks to refine existing corruption theory by the new generation indicators and the insights

that they bring, arguing that principal agent models explain poorly corruption in less developed

societies.

Keywords: bureaucratic corruption, administration corruption, institutional

quality, perception indicators, development.

I. An oxymoron: bureaucracy and corruption

A ghost is haunting development: the ghost of bureaucratic corruption. Several

authors swear to have seen it, but can one really trust people’s eyes? Firstly, if

something is poorly defined, the incidence of sightings tend to be higher, so it is

quite important to understand the presumption at the basis of current definitions

of bureaucratic corruption. Secondly, if one takes a social phenomenon in

isolation from a given context, misperception is easy. Just presume that on a very

foggy day you have all the blinds shut, but one window is ajar and the fog

infiltrates in a cloud : it seems to be a ghost indeed, although if you only opened

the blinds you would see that it comes from the dense mist outside. Finally, but

relatedly, if one notices that a woman does not sit at the same table with her

husband, but serves him only standing, one might engage in complex analyses of

what particular relation exists between these two individuals, unless one would

also observe the couple next door, and indeed the whole community. Then the

discovery would be made that in this particular culture the custom is that the

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woman just serves her husband, but does not eat in the same time with him.

Social phenomena can hardly be explained by only observing individual instances.

It is the premise of this paper that the term ‘bureaucratic corruption’ was carried

over in corruption literature without such proper contextualization and expanded

beyond any meaningful use (which should have been strictly restricted to certain

contexts, which are not so many anyway). The paper also proposes, but does not

engage in, an empirical test of the existence of ‘bureaucratic corruption’, just

limiting itself to some preliminary examples of how such a test could be made.

This being said, in the first part of this paper the concept and the presumption

beyond it would be explored. In the second, I shall suggest how the existence or

non-existence of bureaucratic corruption can be tested, and show some

preliminary data. And final I will discuss the implications of the concept for policy,

showing how misconceptualization can lead to erroneous actions and policies.

In pure linguistic terms, ‘bureaucratic corruption’ is what we call an ‘oxymoron’.

The Oxford dictionary defines oxymoron as a figure of speech in which apparently

contradictory terms appear in conjunction. Now bureaucracy is, according to the

same source, a system of government in which most of the important decisions

are taken by state officials rather than by elected representatives. The German

sociologist Max Weber argued in Economy and Society (Part 2, Chapter 11) that

bureaucracy is defined by written formal rules of operation, organized by strict

hierarchy and labor division, with recruitment and advancement based on skills

and merit evaluation; furthermore, it is efficient and concerned with efficiency

and, above all, operates in an impersonal environment that it creates.

Bureaucracy rationalizes government by the elimination of personalistic and

particularistic features related to any private interest, so it is, in other words,

autonomous from any private interest. The interests of the bureaucrats are

aligned with the interest of the state’s- hence its alleged inhumanity, which made

a great literary career in Central European novels of Frank Kafka or Robert Musil.

That means that, by definition, bureaucracy is inimical to favoritism, as it operates

by rules blind to the claimant’s background and not by personal connections or

family loyalties, as previous forms of governance (feudalism or patriarchalism)

have done. Corruption, on the other hand, has as most popular definition the


abuse of office (appointed or elected) for undue private gain (Rose-Ackermann

2008). But this is an individual level definition, as I have argued already, and while

correct in itself for identifying an instance of corruption, it is worthless to

diagnose the larger governance context (Mungiu-Pippidi 20150, ch 1-2), which

needs us to understand if corrupt acts are isolated (exception) within the total

population of government transactions, or actually in majority (rule of the game).

We then arrive at a definition of institutional corruption as “systematic abuse of

authority to divert public resources intended for universal use for the benefit of

particular private interests”.

Patrimonialism, as espoused in Max Weber’s work, is a feature of governance

where the private-public border is not enforced, with the consequence of

authority holders appropriating public office and its benefits for themselves and

their cronies (Weber 1991; p. 298). Particularism, as developed by Talcott

Parsons on the basis of Weber (1997; 80-82) and further developed by Mungiu-

Pippidi (2006) is an exchange mode of collectivistic societies, encompassing a

variety of interpersonal and personal-state transaction types, such as clientelism,

bribery, patronage, nepotism and other favoritisms, some of which imply at an

individual level some degree of patrimonialism. Particularism is defined as the

deviation from the ethical universalism norm of social allocation (as defined by

law, rules and the modern principles of administrative impersonality, impartiality

and equality, as well as by market relations) resulting in private benefit not

warranted by merit. Particularism defines not only the relations between a

government and its subjects, but also between individuals in a society, and it

explains why advancement in a given society is based on merit or, on the

contrary, status or particular connections with influential people. If particularistic

exchanges, which are carried out on the basis of status and connections versus

impersonal factors (such as merit of product, price and rules), are the dominant

mode in a society, markets cannot evolve from a state of imperfect competition.

Similarly, particularism of transactions between state and citizens makes

democracy a mere façade, as resources are systematically spoiled by authority

holders and the state never manages to become autonomous from private

interest, with bureaucrats and rulers colluding in the public resources spoliation


game. The existence of particularism limits access to public resources (some

applicants are favored and some are discriminated against) resulting in unfair

treatment. Particularism is a broader concept than corruption, as it includes both

criminalized forms of corruption (favor in exchange for undue profit) and what

Daniel Kaufmann labelled ‘legal corruption’(Kaufmann & Vicente 2011). In its

extreme form (most government transactions are particularistic) a state can be

entirely ‘captured’ by private interest. The current scholarship and policy

literature on corruption uses a variety of overlapping and differently theorized

concepts which mix the social and individual level, such as state capture, grand

corruption, regulatory capture, government favoritism, administrative capture

and petty corruption. They all describe a specific case of particularism, for

instance, in clientelism parties trade favors for votes, in petty corruption tiny

bureaucrats deliver public services only incentivized by bribes, but by and large all

these remain particular categories of a general situation, the distribution of public

resource on the basis of favoritism. If we picture governance as the set of formal

rules and informal practices determining who gets what in terms of public

resources, we can then imagine a continuum of public resource allocations with

full particularism at one end and full ethical universalism at the other. The

outcome of particularism- a regular pattern of preferential distribution of public

goods- is called by North and Weingast limited access order, by Acemoglu and

Robinson extractive institutions and by Francis Fukuyama patrimonialism

(Acemoglu & Robinson 2012; North et al. 2009; Fukuyama 2014). And ranging all

the countries in the world on such a continuum it is easy to observe that most

countries are around or below the average (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Distribution of countries from total particularism to full ethical

universalism


Source: World Bank Control of Corruption recoded 1-10. The number of countries

attributed to each score is marked on each column

In such a context of institutional corruption, where particularism and

patrimonialism (poor separation between state resources and private ones) reign

over ethical universalism (equal and fair treatment), does bureaucracy, in the

sense meant by Weber and the Oxford dictionary even exist? And do we imply

that a bureaucrat who is corrupt ceases to be a bureaucrat, but was one before?

Or rather we should take the discussion where it originated, to practices, and not

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the individual level, and ask ourselves how many countries have managed in their

history to build a bureaucracy which corresponds to the Weberian

definitionCorruption as widespread social practice, or corruption as norm, is

frequent in developing societies, and such countries are characterized precisely by

the absence of the autonomy of the state towards private interest, which can be

seen as benchmark of modernity - Weber’s ideal-type of the modern (European)

rational state. For states which are not modern and not European, the simple

existence of something which looks like formal bureaucracies, but behaves by

different rules should question the existence of ‘bureaucracy’. Scholars of

development have long argued that instead of treating corruption as a deviation,

we should rather see what rules of the game apply in a given society rather than

measuring it by a Weberian yardstick (Gupta 1995: 376; Ledeneva 2006; Mungiu-

Pippidi 2006). The strange reality is that the effort to modernize these countries,

frequently by imitating an European model or even driven by the external agency

of donors (Migdal 1998; Fukuyama 2014), resulted in many states having only the

formal institution of ‘bureaucracy’. In other word, many developing countries

have a legally defined public service which on paper is merit based and tenured,

but the informal institutions ruling this public service are based on a complex of

practices having particularism in common- cronyism, patronage, nepotism,

politicization, patrimonialism, which have nothing to do with a modern state,

despite having 172 states ratifying UNCAC, the United Convention against

Corruption, which spells out the norms of precisely such a state. There is a huge

literature on state capacity in poor countries which deals in fact with the pre-

modern character of these states, itself grounded in societies which are very

different from the individualist nineteenth century northern Protestant Europe

where modern bureaucracy appeared. Moreover, the contemporary theory of the

state is more often than not concerned with its redistributive character, taking for

the granted the presumption that the state is autonomous from private interest

and catering for social welfare, and not just the particular interests of kleptocratic

leaders and their clienteles. This is, however, a bias towards developed societies

with concepts from the modern First World being applied everywhere with little

contextualization. And this is why, by 2018, Google Scholar counted more than a

quarter million entries on ‘bureaucratic corruption’.


II. Bureaucratic and administrative corruption

Let us review the most popular definitions of bureaucratic corruption. In the

most cited paper using the term, that of Nathaniel Leff (over 2300 citations by

2018), it is defined as “the practice of buying favors from the bureaucrats

responsible for formulating and administering the government’s economic

policies. Typical examples are bribery to obtain foreign exchange, import, export,

investment or production licenses, or to avoid paying taxes”. By and large, Leff’s

bureaucracy either includes policymakers with considerable policy formulation

power, or refers to cases where bureaucracy has extended powers not over the

policy implementation, but over policy itself. Leff goes on in explaining that

bureaucratic corruption exists in all societies, at all stages of economic

development, and under different political and economic regimes, and that it is

the result of government intervention in the economy which assigns some

resource allocation responsibilities to a bureaucratic structure. It is in this

bureaucratic discretion, he argues, that the source of corruption is to be found.

Susan Rose Ackermann proposes a close model when stating that ‘All states,

whether benevolent or repressive, control the distribution of valuable benefits

and the imposition of onerous costs. The distribution of these benefits and costs

is generally under the control of public officials who possess discretionary power.

Private individuals and firms who want favorable treatment may be willing to pay

to obtain it’. Again, the model presumes weak policymakers and very strong

bureaucrats, who no longer control just policy implementation, but social

allocation itself- the distribution of costs and benefits in a society. This implies

that policymakers (either autocrats or democrats) are powerless and the

bureaucrats untouchable and immovable. Both models allude to discretionary

legislation, which encourages favoritism, and we do know that bureaucracies

cannot pass laws. Bureaucrats may have some discretion, but they do not make

the rules- they implement the rules. Is it not too much neglect in these models for

those who make rules allocating costs or rewards? And equally, to those who

appoint or remove bureaucrats? A further, third model, ‘ the grabbing hand’ of


Schleifer and Vishny (2002) makes some step further, acknowledging that the

rules might be purposely crafted to extract rents: ‘heavy and arbitrary taxes

retard investment, regulations [that] enrich corrupt bureaucrats, state firms

[that] consume national wealth’, but, still, they rather attribute it to ‘ public

sector institutions’ rather than plainly to government. Once acknowledging that

the rules, including the rules giving discretion to bureaucrats, are what matters,

the necessary next step is to acknowledge that politics, and not some form of

government organization, is what empowers or deters corruption. Corruption is

about power, and governments where the bureaucracy is stronger than the

politicians or the heads of state are difficult to find outside the very developed

world, whose administrations can hardly be called ‘bureaucracies’, as they are

entirely dependent on the rulers (in neo-patrimonial regimes), or the elected

officials (where free and fair elections coincide with systematic corruption, what I

called competitive particularism- Mungiu-Pippidi 2015). In other words, to speak

about ‘bureaucratic corruption’ the presumption of the autonomy of the

bureaucracy from the political factor has- at least to some extent- be satisfied. Or,

the literature on the developing world abounds, on the contrary on evidence on

the lack of autonomy of administration, characterized by nepotism, patronage

and instability: in sub-Saharan Africa for many decades only two countries

qualified for a bureaucracy reasonably autonomous from the political factor, both

at appointment level and at the rest of career, Botswana and Mauritius; in post

EU accession Eastern Europe, except for the Baltic countries, politicization has

continued to be rule of the game (Goldsmith 1999: 540; Meyer-Sahling 2011).

Furthermore, evidence exists of collusion between politicians and their

bureaucrats in promoting ‘’perverse economic policies, which while impoverishing

most of society, provide concentrated and significant benefits to the national

elites and interest groups’, in other words in rent creation (Mbaku 1996).

There are only a few cases, therefore, where one can speak of ‘bureaucratic’

corruption. We can perhaps settle for the term of administrative corruption for

the instances when civil servants, in a system based on favoritism, collect benefits

just for themselves (and not their patron, party, etc). But does this really advance

our understanding of corruption? Within a governance context where favoritism


is the rule, each official would rip benefits proportional to her opportunity, the

grand as well as the petty. Are these however separate types of corruption? An

alcoholic remains an alcoholic if he drinks in a five star restaurant or in the gutter,

if he is a senator or a policeman: we cannot describe two types of alcoholism,

grand or petty, elected or appointed. Or, of course, we can, but that is not much

help. What is of interest is the social context, the social practice of alcoholism (or

corruption): the prevalence, the causes, the consequences, the mechanisms. For

both the sociologist or the neo-institutional economist, the informal institution or

the practice (favoritism), and the degree to which it is competitive with the formal

one (impersonality, ethical universalism) is the key to the governance diagnosis.

Clearly, if a bureaucrat is corrupt where a bureaucracy fulfilling the criteria of the

definition exists, we can call this individual deviation an instance of bureaucratic

corruption. But the problem is that the term is used frequently to describe

developing countries, which may affect the understanding of the corruption

mechanism at work there.

However, we find that categorizing corruption by the contextis a mere exception

in corruption literature (Huther and Shah), and terms such as ‘bureaucratic’,

grand’ or ‘petty’ corruption are instead prevalent, without any contextualization.

The reason is the frame by which many scholars approach corruption, the

principal-agent theory which is the most frequent one used to model

relationships between principals and agents. Principal-agent models assume that

the interests of principal and agent diverge, that there is informational

asymmetry to the advantage of the agent, but that the principal can prescribe the

pay-off rules in their relationship. The principal is presumed non-corrupt and the

whole approach fits individual level far better than the social one – it is a non-

sociological approach actually. This is the model advanced by Rose-Ackerman,

whose work is largely cited. She focuses on the bribery of bureaucrats by

companies in the government contracting process and largely presumes that

factors shaping the incidence of such phenomena are endogenous to the

bureaucracy or, at maximum, to the government itself (Rose-Ackerman, S., &

Palifka, B. (2016). Jacob van Klaveren slightly opens the door to more contextual

explanations by presuming that a corrupt bureaucrat regards his office as a


business from which he is able to extract extra-legal income. As a result, the civil

servant's total compensation "does not depend on an ethical evaluation of his

usefulness for the common good but precisely upon the market situation and his

talents for finding the point of maximal gain on the public's demand curve”

(Klaveren 1990: 26). However, this still remains grounded in the individual level,

ignoring the possibility that the civil servant does not operate autonomously and

by himself, but is part of a broader public resource spoiling arrangement. Andvig

and Moene (1990) make a further step with their empirical model of bureaucratic

corruption which focuses on the demand, as well as the supply side, and find

multiple equilibria, which highlight the context differences across countries. And

finally, Einsestadt or Roniger (1984), Johnston (2005)) Mungiu-Pippidi (2006),

North et al. (2009), Acemoglu & Robinson (2012) offer models at governance

societal level, and deduct individual behavior from the broader rules of the game,

rather than the other way around. So to diagnose bureaucratic corruption, one

has first to have a bureaucracy: context comes before individual behavior in an

assessment, and governance regimes range from context A, where corruption is

an exception, bureaucracy is autonomous and the elected principal is non-corrupt

by default, so principal agent model applies, to context B, where the goal of the

ruler is particularistic allocation of resources, the bureaucrat is a tool or an

accessory to reach this goal and the rest of the world is either one’s clients, or

somebody else’s. Table 1 illustrates how the two contexts differ, from definition

to implications such as measurement or responses to corruption. In the first

context, the corrupt agent is just a deviant and can be sanctioned by the principal

if disclosed. In the second, the principal colludes with the agent, corruption being

exercised through a pyramidal organization which extracts resources

disproportionately in favor of the most powerful group, so anticorruption implies

solving power discretion and collective action problems.


Table 1. Corruption as governance context

Features of ideal types

Context A-

corruption exception

Context B-

corruption norm

Definition ✓ Individual behavior where public authority is abused to result undue private profit

✓ Social practice where particularism (and not ethical universalism) informs the majority of government transactions with the result of widespread favoritism, discrimination

Observation level

✓ Corruption unobservable/ whistleblowing needed

✓ Corruption observable as overt behavior, flawed process, as well as through outcomes/consequences, so monitoring and curbing impunity needed

Public private separation

✓ Enshrined as norm, with access allowed and transparent as lobby, and exchanges between the sides consequent in time (revolving doors)

✓ Permeable border, with patrimonialism rather the norm and conflict of interest ubiquitous (one person belongs to both sides in the same time)

Access ✓ Open ✓ Limited and differentiated by group or family affiliation


III. How many cases of ‘ bureaucratic’ corruption are out there?

While this discussion is primarily theoretical, the existence of an autonomous

bureaucracy in any given country can be established empirically, by both surveys

and process tracing, by answering the question when did the majority of

government transactions become non-particularistic, when was a real merit based

system enacted, when did rulers lost or gave away the power to fire bureaucrats

at their will, and so forth. The oldest time series on government quality,

bureaucracy and corruption, that of ICRG/PRS, in existence since 1984, although an

expert score, covers these items to some extent. Additionally, we should be able to

establish if bureaucratic corruption is a distinct entity, and not, in fact, a part of

broader government corruption, itself the reflection of a governance regime or

governance ‘order’ as Douglass North calls it, or of the institutional quality of a

country, as economists Acemogly and Robinson call it. I am only giving a few

preliminary tests in this draft paper.

First, if bureaucratic corruption is a distinct entity, we should find a significant

number of cases where people blame bureaucrats more than they blame rulers. In

the last 2017 Global Corruption Barometer (table 2) one can easily see that

perceptions of corruption tend to be consistent across categories- political leaders,

(at central and local level), civil servants and magistrates. Still, we can presume that

where the perception of bureaucratic corruption is the greatest, it may be it which

drives the others. We establish the lead at 5%, to be over the confidence error of

national surveys, and we count the countries which are in this situation. Twelve

countries in the world have central bureaucracies which are seen as more corrupt

that legislatures and local elected authorities. A few of them are not free-

Relation politician- bureaucrat

✓ Bureaucrat autonomous ✓ Bureaucrat dependent; collusion


Cambodia, Cameroon, so the legislatures is perceived as irrelevant, not enjoying

any real power. Even within those free and partly free countries very weak

legislatures seem to be a common feature. In the most democratic cases, like

Ghana, the lead is just at five per cent. In other words, bureaucracies seem

empowered in these cases- and therefore, blamed more- by the weakness of the

political factor- with explanations varying from case to case.

Table 2. Perceptions of corruption of elected officials and magistrates versus civil

servants

Country Legislative Central

govt

Locally

elected Magistrates

Albania 55% 45% 42% 56%

Algeria 39% 39% 39% 28%

Argentina 46% 28% 36% 39%

Armenia 42% 45% 37% 41%

Australia 12% 12% 17% 4%

Azerbaijan 12% 12% 14% 16%

Belarus 22% 32% 32% 23%

Belgium 19% 20% 15% 12%

Benin 46% 54% 48% 48%

Bolivia 52% 42% 50% 56%

Bosnia and

Herz. 54% 56% 52% 44%

Botswana 25% 29% 22% 14%

Brazil 57% 24% 56% 21%

Bulgaria 41% 31% 29% 42%

Burkina Faso 30% 32% 28% 34%

Burundi 14% 21% 19% 40%


Cambodia 26% 44% 23% 59%

Cameroon 35% 45% 36% 51%

Cape Verde 13% 15% 15% 9%

Chile 62% 40% 54% 47%

China 8% 9% 14% 9%

Colombia 54% 37% 46% 37%

Costa Rica 38% 29% 42% 26%

Cote d'Ivoire 24% 29% 31% 35%

Croatia 28% 28% 29% 26%

Cyprus 32% 30% 24% 18%

Czech Rep. 25% 28% 14% 14%

Dominican

Republic 34% 28% 37% 47%

Ecuador 43% 35% 38% 40%

Egypt 0% 27% 36%

El Salvador 42% 32% 37% 34%

Estonia 9% 8% 6% 3%

France 35% 31% 16% 11%

FYR Macedonia 38% 39% 35% 41%

Gabon 57% 61% 54% 50%

Georgia 9% 8% 7% 6%

Germany 6% 6% 6% 4%

Ghana 48% 53% 43% 49%

Greece 49% 41% 30% 17%

Greenland 15% 13% 14% 5%

Guatemala 37% 32% 42% 31%

Guinea 24% 32% 24% 38%

Honduras 43% 38% 44% 42%

Hong Kong 15% 11% 13% 5%

Hungary 32% 28% 16% 19%

India 33% 45% 40% 25%

Indonesia 54% 50% 47% 32%


Italy 46% 40% 32% 18%

Jamaica 37% 33% 34% 18%

Japan 31% 26% 31% 3%

Jordan 36% 34% 24% 17%

Kazakhstan 15% 23% 24% 28%

Kenya 45% 46% 36% 33%

Korea 79% 69% 67% 41%

Kosovo 46% 46% 42% 40%

Kyrgyz Rep. 50% 54% 51% 62%

Latvia 24% 21% 14% 13%

Lebanon 79% 79% 67% 52%

Lesotho 19% 28% 20% 16%

Liberia 68% 70% 55% 56%

Lithuania 19% 16% 14% 20%

Madagascar 35% 35% 13% 49%

Malawi 27% 35% 22%

Malaysia 41% 45% 48% 33%

Mali 36% 43% 44% 56%

Mauritius 19% 16% 15% 9%

Mexico 56% 57% 64% 50%

Moldova 76% 74% 59% 67%

Mongolia 46% 39% 29% 27%

Montenegro 18% 20% 17% 17%

Morocco 36% 35% 39% 34%

Mozambique 23% 33% 30% 27%

Myanmar 17% 26% 22% 40%

Namibia 20% 37% 26% 28%

Netherlands 12% 12% 12% 7%

Nicaragua 37% 27% 38% 45%

Niger 24% 23% 29% 23%

Nigeria 61% 63% 58% 45%

Pakistan 55% 60% 52% 41%


Palestine 31% 38% 30% 26%

Panama 43% 29% 32% 35%

Paraguay 69% 54% 61% 60%

Peru 64% 53% 59% 63%

Poland 15% 16% 13% 13%

Portugal 33% 25% 31% 15%

Romania 54% 47% 38% 32%

Russia 18% 38% 33% 24%

Sao Tome and

Principe 16% 19% 16% 26%

Senegal 24% 24% 24% 24%

Serbia 28% 32% 33% 32%

Sierra Leone 50% 55% 49% 47%

Slovak Rep. 43% 38% 26% 40%

Slovenia 25% 23% 19% 18%

South Africa 46% 49% 48% 23%

Spain 37% 16% 30% 11%

Sri Lanka 36% 17% 28% 4%

Sudan 42% 43% 43% 25%

Swaziland 36% 45% 25% 27%

Sweden 10% 9% 13% 4%

Switzerland 11% 11% 8% 5%

Taiwan 49% 16% 48% 24%

Tajikistan 6% 10% 12% 14%

Tanzania 21% 25% 25% 36%

Thailand 73% 56% 50% 22%

Togo 35% 39% 37% 48%

Trinidad and

Tobago 40% 41% 39% 35%

Tunisia 17% 31% 32% 17%

Turkey 40% 41% 38% 36%


Uganda 36% 48% 39% 45%

UK 28% 25% 19% 9%

Ukraine 64% 65% 55% 61%

Uruguay 20% 19% 22% 14%

USA 41% 32% 27% 22%

Venezuela 56% 58% 65% 66%

Vietnam 24% 30% 25% 27%

Yemen 77% 79% 51% 60%

Zambia 34% 32% 33% 30%

Zimbabwe 38% 41% 42% 29%

The fact that for most other cases (12 of 115 seems a small figure) we have

more perceptions of politicians’ corruption rather than of public officials,

and the remarkable consistency which seems to exist across categories of

officials (although consistently local authorities seem to do best, and

legislatures worst) lead to a real test on the existence of bureaucratic

corruption as a distinctive entity. How closely correlated are these

perceptions among themselves, and how much are they experience based,

versus attributed from one general assessment that the government/power

is corrupt? As Table 3 shows, correlations are very significant and high: corruption

of central bureaucracy correlates 86,5% with corruption of legislative, 84.5% with

corruption in magistracy and 78% with corruption among magistrates.

Table 3. Correlations across subjective perceptions of corruption

Correlation Matrixa

Magistrates LocallyElected CentralGov Legisative

Correlation Magistrates 1,000 ,742 ,780 ,688

LocallyElected ,742 1,000 ,845 ,893


CentralGov ,780 ,845 1,000 ,865

Legisative ,688 ,893 ,865 1,000

Sig. (1-tailed) Magistrates ,000 ,000 ,000

LocallyElected ,000 ,000 ,000

CentralGov ,000 ,000 ,000

Legisative ,000 ,000 ,000

a. Determinant = ,017

I can go further with the argument, presuming that, according to sociological

theory, governance is an integrated concept, a latent variable reflecting the

position on the continuum particularism-ethical universalism of a society, and

people’s reflection of the fairness of social allocation. If this is the case, the

different perceptions of corruption of various government branches (those with

high awareness among the population) should not be perceived distinctly, but

rather (allowing for some individual experience) as an entity. And so it is: only one

principal component is extracted by factor analysis from the four separate

perceptions presented above, and it is a highly integrated one, explaining 82.5%

of variance, and with a KMO test of 0.81. Central bureaucracy, local and national

politicians corruption perception seem to measure just one and the same thing,

as they upload in similar percentages (see Table 4). Only magistrates (.0846)

contributed somewhat less, so this perception has to some extent a different

origin. The more specific a category is (like tax officials, people who grant

construction permits), the more varied and dramatically less high perceptions of

corruption can be found (see Table 5). In other words, experience correlates

poorly with this general assessment of ‘national corruption’ which cuts across the

most powerful groups in government, and somewhat better by specific categories

of officials and public sector workers (see Table 5).

Table 4. Principal component national corruption

Component Matrixa

Component

1

CentralGov ,947


Locally Elected ,944

Legislative ,936

Magistrates ,864

Extraction Method: Principal Component Analysis.

a. 1 components extracted. [email protected];

[email protected];

Scholars have already investigated the gap between the perception of corruption and experience (see

Seligson, 2006; Abramo 2008; Donchev and Ujhelyi, 2009; Rose and Mishler, 2010; Charron 2015),

although conclusions vary widely. The hypothesis was already advanced that perceptions might simply

reflect a broader experience with other phenomena perceived as corrupt, such as favoritism, undue profit

or other observable occurrences (Olken 2009; Mungiu-Pippidi 2015). Alternative explanations, for

instance that corruption perceptions reflect people's personal satisfaction with governments, have also

been advanced: Inglehart (1999), for example, argues that people might become fed up with the waste

and ineffectiveness of “Big Government” and simply label this type of spending as ‘corrupt’. What I argue

is in line with the theoretical arguments advanced both in my work and the economic literature on quality

of institutions cited in this paper - that subjects ‘attribute’ a rating to fairness of governance in their

country, which is the main determinant of their attitude towards the most representative and general

categories – bureaucrats, politicians-. (For attributions’ theory, see Kelly and Michela 1980). While

personal experience matters, it matters far less and only in relation with very specific categories of officials

where the respondent has direct experience (custom officers, teachers, etc). In other words, people do

not differentiate within government, presuming some collusion between bureaucrats and politicians, and

the more systematic the corruption, and the stronger the political factor, the less ‘bureaucratic corruption’

can be said to exist. The opposite holds true in developed countries, where political corruption and


bureaucratic corruption are better differentiated, as Figure 2 shows for the countries of EU after the crisis

(see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Perceptions of Corruption (& Trust in EU) - EU Countries

Table 5. Contact with public service and experience with bribing

Service users % Bribes/service

users % Bribes total

population

Albania 72% 34% 25%

Algeria 87% 14% 12%

Argentina 81% 16% 13%

00%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%

2008 2009 2011 2013 2017

Pe

rce

nt

Year

Corruption in Country

Trust in EU

Corrupt Politicians

Corrupt Civil Servants

Victimization

Source: Special Eurobarometer 470 & Standard Eurobarometer 87


Armenia 80% 24% 19%

Australia 88% 4% 3%

Azerbaijan 38% 38% 15%

Belarus 77% 20% 15%

Benin 76% 26% 19%

Bolivia 81% 28% 23%

Bosnia and Herz. 75% 27% 20%

Botswana 92% 1% 1%

Brazil 78% 11% 9%

Bulgaria 68% 17% 12%

Burkina Faso 75% 11% 9%

Burundi 80% 14% 11%

Cambodia 94% 40% 37%

Cameroon 86% 47% 41%

Cape Verde 81% 2% 2%

Chile 82% 22% 18%

China 79% 26% 21%

Colombia 83% 30% 25%

Costa Rica 87% 24% 21%

Cote d'Ivoire 66% 34% 22%

Croatia 73% 10% 7%

Cyprus 75% 2% 2%

Czech Rep. 72% 9% 7%

Dominican Republic*

46%

Ecuador 84% 28% 24%

Egypt 82% 50% 41%

El Salvador 75% 31% 23%

Estonia 92% 5% 5%

FYR Macedonia 59% 12% 7%

Gabon 83% 35% 29%

Georgia 58% 7% 4%


Germany 65% 3% 2%

Ghana 57% 36% 21%

Greece 63% 10% 7%

Guatemala 70% 28% 20%

Guinea 70% 35% 24%

Honduras 76% 33% 26%

Hong Kong 58% 2% 1%

Hungary 73% 22% 16%

India 91% 69% 63%

Indonesia 75% 32% 24%

Italy 74% 7% 5%

Jamaica 70% 21% 15%

Japan 78% 0% 0%

Jordan 83% 4% 3%

Kazakhstan 58% 29% 17%

Kenya 88% 37% 33%

Korea 67% 3% 2%

Kosovo 79% 10% 8%

Kyrgyz Rep. 64% 38% 24%

Latvia 91% 15% 14%

Lebanon 47% 28% 13%

Lesotho 72% 5% 4%

Liberia 83% 69% 57%

Lithuania 91% 24% 22%

Madagascar 67% 16% 11%

Malawi 93% 13% 12%

Malaysia* 23%

Mali 75% 18% 14%

Mauritius 88% 1% 1%

Mexico 85% 51% 44%

Moldova 51% 42% 22%

Mongolia 64% 20% 13%


Montenegro 61% 16% 10%

Morocco 92% 48% 44%

Mozambique 82% 34% 28%

Myanmar 80% 40% 32%

Namibia 91% 7% 6%

Nicaragua 80% 30% 24%

Niger 74% 10% 7%

Nigeria 82% 43% 35%

Pakistan 62% 40% 25%

Palestine 82% 13% 11%

Panama 83% 38% 32%

Paraguay 81% 23% 18%

Peru 78% 39% 30%

Poland 77% 7% 6%

Portugal 89% 2% 2%

Romania 58% 29% 17%

Russia 78% 34% 27%

Sao Tome and Principe

83% 23% 19%

Senegal 74% 8% 6%

Serbia 68% 22% 15%

Sierra Leone 71% 41% 29%

Slovak Rep. 78% 12% 9%

Slovenia 85% 3% 2%

South Africa 78% 7% 5%

Spain 91% 3% 2%

Sri Lanka 71% 15% 10%

Sudan 82% 48% 40%

Swaziland 83% 9% 7%

Taiwan 77% 6% 5%

Tajikistan 58% 50% 29%

Tanzania 79% 25% 20%


Thailand 81% 41% 33%

Togo 67% 26% 17%

Trinidad and Tobago

73% 6% 4%

Tunisia 91% 9% 8%

Turkey 42% 18% 8%

Uganda 90% 38% 35%

Ukraine 60% 38% 23%

Uruguay 87% 22% 19%

Uzbekistan 70% 18% 13%

Venezuela 61% 38% 23%

Vietnam 93% 65% 61%

Yemen 47% 77% 36%

Zambia 78% 17% 13%

Zimbabwe 78% 22% 17%

A whole array of tests, as well as work at the individual level with GCB and other

surveys can be used to test this point more in depth. The fact that trust correlates

closely with perception of corruption and seems to have a national denominator

rather than operate by categories speaks for the same explanation. Two models,

one at aggregated level, and one at individual level, also including trust and

considering individual perception as well can be used for further testing. A

correlation of perception of corruption in public sector (excluding politicians and

magistrates) is strongly associated with the Index for Public Integrity (www.public-

integrity.org), explaining 50% of the variance.

Figure 3. Correlation between perception of corruption in public sector and fact based Index for public integrity

http://www.public-integrity.org/

http://www.public-integrity.org/


Figure 4. Evolution of bureaucracy and control of corruption

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

19

84

19

86

19

88

19

90

19

92

19

94

19

96

19

98

20

00

20

02

20

04

20

06

20

08

20

10

20

12

Bureaucracy

Bureaucratic Quality ICRG Corruption

Co

rru

pti

on

Sco

re (

1-1

0 B

est)

Bu

reau

crat

ic Q

ual

ity

(1-1

0 B

est)

n = +120 (1986-1998), 140 (1999-2015) countries


IV. Conclusion. Policy implications of a miscategorization

Although this is a very preliminary test needing far more quantitative work

at both aggregated level and individual level to complete the evidence it seems

that the main argument, however, is supported by data. Few cases exist where

bureaucracy is, and is perceived to be, autonomous from the rulers and therefore

sanctionable as a corrupt bureaucracy/administration, rather than as a part of the

whole government, itself an expression of a corrupt clique/ruling elite/political

class ruling the country and therefore responsible for the outcomes of its social

allocation.

But how does this change in time? To take also a developmental

perspective, we can add the evolution in time. We have no fact-based measure to

assess quality of bureaucracy, so we have to resort to an expert score, the PRS.

Figure 4 shows that average bureaucratic quality registered a slight evolution over

the past twenty years (under one point in the global average, accountable more

to Gulf monarchies), which was not, however, followed by a similar rise in the

average control of corruption. Case studies generally show that improvement of

bureaucracy depends on top down political will. Unlike with e-government or

trade openness, the bureaucracy does not become autonomous as a side effect; it

needs a clear political decision to stop politicization and introduce merit based

reforms, or at least to be scrupulous on merit even if the nature of appointment

remains political (as in Uruguay). And this is why a corrupt principal cannot be

pushed away by bureaucratic reforms- we are dealing with a primacy of politics

and not with one of administration. A reform minded politician can always

introduce merit, if, as former Estonian Prime Minister Mart Laar says, he is willing

to let the bureaucracy be autonomous.i. But how can it work the other way

around, if a patrimonial political actor controls appointments and dismissals of

civil service? Then no bureaucratic intervention can help, and this is a frequent

waste area of anti-corruption: ethical codes and training of civil servants are

introduced when the bureaucracy is not at all autonomous from the rule of

corrupt principals.


The implication of this argument is that in most developing countries,

basing anticorruption work on the basis of principal agent theory and working

to improve bureaucracy separately from the issue of government accountability

is problematic. Development agencies need to understand corruption as a social

practice or institution, not just as a sum of individual corrupt acts, and

acknowledge its political character as well. Furthermore, presuming that ethical

universalism is the default norm is wrong from a developmental perspective,

since even countries in which ethical universalism is the governance norm were

not always this way: from sales of offices to class privileges and electoral

corruption, the histories of even the cleanest countries show that good

governance is the product of evolution, and modernity is a long and frequently

incomplete endeavor to develop bureaucracy autonomy in the face of private

group interests. Neither historical sociology, nor anthropology have ever made

the claim that the kind of impersonal and objective bureaucratic relations that

Max Weber described as informing modern states make some sort of final

unavoidable stage in a long chain of evolution.

Furthermore, addressing a problem at the individual level (for instance, by

criminal justice) is very different than treating it as a policy problem, as a practice

grounded in a whole set of incentives and social arrangements which needs to

change. The consequences of addressing corruption in systematically corrupt

countries by principal agent approaches copied from countries where corruption

is a deviation are not negligible, as tools which aim to build norms might be very

different from tools needed to maintain norms. While it is very well established

that merit based bureaucracies are essential for both development and

government capacity (Evans and Rauch 1999; Dahlstrom and all 2012), how to

rebuild the Western European virtuous sequence creating autonomous and

accountable bureaucracies remains a mystery, especially in democracies, since

most success cases, historical or contemporary are either monarchies (Denmark,

Germany, Japan) or autocracies (Singapore, Bhutan, Qatar). Of course, exceptions

exist and I described them in my book on contemporary transitions to good

governance (Mungiu-Pippidi and Johnston 20017). They are under ten in

numbers, however, for the last forty years.


The matter of oxymoronic ‘bureaucratic corruption’ is therefore not all at all just a

language matter. It is of high practical importance, with actionable character.

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i See interview by Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzwW37T-MUs.

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