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Mike R.'s avatar

"The staggering rates of politicians being investigated and imprisoned means the acts of corruption were caught, deemed impermissible by the law, and prosecuted—in a sense, the system is working."

This may not necessarily mean the system is working. It could equally mean that the system is unjustly and corruplty pursuing previous power-holders in an act of political vengeance and self-promotion!

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Quinn's avatar

Thanks for this great post.

My model had been that a main driver of corruption was the social expectation of corruption – basically the idea you quoted + the power of default behaviors and inertia:

“...in a context in which corruption is the expected behaviour, monitoring devices and punishment regimes should be largely ineffective since there will simply be no actors that have an incentive to hold corrupt officials accountable.”

Until reading this post I hadn't realized that this model doesn’t do a good job explaining the recent corruption in Peru though. There’s apparently enough accountability for Alan Garcia to kill himself rather than face up to it – that seems like a pretty well functioning accountability mechanism! The other corrupt politicians you list seem to be facing real accountability as well.

One way of reconciling this could be:

• The social expectations about corruption that are driving the current accountability mechanisms have emerged relatively recently (say over the past ~20-30 years)

• This batch of corrupt politicians grew up and absorbed more permissive social norms about corruption that existed prior to the emergence of the new ones.

• Their corrupt behavior reflected the prior permissive norms but was then met with the accountability from the new less-permissive norms.

This explanation would also be consistent with:

(1) More reported social concerns about corruption (because people care more about it)

(2) Higher reported corruption levels (more is being caught and reported because people care more about it)

Hopefully I’m not being too optimistic :)

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