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CORRUPTION IN ADVERSARIAL SYSTEMS: THE CASE OF DEMOCRACY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2019

Daniel M. Weinstock
Daniel M. Weinstock*
Affiliation:
Law, McGill University
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Abstract:

In this essay I argue that adversarial institutional systems, such as multi-party democracy, present a distinctive risk of institutional corruption, one that is particularly difficult to counteract. Institutional corruption often results not from individual malfeasance, but from perverse incentives that make it the case that agents within an institutional framework have rival institutional interests that risk pitting individual advantage against the functioning of the institution in question. Sometimes, these perverse incentives are only contingently related to the central animating logic of an institution. In these cases, immunizing institutions from the risk of corruption is not a theoretically difficult exercise. In other cases, institutions generate perverse or rival incentives in virtue of some central feature of the institution’s design, one that is also responsible for some of the institution’s more positive traits. In multi-party democratic systems, partisanship risks giving rise to too close an identification of the partisan’s interest with that of the party, to the detriment of the democratic system as a whole. But partisanship is also necessary to the functioning of such a system. Creating bulwarks that allow the positive aspects of partisanship to manifest themselves, while offsetting the aspects of partisanship through which individual advantage of democratic agents is linked too closely to party success, is a central task for the theory and practice of the institutional design of democracy.

Keywords

Corruptiondemocracyincentivespolitical partiespartisanship
Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , Winter 2018 , pp. 221 - 241
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2019 

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Footnotes

*

I would first like to thank the other contributors to this volume, as well as two anonymous reviewers for Social Philosophy and Policy, for useful comments that improved the essay immeasurably. I would also like to thank David Schmidtz for his patience and forbearance when an episode of ill health threatened its completion.

References

1 Leslie Holmes reports that according to a recent international poll, it has been identified as the world’s number one political problem. Holmes, Leslie, Corruption: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2015), i.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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4 For example, see Warren, op. cit ; Thompson, Dennis F., “Two Concepts of Corruption,” Edmund J. Safra Working Papers, no. 16, 2013CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ceva, Emanuela and Ferretti, Maria Paola, “Liberal Democratic Institutions and the Damages of Political Corruption,” in The Ethics Forum 9, no. 1 (2014), 126–45.Google Scholar For an attempt to combine individualist and institutional accounts with which my account has some similarities, see Miller, Seumas, “Corruption,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, rev. ed., published 2011).Google Scholar

5 According to widely accepted accounts of public service in Guatemala that I received when I taught there in the early 2000s, the risks involved in taking up any position in the public service were such that one could not reasonably expect anyone to do so without additional financial inducement. Moral distinctions were made between “five-percenters,” “ten percenters,” and the like on the basis of lesser or greater bribes insisted upon by different public officials.

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22 I have developed the idea of a “platform” as a normative idea in “Integrating Intermediate Goods to Theories of Distributive Justice: The Importance of Platforms,” in Res Publica 21, no. 2 (2015): 171–83.

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24 On the epistemic function of trials, see Laudan, Larry, Truth, Error, and Criminal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 The benefits and disadvantages of partisanship for democratic societies is a central theme of the works by Rosenblum, Muirhead, White and Ypi, and Bonotti.