Do not hope to get rid of corruption

Nikolai Protsenko - about the book "Corruption: Very short introduction"

The Australian political scientist Leslie Holmes, one of the most famous Western corruption researchers, was able to present a thorough review of this inexhaustible topic on only 150 pages. The author dwells on its four main aspects: what is corruption, how it can be measured, what are its reasons and how to deal with it. However, there are still no unambiguous answers to all these questions: the study of corruption is essentially only starting, and it itself appears in such a variety of forms and changes so quickly that any attempts to eradicate it initially seem to be a vain venture.

Leslie Holmes. Corruption: Very short introduction. M.: Publishing House "Delo" RANEPA, 2021. Content

The elusive object of inquiry

Attempts to determine what corruption is reminiscent of the famous Indian parable of the blind who tried to describe the elephant to the touch. The most important problem in the fight against corruption, Leslie Holmes points out at the very beginning of his book, is that analysts cannot come to an agreement regarding its definition. Some argue that “corruption, like beauty, is in the eyes of a watchman,” others are guided by a formal legal approach, according to which any deviation from the rules is considered corruption exclusively if it is recognized as such in accordance with the law.

This uncertainty, Holmes states, has a direct impact on the practice of combating corruption. For example, in the United Nations Convention against Corruption (AGPK), which the UN positions as “the only legally compulsory universal anti -corruption document”, there is no definition of corruption, since the authors could not come to a single definition. And the leading international anti -corruption non -governmental organization Transparency International * has been recognized as an undesirable organization in Russia for many years used two different definitions of corruption. In her annual index of perception of corruption (IVK), until 2012, she used the following: “improper use of an official position to obtain private benefits”, but in other documents, corruption is “abuse of authority entrusted to personal purposes”.

The fundamental difference between these definitions, according to Holmes, is that the first implies the mandatory participation in the corruption of a civil servant (official), and the second allows you to expose corruption in the private sector. But another difference comes to mind. The abuse of power for personal purposes is usually in the center of public anti -corruption initiatives, and the struggle against corruption, which the state wages (primarily in its ranks), is usually aimed at stopping the improper use of official position.

For example, in the Russian Federal Law of 2008 “On Countering Corruption”, such a definition is given: “abuse of official position, giving a bribe, receiving a bribe, abuse of authority, commercial bribery or other illegal use by an individual of their official position.” However, in the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation the concept of “corruption” is absent, therefore, in practice, law enforcement officers are guided by various criteria , when the crime is coincided, is qualified as a “corruption orientation”. In other words, a formal legal approach can be adjusted in different ways, not to mention the further creative manipulation of the figures of the corresponding section of law enforcement statistics.

One of the reasons for various interpretations of corruption according to Leslie Holmes is culture. From this point of view, we can talk about the “Western” - economic or modern - corruption, on the one hand, and about the “Asian” - social or traditional - on the other. In the latter case, for example, the border between a bribe and a gift or other sign of respect is quite blurry, although, as the author rightly indicates, attitude to such phenomena as patronage and clientelism, can vary significantly in different countries of the West and East. For example, for experts from English -speaking countries and Scandinavia, clientelism (“Well, how not to be able to have a native man?”) Will one of the forms of corruption, but most Italian experts will not agree with this.

The same variety reigns in terms of classification - Holmes gives at least five basic corruption options, which can also intersect. The result that the author comes to the introductory chapter is predictable: there is no consensus about what should be called corruption. Nevertheless, Holmes adds, there is a consensus regarding a narrow determination of corruption: it turns out to be the same abuse of official position for personal purposes, although the components of such definitions also allow various interpretation. However, the author immediately recognizes the validity of the subjective approach to determining this phenomenon, proposing to proceed from the fact that everyone can decide for himself whether this or that action is corruption.

Arshin is general not to measure

The question of how to measure the level of corruption in a single country is equally debatable - the complexity of this task, Holmes admits, partly stems from the fact that we cannot agree on the determination of corruption. However, this does not at all interfere with the regular emergence of various corruption ratings, led by the already mentioned study by Transparency International.

All Holmes said about measuring the level of corruption can be reduced to three main considerations.

Firstly, the methods of organizations that are engaged in this are constantly being improved. For example, adjustment of the calculation of IVK, which is based on surveys of residents of different countries, was carried out in 2012, seventeen years after the publication of the first rating. With the application of new methods, she assured Transparency International, a direct comparison of data on individual countries over the years will become possible, although the principles of the preparation of IVK are still far from ideal. In particular, criticism is subjected to the fact that the rating mainly reflects the perception of corruption by business representatives and experts, and not citizens of the country as a whole.

Secondly, in the case of measuring corruption, the analogy with the description of the elephant by the blind is more to the benefit of the cause, since the more methods appear, the more understandable are the mechanisms of corruption and possible ways to combat it. Holmes calls the trace of public expenses and quantitative survey of the services provided as the most effective methods that have established themselves in backward countries. Both of them were used by the World Bank. For example, in Uganda, traffic allocated for the development of primary school education has allowed to increase the effectiveness of financing from 13 cents to 80 cents per dollar over several years. And in Bangladesh, control over the presence of doctors of state clinics at workplaces made it possible to solve the problem of private (“left”) medical practice.

Thirdly, Holmes makes it clear, not individual (anti-) corruption ratings in themselves are valuable, but their comparison. For example, comparing the data of IVK and the barometer of world corruption, another survey study of Transparency International, demonstrates a high degree of correlation, which once again confirms the intuitive thesis: citizens of wealthy and stable democratic countries are much less inclined to give bribes than citizens of poor and unstable countries or countries from the authoritarian form of reign. Comparisons of corruption indices with other ratings, such as the index of the burden of state regulation and the global competitiveness index, as well as with GDP indicators, are also productive. One of the similar studies, performed back in 2005 by Yu John Sun and Sanjiv Hagram, showed that higher inequality in the distribution of national income usually corresponds to a higher level of alleged corruption in the country.

But not one of the existing methods for measuring corruption is perfectly accurate, the author of the book warns. This is partly due, in his opinion, with the fact that an empirical study of corruption in itself is still at the initial stage. But there are certain doubts about whether he will be able to adequately cover what is called the apical corruption at the elite level, which causes much more harm than the lower corruption, sooner or later. To the last thought, Holmes repeatedly returns throughout the book, especially when it talks about the causes of corruption and methods of combating it.

In an integral flaw of developed capitalism

Analysis of the causes of corruption, Holmes emphasizes, requires the efforts of specialists from various disciplines - sociologists, lawyers, economists, culturalists, psychologists, and political scientists. However, the author puts the socio-psychological approach based on the construction of a multifactorial model. To do this, he adopts the structural theory of Anthony Hiddens, which proceeds from the inability to explain the behavior of people exclusively personal freedom of choice and action (their “agency”) or the structure of the world in which the agents exist and act.

“If we start our study with the study of greed as the basic factor explaining corruption, then even this concept cannot be pulled out of the social context. The desire to have more related to existing social norms; Goods such as a refrigerator or a computer, which in a rich society are considered completely ordinary, can be considered a luxury in the poor society , ”Holmes explains.

The socio-psychological reasons that can lead an individual person to corruption are supplemented by cultural factors-its religious traditions, the level of trust in society, and whether the country was a colony and whether the political dictatorship could affect the level of corruption of a country. But here it is important not to fall into a trap of simple explanations, binding, for example, religion prevailing in the country and the level of corruption (the least corruption is supposedly in Protestant countries, then Catholic, Orthodox, etc.) go. Such hypotheses, of course, require a thorough test - in particular, one of the studies mentioned by Holmes established a reliable correlation between Protestantism and a low level of corruption, but in the case of other religious traditions, there were no strong correlations.

It is by no means impeccable that corruption is more characteristic of dictatorships than democracies. In general, Holmes admits, this is so, but do not forget that in countries with sustainable democracy in recent years there has been no shortage of examples of the very apical or elite, corruption - many of its cases were associated with the financing of political parties. If we extend the concept of corruption to the corporate sector, then the loud corporate scandals of the last decades will be remembered immediately - from an household name in the United States, Enron affairs to Dieselgate with the participation of Volkswagen . Corruption factors summarize Holmes, are often interconnected and characterize the social, economic and political system as a whole, but in the study and explanation of this phenomenon we have to go a very long way.

One of the observations of the author seems to be especially important for successful movement along this path. Corruption itself will never disappear, Holmes admits, but over the past decades it has become too many, and the efforts to combat it most often do not lead to the proper results - corruption is a hydra, which has several new ones in the place of one severed head. In 2005, Daniel Kaufman, one of the leading specialists of the World Corruption Bank, said that a decade of anti -corruption efforts had not yet brought noticeable results, and in 2009 he appreciated the efforts to combat corruption as “barely warming”. The disappointing results of the anti -corruption protests of the last decade, which sometimes led to the overthrow of corrupt regimes, but the policy that came to change politics, were soon accused of corruption, often with a complete basis for that basis.

The root of the problem, as far as one can judge, lies in the direction that has adopted global capitalism over the past three or four decades. First of all, we are talking about such a trend as financialization, thanks to which the volume of money supply and the range of financial instruments sharply increased, and with them the scale of corruption temptations. The second point lies in the role of the state in the economy sharply increased after the global crisis, which, coupled with the financialization of the real sector, gives repeatedly enhanced corruption effects. Ramps and “cuts” today are already yesterday: corruption rent is packaged in complex financial products, and bribes are not necessary to take in cash, now there are cryptocurrencies for this. In a word, it is not surprising that today's hypercapitalism generates hypercorruption.

The author recognizes at the end of the book to win over corruption, claiming that the key factor in success is political will. In support of this, he gives many examples up to the textbook reorganization of the traffic police in Georgia from the time of the presidency of Mikhail Saakashvili. However, political will does not arise from nowhere-it is the same product of the socio-economic system as corruption, and in addition, do not forget that anti-corruption campaigns are too often tend to turn into witch hunt and accounts. However, in one of their practical recommendations, Holmes is absolutely right: “Governments who consider themselves the only organizations that are allowed to fight corruption are seriously mistaken ... Numerous members of society-public servants, business sector, civil society and individual citizens-should also have a desire to deal with corruption. The role of each of them in the fight against corruption is different in each country its own, but the contribution of each of them is extremely important . ”