Do Governments Have an Incentive to Fight Corruption?

Ivan Krastev,  Director, Center for Liberal Strategies, outlined the main ideas from his recent book, Shifting Obsessions: Three Essays on the Politics of Anticorruption, in which he analyzes the political motivations behind the formulation and implementation of anti-corruption policies in Eastern European states. In the first of the three essays in his book, Krastev addresses why corruption became a global concern, and how anti-corruption policies in post-communist societies became popular among institutions of the Washington consensus.

Krastev challenged the mainstream assumption that the salience of anti-corruption policies in the post-communist context came as a response to the increased visibility or number of cases of corruption in the 1990s. Rather, he argued, these policies were the product of the changing politics of international trade and international financial institutions (IFIs). Major global actors had strategic incentives to emphasize the centrality of corruption in transition states; anti-corruption discourse was used by the U.S. government to facilitate free trade, by IFIs to mobilize support for their policies, and by multinational corporations to reduce hidden forms of protectionism.

In his second essay, Krastev examines why around 75 percent of polled Bulgarians, Poles, and Russians share the perception that corruption is more pervasive in post-communism than during communism. Krastev attributed this seemingly paradoxical sentiment to a shift in the dominant form of corruption: the non-monetary mode of exchanging favors during communism was replaced by a monetarized mode of bribery during transition. Since bribes tend to be more exclusionist than the exchange of favors, bribery led to the devaluation of social capital and contributed to larger, more prevalent public complaints of social inequality. Anti-corruption discourse became the main means to criticize state policies on liberalization and the market.

Krastev’s final essay involves an empirical survey that scrutinizes government incentives to fight corruption. His findings undermine the assumption that non-corrupt governments are driven to initiate anti-corruption campaigns as a way to mobilize the public and bolster support for re-elections. Krastev observed a contrary tendency—that governments are not interested in fighting corruption as a major concern in society because public perception is generally unresponsive to gains in the fight against corruption. Krastev linked the public’s perpetual concern with corruption to his observation that the media tends to bias reports in favor of corruption accusations. He concluded by asserting that anti-corruption campaigns are largely ineffective and have the potential to erode rule of law, and that current anti-corruption policies need to be fundamentally restructured.

Patrick Meagher, Associate Director or the Institutional and the Informal Sector at the University of Maryland, provided commentary on Krastev’s presentation. Positioning the discussion of corruption in a more a global context, Meagher argued that the Central European experience had a history of political organization coterminous with the modern state. But in some parts of the world, patrimonial organizations or weak states defy common prescriptive legislation to fight corruption. While Meager was skeptical of the value of anticorruption policies, he felt there was potential for progress as governments adopt less corrupt practices over time. Meagher suggested areas for further research including the use of corruption as a tool for social change and upward mobility, as well as developing policy applications related to the economic discussion of corruption.