fig. 1 Why corruption not reported

powers for personal gain. Insofar as opening up government shows that public offcials are conducting their activities fairly, it should encourage citizens to trust their political institutions. However, if transparency confrms popular perceptions of widespread corruption, it can increase distrust.

Like any concept that has positive associations, the meaning of transparency can be stretched to cover almost any feature of government. Because it is an abstraction, transparency or its absence has become an integral part of many syndromes of governance, good or bad (Johnston 2005). The defnition by Bauhr and Grimes (2012: 5) is broad and general. Transparency is a condition in which both political outsiders and insiders can access information about public policy, evaluate it in terms of conformity to public standards and by the outcomes it produces, and publicize their judgments of how their governors act.

The weakening of closed authoritarian regimes has led to a big increase in freedom of Information (fOI) acts, a necessary requirement for making governance transparent. In 1990 there were only 15 countries with such laws. The number more than doubled in the following decade, and doubled again by 2010. A total of 93 countries around the globe now have fOI acts (Mungiu-Pippidi 2015: 103ff).

The demand to make the process of governance more transparent refects a multiplicity of political pressures. The introduction of democratic institutions such as competing parties and free media encourages civic groups to claim the right to know how they are governed and hold their governors accountable. The exposure of individual policymakers breaking standards in well governed as well as badly governed countries has created pressures for more transparency. Public agencies giving aid to poor countries where capital-intensive corruption is widespread are applying pressure on recipients to be more transparent about where the money goes (Darch and Underwood 2010). The growth of social services has made citizens stakeholders in the delivery of public services, with a claim to know how services are provided. In countries where major media are hesitant to expose government shortcomings, social media create the possibility that news of bad behaviour made available by open governance can rapidly go viral. This puts pressure on prosecutors to open up to scrutiny by public opinion many fles that had been closed and, if there is evidence of unlawful behaviour, to take legal action too.

1 conDiTions for TransParency

The impact of transparency on governance depends on laws and institutions that determine what types of information become publicly accessible and what are not. It also depends on the extent to which procedures make it easy or diffcult for those outside government to obtain information about what goes on within government. Holding politicians publicly accountable for what would otherwise be kept private requires independent institutions to prosecute those in power in courts of law and in the court of public opinion. The numerous conditions that must be met to institutionalize public scrutiny of governance makes the effectiveness of transparency problematic (see Norad 2011; DfID 2015).

Political choices in legislating transparency. To institutionalize transparency, the frst step is the adoption of a fOI act that sets out the conditions infuencing the extent to which governance is open or closed. Since the intent of adopting such an act is to alter the way in which established offceholders make decisions and distribute the benefts of offce, there is inevitably political resistance to proposals by reformers to adopt what international agencies promote as best practice laws.

The drafting of an act involves setting out legal conditions about what information is to be made more available and the procedures for gaining access. The Index of Public Integrity at the Hertie School in Berlin identifes 48 conditions that legislation on transparency ought to cover. These range from deciding principles of coverage in the abstract to detailing specifc rights of access and how those refused information may appeal an offcial decision (cf. www.index-integrity.org; fiorini 2007; Vargas and Schlutz 2016).

To detect both capital-intensive and grass-roots bribery a fOI law ought to cover all public institutions making policy and delivering public services. These include central government leaders and ministries; parliament; the courts and their equivalent institutions at regional and local levels. Many big decisions affecting capital expenditure are in the hands of state-owned industries managed outside this framework; they manage everything from energy resources to public transport. Health services can be administered by functional institutions spending money outside the framework of government ministries, including charitable and profit-making hospitals and clinics. Since capital-intensive corruption often involves private-sector enterprises paying bribes, their actions may be subject to fOI regulations too.

Access to documents differs between institutions making and those delivering policies. Because the adoption of a new law confers costs and benefts on those affected, people with the power to make decisions are subject to public and private lobbying by those who expect to be positively or negatively affected. Lobbying laws can set conditions about the relationship between the authors of a law and those whose interests it will effect. Enforcing these laws requires information about who talks to whom and what is exchanged. Decisions about big bucks capital-intensive projects require laws setting out procedures that must be met by suppliers bidding for a contract and by public offcials deciding which enterprise gets the contract. The delivery of public services at the grass roots is covered by bureaucratic legislation setting conditions for the use of a service. In many political systems the grounds on which offcials make decisions about what to do are kept confdential. If individuals have a problem in obtaining a service, fOI legislation can give individuals the right to access information about how a decision they want to challenge was made.

The statutory enumeration of activities that a fOI act opens to public scrutiny is critical, because everything that is not listed remains closed. The protection of national security is the reason most often given for keeping information private. for example, lives of police investigators or informers to counterterrorism agencies could be put at risk if their work was public knowledge. The defnition of national security can be extended very widely to include how private enterprises get capital-intensive contracts from corrupt governments. An investigation of the methods used by British frms selling tens of billions of dollars of military equipment to Saudi Arabia was silenced by the British Labour government on the grounds that national security came before fOI. BAE Systems made a plea bargain with an American court, paying $400 million to avoid having to name in open court high-ranking Saudi Arabian politicians who had received big bribes in exchange for big contracts.

The principle of opening up public records in the public interest can be challenged by another principle: the right of individuals to privacy. Privacy may be invoked to keep from public scrutiny details of an individual’s biological parents, previous convictions for crime or treatment for mental instability. Countries differ in the extent to which tax returns of public offcials and citizens are open to public scrutiny. In Sweden everyone’s income tax return is open, while in Britain and the United States this is not the case. Politicians campaigning for offce may choose to publish their tax returns or refuse to do so when challenged, as has

been the case with President Donald Trump. Business frms must publish information about their income and expenditure but these documents do not give details of every payment made. firms want to use the cloak of commercial confdentiality to cover up much information about how they secure capital-intensive contracts or encourage doctors to prescribe their proprietary pharmaceuticals. fOI acts specify who is eligible to receive information from public records and how access may be obtained. National laws differ in the extent to which individuals are allowed to access comments public offcials make about them in internal government documents. Estonia is at one extreme: Citizens can access offcial fles about themselves electronically. In most countries, requests for information must be made in writing and often involve the payment of a fee, and there can be restrictions on the number of requests that an individual may make. There can be a legal requirement for the government to respond to a request within a limited number of days too.

An individual who feels that a decision affecting him or her has been improperly made can seek after-the-fact information from offcial institutions charged with preventing bad governance in all its forms. More than 90 countries from Albania to Zambia have an ombudsman offce, an institution named after its origins in Scandinavia more than a century ago (www.theioi.org). An ombudsman’s offce can investigate a complaint by accessing and evaluating documents in government fles that would otherwise be closed. The conditions controlling whether complaints can be investigated and fles opened up are limited by law. The slow tempo of investigations means that any after-the-fact disclosure of an unjustifed decision comes later and may even be too late to help a victim of medical malpractice.

Practical obstacles. fOI does not mean that it is free of cost for the government to provide. It takes time for public offcials to locate documents relevant to the subject of a request, especially when more than one government department or agency is involved. In an era of big data, the more information that is open to public scrutiny, the more time it takes to sift through tens of thousands of records. Computer algorithms searching through haystacks of data are prone to retrieving hundreds or thousands of documents before fnding a few that can point to the existence of formal or informal corruption. Once retrieved, documents are checked internally to ensure that they are relevant to the request and to remove information to protect individual privacy and national security.

Since time is money, to prevent frivolous or vexatious requests, a government may impose a charge. Legal fees vary between countries as does the amount of work needed to answer a request. The British government calculates the cost of each valid request but does not charge for the cost of retrieving a document or series of documents if doing so does not cost the government more than £600.

The existence of public records cannot be assumed. In countries that have been late to replace traditional practices involving personal contact and oral discussion and decision-making, what is done may not be recorded in a written document. Globally, many states are younger than their older citizens. This is true not only for ex-colonies but also in Eastern Europe, where the collapse of Communism and the break-up of the Soviet Union created more than a dozen new states and incentives for outgoing offcials to burn fles, as Vladimir Putin did at that time. Military defeat and internal violence has put public records at risk of destruction from bombs, fres or other forms of disorder. This has affected early bureaucracies such as Germany and developing countries such as Nigeria.

Even a state that began bureaucratization early with little disruption to its territory has a legacy problem of linking older and newer records. The challenges go well beyond the shift from recording information in pen and ink to doing so on a computer. There is a huge backlog of documents that are not archived for electronic retrieval because they were created before contemporary practices were adopted for retrieving documents by some form of electronic tag. for example, the names of political parties were not printed on British ballots until 1969, resulting in independent experts being responsible for calculating the national election result. In addition, responsibilities for dealing with a particular policy are subject to being reshuffed between offces in one of the recurrent reorganizations of government functions and boundaries that occur due to political pressures or in accord with changing expert views of how public policies should be managed.

The territorial and functional fragmentation of institutional responsibilities is increased when both central and local authorities or a mixture of elected and non-elected public agencies are involved. In the nominally unitary United Kingdom, census and demographic data are separately recorded in four national registries. Within England major data about education is in the hands of schools, separately organized examination boards and local authorities. Over the decades all three have been

subject to substantial reorganizations. Changes are greater still among hospitals and doctors’ offces providing services to people under a nominally national health service. The libertarian opposition of Britons to the assignment of a national identity card to every person, as is normal in continental Europe, is a major obstacle to linking information about an individual held in different public institutions and places. In a federal system such as the United States, the fragmentation of policy responsibilities and political power is much greater between Cabinet-level departments in Washington and the grass roots, where formal requirements to keep records may be ignored. Even if police patrolling the streets are required to wear a video camera, they may ‘forget’ to wear a camera or install dud batteries.

Developments in electronic technology have altered the way in which policies are decided and administered, and the records that have been left behind. The traditional bureaucratic practice of confning communication to registered written documents easy to trace was eroded by the spread of telephone communications that left no written trace. The development of email has tilted the balance back. Moreover, the informal nature of email results in many offcials writing as they would talk. This disregard of what third parties would make of their remarks has resulted in evidence of informal and formal corruption when email exchanges are opened up to public scrutiny by disclosure legislation.

2 sTakehoLDers in oPen DaTa

for transparency to have an impact on corruption, there must be a demand for open data as well as a supply. The demand comes from offcials, civil society institutions and individuals with a stake in reducing the violation of formal and informal standards. More than this, institutions must have the resources of time, money and skilled people to sift through large masses of materials to fnd evidence in the gigabytes of information that public institutions generate each day. If efforts invested in the scrutiny of open data are to have an impact, those taking the lead in evaluating behaviour must also have the means of pursuing offcials whose questionable actions are exposed by transparency.

A study of requests fled under the UK fOI act found that requests came from four different categories of users. More than half the demands for central government information and more than one-third for local government information came from people who appeared to be members

of the general public, acting in their own name without any visible institutional resources. Most individual queries are about retail services that directly affect a household and are delivered locally. Researchers, who are second in importance for central government, tend to be concerned with broader issues of governance that are more likely to have political importance. Whether attached to a university or a think tank, they will know what standards public offcials ought to meet. National journalists seek information less frequently from central government because they are interested only in information about activities that they hope could be headline news. for local reporters, local information is more likely to be newsworthy, whatever its content, simply because it is local. Businesses make enquiries only when they are dissatisfed with what they learn from their direct and interest group contacts (Worthy and Hazell 2016).

Offcial institutions. To hold politicians accountable, anti-corruption institutions within government require independence of the chief holders of power. This is a necessary condition in order to take effective legal action on information that is made public by fOI demands. Where anti-corruption institutions are independent, corruption is likely to be low. However, where corruption is high, offcial institutions are less likely to have the legal powers, staff and fnancial resources needed to monitor corruption effectively. In the worst case, they may be complicit in corruption. for a legal action to be taken against an offcial who appears to be violating a law, there must be an offce of public prosecution that is satisfed that there is suffcient evidence to justify a formal indictment. Law enforcement agencies are subject to procedures laid down in statute books. Actions made public by open data must appear to violate legal criteria for corruption. Many activities that prompt accusations of corruption do not do so. for example, a law on campaign fnance can require that all donations to parties and candidates be made public without any limitation being placed on the amount of a contribution. Thus, reports of contributions to elected offceholders by large enterprises and multi-millionaires can prompt headline charges of policies being for sale, even though the law imposes no legal limit on how much money can be contributed.

Evidence that journalists obtain through wiretapping is usually not admissible in court. An email in which one person reports hearing stories that an offcial has accepted money is hearsay, inadmissible in a court of law in most countries. In cases of capital-intensive corruption involving a

transaction between a sophisticated payer of a bribe and equally sophisticated recipients, anything put on paper may be phrased vaguely and a bribe may take the form of a payment in response to invoices for services that are themselves legal. In a court trial, conviction can be avoided if lawyers are able to use legal technicalities to get a case dismissed without having to disprove evidence of corruption.

The standard of evidence required to achieve a guilty verdict in a court of law is much higher and narrower than that required to raise the suspicion of corruption in a speech in parliament or a newspaper headline. When laws are written to go easy on corruption by inhibiting enforcement, anti-corruption campaigners may turn to the court of public opinion, where public offcials must defend themselves for actions that they had expected to be kept private.

Government auditors verify after the fact whether public money has been spent in keeping with bureaucratic procedures. In a political system in which bureaucratic standards are effective, the chief concern of the auditor is that public spending has produced value for money. This may be judged solely by price—the cheapest goods or services have been bought—or on grounds of effciency and effectiveness—the best services have been provided consistent with the funds available. Comparing costs from year to year within an agency and between different suppliers are standard methods for auditing. for recurrent purchases of standard goods and services such as offce supplies, comparisons can be made between what public agencies and private sector frms spend. When auditing local or regional government, spending for the same service can be compared across different local authorities to identify outliers requiring more detailed investigation (see Golden and Picci 2006). When central government is the sole contractor for capital-intensive goods, the only comparative evidence is problematic, since it must be made across national boundaries with different cost structures and currencies. When goods required are not produced nationally, such as military aircraft, this limits the capacity of national auditors to investigative suspicions of foreign companies making payments to opaque foreign bank accounts in return for big bucks contracts.

The good government theory of democracy is that parliament is the representative of the people holding government to account for the delivery of public services. Within most parliaments there are formal and informal groups of MPs who do not hold government offce and are prepared to raise questions about questionable behaviour of governors

revealed in open data. Parliamentary committees can investigate bad governance to see whether it is due to incompetence, sloppiness, disdain for procedures, some form of corruption or a combination of these faults. However, because MPs sit as representatives of competing parties, when judgments come to be made, partisanship matters.

Politicians in opposition parties have a structural incentive to make the most of anything that could damage the reputation of the government. The underlying evidence need not be substantial for an opposition party to insinuate that the behaviour of governors has not come up to public standards or even violates laws against corruption. This tactic was used by both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the 2016 American presidential campaign. Trump demanded that Hillary Clinton release thousands of emails and Clinton that Trump publish his detailed tax returns.

The governing party has a collective interest in minimizing the extent to which open governance makes all their activities public. If information is publicized about questionable behaviour, such as a large fnancial donation to their party, its members are likely to stand together, initially at least, to reject allegations made against a colleague. As and when evidence threatens a negative verdict in the court of public opinion or a law court, the governing party can cut its loss by dropping a politician whose behaviour has become a liability. Intra-party rivalries can lead politicians to make corruption charges against threats to their power. This practice is frequently invoked in one-party states such as the People’s Republic of China.

Capital-intensive contracts for public expenditure give private enterprises a stake in policymaking that may favour opaque procedures if they think that they can win contracts by hook or crook, a belief that corrupt public offcials will encourage. To guard against this, good governance laws and regulations prescribe detailed procedures that frms are expected to follow when bidding for a contract and that offcials should follow when making a decision. Because of the technical nature of most capital-intensive contracts, the procedures are often diffcult to understand and evaluate. Prospective bidders can engage lobbyists to offer arguments and incentives to offcials who prepare the bids to specify conditions that may favour their client’s bid. In countries where public offcials are perceived as open to taking money on the side for themselves or for their political party, money can change hands to infuence the decision. If the regulations are written so that little information need be given to justify a decision, this creates suspicion. In countries where

bidders are competitive, losers have an interest in open access to information about the procurement practice. The winner has an interest in keeping the same information confdential.

The globalization of politics and economics has created international agencies that annually disburse billions in aid to national governments. This gives them a direct interest in fnding out how their funds are spent. To do so requires more transparency than is normal in the governance process of many recipient countries. The confederal nature of the European Union means that it delegates to member states the responsibility for managing EU grants. While the EU has a Court of Auditors, its scrutiny is limited and politics makes it diffcult to impose fnes or terminate grants to member states. The World Bank provides foreign aid to developing country governments that allocate money through institutions that operate in their national language and by informal standards that are diffcult for foreign institutions to monitor. Moreover, countries suspected of misusing funds are members of the World Bank and some have seats or allies on the Bank’s governing board. By contrast, the International Monetary fund normally provides funds subject to conditions for changes in policies by the recipient government, such as raising interest rates. These are changes that the IMf can monitor and, if its conditions are not met, it can threaten to withhold money that the recipient government needs to remain solvent.

Civil society organizations. In the abstract, civil society organizations are neither part of the state nor single individuals. They are formal institutions that represent their members’ interest in a variety of activities involved in governance. These interests may be economic concerns of proft-making companies or trade union members; social rights affected by abortion laws or broad but vague values such as the public interest.

Whereas public offceholders prefer to hold information close to themselves, civil society organizations want to open up access to information relevant to their particular interests. Many documents opened up to public scrutiny are entirely consistent with the law, even if disputed on political grounds. If information gives grounds for suspicion of wrongdoing or shameful behaviour, civil society institutions can challenge what governors are doing. Although civil society institutions lack the standing to bring charges in a court of law, they can arraign public offcials in the court of public opinion. To distinguish their complaint from the everyday political conficts of interest between economic groups, the charge will be that actions by public offcials are shameful, wrong or not in the public interest.

Transparency International (TI) is the best known civil society organization dedicated to fghting corruption on a global basis (www. transparency.org). It was founded in 1993 as a German not-for-proft organization by people with substantial experience of working in developing countries where corruption in governance was a major obstacle to social and economic development as well as being wrong by universalistic standards of good governance. At its headquarters in Berlin, it creates research tools for evaluating national corruption comparatively; it lobbies intergovernmental organizations to adopt measures to reduce corruption nationally and across national borders; and it disseminates information to national chapters. TI supports national anti-corruption efforts by more than 100 affliated national chapters. Each national chapter tends to have a limited staff and funds because its mission precludes dependence on government funds. Nonetheless, because they are national they can provide knowledge and contacts that put pressure on elites to curb abuses of public offce for private gain.

The extent to which civil society organizations are free to act independently of the state varies greatly between countries where laws guaranteeing freedom of association and speech are respected and those where they are not. Within free societies these organizations differ in the extent to which their interests and activities are funded by the government since they share common purposes, for example, providing education and health services. Insofar as these organizations become dependent on public funding they may become more discreet in publicizing government faults that they learn about. In a partly free authoritarian regime, civil society organizations are allowed freedom of expression within limits designed to protect the interests of those in power. for example, partly free post-Communist regimes may tolerate or even support competing political parties as long as they divide opposition to the party of power. Thus, in the 2018 Russian presidential election, there were seven opposition parties on the ballot to divide the votes of the 30% who rejected Vladimir Putin. The Russian Prosecutor’s Offce has classifed the Open Society foundations, funded by George Soros, as an ‘undesirable’ organization because it fnances activities consistent with its name: the promotion of an open society with institutions independent of government free to criticize it.

Large corporations claim that they operate in the public interest, employing large numbers of people and paying sales taxes, social security taxes and profts taxes. Enterprises normally prefer to keep out of politics

in the electoral sense, but when issues arise that affect their interests negatively, they want to have their voice heard and present their views to politicians and the public as is done by not-for-proft civil society institutions. Moreover, they also claim the right to give money to candidates and parties. The American Supreme Court has ruled that big businesses have the same rights to spend money to advance their views as do individuals. Even when laws place some restrictions on political spending, American multimillionaires and billionaires can usually fnd ways to spend large sums in efforts to infuence public policy in their private interest.

The media have both the incentive and the resources to hold offcials to account in the court of public opinion. Journalists have a professional interest in open data that meets their standards of newsworthiness, including indications of corruption. Much information that transparency makes accessible to journalists is about humdrum processes of governance that are not newsworthy and much that is newsworthy has little relation to governance, for example, stories about the overindulgences of television personalities. Investigative journalists with the patience and resources to sift through massive fles can produce headline stories about ‘who spoke to whom’ about decisions concerning capital-intensive contracts. In the absence of documentary evidence of what was done, their stories can raise suspicions of corruption but cannot stand up as evidence in a court of law. Studies of the extent of press regulation have found that corruption tends to be lower in countries where the media has greater freedom from regulation (DfID 2015: 72).

Government can make it diffcult for the media to publicize shameful or corrupt activities by maintaining strict libel laws and making it a severely punishable offence to leak offcial documents to the media. A government can abuse its legal powers to intimidate the owners of critical media, shut them down or to take the offending media into state ownership. In Russia, President Vladimir Putin has used all three methods. Historically, ‘Dog don’t eat dog’ conventions have inhibited the publication of unfavourable stories about political associates of publishers seeking political status and infuence. Changes in media competition have encouraged commercially oriented publishers to seek readers by exposing cases of political corruption (Blankenburg 2002). Audiences can also be sought by narrowcasting, that is, slanting political coverage with stories that re-enforce the political values and perceptions of their audience. In countries where corruption is high, ‘brown envelope journalism’ offers material benefts to media that suppress stories of corruption in return for bribes (Eke 2014).

free of many constraints on conventional civil society media, social media have created a multiplicity of fresh channels to report allegations of corruption and bad behaviour by policymakers. In countries where there are fOI laws, independent social media can initially circulate stories that established media regard as too hot to handle or lacking adequate evidence. If a posting on social media arouses interest, it will then be picked up by conventional media. In political systems that seek to control freedom of speech, even if one social media site responsible for a disclosure is shut down, by the time this happens its evidence is likely to have gone viral. Electronic media in foreign countries can continue to disseminate charges and state censorship can stimulate public curiosity to view stories because the government wants to keep them private. However, social media lack the resources often needed to uncover capital-intensive corruption.

Modern technology can enable a single public employee, if he or she chooses, to become a whistleblower making evidence of bad governance public (Lipman 2012). If the evidence is on paper it can be photocopied, massive electronic fles can be downloaded onto disks, and face-to-face conversations can be secretly recorded. Whistle-blowers are usually individuals working for a government agency or a private enterprise involved in awarding a capital-intensive contract, because the complexity of such contracts requires committing many activities to documents circulated to dozens or even hundreds of employees. Any one employee may then leak their copy of an embarrassing document in hopes of stimulating a protest against what appears to be wrongdoing.

In an era of globalization, networking across national and continental boundaries can open up private fles of public interest. A spectacular example is the disclosure of the papers of a law frm in Panama that advised multinational clients about avoiding taxation. The leaked fles contained more than 11.5 million records covering 3,000 individuals or organizations and some 200,000 shell companies set up by the law frm to minimize taxes by whatever means possible. The documents were originally leaked electronically to a German journalist. They were then scrutinized in detail by a network of 107 different media organizations in 80 countries with the assistance of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The documents named 2 national leaders and many public fgures in countries ranging from Iceland to African states with diamond mines. It was suffciently shameful to lead to the resignation of Iceland’s prime minister. British Prime Minister David Cameron

had to explain to the House of Commons that his father’s use of offshore trusts to reduce taxation was a perfectly legal action consistent with the obligation to look after the interests of the family’s private trust.

Citizens at large. Differentiating retail bribery from capital-intensive corruption focuses on a problem of direct interest to ordinary people. The mass of citizens has little understanding or even awareness of the ins and outs of the public procurement process, whether it is conducted with or without bribery. Even though there is a signifcant public perception of business corruption, the great majority of individuals lack the resources and incentives to engage in protest. By contrast, billions of people are directly or indirectly affected by retail corruption and have frst-hand knowledge of the payment of bribes in their community.

Transparency International encourages its national chapters to organize grass-roots anti-corruption efforts. Its 2013 Global Corruption Barometer asked a battery of questions about the willingness of people to protest against corruption. The activities proposed ranged from signing a petition to paying more to buy products that were produced free of corruption. A total of 84% said they would support at least one anti-corruption activity and the median person was ready to endorse three activities. Majorities expressing a favourable attitude towards protest were high in every continent, and independent of the extent of corruption in a country. There is, however, a large disconnect between what people say they would do and what they actually do. Whereas 46% say they would be willing to join an anti-corruption organization, only a minuscule number do so (see Rose and Peiffer 2015: 55f).

Collective action at the community level is often advocated as a means to give victims of bribery the confdence to think that exposing their personal experience will be supported by local groups whose protests cannot be ignored by local holders of power (Persson et al. 2013; Mungiu-Pippidi 2015: Chapter 4). The Partnership for Transparency fund has piloted projects that have been effective in achieving this. The Partnership draws on the expertise and support of international anti-corruption professionals, many of whom are recently retired World Bank offcials. However, each project is extremely time and labour-intensive and, because projects are community-oriented, they can directly address only a few places in a country where corruption is nationwide. This limits the prospect for institutionalizing community action by citizens. Moreover, there are weak or non-existent links between local protesters and national and international policymakers setting policies.

As losers in a system of bad governance, people who pay bribes have an incentive to take actions to punish offcials who have taken advantage of them. However, to report an incident of corruption requires what Germans call civil courage, that is, a willingness to risk getting into trouble by informing against a public offcial. Even in Europe, where people have many protections against intimidation, most people only give lip service to taking action. Among Eurobarometer respondents who said they had paid a bribe, only one in ten had reported this to a public authority. In EU member states that had been Communist-controlled for decades, respondents were even less likely to tell a public authority that an offcial had demanded a bribe.

Europeans give a multiplicity of reasons for not wanting to report paying a bribe (fig. 1). Three-ffths are resigned to accepting bribery as a persisting condition of their political system and think it is not worth the effort to do anything because no one is punished. A similar proportion shows suffcient awareness of legal procedures to realize that their personal experience of bribery would not necessarily be enough to secure the conviction of an offcial who denied soliciting a bribe. There is also a widespread fear of getting into trouble because of the lack of protection from retaliation against people who report bribery. The unwillingness of individuals to protest about being victimized by retail-level corruption creates a ‘vicious equilibrium’ (Vargas and Schlutz 2016: 448ff).

The effect of increased transparency. In common with other reforms advanced by good governance advocates, the case for opening government to public inspection is promoted as having multiple benefts. These include greater accountability of governors to the governed; greater engagement of citizens in the process of governance and an increase in trust as a result of letting sunlight into activities that were formerly kept in the dark. Opponents of transparency cannot expect public support for protecting their interest in keeping activities secret. They oppose opening up their work by claiming an fOI law will impose onerous red tape and legal procedures; add to the cost of government and result in sloppy decisions being made through informal oral discussions rather than by formal and thorough confdential procedures.

The impact of introducing transparency is greatest when the collapse of an opaque dictatorship leads to its successor discrediting the former regime by opening up records of leaders who enriched themselves.

Black bars show any choice of items under the italicised caption

Resignation e.g. Pointless: no one punished

Everyone knows It's not worth the effort 21% 19% 36% 59%

Legal e.g.

Difficult to prove anything Don't know where to report 21%

58% 48%

Fear e.g.

No protection

Get into trouble Not betray anyone 31% 22% 17% 57%

Don't know, other 6%

0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%

Fig. 1 Why corruption not reported (Source Question B14 from European Barometer Special Survey 397, 2013. N: 26,789)

After the kleptocratic dictator Emmanuel Marcos was deposed in the Philippines in 1986, the new governors opened the shoe cupboards of the dictator’s wife, Imelda Marcos. This revealed 800 pairs of shoes that she accumulated as part of her extravagant lifestyle. In such a context, greater transparency is a consequence rather than a cause of regime change. An insidious effect occurs when a regime responds to pressures by introducing a fOI act that nominally meets international standards but in practice contains loopholes that allow the powers that be to keep out of sight activities that would be judged wrong in the court of public opinion or illegal in a court of law.

The promotion of transparency rules tends to follow best practice in countries where good governance is already established. In such contexts, reformers press their cause by arguing that greater transparency would produce better governance. This was the rationale for adopting a

fOI Act in the United Kingdom in 2003, where governance traditionally did not have a reputation for formal or informal corruption, but it also had a tradition of offcial secrecy (Hine and Peele 2016).

The effect of a fOI Act depends upon who uses it and how. In Britain, tens of thousands of requests for information are annually fled with central government and upwards of 200,000 with local government offces. The chief users are individual members of the public. However, individual requests for information are usually not driven by a civic concern with promoting good governance but by a specifc personal interest in fnding out more about actions that directly affect themselves, for example, local government action on permission to build a house. The volume of requests looks big but that is due to the size of the British population; it is the equivalent of one person in one thousand making a request. Since bureaucratic procedures make it costly in time and money to answer even a seemingly minor request, the system would be threatened with collapse if usage increased greatly. As Worthy and Hazell (2016) conclude, ‘fOI only works if almost nobody uses it’.

The instances in which fOI requests or unauthorized leaks by public offcials cause a political furore are very much the exception. The effect of disclosures is also contingent. In the open American context, the information leaked by Deep Throat to Washington Post journalists led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. By contrast, in Britain, the outcome was different of an inquiry into British involvement in the Iraq War. It was authorized by Tony Blair’s successor as prime minister, Gordon Brown with the power to uncover documents and cross-examine those involved. The Commission, led by a retired senior civil servant, Sir John Chilcot, rejected Brown’s proposal to hold hearings in private. It accumulated tens of millions of words of evidence. After two general elections had passed and the Iraq War was political history, its 2.6 million word report was full of damning criticisms of how Tony Blair and his political advisers took the United Kingdom to war by misrepresenting and ignoring evidence and were ill prepared for the consequences. Tony Blair offered no apology and declared that he had acted in good faith in doing what he believed necessary to protect the public interest of the world’s citizens. The next of kin of Britons killed in Iraq were offered a free copy of the 12-volume £767 offcial report.

Opening up records of past policymaking makes it possible to identify who is to blame when things go wrong. Many British civil servants have welcomed the opening up to public inspection of offcial records of how politically controversial issues are handled. Doing so shows the cautions that they have voiced before bad decisions were made. A ‘yes, Minister’ civil servant can tactfully ask a determined politician to state for the record the grounds for a decision, and a prudent politician may respond by modifying what he or she would not want to say in public. Opening records can show when politicians take the lead in making decisions that went wrong.

British politicians remain ambivalent about fOI. After experiencing its effects as prime minister, Tony Blair took a different view of the principle of transparency than he had advocated in opposition and authorized in an Act of Parliament. He described information as a political weapon. ‘The truth is that the fOI act isn’t used, for the most part, by “the people”. It’s used by journalists. for political leaders, it’s like saying to someone who is hitting you over the head with a stick, “Hey, try this instead”, and handing them a mallet’ (Blair 2010).

Because names make news, it is far easier for politicians and journalists to exploit evidence of individuals making decisions without careful thought and of actions taken by politicians that they did not expect to be opened up to public view by transparency laws. Even if their actions are perfectly legal, actions that break informal standards of behaviour and governance have a damaging effect on the careers of people caught in the spotlight provided by a fOI act. The object of exposing bad behaviour is prevention as well as punishment. Insofar as disclosures of individual misconduct have a demonstration effect on other offcials inclined to operate by hook or by crook, the result will be a reduction in bad governance. However, demonstration effects tend to be limited in their scope and may be dismissed by offcials confdent that what happens to others can’t happen to themselves. The surest way for transparency laws to secure a long-term reduction in corruption is if the individual cases they help expose trigger political pressures that change the laws that allow bad governance to persist.

references

Bauhr, Monika, and Grimes, Marcia. 2012. What is Government Transparency?

Quality of Government Institute Working Paper 2012:16. Gothenburg:

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The Rise of the Scandal Industry. In Political Corruption in Transition, ed. S.

Kotkin and A. Sajo, 149–166. Budapest: CEU Press. Darch, C., and C. Underwood. 2010. Freedom of Information and the

Developing World. Oxford: Chandos. DfID, 2015. Why Corruption Matters: Understanding Causes, Effects and How to

Address Them. London: Department for International Development Evidence

Paper. Eke, Ikechukwu Williams. 2014. Brown Envelope Syndrome and the future of

Journalism in Nigeria. International Interdisciplinary Journal of Scientifc

Research 1 (1): 148–156. fiorini, A. (ed.). 2007. The Right to Know: Transparency for an Open World.

New york: Columbia University Press. Golden, Miriam, and Lucio Picci. 2006. Corruption and the Management of Public Works in Italy. In International Handbook on the Economics of

Corruption, ed. S. Rose-Ackerman, 457–483. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Hine, David, and Gillian Peele. 2016. The Regulation of Standards in British

Public Life: Doing the Right Thing? Manchester: Manchester University Press. Index of Public Integrity. 2018. http://www.index-integrity.org. Berlin: Hertie

School of Governance. Accessed 21 March 2018. Johnston, M. 2005. Syndromes of Corruption. New york: Cambridge University

Press. Landell-Mills, Pierre. 2013. Citizens Against Corruption. Washington, DC:

Partnership for Transparency fund. Lipman, frederick D. 2012. Whistleblowers: Incentives, Disincentives, and

Protection Strategies. New york: Wiley. Mungiu-Pippidi, Alina. 2015. The Quest for Good Governance: How Societies

Develop Control of Corruption. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Norad. 2011. Joint Evaluation of Support to Anti-Corruption Efforts, 2002–2009.

Oslo: Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation Report 6. Persson, A., B. Rothstein, and J. Teorell. 2013. Why Anti-Corruption Reforms fail: Systemic Corruption as a Collective Action Problem. Governance 26 (3): 449–471. Rose, Richard, and Caryn Peiffer. 2015. Paying Bribes for Public Services:

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In Routledge Handbook of Political Corruption, ed. Paul M. Heywood, 347–358. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 9

Reducing Corruption

Politicians made exuberant by winning control of government with a promise to get rid of corruption are tempted to believe that their victory removes all the obstacles that are a legacy from their predecessors. Thus, when the Berlin Wall fell, well-intentioned theorists of the end of history saw no need to worry about corruption because democratic institutions would be a corrective mechanism for the legacy of bad governance from Communist times. If governors engaged in corrupt practices, voters could use the ballot box to throw misbehaving rascals out of offce (Schumpeter 1952; cf. Rose 2009). However, in much of the world corrupt governance is stronger than the capacity of electoral institutions to get rid of it. In more than three-quarters of countries in which competitive elections are held, corruption plays a signifcant part in the process of governance (Mungiu-Pippidi 2015: 48).

As Max Weber (1948) noted, ‘Public policy is the strong and slow boring of hard boards’. Overcoming obstacles to the reform of bad governance requires patience. However, patience is in short supply in a world of 24/7 media and international fnancial markets. Refecting on the experience of being the minister of fnance in Nigeria, where corruption is widespread, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (2013) concluded:

A common approach to tackling corruption in developing countries has been for offcials to target high-profle cases, publishing the arrest of offenders often as a deterrent to others. Such stories tend to generate big

© 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_9 167

headlines. yet after a few weeks interest fades and corruption may still continue unabated. To change this cycle requires that such high-profle approaches be frmly coupled with relentless action to put in place the rules and processes that enshrine transparency and limit discretion and subjectivity.

The logic of making prescriptions is that diagnosis of the causes of bad governance comes frst. The second step is to identify causes that in principle can be directly affected by government action, for example, laws defning corrupt practices and penalties for their violation. The results of such actions will show the extent to which they may reduce bad governance and the extent to which success is limited by such factors as public offcials not having been socialized to behave as bureaucrats.

Many anti-corruption prescriptions refect the law of the hammer: If you give children a hammer, they will want to hammer everything they see. The belief in a single prescription having a pervasive effect ignores differences in the causes of corruption in capital-intensive contracts and delivering public services retail. The approach of social scientists tends to be limited by a priori assumptions of their own discipline. This violates the Titanic rule: What you leave out will sink you every time. Thus, in response to the collapse of Communist regimes, economists advised promoting the market economy by privatizing major state-owned frms with capital assets. In the triumphalist words of the World Bank’s chief economist at the time, Larry Summers (1991), this prescription would succeed because ‘The laws of economics are like the laws of engineering. One set of laws works everywhere.’ The result of the privatization of valuable public assets was that people who knew how to get things done in their country by hook or by crook gained capital-intensive fortunes.

Given the extent of corruption in many Commonwealth countries receiving British aid, in 2016 Prime Minister David Cameron called an action-oriented high-level Anti-Corruption Summit attended by representatives of Commonwealth governments and civil society institutions. There was agreement at the rhetorical level that corruption was a major problem in countries that were once under the British crown, such as India and Nigeria. The proposals in the Leaders’ Anti-Corruption Manifesto were long on general exhortation, moderate in specifc details, and subsequently have been short of evidence of success.

A government headed by politicians who beneft from corruption may accept prescriptions for institutional reforms without swallowing the medicine prescribed. This creates a dilemma for governments funding

foreign aid for political, economic and humanitarian ends. National aid agencies can proclaim, as the British minister for foreign aid has done, that the UK government’s policy is ‘zero tolerance for overseas bribery and corruption’ (DfID 2015). However, where corrupt offcials control the national institutions receiving foreign aid, the British government is hesitant to impose the “cold turkey” solution of cutting off aid to countries that it wants to support.

Diagnoses and prescriptions that inveigh against corruption are of little help in reducing bad governance. It makes about as much sense as having a health policy that simply calls for ‘fghting disease’ (Heywood 2016: 11). Like disease, corruption in the body politic is a phenomenon that can take many forms. In order to reduce it, each form requires a diagnosis that identifes its distinctive characteristics, which part of the body politic it affects, and what its specifc causes are. Without doing so, any prescription will tend to fall back on generalized prescriptions that have no specifc application to the corrupt delivery of public services.

1 changing insTiTuTions

The political institutions that deliver public services are established by national laws that specify bureaucratic rules about how they ought to be administered. However, public offcials may abuse these laws for their private gain. Many explanations of the maintenance of corruption stress the importance of path-dependence. Those in power can reject foreign criticisms of corrupt behaviour by arguing with some historical justifcation that delivering services by hook or by crook is the traditionally accepted way of getting things done in their society. If threatened with reforms that would remove their benefts, they may mobilize political resources strong enough to maintain a stable equilibrium of bad governance (Persson et al. 2013).

When bad governance is path-dependent, it is logical to conclude that corruption can be reduced only by a ‘big bang’ approach that creates a disequilibrium that disrupts the institutions benefting corrupt offcials (Mungiu-Pippidi 2015: 129). The word disrupt emphasizes that the change required is more than an adjustment in the name of increased effciency or piling more rules on top of those that are being successfully evaded. Instead, disruption involves structural changes suffcient to undermine the power of those who have been benefting from bad governance. Although civil society and grass-roots public opinion can demand fundamental changes, the power to do so is in the hands of national leaders.

Introduce new institutions and laws. Most forms of corruption involve the absence or non-enforcement of anti-corruption laws and institutions. A prescription that follows from this is to introduce new and stronger anti-corruption laws and institutions. Since 1990 there has been a dramatic increase in the number of good governance laws and institutions. By 2008 the number of anti-corruption agencies concerned primarily with capital-intensive corruption rose from 12 to 98. In the frst fve years following the adoption of the UN Convention Against Corruption, 125 countries ratifed it (Norad 2011: 49).

The conventional advice for reducing corruption is the adoption of best practice laws and institutions. The practices are those associated with countries in which corruption appears low. foreign aid agencies can make the adoption of such practices a condition of a country receiving a grant. Best practice recommendations are also part of intergovernmental agreements such as the UN Convention Against Corruption. However, the national context of badly governed countries is by defnition very different from countries that are often the source of best practices and it is unwise to assume that lessons drawn from that latter can be successfully planted in very different soil (cf. Rose 2005). To tell policymakers that want to reform a badly governed state to emulate the best practice of Denmark does not tell reformers how to do so (Mungiu-Pippidi 2013). The advice most immediately required is how to make changes that will start the lengthy process of becoming better governed by getting rid of its worst current features.

The large number of countries introducing new institutions and laws provides the basis for a statistical evaluation of the extent to which introducing an anti-corruption agency or an ombudsman or adopting the UN Convention Against Corruption has had a positive effect. The results of an analysis commissioned by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation are very consistent. In seven different statistical tests, none of the measures intended to reduce corruption consistently showed a signifcant impact on a country’s governance (Norad 2011: Table 13). While case studies can identify successful reforms (DfID 2015: Chapter 5), they tend to be exceptional. The most common outcome is that governors go through the motions of adopting new measures while withholding ‘the political commitment and tools they need to complete the job’ (Joutsen 2011: 317).

Spend more money. from an economic perspective, scarcity in the supply of services in high demand such as education and health care should encourage people to offer bribes to get what they want and public

offcials expect bribes. This logically implies that bribery would fall if public spending was increased enough to provide enough school and hospital places for everyone. This policy is consistent with the views of those who regard social welfare as a basic right and with statistical analyses of the positive correlation between public spending on social services and the state of the national economy. Contrary to expectations, increasing the supply of social services has no signifcant effect on people having contact with a service or paying a bribe to get it (Table 2 in Chapter 5). It is not the quantity of public services that affects corruption but the informal standards that public offcials apply when the service is delivered.

An alternative way to spend money to reduce corruption would be to boost the low pay of public employees who have the opportunity to collect bribes in countries where bribery is widespread, such as India. Since the possibility of collecting bribes varies greatly between public-sector occupations, to be most effcient increases in pay should be targeted at front-line public employees who are in daily contact with people wanting to use public services and not on back-room staff who do not have such contacts (cf. Reiner 2010; Goel et al. 2016). This approach is consistent with the correlation between low levels of bribery in high-income countries and a high level of bribery in low-income countries. Superfcially, this correlation would appear to support the prescription that paying public offcials more would reduce the incidence of bribery. However, there is little evidence to support this proposition. In low-income countries, a salary boost that lifted grass-roots offcials just above the poverty line would still leave them poor. Among high-level offcials allocating capital-intensive benefts, any salary increase would be far below what would be paid as a bribe by a multinational corporation wanting a contract. free-market economists theorize that increasing the amount of money the government spends on public services will also increase the number of people who pay bribes, since this will increase contact with corrupt public offcials (Becker 1968). The evidence in preceding chapters shows that increased public expenditure does not necessarily increase corruption. Notwithstanding uncertainties about the direction of causation, there is a strong correlation between a high level of national income and a low level of corruption (Treisman 2015: Table 7.1). Nor are countries receiving large royalties from enterprises exploiting valuable natural resources signifcantly more likely to be corrupt than governments that lack such an economic boon (Table 1 in Chapter 3).

An infux of money to government through foreign aid is associated with corruption when aid money is a signifcant portion of the revenue of a low-income country (Table 1 in Chapter 3). In such a context, foreign assistance is spent not only on public benefts such as dams, roads and hospital buildings but also to the private beneft of offcials controlling aid money. Many countries whose population has big needs also have high levels of corruption. National governments high on the list of recipients of British aid money include places characterized by internal strife, such as Afghanistan, 169th among 176 countries on the Corruption Perceptions Index and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 150th on the Index. They also include countries such as Bangladesh (145th), where many subjects live in poverty and a small proportion proft from corruption (National Audit Offce 2015: 17).

Make trade-offs. Reformers make getting rid of corruption an unconditional goal. However, like all public policies, anti-corruption measures must compete with other priorities. These include public spending on capital-intensive projects such as roads and hospitals that beneft many ordinary people as well as the frms that supply them and the public offcials who authorize the contracts. Under some conditions, governments are prepared to trade off fghting corruption for other goals.

Trade-offs are particularly stark in the feld of national security. National governments can give money to foreign governments for political ends. for example, in 2006 the British government quashed an investigation of BAE Systems paying large bribes to Saudi Arabians, holding that it would be ‘against the wider national interest’ to enforce laws involving a country with which Britain wanted to maintain strong security and trade ties. The principle—my enemy’s enemy is my friend—is used to justify the provision of expensive military equipment and money with little concern with how the money is handled. During the Cold War, the United States provided more money to corrupt governments that took its side than the Soviet Union did because it had more money to give. Today, countries in the Middle and Near East take money from foreign governments with an interest in infuencing the outcome of strife in the region.

Advocates of giving foreign aid justify fghting global poverty in terms of absolute humanitarian values. The World Bank estimates that globally more than 750 million people live in extreme poverty, defned as having an average daily income with a purchasing power of less than $1.90 a day. This is just over 10% of the world’s total population, but it is

very unevenly distributed globally. Half of this total live in sub-Saharan Africa and another third live in the Indian subcontinent and other countries of South Asia. Aid can also be justifed on security grounds—global society is less subject to trouble if extreme poverty is lower—and on economic grounds—people with rising incomes are more likely to spend more money buying goods in international markets.

Aid given in immediate response to natural disasters is especially justifed by universalistic humanitarian standards. The participation of international charities such as the Red Cross gives national politicians a chance to claim credit for doing good free of political controversy. The effects of natural disasters are distributed more or less randomly but they are exacerbated by a disaster striking where bad governance has weakened defences against disaster.

The providers of fnancial aid to poor countries face a dilemma. If they are to provide fnancial support to countries where this is palpably needed, they are likely to sustain existing levels of corruption or see them rise. More than one-third of the population of the poor countries of South Asia is likely to pay a bribe each year and in sub-Saharan Africa one in six do so. When Haiti was hit by a hurricane, it was already among the most corrupt countries in the world, and the payment of bribes in Thailand is half again the global average (see Appendix fig. A.1).

Reducing funding will reduce the funds available for diversion to private benefts of well-connected politicians, but it will also reduce the benefts that are achieved by aid funds that do reach their intended benefciaries. To reduce funding of programmes where much money is diverted is consistent with impersonal theories of good governance, but doing so also cuts the funding of government aid ministries and the not-for-proft charities and private consultants to whom they make grants. The result is summed up by the verdict of the UK’s Independent Commission for Aid Impact on the work of the UK’s Department for International Development: ‘DfID’s anti-corruption activities have demonstrated certain achievements but have had little success in reducing the effects of corruption, especially as directly experienced by the poor’ (ICAI 2014: 1).

The dilemma of accepting corruption or doing without a beneft is not confned to developing countries. Early in his American political career, Harry Truman was put in charge of the budget of his home county in Missouri as a ‘good government’ front for a notoriously corrupt machine politician. In order to get paved roads built in the rural part of the county, the contracts for the work had to be given as political payoffs to