A Smarter Fight Against Corruption

Abstract

According to a recent study, in forty-eight countries around the world, more than a quarter of citizens pays bribes in exchange for service. In this article, the authors suggest that a key to a more effective and socially responsible fight against corruption lies in sequencing. Here, they explain how initiatives targeting high-level corruption in government and business must take priority, preceding the reforms of the public sector.

According to a 2019 study by Transparency International, in forty-eight countries around the world, more than a quarter of citizens pays bribes to doctors, teachers, policemen, and other public officials in exchange for their services. These transactions entail relatively small sums of money: from a bottle of perfume or fancy liquor to a few hundred dollars, ordinary people offer officials whatever they can to receive faster, better, and friendlier treatment in state bureaucracies. On aggregate, however, social scientists find that bureaucratic corruption has strong detrimental effects on public health, economic growth, the rule of law, and popular trust in government.

To combat such corruption, the international community spends millions of dollars on “good governance” reforms in the Global South. Typically, these reforms represent the first step in the fight against corruption because Weber’s rational-legal bureaucracy is foundational to Western-style capitalism. Good governance initiatives limit the discretion and raise the accountability of public servants thorough (a) the decentralization and privatization of service provision and (b) the promotion of effective policing and an independent judiciary. The idea is that competition, oversight, and the threat of punishment will increase the costs of law-breaking and deter corruption. Analysts concur that the success of good governance reforms has varied greatly across the Global South. Effective in some countries, they have failed to make even a small dent in the corrupt economies of many others. The frequent failure of anti-corruption initiatives is typically attributed to their overly ambitious scope, the absence of functional local institutions and the political will to enforce them, and the poor cultural fit between Western-styled reform scripts and local practices.

Many Russian citizens who have reported bribing officials, such as law enforcement, claim to receive improved services in return.

Evgeniy Isaev, Flickr cc

Even when successful in the short term, we argue that public sector reforms will ultimately prove counterproductive in autocratic regimes. Without certain political and economic freedoms, these initiatives will likely undermine the agency of ordinary citizens and generate unsustainable, surveillance-based compliance. In sum, they will subvert rather than support the potential for democratic governance in the long term.

In authoritarian contexts, initiatives targeting high-level corruption in government and business—no matter how threatening to local elites—must take priority, preceding the reforms of the public sector.

Our argument builds from a new, nationally representative survey of Russians (n=2,350). In 2018, William Reis-inger, Wenfang Tang and the first author of this brief administered this survey to assess Russians’ engagement in bureaucratic corruption, their personal networks, and civic behavior. Our analyses suggest that a key to a more effective and socially responsible fight against corruption lies in sequencing. In authoritarian contexts, initiatives targeting high-level corruption in government and business—no matter how threatening to local elites—must take priority, preceding the reforms of the public sector. The top-bottom approach that we propose represents a reversal of the usual order of anti-corruption reforms, but is likely to be the only effective option in the long run. Russians often say that a “fish rots from the head,” and our data suggest that it is from the head that corruption should also be stopped.

A Russian 100 Ruble note.

Bob Marquart, Flickr cc

Bureaucratic Corruption Supports Economic Agency

Scholars of post-socialist countries, such as Rimskii, McMann, Morris, and Polese, have long argued that local citizens turn to bribery because public services are unavailable to them through legitimate avenues. While partially true under communism, this view is now outdated. Today, booming private markets feature a variety of consumer options at different price points and public sectors have largely regained their functionality. Even when free services are inconvenient or of lower quality, they are widely available to ordinary citizens—as evidenced by large portions of the population who report receiving them without additional payments.

We find that roughly twice the number of Russians claim bureaucratic bribes as a vehicle for securing premium public services (46 percent) than for satisfying their basic consumer needs (22 percent). Moreover, of those who report having bribed officials in education, healthcare, and law enforcement, the majority claim receiving improved, better-than-basic services in return. These bribes give citizens access to better equipment, shorter wait times, and more attentive providers. In other words, public sector corruption in Russia allows ordinary citizens to exercise economic agency and control over their interactions with an adversarial and unresponsive state.

Russians often say that a “fish rots from the head,” and our data suggest that it is from the head that [corruption] should also be stopped.

Bureaucratic Corruption Builds Infrastructure for Civil Society

Counterintuitively, our analyses also reveal that bureaucratic corruption is symbiotic with the kind of social connectivity that could potentially promote civic behavior. Although corruption is typically billed as destructive of civil society at the aggregate level, the actual practice of informal transactions weaves a layer of exchange infrastructure into a collective’s social fabric. Using the egocentric network component of our survey, we establish that, among ordinary Russians, those participating in bureaucratic corruption are more likely to have personal ties that are simultaneously outward-oriented and strong (i.e., strong bridging ties). Such networks take citizens outside the insular worlds of their families and provide them with resources to push back against an oppressive regime. Moreover, our analyses confirm that Russian citizens who engage in bureaucratic corruption are significantly more likely than their fellow Russians to be active citizens. For example, bribegivers consume significantly more information about politics from various media outlets and are roughly 45 percent more likely to vote in a presidential election than Russians who do not give bribes. Similarly, bribe-givers are twice as likely to share their views on social media and 1.8 times more likely to sign a petition compared to those who abstain from bribery.

Our results suggest that bureaucratic corruption sustains connections across social cleavages whereby ordinary citizens have an opportunity to interact, collaborate, and organize outside of the state-controlled public arena. In fostering social connectivity favorable to active citizenship, corruption networks may offer an imperfect yet real alternative to a formal civil society in a context where none is allowed to exist.

Bureaucratic Corruption Benefits the Rich and the Poor

Since corruption typically benefits few at the expense of many, it is often linked to social inequality. Yet, we find that petty bribery in Russia’s public sector does not help the rich get richer at a faster rate than the poor. Again, our data show that the vast majority of Russians who report bribery claim that it netted them better or premium service (as opposed to just basic service). Corruption could significantly exacerbate economic inequality if the resource-rich were more likely than the disadvantaged to (a) participate in bribery and (b) convert bribes into premium services. In contrast, we find that richer Russians are not more likely to participate in bribery once their social connectedness is accounted for. Specifically, our analyses show that the key characteristic that bribe-givers share is not their financial status but strategic social connections. While having financial resources does increase the likelihood of building corruption-friendly networks, socio-economic status and social embed-dedness are far from mirror images. Thus, roughly 75 percent of our survey respondents report having someone they can approach for bribery advice, whereas less than 15 percent characterize themselves as financially comfortable. While richer Russians are more likely to procure premium service from bribes, so too are those with better network resources. In sum, embeddedness and financial clout both have market value vis-à-vis corruption. Yet, because one can cultivate strategic social capital without being rich, shutting down bribery will close off avenues that disadvantaged citizens can and do use to “get ahead” in societies like Russia.

What Should be Done?

Our findings suggest that successful anti-corruption reforms in the public sector risk further consolidating the autocracy and strengthening the grip of Putin’s administration on Russian society. By increasing state control over bureaucrats and their clients, such initiatives are likely to shrink the spaces of imperfect yet real freedom and agency, currently available to ordinary citizens. Thus, if the ultimate goal of anti-corruption reforms is to build a robust infrastructure for democracy, “good governance” initiatives may be counterproductive.

It bears repeating that we do not argue that bureaucratic corruption markets should exist indefinitely. Rather, we suggest that their costs and benefits should be evaluated vis-à-vis existing alternatives. When ordinary citizens do have access to competitive markets and independent civil society organizations, such corruption will no longer hold the key to freedom. This leads us to advocate for reversing the usual sequence of reforms in the anti-corruption playbook: political and economic liberalization should take priority over good governance, making high-level corruption the first and the main focus of the anti-corruption community.

While reformers focus on grand corruption, temporary measures may help limit negative externalities of public sector bribery without undermining the citizen autonomy that it affords. One possible measure is decriminalization. Short of full legalization, decriminalization could help institutionalize free markets in services while also preserving the space where citizens can collaborate without surveillance by the state. Moreover, by lowering risks of corruption, decriminal-ization may further equalize access to its benefits and encourage bureaucrats to offer improved services for smaller fees. Lastly, decriminalization is likely to safeguard against political prosecutions in the name of anti-corruptionism, common in contemporary autocracies.

Although corruption is typically billed as destructive of civil society at the aggregate level, the actual practice of informal transactions weaves a layer of exchange infrastructure into a collective’s social fabric.