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Corruption: Diagnosis and treatment
Alina Mungiu-Pippidi
Extracted from Journal of Democracy: Vol 17, Number 03
July 2006

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Alina Mungiu-Pippidi is director of the Romanian Academic Society, a think tank in Bucharest, and a consultant for Freedom House and the United Nations Development Programme in the Balkans. She heads the Coalition for a Clean Parliament, which led an anticorruption campaign during Romania's 2004 elections.

In recent years, anticorruption has become a major industry, with global expenditures growing to an estimated one hundred million dollars per year.¹ To date, however, few successes have resulted from this investment. We clearly speak more about corruption than we used to and spend more money combating it, but there is little evidence that all this activity is accomplishing much. The handbook published by Transparency International (TI) cites as best practices the laws or institutions adopted in various countries, but their effects have yet to be measured.² The World Bank's Anticorruption in Transition also discusses ongoing programs rather than already demonstrated successes.³

Political corruption poses a serious threat to democracy and its consolidation.⁴ One year after the widely acclaimed Orange Revolution in Ukraine, one could already buy, though not very cheaply, a seat in the Ukrainian parliament. The lack of success in curbing corruption, combined with ever more widespread discussion of the issue, renders voters extremely cynical and threatens to subvert public trust in emerging democracies.

Why do so many anticorruption initiatives fail? Can a more successful approach be built based on the very few successes we have witnessed in recent years? The argument I advance is that many anticorruption initiatives fail because they are nonpolitical in nature, while most of the corruption in developing and postcommunist countries is inherently political. In fact, what we label corruption in these countries is not the same phenomenon as corruption in developed countries. In the latter, the term corruption usually designates individual cases of infringe- ment of the norm of integrity. In the former, corruption actually means "particularism"-a mode of social organization characterized by the regular distribution of public goods on a nonuniversalistic basis that mirrors the vicious distribution of power within such societies.⁵

Few anticorruption campaigns dare to attack the roots of corruption in societies where particularism is the norm, as these roots lie in the distribution of power itself. Instead, anticorruption strategies are adopted and implemented in cooperation with the very predators who control the government and, in some cases, the anticorruption instruments themselves. Based on my personal experience as an initiator of a successful anticorruption campaign in Romania (as well as a researcher of many failed efforts), I believe that electoral revolutions can lead to consolidated democracies only if they are followed by revolutions against particularism, and that nothing short of such a revolution will succeed in curbing corruption in countries where particularism prevails.⁶

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1. See Michael Bryane, "The Rapid Rise of the Anticorruption Industry: Toward Second Generation Anticorruption Reforms in Central and Eastern Europe?" Local Governance Brief (Spring 2004): 17-25. http://lgi.osi.hu/publications/2004/254/LGB_spring_2004.pdf.
2. Transparency International's Corruption Handbook: National Integrity Systems in Practice, available at http://ww1.transparency.org/ach/index.html.
3. World Bank, Anticorruption in Transition: A Contribution to the Policy Debate (Washington: World Bank, 2000).
4. See Larry Diamond, Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 92.
5. See Guillermo O'Donnell, "Illusions about Consolidation," in Larry Diamond, Marc F. Plattner, Yun-han Chu, and Hung-mao Tien, eds., Consolidating the Third Wave Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 46-47.
6. See Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, "The Story of the Romanian Coalition for a Clean Parliament," Journal of Democracy 16 (April 2005): 154-55. For a full case study see www.sar.org.ro/Romanian%20Coalition_for%20a%20Clean%20Parliament.pdf.

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