Political Corruption - Conditions Favorable For Corruption

Conditions Favorable For Corruption

It is argued that the following conditions are favorable for corruption:

• Information deficits
  • Lacking freedom of information legislation. For example: The Indian Right to Information Act 2005 is perceived to have "already engendered mass movements in the country that is bringing the lethargic, often corrupt bureaucracy to its knees and changing power equations completely."
  • Lack of investigative reporting in the local media.
  • Contempt for or negligence of exercising freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
  • Weak accounting practices, including lack of timely financial management.
  • Lack of measurement of corruption. For example, using regular surveys of households and businesses in order to quantify the degree of perception of corruption in different parts of a nation or in different government institutions may increase awareness of corruption and create pressure to combat it. This will also enable an evaluation of the officials who are fighting corruption and the methods used.
  • Tax havens which tax their own citizens and companies but not those from other nations and refuse to disclose information necessary for foreign taxation. This enables large scale political corruption in the foreign nations.

• Lacking control of the government.
  • Lacking civic society and non-governmental organizations which monitor the government.
  • An individual voter may have a rational ignorance regarding politics, especially in nationwide elections, since each vote has little weight.
  • Weak civil service, and slow pace of reform.
  • Weak rule of law.
  • Weak legal profession.
  • Weak judicial independence.
  • Lacking protection of whistleblowers.
    • Government Accountability Project
  • Lack of benchmarking, that is continual detailed evaluation of procedures and comparison to others who do similar things, in the same government or others, in particular comparison to those who do the best work. The Peruvian organization Ciudadanos al Dia has started to measure and compare transparency, costs, and efficiency in different government departments in Peru. It annually awards the best practices which has received widespread media attention. This has created competition among government agencies in order to improve.

• Opportunities and incentives
  • Individual officials routinely handle cash, instead of handling payments by giro or on a separate cash desk—illegitimate withdrawals from supervised bank accounts are much more difficult to conceal.
  • Public funds are centralized rather than distributed. For example, if $1,000 is embezzled from a local agency that has $2,000 funds, it is easier to notice than from a national agency with $2,000,000 funds. See the principle of subsidiarity.
  • Large, unsupervised public investments.
  • Sale of state-owned property and privatization.
  • Poorly-paid government officials.
  • Government licenses needed to conduct business, e.g., import licenses, encourage bribing and kickbacks.
  • Long-time work in the same position may create relationships inside and outside the government which encourage and help conceal corruption and favoritism. Rotating government officials to different positions and geographic areas may help prevent this; for instance certain high rank officials in French government services (e.g. treasurer-paymasters general) must rotate every few years.
  • Costly political campaigns, with expenses exceeding normal sources of political funding, especially when funded with taxpayer money.
  • Less interaction with officials reduces the opportunities for corruption. For example, using the Internet for sending in required information, like applications and tax forms, and then processing this with automated computer systems. This may also speed up the processing and reduce unintentional human errors. See e-Government.
  • A windfall from exporting abundant natural resources may encourage corruption. (See Resource curse)
  • War and other forms of conflict correlate with a breakdown of public security.
• Social conditions
  • Self-interested closed cliques and "old boy networks".
  • Family-, and clan-centered social structure, with a tradition of nepotism/favouritism being acceptable.
  • A gift economy, such as the Soviet blat system, emerges in a Communist centrally planned economy.
  • Lacking literacy and education among the population.
  • Frequent discrimination and bullying among the population.
  • Tribal solidarity, giving benefits to certain ethnic groups

In the Indian political system, for example, it has become usual that the leadership of national and regional parties are passed from generation to generation creating a system in which a family holds the center of power. Some examples are most of the Dravidian parties of south India and also the Congress party, which is one of the two major political parties in India.