Political And Public Aspects of Corruption Research Paper

1. Definition

Idiomatic definitions differ substantially from country to country, a problem first raised by anthropologists, who denoted variations resulting from different social, religious, and cultural backgrounds. Corruption as a political phenomenon adds to that definitional complexity. The different usages of corruption by political scientists, with a broader meaning than those present in most contemporary penal codes, have raised potential ambiguities.

1.1 Contemporary Social Sciences Definitions

One could group this rich diversity in three basic definitional types: public-office-centered, market-centered, and public-interest-centered.

1.1.1 Public-Office-Centered Definitions. Tradition-ally, the largest group of political scientists has opted for a definition focusing on those practices behaviors that violate the legal formal standards regulating public office. The most prominent definition is that Nye: ‘Corruption is behavior which deviates from the normal duties of a public role because of private-regarding …, pecuniary or status gains; or violates rules against the exercise of certain types of private-regarding influence. This includes such behavior as bribery … nepotism … and misappropriation …’ (1967).

Public-office definitions may help to disentangle the complexity of corruption by restricting the variety of potential denominations to the (most) visible or condemnable types. In practice, the standards covered by this set of definitions are not too far from those stated in most Penal Codes. More often than not, penal reforms are a post facto attempt to deal with corruption. Rules governing public office have been revised or stiffened, when certain manifestations of corruption have become rampant, provoking wide-spread convulsion and contempt in political society.

Public-office definitions are stable and objective and, for those reasons, have attracted considerable popularity amongst political scientists and criminologists. Normative aspects are simplified by legal reductionism. Legal norms, it is argued, translate a tangible value system, that can be considered, a priori, as an expression of the mores and ethic juridical structure of a society at a given time. But even then one cannot escape the interpretative differences and imperfections of legal norms and how these evolve through time. The question arises: ‘Which statement of the rules and norms governing public office is to be employed?’ For most authors, the normative discourse of legislators, judges, and other competing authorities should be used as a definitional criterion. Legal norms are most likely to reflect the ethical standards of a particular group—the ruling elite—hence socially disputable and susceptible to revision.

The usage of legalistic definitions highlights the weaknesses of black-and-white modes of conceptualization. If compliance with public-office rules relies on the degree to which these are embedded in the ethical environment of the society in question, then one is bound to end with a rigid definition of corruption unrepresentative of the ensemble of manifestations occurring in that legal social context. As Sorokin remarked, ‘… There always is some discrepancy be-tween the situation as it is depicted in the ‘‘official law’’ and in the psychosocial mentality of members of the society. And the discrepancy is the greater, the quicker the socioethical life of the society changes’ Sorokin (1991). Public-office definitions may have an analytical advantage from other definitions as they ease comparison across countries, societies, or regimes, yet, they bear the cost of leaving too many things undefined and, consequently, unexplained.

1.1.2 Market-Centered Definitions. A more restricted group of academics, deriving their premises from economic theory, conceptualized corruption in terms of an exchange of money for political decisions (asset), which private actors seek to acquire (demand), and public agents are just too willing to sell (supply) by avoiding being caught (liability). The definition embarks on a public choice assertion that, ceteris paribus, all agents will seek rationally to take an advantage from their privileged position in office (rent maximizing) whenever there is a window of opportunity. As van Klareven argues, ‘A corrupt civil servant, regards his public office as a business … a ‘‘maximizing unit.’’ The size of his income depends … upon the market situation and his talents for finding the point of maximal gain on the public’s demand curve’ Van Klareven (1989).

The definition is articulated convincingly when dealing with specific types of transaction corruption (bribery, kickback, pots-de-in) in which the legal criterion of infringement–condemnation may not be so clear-cut or nonexistent. Rose-Ackerman, an exponent of this type of definition, stresses that market corruption is essentially about ‘all payments (legal or illegal) to agents that are not passed on to superiors,’ but includes also a series of ‘legal activities with similar public policy consequences,’ such as, ‘campaign contributions and lobbying’ Rose-Akerman (1978).

Definitions of this sort appear to bypass normative considerations, but in reality they do not. Corruption is seen essentially as those exchanges, often between public officials and private entrepreneurs, likely of being susceptible to some disciplinary or criminal punishment. However, if corruption were defined as a rational behavior of maximization of personal advantages, then what would be the stimuli behind the acceptance of a pecuniary benefit that can be sanctioned by law? The definition also neglects ‘moral costs’ affecting the rationale of actors to engage in corruption such as public condemnation, disapproval by superiors and colleagues in the working place, and individual ethics. Some acknowledge the existence o‘moral costs of breaking the law’ (Rose-Ackerman 1978), but fail to provide a clear reference of what those ‘moral costs’ are.

The reliance on market concepts undermines that rules and principles binding public and elected officials are considerably distinct from those applicable to market actors. Market(s) of corruption—a disputable concept (Cartier-Bresson 1995)—can be defined as parallel exchanges where scarce ‘goods’ are allocated at prices determined illegally, contrary to govern- mental regulations and affecting its public policies (i.e., ‘black market’). Such definition may not even correspond to the mechanisms and concepts operating in a free market situation. The very designation of ‘black,’ i.e., obscure and sanctionable, runs counter to the ‘freedom of choice’ qualifying market economies.

1.1.3 Public-Interest-Centered Definitions. In recent years, political scientists increasingly have felt that both these types of definition were narrowly conceptualized. On the one hand, market-centered definitions were useful in so far as one dealt with trans-action corruption, but insufficient once manifestations referred to nonpecuniary social exchanges and their moral implications. On the other, there was an upsurge against the tendency to reduce corruption to public-office rules applicable to a limited number of practices behaviors, most likely criminal. According to these authors, corruption is a deviant behavior or practice characterized essentially by the subjugation of public to private interests (Rogow and Lasswell 1963, Meny 1992). The classical concept of public interest is revived and argued vividly as a criterion not only useful, but also indispensable to illustrate the essence of corruption. The public interest invites men to overcome their selfishness, to confront their preferences with those of others, and to evaluate options with equal disinterest and impartiality.

Moral issues are taken into account. Friedrich wrote, ‘Corruption, being in fact a decomposition of the body politic through moral decay, is a general category to include all kinds of practice which are believed … morally corrupt’ Friedrich (1989). The immediate questions are ‘whose morals?’ determine ‘what corruptions?’ In order to avoid associating corruption as value system degeneration with the classical idea of a transcendental and pre-established set of mores, the concept is made tangible through the predominant public perceptions in society. Morality is regarded as a social construction and what is or is not corruption will depend on the observer’s opinion. However, replacing ‘public interest’ by a more fluid and vague concept of ‘public opinion’ does not prove elucidating either. The usage of public opinion pertains to the conceptualization of corruption, but only in terms of its operationalization, in other words, as a soft criterion used to measure the nature and scope of corruption.

Critics insist that the public interest is a weak reference, since in most contexts there is no definition of what the concept stands for: the notion of public is difficult to ascertain, least to say, that interest is another jargon of pluralist theories of the State. The concept is a battled one and open to broad interpretations and for that reason tends to be discarded from comparative measurements. The notion of public interest—its values, perceptions, and laws—vary across societies and that has implications in terms of what manifestations of corruption are identified across cases. However, this should not constitute an obstacle to the explanation of why societies have different standards defining corrupt practices behavior or why these standards change through time.

1.2 Operationalization

The plurality of definitions available, sometimes controversial, may become an obstacle to empirical research. An alternative is to operationalize the concept with the utmost goal of enhancing broad-based comparisons. This is not an easy task as most measures do not ‘travel’ easily in space and time. Scott wrote, ‘Corruption, we would all agree, involves a deviation from certain standards of behavior. The first question which arises is, What criteria shall we use to establish those standards?’ Scott (1972). Empirical studies on corruption have too often relied on legal formal criteria to qualify standards of corruption (Nye 1967, Scott 1972). These tend to be regarded as stable and accurate indicators of what are the standing standards of corruption at a given time slot and society. Yet, even legal standards are not monoliths. The concept of corruption as defined in most penal codes is no longer particularly distinct from other types of crimes, such as fraud, influence trafficking, peculate, extortion. There has been equally a tendency towards enlarging its definitional parameters in order to embrace a wider range of pervasive manifestations (e.g., the inclusion of nonpecuniary inducements, the distinction of passive and active initiatives, and licit or illicit out-comes).

Legal criteria are not a precise volume indicator either: most corrupt transactions are obscure and clandestine; and shifts in volume may be a product of greater or more efficient prosecution. By excluding public reaction from the conceptual framework of corruption one risks to fall into legal dichotomising (i.e., legal ‘noncorrupt vs. illegal’ corrupt). But not everything that is legal is approved morally by citizens (Gardiner 1992). A purely legal conceptualization would omit all corrupt behavior which does not necessarily imply a breach of law or of codes of conduct, but still involve ‘a serious violation of the standards and expectations associated with a public role’ (Friedrich 1966, Jos 1993).

Corruption is also about perceptions. It can be many things to many people and has been used incessantly as an offensive political weapon. Another aspect of public opinion condemnation is that of labeling a cluster of distinct practices behaviors as corruption, independently of the standing legal standards. Greater public perception depends largely on ‘how?’ and ‘what kind?’ of manifestations has been made visible to the public. Public opinion is fluid and particularistic, susceptible of being politically mobilized. Hence, the understanding of the ‘corruption of politics’ passes through an attentive analysis of the ‘politics of corruption’ (Nelken and Levi 1996). For most times, public opinion is an insufficient criterion based upon unstable, vague, if not contradictory, standards which oscillate between diversified perceptions in society, but criticisms fall short of a flexible alternative to measure qualitative variations. The variety of social representations on corruption is a sign that there is no harmonious definition, but competing standards. There is no static definition, but a qualitative gradation in terms of public condemnation and there is no necessary concordance between social cultural standards and the standing legal rules condemning corruption in society.

However, a purely public opinion-based conceptualization is not the solution either. In as much as public opinion is important to understand changes in ethic juridical structure, the condemnation of corruption is not just a matter of perception. Public accusation goes beyond the allegations raised by prominent newspapers, the rhetoric of electoral campaigns, or that of fervent parliamentary debates, and condemnation can be translated into criminal prosecution.

Corruption cannot be defined exclusively by legal or public opinion criteria. Corruption as a deviant behavior practice concerns both the breach of rules governing public office and the infringement of non-codified, widely accepted ethical norms (Gardiner 1992, Jos 1993). The concept has to be flexible enough to include both set of norms ‘constituting a society’s system of public order’ and the way these two ethical components are being challenged continuously and revisited (Johnston 1996).

Heidenheimer’s (1989) definition of black, gray, and white types of corruption in relation to a variation of an elite-and public-based standards attempts to bridge both criteria. His typology is innovative in so far it denotes a certain qualitative gradation of the phenomenon product of value change. Some practices behaviors, (often) collusive and subject to prosecution, are regarded as severe violations of the legal and moral norms set in society (black corruption). In this case, standing legal standards are likely to be reinstated by competent authorities when infringement is exposed. When toleration mounts, coding certain corrupt practices behaviors ‘a way of life,’ legal condemnation gradually loses its meaning (white corruption). Standards degenerate. Neither of these two situations will necessarily trigger a revision of standards. It is rather the ‘grayness’ of corruption that promotes the demand for reform in the system, because existing standards are no longer seen as operational by political elites and sectors of public opinion. The waves of reform and control that swept across most Western European countries by the late 1980s and early 1990s can only be understood in the light of a significant value discrepancy between ruling elites and masses (gray corruption).

2. The Measurement Of Corruption

The measurement of corruption goes hand in hand with the observation of qualitative and quantitative variations in space and time. Is country ‘A’ more corrupt than country ‘B’? Is there more corruption at the end of the twentieth century than in the 1980s? Was illegal party financing equally condemnable as political corruption across different pluralist democracies? Political scientists increasingly are concerned to come about with a measurement of corruption as a pre-analytical step towards a more comprehensive, empirically based, comparative explanation of corruption.

Priority has been given to the measurement of levels of corruption, but this was not without its problems. Attempts at measuring corruption across countries with significantly different legal and moral norms have been criticized as an academic tool of stereotyping, which political actors and others, at the national or international levels, are just too willing to have at their disposal as an offensive (or defensive) labeling weapon. The problem of stereotyping emerges at the level of operationalization, but it also has to do with the parameters of comparison (small n large N ). How to include the greatest number of cases without losing consistency and comparability? Different countries are governed by different rules and norms, so the immediate problem is: whose standards should be taken as reference to comparison?

This brings back the problematic that surfaced earlier comparative works: how to avoid ‘cultural relativism’ without falling into ‘cultural imperialism?’ Taking a lower denominator—each country’s rules governing office or national perceptions of the phenomenon—makes it difficult to envisage meaningful generalisations about corruption. Cultural specificities are to be taken seriously; yet, this has often permitted a degree of toleration towards some forms of corruption regarded as beneficial to the societies in question. Taking Western values as an higher de-nominator, which other countries may try to emulate, raises doubts about the validity of results attained, either because those standards are not yet embedded in developing societies or because such alta vista neglects different social cultural realities.

Transparency International (TI), a non-govern-mental organisation (NGO) devoted exclusively to the study and combat of corruption worldwide, has developed a corruption perception index based on several surveys conducted in as many as 85 countries (cf. http://www.transparency.de). The TI’s index is the first attempt to measure levels of corruption, but its reliance on public opinion poses serious limitations: (a) there is a problem of operationalization (the index is concerned only with transaction corruption, namely, bribery of foreign officials); (b) there is a problem of sample (it relies on an homogeneous sector of public opinion, i.e., international businessmen, financial journalists); (c) it reinforces (or creates) stereotyping. Despite undeniable methodological weaknesses, political scientists have not precluded its use as a starting point for further qualification and understanding of corruption.

Unfortunately, there have been few attempts at measuring qualitatively standards of corruption and establishing comparative frameworks of control measures implemented and their effectiveness. After all, corruption as a policy issue is part of a cumulative learning process of past control experiences, their successes, and failures. Timescale measurements of qualitative variations equally have been lagging. The understanding of why corruption emerges in a particular conjuncture leading to widespread condemnation and revision of standards, or inversely, why after periods of enforced political morality, ethical standards shade into oblivion, has been mainly a task of some political historians and public policy analysts (Woodiwiss 1988, Meny 1993).

3. The Evolution Of Theoretical Approaches

3.1 The Corruption Of The ‘Good Polity’

For the founders of Western political thought, such as Plato, Aristotle, and Thucydides, corruption ex-pressed the degeneration of right regimes, those who rule for the ‘good of the whole,’ into perverted ones, those who rule for ‘the good of themselves’ (i.e., tyranny, oligarchy, demagogy). Whereas the conceptual overlap between the broader institutional decay and corruption, stricto sensu, was explained in terms of behaviors, practices, and laws that debased from the ‘common good,’ little was said about the moral components of that intangible axiom. This tradition persisted throughout the development of Western political thought, from Aquinas to Rousseau, from Montesquieu to Burke, from the twentieth century philosophers of decadence (Aron, Malraux) to the contemporary theorists of democracy (Dahl, Sartori). Their conceptual weakness was that of not establishing empirically what standards defined political corruption, because that was secondary to their theoretical concern with the broader moral corruption.

This contributed largely to its unpopularity in earlier comparative works, because it ‘sacrificed clarity to brevity, in so far as it leaves too implicit how or why behavior is deviant from which norms’ (Heidenheimer et al. 1989). The decolonization processes in the aftermath of World War II brought a vast number of new entities to the world’s political map, whose values of democracy emulated were not necessarily those upon which Western democracies had been historically founded. The moralist (or institutionalist) approach became an easy target by ‘those whose conceptions are not based on Aristotelian ideal types’ (Heidenheimer et al. 1989). With the autonomy of political science in the 1950s, the classical approach was gradually replaced by new political science approaches (functionalist, market, and systemic).

3.2 Contemporary Political-Science Approaches

The attempt to locate studies about corruption according to schools of thought does not seek over- simplification of the variety of methods and perspectives through which the complexity of corruption is made tangible. Typologizing aims at helping those who are strange to the subject or have come across its problematic in the course of their research, to be aware of their adhesion to each alternative available as well as the insufficiencies and partial judgements recurring from their own choice.

The specificity of each theoretical approach depends largely upon the definition chosen to interpret the phenomenon. Their evolution denotes a value change in the way the phenomenon has been identified and explained.

3.2.1 Functionalist Approach. Viewing corruption as ‘another form of political influence,’ functionalism, during the 1960s, tolerated certain forms of corruption in so far these were held to enhance economic development and political integration. Cultural relativism added to this complacency by considering corruption to be inherent in specific cultures societies, and ignoring it elsewhere.

The normative argument surrounding the degree of legitimacy of the authoritative allocation of values and goods to society was a question which functionalists avoided at all costs. Corruption thus concerned the same ‘legitimate apparatus’ in two different facets of political activity: ‘Whereas party manifestos, general legislation, and policy declarations are the formal façade of the political structure, corruption stands in sharp contrast to these features as an informal political system in its own right’ (Scott 1972). Here, one could identify a Machiavellian vision of politics. But whereas the Florentine thinker observed that the struggle, exercise, and maintenance of power opened the door to a number of strategies, common to both democratic and authoritarian regimes, which were not necessarily confined to the legal and ethical norms set in society, functionalists went further to actually claim that corruption had its positive effects to the political system, despite being an ‘immoral thing.’ Corruption, functionalists concluded, ‘greased the wheels of the system’ in countries where the administrative process was overloaded and overstretched and it helped to hold shaky systems together, by mobilizing voters into the democratic process through party patronage and clientelism (Leff 1964, Bayley 1966, Huntington 1968).

Today, it would be difficult to advocate the benefits of conventional forms of corruption, in countries where toleration of those practices furthered the expansion and institutionalization of corruption into other areas of public life and paved the collapse of the political system. Moreover, the belief that corruption in developing regions, such as Latin America, Asia, and Africa, promoted economic development, political participation, and administrative efficacy proved historically wrong. Functionalists had never accounted for the long-lasting negative effects of corruption.

3.2.2 Market Approach. The market approach focuses essentially on the principal-agent-client (PAC) corrupt transactions taking place at the bureaucratic level, coupling positive economic theory with neo-liberal theories of the state (Rose-Ackerman 1978). Although PAC theorists criticized vividly the functionalist view on benefits of corruption for development, their approach also sought to evade moral issues by centering their utilitarian arguments on the rational choice of individuals to under-take corrupt transactions. Accordingly, corruption depended on two major determinants: the existing structures of opportunity and the costs incentives involved. From a theoretical standpoint, the rational choice approach has underestimated personal ethical standards constraining the public official’s ‘choice’ or willingness to engage in corruption. Certainly, individual standards of probity, what the Anglo-Saxons termed ‘civil service spirit,’ go beyond cost-benefit calculations and constitute an important element in any micro-interpretation of corruption. Its theoretical weakness, however, had to do more with a drawback of neoliberal theories of the State.

The Welfare State crisis and the collapse of socialist economies offered propitious ground for a conceptualization of corruption as an illegal tradeoff between public and private spheres. Corruption, it was argued, expanded where the State extensively had permeated the market sphere, directly, through interventionist policies and ownership, and indirectly, via ‘obstructive’ market regulation. The remedies advocated were too simplistic: if the reason for corruption was excessive State intervention and regulation over the market economy, the solution was, ipse dixit, to privatize and deregulate. By the late 1980s, however, PAC theorists were less prone to support the neo-liberal assumption of ‘less State, less corruption’: privatization and deregulation processes taking place worldwide had created new corrupt incentives and opportunity structures. The contribution of political economists to the study of corruption did not preclude with the neoliberal theories of the State, nor public choice interpretations of the motivation for corrupt behavior. Current economic theory is re-examining the very concept of ‘market of corruption’ through an analysis of the networks of corruption unrepresentative of a market and by introducing nonrational elements to motivation (Cartier-Bresson 1995).

3.2.3 Systemic (Or Neoclassical) Approach. Both these approaches have avoided an important conceptual aspect, namely, moral condemnation. They had fallen into a reductionist and mechanic vision of the democratic process and ignored that democracy, other than being a set of procedures and institutions, is also a normative system with ultimate goals to be realized in society (Meny 1992). Current literature on democracy theory looks attentively at normative aspects and qualities, including its pathologies and the measures to prevent its degeneration. This is not because corruption is more frequent in democracies than in nondemocracies, but because its consequences seem to be more damaging to the basic principles of democracy: equality before the state apparatus, accountability and transparency of public decisions, and the legitimacy of political institutions.

The revival of the moralist approach goes together with the growing belief that the ethical foundations of democracy have degenerated during the past decades. Academic concern about the growth of corruption in the post-Cold War environment is associated closely with the processes of state collapse and democratic consolidation in Central and Eastern Europe (Holmes 1993) and a period of crisis faced by the model of liberal democracy—weakened political participation and solidarity, party and party system crisis, crisis of the State of Law, crisis of the Welfare State (Della Porta and Meny 1995).

Everywhere, corruption was no longer product of an occasional ‘rotten apple,’ but a systemic phenomenon often with greater success than the legitimate political system from which it draws its resources (Della Porta and Meny 1995). It no longer appeared to be an exception, but a norm: threatening democratic foundations, causing institutional crisis, destabilizing the global economy, helping ‘organized crime’ to breed from clandestinity to illicit government, fomenting public deception about political life, and undermining the idea of public good. Corruption celebrated the communion between power and economy: money increased the possibility to privileged access to power, and power allowed the possibility to enrich (Della Porta 1992).

Political scientists were invited to revise their definitions and to include normative concerns in their empirical account of corruption (Jos 1993). Politico-institutional crisis and reform were the key conjunctural features urging the need for a normative analysis of corruption and this was not detached from the world economic downturn of the early 1990s. ‘What changed in the early 1990s was the public’s readiness to tolerate political corruption’ (Heywood 1997): if the economic boom of the 1980s had been propitious for complacent views about corruption, the decreasing ‘feel-good’ factor of the 1990s hastened perceptions and condemnation, if not only as a reaction to widening social disparities.

By the early 1990s, corruption was condemned widely at all levels of decision-making: local, national, regional, and international. The discrepancy between the legal formal standards and those upheld by the society at large had grown wide (Johnston 1991, Meny 1996). Most democracies became engaged in a spiral-web of media exposure, scandal, political inquiries, and judicial prosecution. Governments, even those that until then considered corruption ‘a problem affecting others,’ reacted through the implementation of a series of control measures and devoted their efforts to the moralization of political life.

The growing concern about corruption by inter- national governmental (the Council of Europe, the European Union (EU), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)) and nongovernmental (the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), some NGOs, and multinational corporations (MNCs)) entities was contemporary to other transnational issues, such as environmental degradation, human rights, fraud, money laundering, fiscal evasion, and/organized crime. Although analytically distinct from these cross-border phenomena, the mechanisms and ways in which corruption takes place are often intertwined. Not surprisingly, bribery by MNCs linked to the establishment of petrol and chemical industries or infrastructural projects in developing countries have resulted in vast environmental degradation. Similarly, countries condemned internationally for human rights violations are also known for their predatory practices towards national and foreign investors. At the EU level, official reports have indicated that the growth of fraud against Community financial interests is related partly to the diversion of funds by criminal organizations, which have been used, a posteriori, for illegal political financing.

3.2.4 Corruption And Its Public Policy Dimension. Current political research is particularly concerned with the way corruption affects governmental ability and efficacy to deliver policy outputs, varying accordingly to the singular organisational and attitudinal characteristics of each country. In a few words, corruption runs counter to good governance.

Other than a moral issue, corruption is a public policy problem. Corruption grows where public ethics have degenerated, where there are no clear rules through which public business is carried out, and where public or private activities lack proper modes of regulation to guarantee due process and fairness. The changing nature of the State and the blurring of the public private divide have been at the core of the problematic of corruption in recent years, alerting decision makers to the need to strengthen controls and revise standards in public life (Meny 1992, Della Porta 1992).

The complexity of modern decision-making process—different layers, actors, and mechanisms of political influence—added to the lack of transparency in which public decisions and procedures have been carried out, permitted a privileged access to State resources and undermined public confidence in democratic government.

The costs of corruption to the public purse are unquantifiable. Besides being a burden to taxpayers, corruption consolidates inefficiency and foils value-for-money considerations. It inflates market prices for public services and goods, supplied directly or contracted out to market actors; it fosters clientelism at the cost of fair competition. It allows the uncompetitive to thrive in a context of political protection.

Policy-makers have tried, in many countries, to regulate and control the situations conducive to corruption: procurement policies, regulation of public utilities delivery, control of markets. Other forms of soft corruption (various types of conflict of interest, pantouflage, cumul des mandats, lobbying) have also been subject to tighter regulation.

At the international level, the United Nations (UN) incessantly has reported and condemned vividly corruption as a product of mismanagement and bad policy-making at all levels. International economic financial organizations (the OECD, the IMF, the World Bank) equally have realized that their rehabilitation programs could not be accomplished solely through the recruitment of expert economists and that specific social, cultural, political, and institutional factors conditioning development had to be brought into account. Financial aid to underdeveloped economies, rather than contributing to development, was helping to sustain corrupt elites in power. The European Commission has insisted on good governance as a criterion to its preferential financial treatment and trading benefits with developing countries, and a guiding principle to enlargement accession strategies.

The European Parliament has also taken a recriminatory position in regard to corruptive practices within EU institutions, more precisely, the Commission.

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