1 SETTING STANDARDS FOR GOOD AND BAD GOVERNANCE
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speeding as long as it does not create the danger of an accident because the road is empty. The violation of a law can also be informally tolerated if it is regarded as a relic of out-of-date standards of public morality, for example, a law that makes the possession or sale of marijuana an offence. In a country, in which an authoritarian government represses critics, exposing corruption on the internet may be illegal but tolerated as an acceptable weapon of subjects whose legal resources for opposition are weak (Scott 1972). Even though an action is legal, it can still be wrong by the informal normative standards about how public officeholders ought to behave. A governing party may legally accept a substantial sum of money from a business contribution if it is done in keeping with laws it has enacted about party finance. By definition this action is legal. However, if the government adds a special clause in a tax law that favours its financial donors, this will appear corrupt by the informal standards of public opinion. Likewise, politicians can be described as behaving shamefully if they proclaim standards in public and violate them in private, for example, British politicians who promote the principle of equality in education while sending their children to privileged private schools. Disputed standards. Although standards conventionally applied in assessing corruption are expressed in universalistic terms, because corruption is a political issue, standards are often objects of political dispute. Politicians have the rhetorical skills to argue that accusations against them for corruption are false facts made up by their partisan opponents. Lawyers have professional skills to get a court to rule that there is nothing illegal in the way a politician has violated informal standards of behaviour by taking money from a big business in exchange for favours. Even if evidence of breaking informal standards is acknowledged, if this does not lead to a conviction in a court of law, a politician can argue that a formal investigation has cleared him or her of blame. National differences in history and culture can be used to challenge applying the label of corruption to practices that appear corrupt by universalistic standards but appropriate in the national context in which they are found (cf. March and Olsen 2006; Tanzler et al. 2012). Such standards are rejected as social constructions of modern Western governments that are alien to traditional norms about the relationship of governors and governed in developing societies. Governments in former colonies can add that they are political relicts of imperialism. This political argument tends to be supported by studies of anthropologists who closely
