Richard Rose & Caryn Peiffer POLITICAL CORRUPTION & GOVERNANCE BAD GOVERNANCE & CORRUPTION

Series Editors Dan Hough University of Sussex Brighton, UK Paul M. Heywood University of Nottingham Nottingham, UK Political Corruption and Governance

This series aims to analyse the nature and scope of, as well as possible remedies for, political corruption. The rise to prominence over the last 20 years of corruption-related problems and of the ‘good governance’ agenda as the principal means to tackle them has led to the development of a plethora of (national and international) policy proposals, international agreements and anti-corruption programmes and initiatives. National governments, international organisations and NGOs all now claim to take very seriously the need to tackle issues of corruption. It is thus unsurprising that over couple of decades, a signifcant body of work with a wide and varied focus has been published in academic journals and in international discussion papers. This series seeks to provide a forum through which to address this growing body of literature. It invites not just in-depth single country analyses of corruption and attempts to combat it, but also comparative studies that explore the experiences of different states (or regions) in dealing with different types of corruption. We also invite monographs that take an overtly thematic focus, analysing trends and developments in one type of corruption across either time or space, as well as theoretically informed analysis of discrete events. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14545

Richard Rose · Caryn Peiffer Bad Governance and Corruption

Richard Rose Centre for the Study of Public Policy University of Strathclyde Glasgow, UK Caryn Peiffer School for Policy Studies University of Bristol Bristol, UK Political Corruption and Governance ISBN 978-3-319-92845-6 ISBN 978-3-319-92846-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92846-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018943674 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifcally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microflms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifc statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affliations. Cover image: © MartinPrague/iStock/Getty Images Plus Cover design by Akihiro Nakayama Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer International Publishing AG part of Springer Nature The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

v Preface: Why This Book Is Important Governance is a recurring word in the discussion of public policy because it describes the relationship between governors and governed, an inevitable feature of every political system. The quality of governance varies greatly between political systems, but the attention given to good and bad governance is unbalanced. A Google search fnds 47 million references to good governance and fewer than 7 million to bad governance. However, more societies are subject to bad governance than to good governance, and corruption is a major cause. The introduction of elections in formerly undemocratic regimes has not guaranteed that a country enjoys good governance, and bad governance can be found not only in developing countries but also in parts of Europe and Northern America too. Corruption takes many forms. The United Nations Convention Against Corruption casts a wide net in describing ‘the scourge of corruption’. It includes not only the payment of bribes, the most common form of corruption, but also the tolerance of organized crime, dealing in drugs, money laundering, and handling stolen assets. Since the Convention was published in 2005, a total of 175 member states have signed it, including many where corruption is a signifcant feature of governance. They could do so without censure for their national practices because the Convention lacks the means of effective enforcement. Consistent with the UN’s respect for national sovereignty, member states are asked to consider adopting good governance laws insofar as they are

vi Preface: Why This Book Is Important in keeping with their national constitutions. Even if a constitution rhetorically endorses normative standards of good governance, the practice can still be corrupt. This book is about the experience of ordinary people with governance when they come into contact with offcials delivering public policies at the grass roots of their society. The services delivered include both the ‘good’ goods of public policy such as education and health care, and the necessary but not always welcome services of the police and offcials issuing documents such as identity cards and driving licences. The view of government at the grass roots is very different from that at the top of government. In the words of a Chinese proverb: The mountains are high and the emperor is far away. Our approach is unique because we analyze empirical evidence from sample surveys asking more than 175,000 people about their experience of governance. The surveys are not confned to countries with good governance nor do they concentrate exclusively on badly governed countries. They cover a cross-section of the world’s population in 125 countries of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe and North and South America. For billions of people, corruption is not just a subject for academic scrutiny but a familiar experience of what happens when they meet public offcials face to face. Globally, an estimated 1.8 billion people annually pay a bribe to get a public service that they are entitled to receive, such as health care, or to avoid onerous regulations requiring such things as a permit to make a living as a street trader. The number of people experiencing bribery each year is so large because many of the countries viewed as practising good governance, such as the Scandinavian states, have only a few percent of the world’s population. Conversely, corruption is high in the world’s most populous countries. In India, an estimated 807 million people are caught up in bribery each year, and in the People’s Republic of China, 290 million. The 10 countries contributing the largest number of bribe payers to the global total include undemocratic countries such as Russia, as well as countries that hold free or partly free elections such as Mexico and India. The impact of corruption on societies is bad because a signifcant amount of money that should be spent on national development is diverted into the pockets of politicians and public employees delivering services. In the words of UN Secretary-General Kof Annan when endorsing the UN’s 2005 Convention Against Corruption:

Preface: Why This Book Is Important   vii This evil phenomenon is found in all countries but it is in the developing world that its effects are most destructive. Corruption hurts the poor disproportionately by diverting funds intended for development, undermining a government’s ability to provide basic services, feeding inequality and injustice and discouraging foreign aid and investment. Because corruption is good for public offcials who pocket bribes, bad governance can be maintained indefnitely when the people who beneft most also have the most political power. The impact of corruption on governance depends on the behaviour of politicians and public offcials. The frst chapter distinguishes between the narrow formal defnition of corruption and the much broader informal defnition. Formal standards are set out in laws that specify the bureaucratic procedures that public offcials ought to follow, such as treating all citizens impartially. Bad governance is the consequence of public offcials breaking laws by such actions as demanding a bribe to deliver a service that a person is entitled to receive free. Informal standards of how politicians ought to behave are held in the minds of voters, for example that politicians should not use their public offce to accumulate private wealth or make misleading promises in pursuit of winning elections. Whereas formal standards are enforced in courts of law, informal standards are enforced in the court of public opinion. When the behaviour of offceholders meets both standards, good governance is the result. When one standard is violated and the other is not, the quality of governance is in dispute. When both standards are violated, governance is doubly corrupt. Many people are more concerned with getting what they want from governance than with whether public offcials adhere to formal standards. This is particularly the case for people who depend on public services because they lack the money to buy private health care or education. Chapter 2 shows how people satisfce, that is, getting what they want by the book, by hook or by crook. In the frst instance, offcials satisfy claimants by following standards of impartiality set out in bureaucratic rules. When this does not happen, people may get what they want by pulling hooks, using personal connections to get around indifferent or slow-moving public offcials. If that does not work, the crooked alternative is to pay a bribe to get what you want. Many social science theories offer explanations for the chief infuences on whether people get what they want by the book or by other means.

viii Preface: Why This Book Is Important The most familiar measures of corruption, such as the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) of Transparency International and the World Bank Governance Index, characterize national political systems as a whole. They do so on the basis of expert perceptions of the extent to which there is big bucks corruption in the award of multi-million or billion dollar contracts for infrastructure projects such as building roads, drilling for oil, or the purchase of expensive military aircraft. The benefciaries are a relatively few big businesses, since only such companies have the capital to invest in producing these goods and services. They also have ample funds to pay large bribes to obtain contracts from a relatively small number of high-ranking government offcials. Describing a country as corrupt or as an exemplar of good government implies that bad or good governance is pervasive in its political system. However, no country is perfectly free of corruption or corrupt in everything its public offcials do. The CPI rating emphasizes differences in the degree of good or bad governance; on its 100-point scale the best-governed countries are rated at 90 and the worst at 10. The median country has a rating of 38. Because governance involves many different activities, a political system can be bad in some parts while good in others. In the United States and in Europe, a city can have corrupt police who accept bribes from drug dealers while teachers offer a high quality of public education in keeping with formal standards. There are big differences in corruption between governments within continents as well as between continents, including countries at similar levels of economic development. The third chapter tests statistically major theoretical explanations of why national levels of corruption differ. Major causes are differences in historical legacies, the extent of contemporary democracy, and foreign aid money that can be diverted to the private beneft of public offcials. Within a national political system, services differ in the opportunities that they offer offcials to demand bribes. This is especially true of grass-roots services that are delivered retail by face-to-face encounters between low-level public offcials and ordinary citizens wanting their services. A police offcer can turn a blind eye to a motoring offence in exchange for cash in hand, but a post offce clerk cannot ensure the prompt delivery of a parcel to a distant city if offered money under the counter. Citizens likewise differ in whether they have contact with public services, thus becoming vulnerable to corruption. Older women, for example, are more likely to make use of health services than are young

Preface: Why This Book Is Important   ix men. The global evidence presented in Chapter 4 shows that on average 17% report paying a bribe for the use of a public service in the past year; 57% receive services by the book; and 26% are not at risk because they have not had any contact with public services in the past 12 months. Since the incidence of bribery varies between services, people who use several public services may have a mixture of experiences, sometimes paying a bribe and sometimes not. The extent to which people experience the effects of bad governance varies both within countries and between countries. Social scientists explain differences between individuals by reference to their socio-economic characteristics, their attitudes, and their experiences, while accounting for cross-national differences by reference to national context. The two approaches are combined in statistical analysis in Chapter 5. The results show that differences in historical legacies and contemporary contexts are just as important as differences between individuals in determining bribe-paying for public services. Since there are big differences in the extent to which people contact services, we also test whether differences in the life cycle and in gender infuence the likelihood of individuals paying a bribe. Whereas an ordinary person can argue that their personal indiscretions are a private matter, it is much harder for public offcials to separate private and public behaviour. Moreover, even if their behaviour is not illegal, it can still be judged as falling short of informal standards that public opinion uses to assess the behaviour of politicians. In many long-established democratic countries, the payment of bribes is much less common than the incidence of politicians behaving badly. Hence, in Chapter 6, we report the results of a specially designed survey that asked people in Britain, France and Spain their perceptions of politicians behaving badly. It found that only a minority of citizens think most politicians behave disreputably in their private lives or take money for doing favours. The most common form of bad behaviour reported is that of politicians saying one thing to get elected and doing the opposite once in offce. Bad governance challenges standards of how citizens ought to behave, such as voting in elections and trusting their political institutions. Instead of mobilizing people to be good citizens, corruption may demobilise people, discouraging them from voting and encouraging distrust in governors. In Chapter 7 we test the impact of corruption on citizenship by analyzing nationwide sample surveys in Africa, Latin America

x Preface: Why This Book Is Important and formerly Communist countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Exposure to corruption has little effect on whether people vote; the major infuences are social characteristics such as age and education. Ordinary people are not dupes or fools. If people see their government as corrupt, they are more likely to distrust their governors. If people see their politicians breaking informal standards, especially making promises to win votes that they abandon once in offce, they are much more inclined to distrust their governors. The theory of open governance is that making transparent what happens in the corridors of power will reduce formal and informal corruption. Public offcials will avoid seeking bribes for fear of being subject to legal sanctions, and politicians will avoid behaving badly for fear of being indicted in the media and convicted in the court of public opinion. For this to happen, there must be stakeholders with the institutions and incentives to hold politicians to account for their actions. In democratic political systems, journalists and opposition politicians are free to do so and law enforcement offcials are prepared to live up to their name rather than serve the interests of corrupt policymakers. However, where corruption is relatively high, civil society institutions tend to be kept weak by governors, and both law enforcement institutions and their offcials are part of a system of corruption. The evidence presented in Chapter 8 shows that opening up governance to popular scrutiny is unlikely to break a vicious equilibrium of bad governance. In countries with high levels of corruption, people know from their own experience what bad governors are doing, but they are also hesitant to challenge powerful rulers to stop abusing their offces for private gain. Our study diagnosing the causes of corruption concludes with a chapter recommending ways of reducing corruption. It cautions against recommendations for the adoption of best-practice anti-corruption policies that ignore the historical legacies and contemporary institutions that are maintaining systems of bad governance. It also cautions against one-size-fts-all remedies that do not recognize differences between bigbucks corruption in the purchase of military aircraft and petty bribes that ordinary people pay to local offcials. Because corruption varies greatly between public services, reducing corruption requires making changes in how services are delivered at the grass roots of government, and not just changing leaders and institutions at the top. Nine principles identify actions that governors can take if they have the political incentives and will to do so. The principles do not require

Preface: Why This Book Is Important   xi a change in the hearts and minds of public offcials. They require such things as applying the common-sense principle that people will have no need to pay bribes to public offcials if their posts are abolished. Face-toface contacts between claimants and offcials can be eliminated by introducing computers that enable individuals to get what they want by flling in online forms that follow procedures consistent with good governance. Onerous laws and regulations requiring permits and licences that give offcials opportunities to collect ‘rents’ (that is, bribes) can be repealed. Such actions not only reduce opportunities for bribery but also increase the effciency and ease of using public services. Even though the piecemeal reform of particular services will not deliver good governance in its entirety, at a minimum it can reduce the impact of bad governance on citizens. Because governance is of immediate concern to large audiences outside the academic world, we have written this book in language that can be understood by readers engaged in the political process as well as by social scientists. We give examples of corrupt activities in order to put fesh on the bare bones of numbers and abstract concepts. We also pay attention to the fuzziness of standards that are used in formal and informal descriptions of corruption. We present the results of statistical data analysis in clear text, tables and graphics. Since this book is not a Ph.D. thesis, we dispense with a lengthy review of the vast literature of aspects of corruption. We do not need to go into great technical detail comparing different ways in which surveys ask questions about corruption, because we have covered this topic thoroughly in our 2015 book with Palgrave Macmillan, Paying Bribes for Public Services. In researching and writing this book we have drawn on our experience of dealing with governance in Africa, Asia, Latin America and post-Communist Europe, as well as in Western Europe and the United States. Richard Rose has been asked to pay a bribe by an urban American politician who dishonestly wanted money in exchange for votes that the politician couldn’t deliver, and offered a bribe in an East European country to co-operate in politically framed research. Caryn Peiffer has had to pay bribes for services in Indonesia and southern Africa. Both have had experience in getting things done in all kinds of places ranging from up the Amazon, to Belfast, southern India, Moscow and Sicily. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 stimulated Richard Rose to design survey questionnaires collecting empirical data about how ordinary people cope with systems of bad governance in conditions of high

xii Preface: Why This Book Is Important uncertainty and risk in 17 countries of Central and Eastern Europe and successor states of the Soviet Union. Since 1998 Rose has been a pro bono member of the Research Advisory Committee of the Transparency International Secretariat in Berlin, advising on the design of its survey work. Caryn Peiffer draws on feldwork in Botswana and Zambia performed as part of research for a Ph.D. thesis at Claremont Graduate School. Subsequently, Peiffer has done research on problems of governance in Uganda, South Africa, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea and lectured for the Afrobarometer. The preparation of this book has been made possible by a fve-year grant from the British Economic & Social Research Council to examine the global experience of corruption (ES/I03482X/1). Supplementary support for the study of Politicians Behaving Badly has come from Bernhard Wessels of the Democracy Programme of the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin and from a European Union grant on open governance to the Italian research institute RISSC (the Research Centre on Security and Crime), Padua. Papers about corruption have been presented at seminars and conferences in London, Oxford, Sussex, Berlin, Brussels, Cape Town, Gothenburg, Oslo, Paris, Venice, Warsaw and Washington. We owe particular thanks to the Global Corruption Barometer team at the Berlin Secretariat of Transparency under the leadership of Dr. Robin Hodess and to Coralie Pring, Manager of TI’s massive data bases. Ohna Robertson was prompt and accurate in going through the many revisions of the text, tables and fgures in this book and Karen Anderson’s copyediting helped make this book clearer for the general reader. Glasgow, UK Bristol, UK Richard Rose Caryn Peiffer

xiii About the Book More than 1.8 billion people pay the price of bad government each year: a bribe to a public offcial. This is because bad governance is much more widespread than good governance, and corruption is a major cause. In developing countries it affects social services such as health care and education, and such law enforcement institutions as the police. When public offcials do not act as bureaucrats delivering services by the book, people can try to get them by hook or by crook. In Western democracies, people normally get what they want through processes of good governance. Corruption also takes the form of violating informal standards. Politicians mislead voters, saying one thing to get elected and doing the opposite once in offce. Large businesses exploit loopholes in laws to avoid paying billions in taxes and make extra charges in contracts for military equipment and building infrastructure. The book’s analysis draws on unique evidence: a data base of sample surveys of 175,000 people in 125 countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe and North and South America.

xv Contents 1 Setting Standards for Good and Bad Governance 1 1 What Corruption Is About 2 2 Countries Mix Good and Bad Governance 10 3 Evidence of Corrupt Governance 15 References 18 2 Getting What You Want from Governance 21 1 Satisfcing by the Book, by Hook or by Crook 22 2 The Health of the Body Politic 28 3 Comparing Explanations of Corruption 32 References 36 3 Exploiting National Government 39 1 Corruption at the Top 40 2 Measuring National Corruption 44 3 Explaining National Differences in Corruption 50 References 58 4 Exploiting People at the Grass Roots 61 1 How People See Public Institutions 62 2 How Public Services Differ 65 3 Contact Varies by Service 68 4 Experience of Bribery Varies Too 71 References 81

xvi Contents 5 Explaining Who Pays Grass-Roots Bribes 83 1 Theories of Who Pays Bribes 84 2 Both Levels Matter 87 3 Differences Between Services 93 References 104 6 Politicians Behaving Badly 107 1 Tolerated and Shameful Behaviour 109 2 The Extent of Bad Behaviour 114 3 Punishment in the Court of Public Opinion 121 References 125 7 The Impact of Corruption on Citizens 127 1 Theories of the Impact of Corruption 129 2 Corruption Has Little Impact on Voting 132 3 Corruption Gives a Big Boost to Distrust 136 References 143 8 Making Government Transparent 145 1 Conditions for Transparency 147 2 Stakeholders in Open Data 151 References 164 9 Reducing Corruption 167 1 Changing Institutions 169 2 Targeting Vulnerable Services 174 3 Changing Services at the Grass Roots 177 4 Implications for Better Governance 183 References 185 Appendix 187 Index 197

xvii About the Authors Professor Richard Rose is a pioneer in the comparative study of public policy through quantitative and qualitative analysis. He has given seminars in 45 countries across Europe, North and South America, Africa and Asia, and his writings have been translated into 18 languages. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and founder-director of the Centre for the Study of Public Policy. Dr. Caryn Peiffer researches problems of governance in developing countries across Africa and Asia, using quantitative, qualitative and experimental methods. She is a Lecturer in International Public Policy and Governance at the School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol, UK.

xix List of Figures Chapter 2 Fig. 1 Global consensus bribery is wrong 27 Chapter 3 Fig. 1 Big variations in corruption within every continent 47 Chapter 4 Fig. 1 Perceptions of corruption in institutions 64 Fig. 2 Contact with services high in every continent 69 Fig. 3 Bribery varies between and within continents 72 Fig. 4 Consistent payers of bribes the exception 75 Chapter 5 Fig. 1 Impact of signifcant infuences on paying bribe 92 Chapter 8 Fig. 1 Why corruption not reported 161 Appendix Fig. A.1 Percentage paying bribe by country 188

xxi List of Tables Chapter 1 Table 1 Combining legal and informal standards of corruption 6 Table 2 Corruption surveys analyzed in this book 17 Chapter 2 Table 1 Getting things done by hook or by crook 26 Chapter 3 Table 1 Contextual infuences on national corruption (dependent variable: National Corruption Perceptions’ Index ordinary least squares regression) 54 Chapter 4 Table 1 Contact varies by public service 70 Table 2 Bribery for services after controlling for contact 74 Chapter 5 Table 1 Combined individual and institutional infuences on bribery 88 Table 2 Comparing infuences on contact and bribery by service 98 Table 3 Heckman analysis of infuences on contact and bribery 100 Chapter 6 Table 1 Popular perceptions of Politicians Behaving Badly 116 Table 2 Partisan infuences on perceptions of politicians 120 Table 3 Punishments for bad behaviour 122 Table 4 Punishments if politicians say one thing, do another 124

xxii List of Tables Chapter 7 Table 1 Corruption has little impact on going to vote 133 Table 2 Corruption increases distrust in government 137 Table 3 Breaking informal standards in Western Europe 141 Appendix Table A.1 Chapters 3, 5 and 7: Aggregate measures of national context 191 Table A.2 Chapter 5: Individual measures 192 Table A.3 Chapter 7: Afrobarometer variables 193 Table A.4 Chapter 7: LAPOP variables 194 Table A.5 Chapter 7: EBRD variables 195 Table A.6 Conventions in reporting data 196

1 At the symbolic level, few citizens would say that they are against good governance and fewer still would endorse bad governance or corruption. However, because of their symbolic power, the terms governance and corruption are applied indiscriminately to describe what people like or dislike. Without standards for defning these terms, the result is confusion. Because the words governance and government share the same Greek root, they are often used interchangeably. Governance is a behavioural relationship between governors and governed. Government is a set of institutions established by a constitution and laws. A narrow defnition of governance is that it is about relations within the government between principals, who decide what government institutions do, and public offcials who act as their agents in the process of governance (cf. Peters and Pierre 2004). While these relationships are important for high-level politics, this focus ignores how public offcials deal with the great mass of citizens living outside the national capital. Governance and government are linked. Institutions provide the laws, money and public employees that produce public services, while governance determines the experience that ordinary people have when they deal with offcials delivering these services. These outputs include both the ‘good’ goods of public policy, such as education and health care, and necessary but not always welcome services, such as court orders. CHAPTER 1 Setting Standards for Good and Bad Governance © The Author(s) 2019 R. Rose and C. Peiffer, Bad Governance and Corruption, Political Corruption and Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92846-3_1

2 R. ROSE AND C. PEIFFER The delivery of services can be in keeping with the standards of good governance or corruption. How the process of governance is evaluated refects the standards used to defne corruption, as well as by how public offcials behave. When ordinary Russians describe politicians as corrupt they usually have in mind offcials abusing their public offce for private gains that can be worth billions of roubles. When Britons refer to politicians as corrupt, they often have in mind behaviour that would be unacceptable among friends or people at work or that they would be ashamed of doing themselves. When dictators in poor countries are accused of corruption because they take money in return for awarding public contracts to private enterprises, they may claim that they are not acting corruptly but simply following their country’s traditional cultural practices. 1 What Corruption Is About To defne corruption as a departure from good governance is logically clear but in practice of little help because the term governance has been stretched to cover a jumble of activities and political processes. For example, the World Bank defnes governance as: The traditions and institutions by which authority in a country is exercised. This includes the process by which governments are selected, monitored and replaced; the capacity of the government to effectively formulate and implement sound policies; and the respect of citizens and the state for the institutions that govern economic and social interactions among them. (http://infor.worldbank.org/governance) Social scientists are likewise expansive in their views. The Quality of Government Institute of the University of Gothenburg eclectically includes more than 2500 variables in its database about political institutions and processes, including some indicators of institutions that may facilitate corruption. To describe governance in positivist language as the normal way in which public offcials relate to citizens can be taken to mean that the way public offcials usually behave is how they ought to behave. In countries, where good governance tends to prevail, this can be a distinction without a difference. However, where offcials often do not behave as they ought to, a positivist defnition ignores the normative difference between good and bad governance. Where corruption is persisting, a behavioural

1 SETTING STANDARDS FOR GOOD AND BAD GOVERNANCE 3 characterization may interpret activities that appear corrupt by international standards as an equilibrium maintained by the holders of power delivering policies that beneft themselves and their supporters and that are accepted with resignation by people who lack the political infuence to promote good governance (Mungiu-Pippidi 2015). The practice of governance also changes across time. Prior to the introduction of nineteenth-century reforms, England’s aristocratic governors used customary practices to maintain their political power and the material benefts of offce. Until late Victorian times offces now regarded as public, such as seats in Parliament, could be bought and sold as private property. Those excluded from power campaigned successfully for the reform of traditional practices that they stigmatized as ‘Old Corruption’ (Rubinstein 1983). In the United States, urban politicians used democratic institutions to create political machines that controlled governance for the beneft of themselves and those who voted for them. Public contracts were given to major supporters and cash, food or low-level public jobs were given to ordinary voters in exchange for their votes. The practice of judging governments by what they do rather than by how they do it was embodied in the boast of Chicago machine politicians that it is ‘the city that works’. The phrase leaves open how it works. To compare good and bad governance in countries around the world today, a defnition of corruption is needed that goes beyond endorsing that whatever is accepted in a given national context is internationally acceptable as good. It is even more needed by intergovernmental organizations such as the World Bank, which annually spends many billions in trying to improve economic and social conditions in countries in which its efforts can be frustrated when its money gets into the hands of offcials who accept corruption as a normal part of governance. Making the defnition of a concept relative to national context or loading it up with a dozen or more different meanings risks stretching it to the point at which it is no longer scientifcally useful. Socially constructed defnitions. The meaning of corruption cannot be confned to the black and white letters of a dictionary. It is socially constructed according to the context in which it is used and the normative standards of those using the term, whether they are social scientists, journalists, politicians or ordinary people. Review articles chronicle many different contemporary uses of the word (Varraich 2014; Kurer 2015). The number of meanings increases greatly when comparisons are made across time and space (see e.g. Heidenheimer and Johnston 2002: Part One).

4 R. ROSE AND C. PEIFFER The English word corruption is derived from the Latin corrumpere, something that fails to meet a particular standard (Oxford English Dictionary 1936, vol. 1: 400). A computer programme can be described as corrupt if it does not meet the standard set by the computer’s operating system. The best-known political use of the term is Lord Acton’s dictum: ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’. The statement leaves open the standards that are broken by the corruption of power. In philosophical terms, corruption has a family of meanings with a degree of kinship; it also has family disputes. Because corruption invariably has negative connotations, it tends to be used as a synonym for bad governance. The positivist approach of contemporary social science favours reducing the meaning of corruption to a single characteristic that can be expressed numerically for use in quantitative analyses testing theories of the causes and consequences of corruption. A legal approach is likewise narrow but it relies on written texts that specify illegal practices in the delivery of public services, the only numbers employed are those used in enumerating the clauses of a law. The most commonly quoted defnition is that of Transparency International: ‘the abuse of entrusted power for private gain’ (www. transparency.org). Its anti-corruption glossary lists 60 entries with different examples of corruption, such as mutually benefcial collusion in money-laundering. Imputing so many different meanings to the term threatens to drain corruption of any particular meaning. Like democracy, another concept that has dozens of different meanings, the signifcance of corruption for governance means that it cannot be abandoned. It also challenges writers to be clear about what they mean when they describe activities as corrupt. In this book, the core meaning of corruption is that it violates formal bureaucratic standards or informal normative standards about how public offce-holders ought to behave, or both. Formal bureaucratic standards are set out in laws and regulations. Violations of these standards can be assessed through normal legal processes and enforced by courts. Informal standards are norms about how governors ought to behave. These standards are ‘soft’ laws. They are social psychological expectations held in the mind rather than recorded in statute books. In a political system of good governance, informal norms can re-enforce legal standards, for example public offcials ought not to take money in exchange for doing favours. If there is a consensus within a society that

1 SETTING STANDARDS FOR GOOD AND BAD GOVERNANCE 5 a public offcial has broken an informal standard, then he or she can be punished for corrupt behaviour in the court of public opinion. When both formal and informal standards of political behaviour are weak or lacking, then politicians will be left to their own devices to decide how to behave. When the breakdown of the Soviet Union led to the transformation of Communist societies, behaviour that appeared corrupt to Western advisors was justifed on the grounds of the ‘primacy of surviving by mutual social favours’ (Sajo 2002: 2; cf. Rose 2009: Chapter 5). The primacy of survival is today specially relevant in failed states. An economic theory based on the premise that individuals pursue their own self-interest can lead to public offcials profting surreptitiously from the sale of state-owned assets such as the trade in oil or even ‘stealing the state’ by transferring assets to a new breakaway entity that they control (Solnick 1998). In the absence of a state with the effective power to enforce any standards, the optimal outcome is, in the words of an economist, ‘effcient predatory behaviour in a lawless world’ (DablaNorris 2002). A necessary condition of characterizing the behaviour of offceholders is that there are laws formally setting standards that public offcials ought to apply impartially when making decisions about who receives benefts or must comply with obligations. In short, public offcials should behave like bureaucrats in Max Weber’s universalistic defnition of a modern state (1947). If they do not, then their behaviour is corrupt. In a political system that has not adopted the bureaucratic rules of a modern state, corruption in this sense cannot exist. If an offcial shows favouritism in dispensing services to relatives and friends, this may be considered appropriate by the standards of the national culture. If an offcial is given money after delivering a beneft to an individual or waiving an obligation, in the absence of a law making this illegal, it is not bribery. Anthropologists describe this as a customary act of gratitude and economists as a rational transaction in which you get what you pay for. In such a context, only by importing modern standards can customary behaviour be described as corrupt. Bureaucratic governance in the Weberian sense is a nineteenth-century development in Europe (Anderson and Anderson 1967; Finer 1997). In countries and continents, where its standards have been incorporated slowly and incompletely in the past half-century, public offcials can operate by a mixture of informal traditional standards and formal laws and regulations modelled on contemporary international standards.

6 R. ROSE AND C. PEIFFER In states with a legacy of Marxist–Leninist standards or some other form of dictatorship, those in power can enforce laws selectively to their own advantage and the disadvantage of their opponents (Johnston 2014). Informal normative standards provide an additional means for judging acts of public offcials as corrupt. Public offcials tend to be held to higher normative standards of behaviour than people in charge of private-sector enterprises, where the standard that matters most is making money. They are also held to higher standards than entertainment celebrities who shamelessly assess behaviour by how much publicity it attracts. Even if an action does not break a law, if it violates a normative standard of behaviour it can be labelled corrupt in the court of public opinion. In combination, legal and normative standards offer four different ways of categorizing activities of governance. In the ideal-type system of good governance, public services are delivered in keeping with bureaucratic standards set out in rules and procedures that stipulate under what conditions individuals are or are not entitled to receive a social beneft or obligated to comply with regulations. Bureaucratic offceholders are impartial in their dealings with citizens, treating people in like circumstances in the same way. Equally important, there is a public consensus that these procedures are the right way to deliver services. When these two criteria are met, the outcome meets both standards of good governance. At the other extreme, a system of governance is doubly corrupt if offceholders violate laws for their own advantage and their behaviour is inconsistent with the normative values of a society (Table 1). Labelling activities as corrupt is problematic when legal and normative defnitions produce conficting assessments. Behaviour that is illegal can be tolerated in the court of public opinion if legal standards are inconsistent with informal practices of a society. For example, laws that defne speeding at a level below the speed that motorists think is safe and reasonable are regularly violated. Traffc police are expected to tolerate Table 1 Combining legal and informal standards of corruption Legal Yes No Normative Acceptable Acceptably bureaucratic Tolerated Unacceptable Shameful Doubly corrupt

1 SETTING STANDARDS FOR GOOD AND BAD GOVERNANCE 7 speeding as long as it does not create the danger of an accident because the road is empty. The violation of a law can also be informally tolerated if it is regarded as a relic of out-of-date standards of public morality, for example, a law that makes the possession or sale of marijuana an offence. In a country, in which an authoritarian government represses critics, exposing corruption on the internet may be illegal but tolerated as an acceptable weapon of subjects whose legal resources for opposition are weak (Scott 1972). Even though an action is legal, it can still be wrong by the informal normative standards about how public offceholders ought to behave. A governing party may legally accept a substantial sum of money from a business contribution if it is done in keeping with laws it has enacted about party fnance. By defnition this action is legal. However, if the government adds a special clause in a tax law that favours its fnancial donors, this will appear corrupt by the informal standards of public opinion. Likewise, politicians can be described as behaving shamefully if they proclaim standards in public and violate them in private, for example, British politicians who promote the principle of equality in education while sending their children to privileged private schools. Disputed standards. Although standards conventionally applied in assessing corruption are expressed in universalistic terms, because corruption is a political issue, standards are often objects of political dispute. Politicians have the rhetorical skills to argue that accusations against them for corruption are false facts made up by their partisan opponents. Lawyers have professional skills to get a court to rule that there is nothing illegal in the way a politician has violated informal standards of behaviour by taking money from a big business in exchange for favours. Even if evidence of breaking informal standards is acknowledged, if this does not lead to a conviction in a court of law, a politician can argue that a formal investigation has cleared him or her of blame. National differences in history and culture can be used to challenge applying the label of corruption to practices that appear corrupt by universalistic standards but appropriate in the national context in which they are found (cf. March and Olsen 2006; Tanzler et al. 2012). Such standards are rejected as social constructions of modern Western governments that are alien to traditional norms about the relationship of governors and governed in developing societies. Governments in former colonies can add that they are political relicts of imperialism. This political argument tends to be supported by studies of anthropologists who closely

8 R. ROSE AND C. PEIFFER observe how public services are allocated in a traditional village and use this to construct an idealised model of customary practices that ft into a village’s way of life. A description of what is normal in the sense of being customary can be linked to a normative judgment that this is how villagers ought to behave in ‘a moral economy of corruption’ (de Sardan 1999). However, anti-corruption organizations dispute these views as undermining good governance and the political and economic development and wellbeing of people in low-income countries. The introduction of bureaucratic institutions meant to deliver services impartially challenges customary ways of doing so by particularistic standards in which who you are and who you know is important to get things done. Mungiu-Pippidi (2015: 24) describes particularism as acceptable behaviour in societies in which people expect offcials with whom they share an identity to favour their own kind. In the words of an Indian anthropologist (Gupta 1995: 397), ‘a highly placed offcial who fails to help a close relative or fellow villager obtain a government position is often roundly criticised by people for not fulflling his obligations to his kinsmen and village brothers’. Although favouritism involves offcials abusing their power, it is not done in exchange for money but as an expression of solidarity ties with those whom they favour. Whereas favouritism tends to link people with particular given characteristics, clientelism involves politicians selectively distributing benefts of public services in exchange for votes or political support (Eisenstadt and Ronger 1984). The result of this exchange is a “win–win” outcome in which each participant gets a personal beneft, while the public sector bears the cost. Political patronage refers to the award of jobs on the public payroll to clients who may or may not have the merit-based qualifcations for holding a job; they owe their appointment to who they know rather than what they know. The evaluation of how individuals and businesses minimize their taxes is a familiar example of disputed standards. Tax evasion involves hiding income that should be legally declared and taxed. In a modern economy, opportunities for tax evasion are limited, since employers are legally required to deduct income tax and social security taxes before paying wages net. Large corporations must keep computerized accounts in order to monitor whether they are making or losing money. Cash payments are easier to hide from tax collectors. However, in a modern economy, there are a limited number of occupations where most income is in cash. Waiters and taxi drivers paid or tipped in cash may understate

1 SETTING STANDARDS FOR GOOD AND BAD GOVERNANCE 9 their income but they cannot tell the tax authorities that they are working for nothing. Self-employed electricians can do a few hours of work for cash in hand but a real estate developer has such a big cash fow that it becomes diffcult to operate on a cash-only basis. In developing countries, payments in cash tend to be the norm for peasants, street traders and casual workers. In developing countries, the evasion of taxes in the shadow economy can account for up to two-ffths of national economic activity and in modern economies up to an eighth or more (Schneider and Enste 2002). Everywhere estimates of shadow economy earnings outside the tax system are substantial. Tax avoidance involves organizing economic activities within the law in ways that reduce tax liabilities, for example, dividing the profts of a family frm among members of a family paying different rates of taxes. By defnition, tax avoidance is legal, as an English judge has explained. Every man is entitled if he can to arrange his affairs so that the tax attaching under the appropriate Acts is less than it would otherwise be. If he succeeds in ordering them so as to secure that result then, however unappreciative the Commissioners of Inland Revenue or his fellow taxpayers may be of his ingenuity, he cannot be compelled to pay an increased tax. (Quoted in Rose and Karran 1987: 203) Entrepreneurs such as Donald Trump not only endorse these words but also put them into practice. Accountants make their living by advising people how to look after their self-interest by minimizing their liability to tax, and large corporations practice tax avoidance on behalf of their shareholders and highly paid executives. Multinational corporations such as Google and Starbucks have arranged their cash fows so that expenses are highest in countries where national taxes are high. Profts are booked in countries such as Luxembourg or Ireland, where taxes on businesses are low. Even though tax avoidance is by defnition legal, public opinion tends to see it as wrong. In a British survey about paying taxes, 61%, said it was never acceptable to avoid tax legally and an additional third thought it was usually not justifable (Shah 2016: Fig. 2). A majority see tax avoidance as unfair to people who pay their full share of taxes. More than a quarter see tax avoidance as shirking a public responsibility to help pay for public services, and a similar proportion describe it as immoral. Yet, as long as the sums involved are not on the scale of corporate profts,

10 R. ROSE AND C. PEIFFER many people are prepared to collaborate in tax avoidance or evasion by making generous claims for expenses or getting a discount for paying a restaurant bill in cash rather than by a credit card. Indefnitely stretching the meaning of corruption. The association of corruption with bad governance encourages stretching the term to label as corrupt anything that people think is wrong with their political system. Carried to the extreme, political practices can be labelled as corrupt by reasoning backwards from the norms of a political commentator (cf. Warren 2015: 48ff). However, as more and more activities are labelled corrupt, the umbrella term becomes a circus tent in which the word loses any specifc meaning. For example, when the US Supreme Court accepted as legal the election result that gave George W. Bush the presidency in 2000, a liberal Harvard Law School professor, Alan Dershowitz, declared ‘The decision in the Florida election case may be ranked as the single most corrupt decision in Supreme Court history’ (2001: 174). Bad governance is not restricted to the corrupt violation of formal and informal standards. Political blunders that waste large sums of money in failing to achieve their stated objective can refect ignorance, arrogance, carelessness or stupidity among decision-makers rather than bribery. Public offcials who are lazy or incompetent in performing their duties cause damage to governance. However, the contribution they make to bad governance is not the result of receiving bribes but due to their personal faults. The idea of the public interest is a powerful political symbol; the term is associated with good governance and anything said to go against the public interest may promote bad governance. The public interest is assumed to be so self-evidently desirable that little attention is given to specifying a precise defnition (cf. Beetham 2015: 42ff). Since politics is about the expression of conficting views, there is little consensus about what constitutes the public interest. Political parties competing for votes can avoid making clear but potentially controversial programmes by claiming that they can be trusted to make policies in the public interest. This was a favourite rhetorical trick of Britain’s Tony Blair. 2  Countries Mix Good and Bad Governance Autocracies of all kinds have governed for thousands of years without having modern bureaucracies in the Weberian sense; their legitimacy rested on traditional acceptance of how rulers acted, subject to

1 SETTING STANDARDS FOR GOOD AND BAD GOVERNANCE 11 intermittent challenge by disruptive charismatic personalities or external forces (Rubinstein and von Maravic 2010). Their durability required the development of administrative institutions capable of enforcing important decrees of the ruler, extracting money from subjects and protecting their boundaries against internal and external armed forces. The Byzantine Empire, which gave its name to a form of governance that is complex and opaque, lasted for almost one thousand years. Its successor, the sprawling Ottoman Empire, a failed state by today’s standards, ruled for more than 450 years, because pashas were allowed to exploit their regional power as they wished as long as the overarching priorities of the Ottoman Sultan were met. To describe such systems of governance as corrupt imposes twenty-frst century standards on governance in the past millennium. Today, virtually every national system of governance has many formal attributes of a modern state, such as a military equipped with expensive weapons and public institutions offering secure employment and a pension. These attributes are found not only in pioneering modern states of Europe but also in developing countries with very different histories. To receive grants for development from foreign aid agencies such as the World Bank, a national government must have offcials who can produce on paper an acceptable response to the demand of these agencies that as a condition of receiving aid it adopts formal bureaucratic standards. Governors can adapt modern institutions to promote their own political power or by default since they have become the only game in town. However, the introduction of modern institutions and laws in the national capital of a developing country does not ensure their effective implementation at the grass roots. At this level, governance is also infuenced by informal standards and norms that pre-date a country’s exposure to the contemporary idea of good governance. Even though the mixture of modern bureaucratic standards and informal practices differs between countries, it everywhere means that it is impossible for any system of governance to be perfectly corrupt or perfectly corruption-free. This is illustrated by the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) of Transparency International, which assesses countries on a scale ranging from 0, totally corrupt, to 100, the ideal for integrity. No country scores above 90 and no country scores below 10 in its 2016 ranking. Moreover, high ratings are not confned to Western governments. Among 176 countries, Singapore ranks seventh and Hong Kong is placed above the United States too. Such differences have important

12 R. ROSE AND C. PEIFFER implications for anti-corruption policies: to be effective they must take into account specifc features of political systems rather than rely on onesize-fts-all recommendations for reform based on a universalistic theory of good governance. Globally, there is a substantial statistical correlation between the achievement of modern standards of good governance and a low level of corruption. However, the People’s Republic of China is a conspicuous example of a country achieving a high rate of economic growth notwithstanding a high level of corruption (Wedeman 2012). It has developed institutions capable of managing an economy that is successful in world markets; created a powerful military force; and administers a population of more than 1.2 billion people spread over a land area greater than the United States. Even though estimated income per person in China is only one-quarter the average of the most modern European societies, Chinese life expectancy is similar to European and American levels. The one-party Communist party-state has achieved successes by creating a system of governance practicing ‘corruption by design’ (Manion 2004). This has given opportunities to Communist Party cadres to promote national economic development by using their political power to help enterprises circumvent regulations that had a negative effect. Concurrently, cadres may use their political power to enrich themselves by a variety of means that are corrupt by international standards. At the grass roots, the distribution of social services is affected by the traditional Chinese practice of guanchi, informal connections (Munro 2012). It offers individuals the alternatives of getting what they want by pulling strings or following rules. If neither is effective, paying a bribe is an often-invoked third alternative. The power of Communist cadres to control the extent of corruption creates a system of bounded corruption (cf. Manion 2016). This places China just above the median in the CPI. By comparison, the undisciplined practice of corruption in Russia places it in the bottom quarter of the CPI rating. However, the large rewards of corruption for party cadres and their allies results in income inequality in Communist China being twice as high as in Western European countries that are judged by the CPI as being relatively low in corruption (Han et al. 2016). In India, the British Crown introduced an Imperial Civil Service in 1858 to serve the Viceroy responsible for governing the country. It was staffed by able Oxford and Cambridge graduates selected through competitive examinations and trained in practices that were supporting the

1 SETTING STANDARDS FOR GOOD AND BAD GOVERNANCE 13 modernization of Britain. However, the number of British administrators was minuscule in relation to the country’s hundreds of millions of peoples and territory. Governance at the grass roots was in the hands of a variety of local rulers who were expected to support Imperial rule in return for the right to exercise local power as they wished. At the time of independence in 1947, the Indian subcontinent had more than 600 princely states. Although India since 1947 has chosen its government by democratic elections and had a legacy of able civil servants at the apex of government, corruption in India is high by global standards. Government imposes many regulations on businesses that create opportunities for public offcials to collect ‘rents’ (that is, bribes) from enterprises wanting prompt approval of legal requests or the non-enforcement of laws. Entrepreneurs who proft from corruption by breaking laws can turn to politics to win offces that may give them immunity from prosecution as well as opportunities to infuence public legislation to their private advantage (Das 2001; Sanchez 2015). Prime Minister Narendra Modi has sought to fush out corrupt profteering by abruptly replacing rupee denominations commonly used to pay bribes with freshly designed notes. At the grass roots, ethnic and caste divisions encourage favouritism in allocating public services and bribery is three times the level of China. The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita of India is less than half that of China while its Gini Index of Inequality is just as high. Among African countries, the state of Nigeria is distinctive in having enormous oil wealth that gives it a GDP per capita above the average for sub-Saharan African states. Since independence from Britain in 1960, political control has alternated between generals, elected presidents and autocrats. Its institutions of governance have been fragmented between three main ethnic groups that engaged in a bitter civil war in the late 1960s. Symptoms of a failed state are persisting. Nigeria is in the lowest quarter of countries ranked in the CPI, far below India as well as China. One explanation for Nigerian corruption is that it suffers the curse of natural resources; this creates a large fow of foreign money into a country whose rulers can corruptly appropriate it to their own advantage. Since exploiting natural resources requires capital-intensive equipment, its exploitation produces large benefts shared among a small number of policymakers and heads of enterprises dealing in natural resources. Up to 20% of oil produced is estimated to disappear into opaque enterprises. The so-called curse of big oil revenues is insuffcient to explain Nigerian

14 R. ROSE AND C. PEIFFER corruption, since this form of bad governance is also found in countries such as Kenya, which lacks oil revenue and has virtually the same rating as Nigeria on the CPI index of national corruption. At the grass roots, the Afrobarometer fnds that in each country 32% have paid a bribe to obtain public services during the past year. Modern Western political systems have not abolished informal relations in administering bureaucratic standards. For example, offcials in local offces of government can offer advice to people about how to fll out bureaucratic forms required to claim a service to which they are entitled. In the most modern European and Anglo-American states, there is little bribery in the grass-roots delivery of services that account for the bulk of public expenditure. In Europe today, the cost of fnancing democratic politics is held down by the prohibition of political advertising on television and radio and the public budget providing an annual grant to political parties subject to conditions limiting what they do with their money and the publication of accounts (cf. McMenamin 2013). However, authors of a book entitled Unmasked: Corruption in the West argue that a more broad-ranging defnition is needed in order to cover corruption in modern states. Their defnition is stretched to include everything from legal tax avoidance to bribes paid to FIFA offcials who decide where to hold international football competitions (Cockcroft and Wegener 2017). In the United States, the early twentieth-century progressive movement secured the modernization of public administration at the federal level. However, the decentralization of law enforcement and public expenditure to the state and municipal level results in major variations in governance between and within American states (see www.publicintergrity.org). States can be rated on the basis of their anti-corruption laws, the number of offcials indicted or convicted on formal charges of corruption and the perceptions of groups such as political reporters. Johnston (2014: Chapter 7) distinguishes between legal and illegal corruption, a distinction similar to our defnition of corruption as the violation of formal or informal standards of governance. In the United States, the cost of election campaigning and the absence of major restrictions on how much money can be spent makes political fnance a prime example of legal corruption. The use of attack strategies to win elections results in infated claims of corruption. In the 2016 American presidential race, Donald Trump was accused by his opponents of corrupting the language of politics by voicing false facts, while Hillary Clinton’s opponents

1 SETTING STANDARDS FOR GOOD AND BAD GOVERNANCE 15 accused her of taking fat fees from fnancial corporations wanting to infuence government policy. By the standards of a particular national culture, the delivery of public services by methods that are customary and legal but inconsistent with modern bureaucratic rules can be described as normal (cf. Riggs 1964). Evaluating governance by the standards of a country’s culture confuses the clinical analysis of how a country is governed with a normative evaluation that may be self-interested when made by national politicians. It is also inconsistent with the social science practice of using generally applicable standards to compare and contrast national political systems by universalistic standards. 3  Evidence of Corrupt Governance Endless debates about the defnition of corruption are academic in the pejorative sense when the conclusion is that its many connotations make the term meaningless. The everyday experience of millions of people around the world shows this is not the case. The challenge is to adopt a defnition that can be used to produce reliable and valid evidence of corruption. The delivery of grass-roots public services directly to individuals is an activity very suitable for analysis by that familiar social science tool, surveys that interview a representative sample of the population. Because surveys report evidence about the mass of the population, they differ from media stories about national politicians taking big sums of money in exchange for making decisions that bring big bucks benefts to businesses and wealthy individuals. Anthropological accounts of behaviour in a village offer detailed and colourful accounts of what people do to get public services. It is unsatisfactory to project conclusions drawn from the ethnographic study of a few villages onto the whole of a country; even less are they suitable for projection onto a whole continent (Torsello 2015). Experimental studies test hypotheses derived from abstract models of when bribes may be paid. However, experiments with students in the artifcial setting of a laboratory on a university campus cannot be reliably generalized to the conditions facing ordinary people in their encounters with real public offcials (Serra and Wantchekon 2012). The surveys analysed here have been selected by the twin criteria of substantive relevance and methodological quality. To be of substantive use for understanding how corruption relates to bad governance, a

16 R. ROSE AND C. PEIFFER survey must systematically ask a battery of questions about whether individuals have had contact with a variety of public services before asking whether they have paid a bribe as a result of their contact.1 Most surveys do not do so; they follow the CPI practice of using perceptions of national corruption as an indirect indicator of bad governance. Since few people deal with important national political institutions, perceptions of corruption are often devoid of the frst-hand experience. Mass perceptions can refect hearsay, partisan biases or media stories of capital-intensive scandals. Our evidence comes from a unique global survey database co-ordinated by Transparency International in cooperation with established institutes that asked the same key questions about the contacts people had with their system of governance and whether bribery was involved (Table 2). Collectively, the surveys cited in tables in this book covered 128 countries on every continent except Antarctica, and 150,215 people were interviewed. The countries range from those with very good reputations for governance, such as Denmark and Singapore, and those with very bad reputations, such as Nigeria and Venezuela. This empirical data is used to test theories of what infuences whether an individual will experience good governance or corruption: differences in national context, individual attitudes and socio-economic characteristics; and differences between public services. We only report nationwide sample surveys that publicly document their sampling methods and representativeness is confrmed by cross-checks with census data about a country’s distribution of population by gender, age and rural residence. Altogether the Barometer surveys report the experience of governance of more than fve-sixths of the world’s population. This extraordinary coverage is possible because for the frst time the Global Corruption Barometer was able to conduct nationwide surveys in the world’s two most populous countries, the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of India. Comparing survey results from so large and varied a range of countries and peoples provides evidence showing whether behaviour found in one country is similar to that in other countries or even other continents. For example, on a global basis far more people are at risk of paying a bribe for health care than to the courts. This is not because health workers are more corrupt but because more people 1For a detailed guide to questions that should be asked in order to understand under what circumstances bribery occurs, see Rose and Peiffer (2015).

1 SETTING STANDARDS FOR GOOD AND BAD GOVERNANCE 17 Table 2 Corruption surveys analyzed in this book Africa 31 sub-Saharan countries surveyed by Afrobarometer, 2014–2016 (www.afrobarometer.org). Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Cote d’Ivoire, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Total interviews: 47,937 Asia 15 countries in Transparency International Asia Pacifc Global Corruption Barometer, 2015–2016 (www.transparency.org/ research/gcb/). Australia, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam. Total interviews: 20,361 EBRD 28 formerly Communist countries of Europe and Eurasia from the Life in Transition survey of the European Bank for Reconstruction & Development, 2016 (http://www.ebrd.com/what-we-do/ economic-research-and-data/data/lits.html). Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, FYR Macedonia, Georgia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kyrgyz Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Tajikistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. Total interviews: 42,202 Western Europe 15 older EU member states in Eurobarometer 2013 Special Survey 397: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and United Kingdom. Total interviews: 15,681 (https://data.europa.eu/) Latin America 26 South and Central America countries of the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP: www.vanderbilt.edu/lapop) 2014–2015. Argentina, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay and Venezuela. Total interviews: 50,439 MENA (Middle East & North Africa) 10 countries: Afrobarometer VI, 2014–2016: Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Sudan and Tunisia, plus Transparency International: Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen and Turkey. Total interviews: 12,297 (http://www.transparency.org/research/gcb/ gcb_2015_16) Global Corruption Barometer 107 countries in Transparency International’s ninth round 2015–2016 survey. Total interviews: 149,906 (https://www. transparency.org/research/gcb/overview). An additional 12 countries were not included because data was lacking about bribery or related topics.

18 R. ROSE AND C. PEIFFER make more use of health care than have recourse to judicial institutions. Cross-national data show whether the incidence of bribery in a country is relatively high, average or low by comparison with other countries in the same and other continents. The evidence demonstrates that an essential feature of good governance in Western countries—public services are delivered without bribery—is atypical in the world as it is today. References Anderson, Eugene N., and Pauline R. Anderson. 1967. Political Institutions and Social Change in Continental Europe in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. Beetham, David. 2015. Moving Beyond a Narrow Defnition of Corruption. In How Corrupt Is Britain?, ed. David Whyte, 41–46. London: Pluto Press. Cockcroft, Laurence, and Anne-Christine, Wegener. 2017. Unmasked: Corruption in the West, London: I.B. Tauris. Dabla-Norris, E. 2002. A Game Theoretic Analysis of Corruption. In Governance, Corruption and Economic Performance, ed. G.T. Abed and S. Gupta, 111–134. Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund. Das, S.K. 2001. Public Offce, Private Interest, Bureaucracy and Corruption in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Dershowitz, Alan. 2001. Supreme Injustice: How the High Court Hijacked Election 2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Olivier de Sardan, J. P. 1999. A Moral Economy of Corruption in Africa? The Journal of Modern African Studies, 37 (1): 25-52. Eisenstadt, S.N., and L. Ronger. 1984. Patrons, Clients and Friends. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Finer, S.E. 1997. The History of Government, 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gupta, Akhil. 1995. Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State. American Ethnologist 22 (1): 375–402. Han, Jin, Qingxia Zhao, and Mengnan Zhang. 2016. China’s Income Inequality in the Global Context. Perspectives in Science 7: 24–29. Heidenheimer, A., and M. Johnston. 2002. Political Corruption. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Johnston, Michael. 2014. Corruption, Contention and Reform. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kurer, Oskar. 2015. Defnitions of Corruption. In Routledge Handbook of Political Corruption, ed. Paul M. Heywood, 30–41. London: Routledge.

1 SETTING STANDARDS FOR GOOD AND BAD GOVERNANCE 19 Manion, Melanie. 2004. Corruption by Design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Manion, Melanie. 2016. Taking China’s Anti-corruption Campaign Seriously. Economic and Political Studies 4 (1): 3–18. March, James G., and Johan P. Olsen. 2006. The Logic of Appropriateness. In The Oxford Handbook of Public Policy, ed. M. Moran, M. Rein, and R.E. Goodin, 689–708. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McMenamin, Iain. 2013. If Money Talks, What Does It Say? Corruption and Business Finance of Political Parties. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mungiu-Pippidi, Alina. 2015. The Quest for Good Governance: How Societies Develop Control of Corruption. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Munro, Neil. 2012. Connections, Paperwork or Passivity: Strategies of Popular Engagement with the Chinese Bureaucracy. The China Journal 68: 147–175. Oxford English Dictionary. 1936. Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Peters, B.Guy, and John Pierre. 2004. Multi-level Governance and Democracy: A Faustian Bargain? In Multi-Level Governance, ed. Ian Bache and Matthew Flinders, 78–89. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Riggs, Fred W. 1964. Administration in Developing Countries: The Theory of Prismatic Society. Boston: Houghton, Miffin Company. Rose, Richard. 2009. Understanding Post-Communist Transformation: A Bottom Up Approach. London and New York: Routledge. Rose, Richard, and Terence Karran. 1987. Taxation by Political Inertia. London: Allen & Unwin. Rose, Richard, and Peiffer, Caryn. 2015. Paying Bribes for Public Services: A Global Guide to Grass-Roots Corruption. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rubinstein, W.D., and Patrick von Maravic. 2010. Max Weber, Bureaucracy and Corruption. In The Good Cause, ed. G. de Graaf, P. von Maravic, and P. Wagenaar, 21–35. Opladen: Barbara Budrich. Rubinstein, W.L. 1983. The End of Old Corruption in Britain, 1780–1860. Past and Present 101 (1): 55–86. Sajo, Andras. 2002. Clientelism and Extortion: Corruption in Transition. In Political Corruption in Transition: A Sceptic’s Handbook, ed. S. Klotkin and A. Sajo. Budapest: Central European University Press. Sanchez, Andrew. 2015. Criminal Entrepreneurship: A Political Economy of Corruption and Organised Crime in India. In Routledge Handbook of Political Corruption, ed. Paul M. Heywood, 67–76. London: Routledge. Schneider, Friedrich, and Dominik Enste. 2002. Hiding in the Shadows. Economic Issues No. 30. Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund. Scott, James C. 1972. Comparative Political Corruption. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

20 R. ROSE AND C. PEIFFER Serra, D., and L. Wantchekon, (eds.). 2012. New Advances in Experimental Research on Corruption. Bingley, Yorks: Emerald Books. Shah, Preena. 2016. Exploring Public Attitudes to Tax Avoidance in 2015. HM Revenue and Customs Research Report 401, London. Solnick, Steven L. 1998. Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tänzler, K., K. Mara, and A. Giannakopoulos (eds.). 2012. The Social Construction of Corruption in Europe. Aldershot: Ashgate. Torsello, Davide. 2015. The Ethnographic Study of Corruption. In Routledge Handbook of Political Corruption, ed. Paul M. Heywood, 183–196. London: Routledge. Varraich, Aiysha. 2014. Corruption: An Umbrella Concept. Working Paper Series 2014:04, Quality of Government, Gothenburg. Warren, Mark E. 2015. The Meaning of Corruption in Democracies. In Routledge Handbook of Political Corruption, ed. Paul M. Heywood, 42–55. London: Routledge. Weber, M. 1947. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. A.M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Wedeman, A. 2012. Double Paradox: Rapid Growth and Rising Corruption in China. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

21 In the ideal-type bureaucratic state governance operates by the book. Statute books contain laws stating the conditions for supplying a specifc service and public agencies have teachers, nurses or civil engineers with the expert knowledge and skills to deliver it by the book. But what do people do when the state in which they live is not staffed by bureaucratic automatons behaving strictly by the book? This challenge is of immediate relevance in most countries in the world today, where public offcials do not conform to the strict Weberian ideal of the modern bureaucrat. Few offcials operate with the unpredictable arbitrariness of a despot or with the commitment of a Communist or Nazi ideologue. Instead, the practice of governance offers people a choice of how they get the service they want. These choices are ignored in many studies of governance. For example, the 983-page Oxford Handbook of Public Policy has no index reference to bribery, favouritism or corruption (Moran et al. 2008). Bureaucracy is not the only way of getting things done. Getting services by the hook means using informal means to go around the rules that control bureaucratic behaviour. For example, a person may fnd a friend or a friend of a friend who will contact a hospital offcial who can arrange for an individual to jump the queue for medical treatment. It may also mean exploiting the gaps that arise when rules in the book do not give a public offcial clear guidance about what to do when faced CHAPTER 2 Getting What You Want from Governance © The Author(s) 2019 R. Rose and C. Peiffer, Bad Governance and Corruption, Political Corruption and Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92846-3_2

22 R. ROSE AND C. PEIFFER with a circumstance that routine guidelines do not cover. Relying on informal practices to deliver a service is not a symptom of bad governance as long as what is done does not explicitly violate a bureaucratic rule. Using crooked means to deliver a service takes rules into account in the sense that they are knowingly violated and public offcials acts for their own gain. From the normative point of view of a citizen who has been brought up to respect the standards of good governance, getting what is wanted by hook or crook can be considered wrong. However, it can also be deemed preferable to doing without a public service that a person needs or wants. We start this chapter by describing how people can get what they want from public offcials by relying on a portfolio of strategies using bureaucratic procedures, crooked means or informal hooks that fall between the alternatives of good governance and corrupt practices. However, the mixture of standards is not the same in every country. 1  Satisficing by the Book, by Hook or by Crook When people approach a public offcial for a service, they want a satisfactory outcome. To get what they want, they can adopt a satisfcing strategy of following a trial-and-error sequence of methods until one is successful (Simon 1978). The starting point can be going by the book, following bureaucratic procedures to request such things as a permit or a medical appointment. If a request is delivered without an undue delay, good governance procedures work. However, if there are diffculties and delays in getting what is wanted, informal personal contacts may be used to hook up with a friend of a friend who can see that the service is delivered as a favour. If neither means works, then a person may pay a bribe as a third-best means of getting satisfaction. Governing by the book. Formal laws and rules govern the process of delivering public policies in a system of good governance. Rules provide the impartial criteria for offcials to apply when deciding whether individuals receive a public service that they have claimed. When a law authorizes a service that is delivered nationwide, the application of rules is not done by those who made the rules in the national capital, but by delegation to locally based public employees, such as teachers or refuse collectors, who are in direct contact with affected claimants in their community. Offcials are not meant to provide the service just to favoured

2 GETTING WHAT YOU WANT FROM GOVERNANCE 23 friends, members of their ethnic group or clients of the governing party; they are meant to act impartially, treating people with similar characteristics similarly. Instead of being infuenced by personal factors, they should apply rules and regulations in the books or on the computer terminal on their desk (in French, their bureau); that is what makes them bureaucrats. The rights of individuals to receive a service and obligations to comply with an offcial regulation are set out in bureaucratic rules. Laws about public education can specify that it is provided free of charge from a given age to all children living in the country and parents are obligated to send their school-age children to school. Rules often specify what examination qualifcations applicants must have to be admitted to a university. Laws also set out obligations, such as the need for a motorist to have a driving license that can be obtained by meeting such conditions as passing a driving test. In a system of good governance, all that individuals need to do to get a service is to show that they are entitled to receive it. If they are not entitled, then a public offcial should not provide it. A purely bureaucratic service would operate like a vending machine, following pre-programmed rules. An individual would enter the information required to claim a service, make a payment if necessary, and the machine would produce whatever was requested. The payment of pensions is a paradigm example of how a policy can operate by the book. To qualify for a pension an individual must show proof of their date of birth and of having contributed to a pension fund during years of employment. These criteria are matters of fact that can be retrieved from public records. Relevant facts about the circumstances of a pension claimant can be fed into a computer that applies impersonal rules to calculate the value of a monthly pension. The money need not be put in the hands of a local offcial to deliver. A computer can write an instruction transferring the money to a pensioner’s bank account. An annual adjustment in the value of a pension can be made by a computerized mathematical formula that calculates changes in keeping with infation and/or economic growth. The new pension rate is then implemented electronically. There is no opportunity for a bribe to be paid since these steps are done by the ultimate in impersonal impartiality, an unseen computer in a remote offce. However, there are a limited number of public services that can be delivered by a computer without any involvement by a public employee.

24 R. ROSE AND C. PEIFFER Bureaucratic procedures can be criticized for imposing red tape, such as time-consuming delays in giving a response to a request for a service when a person wants it promptly or refusing to deliver what is wanted because a person fails to qualify to receive it. However, criticisms of the formal rules that cause delays and refusals are missing the point. Bureaucratic procedures are not about obliging people by giving them what they want but about fairness, that is, applying the same rules to everyone. Insofar as this happens, good governance is normal in both the behavioural and ethical senses. Going beyond bureaucratic rules. Much of governance is a social relationship between people, a public employee who delivers a service and a person wanting it. Social relations give people a hook that they can use to get things done when they deal with public offcials who have a lesser or greater degree of discretion in how they deal with individuals. A doctor has scope to decide what treatment to give an ailing patient and a policeman has discretion in deciding whether to stop or detain an individual who appears to be acting suspiciously. Large bureaucratic organizations operate by a combination of formal and informal practices (North 1990; Coleman 1990). When a person rings a large organization in search of help, an electronic voice will ask for bureaucratic information and recommend going to a website before offering to connect the caller with an individual offcial. The longer the wait to talk to a person, the stronger the nudge for an individual to go to an organization’s web site to fnd out how to make a claim for a service. Pressures to limit costs are an incentive for public agencies to emulate airlines and push people to claim services by flling out electronic forms online. Out of irritation from waiting in a queue or ignorance of bureaucratic procedures, people may rely on informal methods to get a public service by hook rather than by the book. In doing so they can make use of their social capital, that is, networks of people whom they know (cf. Putnam 2000). Social capital can take the form of membership in a community organization, a church or a trade union, or a network of friends and neighbours. Given the pervasiveness of governance, most networks are likely to include one or more people who have personal connections with public offcials who can be hooked into providing satisfaction. This can be done from a diffuse sense of favouritism toward people with whom the offcial has a long-standing connection. Those dispensing favours for what they control build up a stock of credit with others in their network to whom they can turn to get favourable treatment when they want a service that they do not control.

2 GETTING WHAT YOU WANT FROM GOVERNANCE 25 Informal networks are especially important in developing countries in which a traditional reliance on personal relations is as strong as relatively recently introduced bureaucratic procedures (Portes 1998; Rose 1999). The Global Corruption Barometer fnds that 61% think that personal relations with public offcials are important or very important in getting public services. An additional quarter thinks that personal contacts can sometimes be important and only one in twelve think they are of no importance (Rose and Peiffer 2015: 17f). Moreover, informal networks of social capital are widely distributed. Two-ffths of Afrobarometer respondents are members of a voluntary association, one-third have political contacts and almost one-quarter have turned to a religious leader for help in the past year. In the Latin American Public Opinion Project survey, two-thirds belong to some sort of formal organization and three in ten have had an informal contact with a public offceholder or politician in the past year. Where corruption is part of the system of governance, getting what you want by crooked means is an alternative. Many Western social scientists theorize that if bribery becomes relatively common in a political system it creates a behavioural norm that paying a bribe is a necessary condition of getting a service. Social capital can facilitate corruption if someone in a network offers to act as a go-between to get a corrupt offcial to deliver a service in exchange for a bribe Doing so then becomes acceptable on the grounds that ‘the system made me do it’, the title of a book by Rasma Karklins about getting public services in countries that have been Communist (2005). In societies in which standards of governance fall short of the good governance ideal, individuals have a choice of getting a public service by the book, by hook or by crook. Barometer surveys in Russia, the Czech Republic and the Republic of Korea have asked people to choose from several alternatives the best way to get four different types of services. In all three countries, the majority would not rely just on bureaucratic procedures. Less than one in fve Russians thought bureaucratic procedures would deliver prompt treatment for a painful disease or avoid delays in the issuance of a government permit. In the Czech Republic from a ffth to less than half thought bureaucracy would do what they wanted, and only a minority of Koreans had faith in their bureaucracy working as automatically as a vending machine (Table 1). In countries, where public services do not have the reputation of operating by the bureaucratic book, few people feel helpless when public services do not

26 R. ROSE AND C. PEIFFER deliver what they are expected to deliver. The passive response—nothing can be done—is on average given by only one-sixth of Czechs, less than one-quarter of Russians, and one-third of Koreans. When the state is a monopoly provider of a service and public offcials do not deliver what is wanted, most people are ready to bend or break rules by using informal connections or paying a bribe. A majority of Russians regard getting a permit by hook or by crook as a standard operating procedure. This is a legacy of the Soviet era, when a person with a network of party-related connections could use these to get what they wanted (Ledeneva 2008). In the Czech Republic, almost half believe that if they invoke social capital or push offcials by writing a letter they Table 1 Getting things done by hook or by crook Sources Corrupt option: Offer bribe, use connections, make up a story. Bureaucratic: Write a letter of complaint, push offcials to act. Market: Buy what you want legally; education: pay a tutor. Passive: Nothing can be done. New Korea Barometer 1997 (N: 1117); Czech Republic: New Democracies Barometer V 1998 (N: 1017); New Russia Barometer VII 1998 (N: 1908) Strategy Corrupt Bureau Market Passive 1. Action if an offcial delays issuing a government permit Russia 62 18 n.a. 20 Czech Republic 35 46 n.a. 19 Korea 21 45 n.a. 34 2. Actions to get a better fat when not entitled to publicly subsidized housing Russia 44 n.a. 30 27 Czech Republic 14 23 48 15 Korea 22 n.a. 64 15 3. Getting into university without good enough grades Russia 38 n.a. 36 26 Czech Republic 12 n.a. 71 17 Korea 5 n.a. 37 57 4. Getting treatment for a painful disease when hospital says one must wait for months Russia 57 13 11 19 Czech Republic 24 31 31 14 Korea (not applicable; no government health service)

2 GETTING WHAT YOU WANT FROM GOVERNANCE 27 will get what they want without having to wait too long. In the Republic of Korea, where Communist-style control of the state has not existed, few feel they have the connections needed to push civil servants to do what they want. Where there is a choice for a service, the market offers a legal alternative for satisfcing. Among Koreans and Czechs, this is most evident in the readiness to buy a house in the private sector or to pay a tutor to help their child to qualify for a university place. If Russians have the choice between spending money to get a public service by paying cash or using their social capital network, they are inclined to make use of Soviet-style social capital to escape from a corrupt public service. Nonetheless, even if people are prepared to pay a bribe to get a public service, this does not mean that they think it is the right thing to do (Fig. 1). On every continent, there is a consensus that it is wrong for offceholders to proft by claiming bribes. Whatever the level of bribery in a country, questions about the acceptability of bribery fnd overwhelming 77% 81% 82% 85% 86% 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% Afrobarometer LAPOP Eurobarometer GCB EBRD Percent saying public officials behaving wrongly Fig. 1 Global consensus bribery is wrong (Sources Here and subsequently sources are as given in Table 2 in Chapter 1 unless otherwise noted)

28 R. ROSE AND C. PEIFFER majorities do not excuse corrupt payments as even occasionally acceptable. When people in formerly Communist countries are asked what they think of a public offcial asking for a favour or gift in return for services, almost seven-eighths say it is unacceptable, a higher level even than in Europe. When Latin Americans are asked—Do you think the way things are sometimes paying a bribe is justifed?—more than four-ffths say it is unacceptable. When Africans are asked about bribery, 77% describe it as wrong and say that the offcial collecting the bribe should be punished. Individuals who think that bribery is wrong are nonetheless vulnerable to being asked to pay a bribe by a corrupt public offcial. When this happens, they may resolve the confict between their ethical and behavioural norms by deciding that paying a bribe is a lesser evil than going without a valuable service for themselves, their child or a parent needing health care. The extent to which this happens means that most bribes are paid by people who think it is wrong to do so. People pay bribes because they are afraid that if they do not they will not get what they want. Very few citizens offer bribes because they see this as an acceptable way of obtaining public services. 2 The Health of the Body Politic An underlying assumption of models of good governance is that public services are delivered by people who act like robots, who respond automatically to requests according to formal bureaucratic rules that are programmed into their electronic control system. Because of this, robots lack discretion and autonomy. However, the body politic is better understood by analogy with the empirical and normative approaches that doctors use in handling patients (cf. Etzioni 1985). Medical textbooks set out a model of the anatomy and physiology of the human body in a state of perfect health. However, doctors do not assume that everyone they see is in a state of perfect health. The textbook model of perfect health is used as a standard for identifying bad health. Many textbooks of public administration concentrate on describing the practice of a system of good governance in perfect health. People get what they want if they are entitled to do so and do not get what they should not have. A realistic model needs to take into account symptoms of bad health in the anatomy and physiology of governance. Corruption provides many symptoms of governance in bad health.

2 GETTING WHAT YOU WANT FROM GOVERNANCE 29 Institutions constitute the anatomy of governance. In the classic model of a unitary body politic, institutions are linked hierarchically from head to toe. At the head is a single authority, whether a monarch, a dictator, a cabal, a president or prime minister. In an era of big government, the headship includes political principals who give direction to the departments and agencies that collectively constitute the body politic. The scale and variety of a department’s activities mean that political principals must rely on offcials lower down in the department to act as agents carrying out the decisions that principals make. Military defence comes closest to meeting the ideal of hierarchical governance. At the top is a commander-in-chief who has the legitimate authority to issue commands to army, navy and air force institutions. Obedience to commands from above is a fundamental rule from privates up to generals. However, the military is an exceptional government institution. The French practice of technocracy places at the head people with the technical expertise to make decisions in collaboration with politicians with the skills to secure the popular compliance necessary to make decisions effective. The multiplicity of policies for which governors are responsible today results in the functional division of governance into many departments, each of which has a nominal head. To carry out its many functions each department is divided into bureaus dealing with particular services. For example, an Education Department will have separate bureaus for primary schools, secondary education, universities, teacher training and so forth. In addition, some major functions are usually hived off to other types of agencies, such as the central bank, a health authority or not-forproft or proft-making institutions. When multiple institutions are jointly involved in a policy area, as is normally the case in a federal political system, this creates political and constitutional barriers to any principal controlling all that is done within the state (Piattoni 2010). Geography is a structural barrier to the ability of political principals to monitor how their local agents follow the rules that they lay down. Social services, such as education and health care, are delivered wherever citizens live and most citizens live a signifcant distance from their national capital. London is only one-eighth of the population of the United Kingdom and Beijing and New Delhi about one percent of their respective national populations. Local government is responsible for many services that must be delivered locally, such as refuse collection. Even if education is nominally under the control of a central government

30 R. ROSE AND C. PEIFFER ministry, classrooms are far away. The traditional claim of a French minister that every teacher will drill pupils daily in accord with instructions from on high invites the sceptical response ‘Perhaps’ or ‘How would the minister know?’ Because of differences in the institutions delivering public policies, governance involves a population of political bodies rather than a single body politic. A politician nominally in charge of government is more like the president of a university than the commander-in-chief of a military force. He or she can proclaim standards and identify goals that must be broad enough to apply in many contexts, such as saving public money, while vague enough to leave a lot of discretion in the hands of their agents. A university lecturer can meet students in classes without ever meeting a university president and a president can announce a new strategy for teaching students without setting foot in a classroom. So too a minister for health will only see how doctors deal with patients when she or he is actually a patient, and doctors hear about what the minister wants them to do through the media or in bulletins from their professional association. The physiology of governance determines whether public services are delivered by the book or whether hooks are used to get around rules or bribes to break rules. Lower-level public offcials are the lifeblood of implementing policies. Corruption at the grass roots is not due to the absence of bureaucratic rules stipulating the obligations of public employees but to limitations on the application of impersonal rules in a relationship between people. Offcials on the ground can exploit their distance from nominal makers of policy to become principals deciding how they deal with ordinary people who are the recipients of public services. Even though public employees are expected to behave in accord with bureaucratic rules, most do not see themselves as bureaucrats, following formal rules without regard to the circumstances of the individuals they deal with. They see themselves as people whose job is to apply the professional and technical standards in which they have been trained. Radically different skills are required to teach children how to read, to collect taxes or to be a submarine captain. In a modern system of governance, individuals are appointed to a particular post because they have qualifcations relevant to that service, for example a teaching diploma, an accountancy certifcate or successful completion of training as a pilot. Public servants spend most of their working lives directly engaged in applying these skills as the employee of a local education authority, a government tax accountant or an air force pilot.