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9 Corruption and anti-corruption Corruption has been a long-term and deep-seated problem in Romania. Its depth and prevalence have acted as a check on the country’s economic development, impaired the state even in the performance of its normal duties, and created huge barriers of mistrust between society and the political elite which, on more than one occasion, has stimulated the rise of powerful extremist movements.1 It is appropriate to locate an extensive appraisal of the phenomenon and attempts to bring it under control to near the end of the book
7 Anti-corruption: prevention and control Introduction The connection between corruption and scandal is directly related to prevention and control, because it is largely due to the growth of corruption scandals in the UK and elsewhere that there have been increasingly resolute attempts since the early 1990s to prevent and control the spread of corruption. Scandals are important in driving efforts to tackle problems like corruption because they push problems – suddenly and dramatically – to the top of the political agenda and create the public pressure needed to
MUP FINAL PROOF – <STAGE>, 07/29/2013, SPi 5 London corruption: the fall of the House of Porter It should be noted ... how easily men are corrupted, and in nature become transformed, however good they may be and however well brought up. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Discourses (1519)1 My provisional view is that the council was involved in gerrymandering, which I am minded to find is a disgraceful and improper purpose and not a purpose for which a local authority may act. John Magill, District Auditor for the City of Westminster (1994)2 London’s politics from 1963
This book provides an accessible account of current thinking about political corruption, recognising that the phenomenon is a serious problem: since it infringes rules defining legitimate and illegitimate means of the acquisition of wealth and the exercise of power, corruption damages the interests of the advantaged and disadvantaged alike. The advantaged find that wealth cannot be pursued and maintained safely, the disadvantaged that development is thwarted and resources redistributed from the poor to the rich. Against this background, the book takes the reader on a journey – a journey that begins with what corruption is, why its study might be important and how it can be measured. From there it moves on to explore corruption’s causes, its consequences and how it can be tackled – before finally discovering how these things are playing out in the established liberal democracies, in the former communist regimes and in what used to be commonly referred to as ‘the third world’. On the way it takes a couple of detours – first, to ascertain how the minimum of trust necessary for the corrupt transaction to take place at all is established and underwritten, and second to survey the phenomenon of scandal – to which corruption may give rise. The book is therefore offered as an informative ‘travel guide’ of potential interest to journalists and policy makers as well as to students and academics researching matters on which political corruption has a bearing.
8 Corruption in liberal democracies: a case study of Italy Introduction This chapter takes Italy as a case study of corruption in liberal democracies. A case study is the study of an entity – a country, a person, an institution or whatever it happens to be – that is carried out not for its own sake but because ‘it has significance beyond its boundaries’ (Hague, Harrop and Breslin, 1998: 275). It is carried out because the entity in question is taken to be an example of some larger category of entities so that studying it can help us to throw light on – develop
6 Political corruption and scandal Introduction In the last chapter we considered the relationship between political corruption and organised crime. Thanks to the close connection between the two concepts, ‘organised crime’ and ‘corruption’ are often confused with one another or used interchangeably. This also seems to be the case with the concepts of ‘corruption’ and ‘scandal’. Yet the two are different. Corruption is by definition an illegitimate activity and therefore likely to remain hidden. Therefore, you can have corruption without scandal simply because
Historians have shied away from seeking to measure or assess the extent of corruption among the Westminster elites during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. This is not for want of scandal, for the scandals were many, from those surrounding the collapse of imperial banking and mining ventures through to the ‘trading of honours’, the award of armament contracts and
In May 1974, an editorial in The Times inveighed against the growing affliction of corruption in British public life. 1 Deploring the Poulson affair which had engulfed the career of former Labour council leader T. Dan Smith, the editorial pointed to a wider crisis of public morals. It claimed that ‘in an age of looser morality and softer disciplines’ voters were being
The many lives of corruption begins the task of piecing together the bigger picture of how corruption has undermined public life in modern Britain. It offers a uniquely expansive perspective, which stretches from the Old Corruption and ‘unreformed’ politics of the eighteenth century through to the mass democracy and welfare state of the twentieth.
Conceptually, as an object of thought, as much as practicably, and as an object of reform, corruption has proved tenaciously problematic and protean. This volume engages with both of these crucial aspects, arguing that it is only by grasping them together that we can fully understand how corruption has shaped the making of a democratic-capitalist state in Britain and given rise to new ideals of public service. It examines the factors that have facilitated and frustrated anticorruption reforms, as well as the various ways ‘corruption’ has been conceived by historical agents. It does so across a range of different sites – electoral, political and administrative, domestic and colonial – presenting new research on neglected areas of reform, while revisiting well-known scandals and corrupt practices. The many lives of corruption is essential reading for all scholars interested in understanding how the pursuit of purity in British public life has evolved over the past two and a half centuries – and why corruption remains such a pressing issue today.
conscious of the social and literary context in which they arose and the interpretative structures affecting their production. 4 That there is more than a grain of truth, however, in the attitudes displayed in some of the portraits is borne out by the evidence of cases of corruption, conspiracy and abuse of process coming before the courts. Moreover, some of the literary sketches are rooted in a