fig. 1 Global consensus bribery is wrong

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 The violation of a law can also be informally tolerated if it is regarded as a relic of out-of-date standards of public morality, for example, a law that makes the possession or sale of marijuana an offence.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 offceholders 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 fnance. By defnition this action is legal. However, if the government adds a special clause in a tax law that favours its fnancial 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

observe how public services are allocated in a traditional village and use this to construct an idealised model of customary practices that ft into a village’s way of life. A description of what is normal in the sense of being customary can be linked to a normative judgment that this is how villagers ought to behave in ‘a moral economy of corruption’ (de Sardan 1999). However, anti-corruption organizations dispute these views as undermining good governance and the political and economic development and wellbeing of people in low-income countries.

The introduction of bureaucratic institutions meant to deliver services impartially challenges customary ways of doing so by particularistic standards in which who you are and who you know is important to get things done. Mungiu-Pippidi (2015: 24) describes particularism as acceptable behaviour in societies in which people expect offcials with whom they share an identity to favour their own kind. In the words of an Indian anthropologist (Gupta 1995: 397), ‘a highly placed offcial who fails to help a close relative or fellow villager obtain a government position is often roundly criticised by people for not fulflling his obligations to his kinsmen and village brothers’. Although favouritism involves offcials abusing their power, it is not done in exchange for money but as an expression of solidarity ties with those whom they favour.

Whereas favouritism tends to link people with particular given characteristics, clientelism involves politicians selectively distributing benefts of public services in exchange for votes or political support (Eisenstadt and Ronger 1984). The result of this exchange is a “win–win” outcome in which each participant gets a personal beneft, while the public sector bears the cost. Political patronage refers to the award of jobs on the public payroll to clients who may or may not have the merit-based qualifcations for holding a job; they owe their appointment to who they know rather than what they know.

The evaluation of how individuals and businesses minimize their taxes is a familiar example of disputed standards. Tax evasion involves hiding income that should be legally declared and taxed. In a modern economy, opportunities for tax evasion are limited, since employers are legally required to deduct income tax and social security taxes before paying wages net. Large corporations must keep computerized accounts in order to monitor whether they are making or losing money. Cash payments are easier to hide from tax collectors. However, in a modern economy, there are a limited number of occupations where most income is in cash. Waiters and taxi drivers paid or tipped in cash may understate

their income but they cannot tell the tax authorities that they are working for nothing. Self-employed electricians can do a few hours of work for cash in hand but a real estate developer has such a big cash fow that it becomes diffcult to operate on a cash-only basis. In developing countries, payments in cash tend to be the norm for peasants, street traders and casual workers. In developing countries, the evasion of taxes in the shadow economy can account for up to two-ffths of national economic activity and in modern economies up to an eighth or more (Schneider and Enste 2002). Everywhere estimates of shadow economy earnings outside the tax system are substantial.

Tax avoidance involves organizing economic activities within the law in ways that reduce tax liabilities, for example, dividing the profts of a family frm among members of a family paying different rates of taxes. By defnition, tax avoidance is legal, as an English judge has explained.

Every man is entitled if he can to arrange his affairs so that the tax attaching under the appropriate Acts is less than it would otherwise be. If he succeeds in ordering them so as to secure that result then, however unappreciative the Commissioners of Inland Revenue or his fellow taxpayers may be of his ingenuity, he cannot be compelled to pay an increased tax. (Quoted in Rose and Karran 1987: 203)

Entrepreneurs such as Donald Trump not only endorse these words but also put them into practice. Accountants make their living by advising people how to look after their self-interest by minimizing their liability to tax, and large corporations practice tax avoidance on behalf of their shareholders and highly paid executives. Multinational corporations such as Google and Starbucks have arranged their cash fows so that expenses are highest in countries where national taxes are high. Profts are booked in countries such as Luxembourg or Ireland, where taxes on businesses are low.

Even though tax avoidance is by defnition legal, public opinion tends to see it as wrong. In a British survey about paying taxes, 61%, said it was never acceptable to avoid tax legally and an additional third thought it was usually not justifable (Shah 2016: fig. 2). A majority see tax avoidance as unfair to people who pay their full share of taxes. More than a quarter see tax avoidance as shirking a public responsibility to help pay for public services, and a similar proportion describe it as immoral. yet, as long as the sums involved are not on the scale of corporate profts,

many people are prepared to collaborate in tax avoidance or evasion by making generous claims for expenses or getting a discount for paying a restaurant bill in cash rather than by a credit card.

Indefnitely stretching the meaning of corruption. The association of corruption with bad governance encourages stretching the term to label as corrupt anything that people think is wrong with their political system. Carried to the extreme, political practices can be labelled as corrupt by reasoning backwards from the norms of a political commentator (cf. Warren 2015: 48ff). However, as more and more activities are labelled corrupt, the umbrella term becomes a circus tent in which the word loses any specifc meaning. for example, when the US Supreme Court accepted as legal the election result that gave George W. Bush the presidency in 2000, a liberal Harvard Law School professor, Alan Dershowitz, declared ‘The decision in the florida election case may be ranked as the single most corrupt decision in Supreme Court history’ (2001: 174).

Bad governance is not restricted to the corrupt violation of formal and informal standards. Political blunders that waste large sums of money in failing to achieve their stated objective can refect ignorance, arrogance, carelessness or stupidity among decision-makers rather than bribery. Public offcials who are lazy or incompetent in performing their duties cause damage to governance. However, the contribution they make to bad governance is not the result of receiving bribes but due to their personal faults.

The idea of the public interest is a powerful political symbol; the term is associated with good governance and anything said to go against the public interest may promote bad governance. The public interest is assumed to be so self-evidently desirable that little attention is given to specifying a precise defnition (cf. Beetham 2015: 42ff). Since politics is about the expression of conficting views, there is little consensus about what constitutes the public interest. Political parties competing for votes can avoid making clear but potentially controversial programmes by claiming that they can be trusted to make policies in the public interest. This was a favourite rhetorical trick of Britain’s Tony Blair.

2 counTries mix gooD anD BaD governance

Autocracies of all kinds have governed for thousands of years without having modern bureaucracies in the Weberian sense; their legitimacy rested on traditional acceptance of how rulers acted, subject to

intermittent challenge by disruptive charismatic personalities or external forces (Rubinstein and von Maravic 2010). Their durability required the development of administrative institutions capable of enforcing important decrees of the ruler, extracting money from subjects and protecting their boundaries against internal and external armed forces. The Byzantine Empire, which gave its name to a form of governance that is complex and opaque, lasted for almost one thousand years. Its successor, the sprawling Ottoman Empire, a failed state by today’s standards, ruled for more than 450 years, because pashas were allowed to exploit their regional power as they wished as long as the overarching priorities of the Ottoman Sultan were met. To describe such systems of governance as corrupt imposes twenty-frst century standards on governance in the past millennium.

Today, virtually every national system of governance has many formal attributes of a modern state, such as a military equipped with expensive weapons and public institutions offering secure employment and a pension. These attributes are found not only in pioneering modern states of Europe but also in developing countries with very different histories. To receive grants for development from foreign aid agencies such as the World Bank, a national government must have offcials who can produce on paper an acceptable response to the demand of these agencies that as a condition of receiving aid it adopts formal bureaucratic standards. Governors can adapt modern institutions to promote their own political power or by default since they have become the only game in town. However, the introduction of modern institutions and laws in the national capital of a developing country does not ensure their effective implementation at the grass roots. At this level, governance is also infuenced by informal standards and norms that pre-date a country’s exposure to the contemporary idea of good governance.

Even though the mixture of modern bureaucratic standards and informal practices differs between countries, it everywhere means that it is impossible for any system of governance to be perfectly corrupt or perfectly corruption-free. This is illustrated by the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) of Transparency International, which assesses countries on a scale ranging from 0, totally corrupt, to 100, the ideal for integrity. No country scores above 90 and no country scores below 10 in its 2016 ranking. Moreover, high ratings are not confned to Western governments. Among 176 countries, Singapore ranks seventh and Hong Kong is placed above the United States too. Such differences have important

implications for anti-corruption policies: to be effective they must take into account specifc features of political systems rather than rely on onesize-fts-all recommendations for reform based on a universalistic theory of good governance.

Globally, there is a substantial statistical correlation between the achievement of modern standards of good governance and a low level of corruption. However, the People’s Republic of China is a conspicuous example of a country achieving a high rate of economic growth notwithstanding a high level of corruption (Wedeman 2012). It has developed institutions capable of managing an economy that is successful in world markets; created a powerful military force; and administers a population of more than 1.2 billion people spread over a land area greater than the United States. Even though estimated income per person in China is only one-quarter the average of the most modern European societies, Chinese life expectancy is similar to European and American levels.

The one-party Communist party-state has achieved successes by creating a system of governance practicing ‘corruption by design’ (Manion 2004). This has given opportunities to Communist Party cadres to promote national economic development by using their political power to help enterprises circumvent regulations that had a negative effect. Concurrently, cadres may use their political power to enrich themselves by a variety of means that are corrupt by international standards. At the grass roots, the distribution of social services is affected by the traditional Chinese practice of guanchi, informal connections (Munro 2012). It offers individuals the alternatives of getting what they want by pulling strings or following rules. If neither is effective, paying a bribe is an often-invoked third alternative. The power of Communist cadres to control the extent of corruption creates a system of bounded corruption (cf. Manion 2016). This places China just above the median in the CPI. By comparison, the undisciplined practice of corruption in Russia places it in the bottom quarter of the CPI rating. However, the large rewards of corruption for party cadres and their allies results in income inequality in Communist China being twice as high as in Western European countries that are judged by the CPI as being relatively low in corruption (Han et al. 2016).

In India, the British Crown introduced an Imperial Civil Service in 1858 to serve the Viceroy responsible for governing the country. It was staffed by able Oxford and Cambridge graduates selected through competitive examinations and trained in practices that were supporting the

modernization of Britain. However, the number of British administrators was minuscule in relation to the country’s hundreds of millions of peoples and territory. Governance at the grass roots was in the hands of a variety of local rulers who were expected to support Imperial rule in return for the right to exercise local power as they wished. At the time of independence in 1947, the Indian subcontinent had more than 600 princely states.

Although India since 1947 has chosen its government by democratic elections and had a legacy of able civil servants at the apex of government, corruption in India is high by global standards. Government imposes many regulations on businesses that create opportunities for public offcials to collect ‘rents’ (that is, bribes) from enterprises wanting prompt approval of legal requests or the non-enforcement of laws. Entrepreneurs who proft from corruption by breaking laws can turn to politics to win offces that may give them immunity from prosecution as well as opportunities to infuence public legislation to their private advantage (Das 2001; Sanchez 2015). Prime Minister Narendra Modi has sought to fush out corrupt profteering by abruptly replacing rupee denominations commonly used to pay bribes with freshly designed notes. At the grass roots, ethnic and caste divisions encourage favouritism in allocating public services and bribery is three times the level of China. The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita of India is less than half that of China while its Gini Index of Inequality is just as high.

Among African countries, the state of Nigeria is distinctive in having enormous oil wealth that gives it a GDP per capita above the average for sub-Saharan African states. Since independence from Britain in 1960, political control has alternated between generals, elected presidents and autocrats. Its institutions of governance have been fragmented between three main ethnic groups that engaged in a bitter civil war in the late 1960s. Symptoms of a failed state are persisting. Nigeria is in the lowest quarter of countries ranked in the CPI, far below India as well as China.

One explanation for Nigerian corruption is that it suffers the curse of natural resources; this creates a large fow of foreign money into a country whose rulers can corruptly appropriate it to their own advantage. Since exploiting natural resources requires capital-intensive equipment, its exploitation produces large benefts shared among a small number of policymakers and heads of enterprises dealing in natural resources. Up to 20% of oil produced is estimated to disappear into opaque enterprises. The so-called curse of big oil revenues is insuffcient to explain Nigerian

corruption, since this form of bad governance is also found in countries such as Kenya, which lacks oil revenue and has virtually the same rating as Nigeria on the CPI index of national corruption. At the grass roots, the Afrobarometer fnds that in each country 32% have paid a bribe to obtain public services during the past year.

Modern Western political systems have not abolished informal relations in administering bureaucratic standards. for example, offcials in local offces of government can offer advice to people about how to fll out bureaucratic forms required to claim a service to which they are entitled. In the most modern European and Anglo-American states, there is little bribery in the grass-roots delivery of services that account for the bulk of public expenditure. In Europe today, the cost of fnancing democratic politics is held down by the prohibition of political advertising on television and radio and the public budget providing an annual grant to political parties subject to conditions limiting what they do with their money and the publication of accounts (cf. McMenamin 2013). However, authors of a book entitled Unmasked: Corruption in the West argue that a more broad-ranging defnition is needed in order to cover corruption in modern states. Their defnition is stretched to include everything from legal tax avoidance to bribes paid to fIfA offcials who decide where to hold international football competitions (Cockcroft and Wegener 2017).

In the United States, the early twentieth-century progressive movement secured the modernization of public administration at the federal level. However, the decentralization of law enforcement and public expenditure to the state and municipal level results in major variations in governance between and within American states (see www.publicintergrity.org). States can be rated on the basis of their anti-corruption laws, the number of offcials indicted or convicted on formal charges of corruption and the perceptions of groups such as political reporters. Johnston (2014: Chapter 7) distinguishes between legal and illegal corruption, a distinction similar to our defnition of corruption as the violation of formal or informal standards of governance. In the United States, the cost of election campaigning and the absence of major restrictions on how much money can be spent makes political fnance a prime example of legal corruption. The use of attack strategies to win elections results in infated claims of corruption. In the 2016 American presidential race, Donald Trump was accused by his opponents of corrupting the language of politics by voicing false facts, while Hillary Clinton’s opponents

accused her of taking fat fees from fnancial corporations wanting to infuence government policy.

By the standards of a particular national culture, the delivery of public services by methods that are customary and legal but inconsistent with modern bureaucratic rules can be described as normal (cf. Riggs 1964). Evaluating governance by the standards of a country’s culture confuses the clinical analysis of how a country is governed with a normative evaluation that may be self-interested when made by national politicians. It is also inconsistent with the social science practice of using generally applicable standards to compare and contrast national political systems by universalistic standards.

3 eviDence of corruPT governance

Endless debates about the defnition of corruption are academic in the pejorative sense when the conclusion is that its many connotations make the term meaningless. The everyday experience of millions of people around the world shows this is not the case. The challenge is to adopt a defnition that can be used to produce reliable and valid evidence of corruption.

The delivery of grass-roots public services directly to individuals is an activity very suitable for analysis by that familiar social science tool, surveys that interview a representative sample of the population. Because surveys report evidence about the mass of the population, they differ from media stories about national politicians taking big sums of money in exchange for making decisions that bring big bucks benefts to businesses and wealthy individuals. Anthropological accounts of behaviour in a village offer detailed and colourful accounts of what people do to get public services. It is unsatisfactory to project conclusions drawn from the ethnographic study of a few villages onto the whole of a country; even less are they suitable for projection onto a whole continent (Torsello 2015). Experimental studies test hypotheses derived from abstract models of when bribes may be paid. However, experiments with students in the artifcial setting of a laboratory on a university campus cannot be reliably generalized to the conditions facing ordinary people in their encounters with real public offcials (Serra and Wantchekon 2012).

The surveys analysed here have been selected by the twin criteria of substantive relevance and methodological quality. To be of substantive use for understanding how corruption relates to bad governance, a

survey must systematically ask a battery of questions about whether individuals have had contact with a variety of public services before asking whether they have paid a bribe as a result of their contact.1 Most surveys do not do so; they follow the CPI practice of using perceptions of national corruption as an indirect indicator of bad governance. Since few people deal with important national political institutions, perceptions of corruption are often devoid of the frst-hand experience. Mass perceptions can refect hearsay, partisan biases or media stories of capital-intensive scandals.

Our evidence comes from a unique global survey database co-ordinated by Transparency International in cooperation with established institutes that asked the same key questions about the contacts people had with their system of governance and whether bribery was involved (Table 2). Collectively, the surveys cited in tables in this book covered 128 countries on every continent except Antarctica, and 150,215 people were interviewed. The countries range from those with very good reputations for governance, such as Denmark and Singapore, and those with very bad reputations, such as Nigeria and Venezuela. This empirical data is used to test theories of what infuences whether an individual will experience good governance or corruption: differences in national context, individual attitudes and socio-economic characteristics; and differences between public services. We only report nationwide sample surveys that publicly document their sampling methods and representativeness is confrmed by cross-checks with census data about a country’s distribution of population by gender, age and rural residence.

Altogether the Barometer surveys report the experience of governance of more than fve-sixths of the world’s population. This extraordinary coverage is possible because for the frst time the Global Corruption Barometer was able to conduct nationwide surveys in the world’s two most populous countries, the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of India. Comparing survey results from so large and varied a range of countries and peoples provides evidence showing whether behaviour found in one country is similar to that in other countries or even other continents. for example, on a global basis far more people are at risk of paying a bribe for health care than to the courts. This is not because health workers are more corrupt but because more people

1 for a detailed guide to questions that should be asked in order to understand under what circumstances bribery occurs, see Rose and Peiffer (2015).

Table 2 Corruption surveys analyzed in this book

Africa

Asia

31 sub-Saharan countries surveyed by Afrobarometer, 2014–2016 (www.afrobarometer.org). Benin, Botswana, Burkina faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Cote d’Ivoire, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Total interviews: 47,937 15 countries in Transparency International Asia Pacifc Global Corruption Barometer, 2015–2016 (www.transparency.org/ research/gcb/). Australia, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam. Total interviews: 20,361 EBRD 28 formerly Communist countries of Europe and Eurasia from the Life in Transition survey of the European Bank for Reconstruction & Development, 2016 (http://www.ebrd.com/what-we-do/ economic-research-and-data/data/lits.html). Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, fyR Macedonia, Georgia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kyrgyz Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Tajikistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. Total interviews: 42,202 Western Europe 15 older EU member states in Eurobarometer 2013 Special Survey 397: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, finland, france, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and United Kingdom. Total interviews: 15,681 (https://data.europa.eu/) Latin America 26 South and Central America countries of the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP: www.vanderbilt.edu/lapop) 2014–2015. Argentina, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay and Venezuela. Total interviews: 50,439

MENA (Middle East & North Africa) 10 countries: Afrobarometer VI, 2014–2016: Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Sudan and Tunisia, plus Transparency International: Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, yemen and Turkey. Total interviews: 12,297 (http://www.transparency.org/research/gcb/ gcb_2015_16)

Global Corruption Barometer 107 countries in Transparency International’s ninth round 2015–2016 survey. Total interviews: 149,906 (https://www. transparency.org/research/gcb/overview). An additional 12 countries were not included because data was lacking about bribery or related topics.

make more use of health care than have recourse to judicial institutions. Cross-national data show whether the incidence of bribery in a country is relatively high, average or low by comparison with other countries in the same and other continents. The evidence demonstrates that an essential feature of good governance in Western countries—public services are delivered without bribery—is atypical in the world as it is today.

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CHAPTER 2

Getting What you Want from Governance

In the ideal-type bureaucratic state governance operates by the book. Statute books contain laws stating the conditions for supplying a specifc service and public agencies have teachers, nurses or civil engineers with the expert knowledge and skills to deliver it by the book. But what do people do when the state in which they live is not staffed by bureaucratic automatons behaving strictly by the book? This challenge is of immediate relevance in most countries in the world today, where public offcials do not conform to the strict Weberian ideal of the modern bureaucrat. few offcials operate with the unpredictable arbitrariness of a despot or with the commitment of a Communist or Nazi ideologue. Instead, the practice of governance offers people a choice of how they get the service they want. These choices are ignored in many studies of governance. for example, the 983-page Oxford Handbook of Public Policy has no index reference to bribery, favouritism or corruption (Moran et al. 2008).

Bureaucracy is not the only way of getting things done. Getting services by the hook means using informal means to go around the rules that control bureaucratic behaviour. for example, a person may fnd a friend or a friend of a friend who will contact a hospital offcial who can arrange for an individual to jump the queue for medical treatment. It may also mean exploiting the gaps that arise when rules in the book do not give a public offcial clear guidance about what to do when faced

© The Author(s) 2019 R. Rose and C. Peiffer, Bad Governance and Corruption, Political Corruption and Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92846-3_2 21

with a circumstance that routine guidelines do not cover. Relying on informal practices to deliver a service is not a symptom of bad governance as long as what is done does not explicitly violate a bureaucratic rule.

Using crooked means to deliver a service takes rules into account in the sense that they are knowingly violated and public offcials acts for their own gain. from the normative point of view of a citizen who has been brought up to respect the standards of good governance, getting what is wanted by hook or crook can be considered wrong. However, it can also be deemed preferable to doing without a public service that a person needs or wants.

We start this chapter by describing how people can get what they want from public offcials by relying on a portfolio of strategies using bureaucratic procedures, crooked means or informal hooks that fall between the alternatives of good governance and corrupt practices. However, the mixture of standards is not the same in every country.

1 saTisficing By The Book, By hook or By crook

When people approach a public offcial for a service, they want a satisfactory outcome. To get what they want, they can adopt a satisfcing strategy of following a trial-and-error sequence of methods until one is successful (Simon 1978). The starting point can be going by the book, following bureaucratic procedures to request such things as a permit or a medical appointment. If a request is delivered without an undue delay, good governance procedures work. However, if there are diffculties and delays in getting what is wanted, informal personal contacts may be used to hook up with a friend of a friend who can see that the service is delivered as a favour. If neither means works, then a person may pay a bribe as a third-best means of getting satisfaction.

Governing by the book. formal laws and rules govern the process of delivering public policies in a system of good governance. Rules provide the impartial criteria for offcials to apply when deciding whether individuals receive a public service that they have claimed. When a law authorizes a service that is delivered nationwide, the application of rules is not done by those who made the rules in the national capital, but by delegation to locally based public employees, such as teachers or refuse collectors, who are in direct contact with affected claimants in their community. Offcials are not meant to provide the service just to favoured

friends, members of their ethnic group or clients of the governing party; they are meant to act impartially, treating people with similar characteristics similarly. Instead of being infuenced by personal factors, they should apply rules and regulations in the books or on the computer terminal on their desk (in french, their bureau); that is what makes them bureaucrats.

The rights of individuals to receive a service and obligations to comply with an offcial regulation are set out in bureaucratic rules. Laws about public education can specify that it is provided free of charge from a given age to all children living in the country and parents are obligated to send their school-age children to school. Rules often specify what examination qualifcations applicants must have to be admitted to a university. Laws also set out obligations, such as the need for a motorist to have a driving license that can be obtained by meeting such conditions as passing a driving test. In a system of good governance, all that individuals need to do to get a service is to show that they are entitled to receive it. If they are not entitled, then a public offcial should not provide it.

A purely bureaucratic service would operate like a vending machine, following pre-programmed rules. An individual would enter the information required to claim a service, make a payment if necessary, and the machine would produce whatever was requested. The payment of pensions is a paradigm example of how a policy can operate by the book. To qualify for a pension an individual must show proof of their date of birth and of having contributed to a pension fund during years of employment. These criteria are matters of fact that can be retrieved from public records. Relevant facts about the circumstances of a pension claimant can be fed into a computer that applies impersonal rules to calculate the value of a monthly pension. The money need not be put in the hands of a local offcial to deliver. A computer can write an instruction transferring the money to a pensioner’s bank account. An annual adjustment in the value of a pension can be made by a computerized mathematical formula that calculates changes in keeping with infation and/or economic growth. The new pension rate is then implemented electronically. There is no opportunity for a bribe to be paid since these steps are done by the ultimate in impersonal impartiality, an unseen computer in a remote offce. However, there are a limited number of public services that can be delivered by a computer without any involvement by a public employee.

Bureaucratic procedures can be criticized for imposing red tape, such as time-consuming delays in giving a response to a request for a service when a person wants it promptly or refusing to deliver what is wanted because a person fails to qualify to receive it. However, criticisms of the formal rules that cause delays and refusals are missing the point. Bureaucratic procedures are not about obliging people by giving them what they want but about fairness, that is, applying the same rules to everyone. Insofar as this happens, good governance is normal in both the behavioural and ethical senses.

Going beyond bureaucratic rules. Much of governance is a social relationship between people, a public employee who delivers a service and a person wanting it. Social relations give people a hook that they can use to get things done when they deal with public offcials who have a lesser or greater degree of discretion in how they deal with individuals. A doctor has scope to decide what treatment to give an ailing patient and a policeman has discretion in deciding whether to stop or detain an individual who appears to be acting suspiciously.

Large bureaucratic organizations operate by a combination of formal and informal practices (North 1990; Coleman 1990). When a person rings a large organization in search of help, an electronic voice will ask for bureaucratic information and recommend going to a website before offering to connect the caller with an individual offcial. The longer the wait to talk to a person, the stronger the nudge for an individual to go to an organization’s web site to fnd out how to make a claim for a service. Pressures to limit costs are an incentive for public agencies to emulate airlines and push people to claim services by flling out electronic forms online.

Out of irritation from waiting in a queue or ignorance of bureaucratic procedures, people may rely on informal methods to get a public service by hook rather than by the book. In doing so they can make use of their social capital, that is, networks of people whom they know (cf. Putnam 2000). Social capital can take the form of membership in a community organization, a church or a trade union, or a network of friends and neighbours. Given the pervasiveness of governance, most networks are likely to include one or more people who have personal connections with public offcials who can be hooked into providing satisfaction. This can be done from a diffuse sense of favouritism toward people with whom the offcial has a long-standing connection. Those dispensing favours for what they control build up a stock of credit with others in their network to whom they can turn to get favourable treatment when they want a service that they do not control.

Informal networks are especially important in developing countries in which a traditional reliance on personal relations is as strong as relatively recently introduced bureaucratic procedures (Portes 1998; Rose 1999). The Global Corruption Barometer fnds that 61% think that personal relations with public offcials are important or very important in getting public services. An additional quarter thinks that personal contacts can sometimes be important and only one in twelve think they are of no importance (Rose and Peiffer 2015: 17f). Moreover, informal networks of social capital are widely distributed. Two-ffths of Afrobarometer respondents are members of a voluntary association, one-third have political contacts and almost one-quarter have turned to a religious leader for help in the past year. In the Latin American Public Opinion Project survey, two-thirds belong to some sort of formal organization and three in ten have had an informal contact with a public offceholder or politician in the past year.

Where corruption is part of the system of governance, getting what you want by crooked means is an alternative. Many Western social scientists theorize that if bribery becomes relatively common in a political system it creates a behavioural norm that paying a bribe is a necessary condition of getting a service. Social capital can facilitate corruption if someone in a network offers to act as a go-between to get a corrupt offcial to deliver a service in exchange for a bribe Doing so then becomes acceptable on the grounds that ‘the system made me do it’, the title of a book by Rasma Karklins about getting public services in countries that have been Communist (2005).

In societies in which standards of governance fall short of the good governance ideal, individuals have a choice of getting a public service by the book, by hook or by crook. Barometer surveys in Russia, the Czech Republic and the Republic of Korea have asked people to choose from several alternatives the best way to get four different types of services. In all three countries, the majority would not rely just on bureaucratic procedures. Less than one in fve Russians thought bureaucratic procedures would deliver prompt treatment for a painful disease or avoid delays in the issuance of a government permit. In the Czech Republic from a ffth to less than half thought bureaucracy would do what they wanted, and only a minority of Koreans had faith in their bureaucracy working as automatically as a vending machine (Table 1). In countries, where public services do not have the reputation of operating by the bureaucratic book, few people feel helpless when public services do not

deliver what they are expected to deliver. The passive response—nothing can be done—is on average given by only one-sixth of Czechs, less than one-quarter of Russians, and one-third of Koreans.

When the state is a monopoly provider of a service and public offcials do not deliver what is wanted, most people are ready to bend or break rules by using informal connections or paying a bribe. A majority of Russians regard getting a permit by hook or by crook as a standard operating procedure. This is a legacy of the Soviet era, when a person with a network of party-related connections could use these to get what they wanted (Ledeneva 2008). In the Czech Republic, almost half believe that if they invoke social capital or push offcials by writing a letter they

Table 1 Getting things done by hook or by crook

Strategy

Corrupt Bureau Market Passive 1. Action if an offcial delays issuing a government permit Russia 62 18 n.a. 20 Czech Republic 35 46 n.a. 19 Korea 21 45 n.a. 34 2. Actions to get a better fat when not entitled to publicly subsidized housing Russia 44 n.a. 30 27 Czech Republic 14 23 48 15 Korea 22 n.a. 64 15 3. Getting into university without good enough grades Russia 38 n.a. 36 26 Czech Republic 12 n.a. 71 17 Korea 5 n.a. 37 57 4. Getting treatment for a painful disease when hospital says one must wait for months Russia 57 13 11 19 Czech Republic 24 31 31 14 Korea (not applicable; no government health service)

Sources Corrupt option: Offer bribe, use connections, make up a story. Bureaucratic: Write a letter of complaint, push offcials to act. Market: Buy what you want legally; education: pay a tutor. Passive: Nothing can be done. New Korea Barometer 1997 (N: 1117); Czech Republic: New Democracies Barometer V 1998 (N: 1017); New Russia Barometer VII 1998 (N: 1908)