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ABSTRACT
Anti-corruption reforms in fragile and conflict-affected states are considered as a policy imperative by international actors engaged in statebuilding. The establishment of anti-corruption agencies is often the preferred implementation strategy. The main rationale is that anti-corruption agencies demonstrate a government’s commitment to fight corruption, and should thus improve state legitimacy within a context of weak governance. In practice, several intervening factors condition the legitimacy effect of anti-corruption agencies, including the types and systems of corruption prevalent in a specific context, the perceptions of corruption towards specific parts of government, and how citizens attribute the successes or failures of these agencies to the state. More broadly, these intervening factors also challenge the predominant assumption of a positive linear relationship between anti-corruption reforms, increased state legitimacy, and greater stability in fragile and conflict-affected states.
Acknowledgements
I thank Philippe Le Billon for his valuable feedback on earlier versions of this article as well as the reviewers for their helpful comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Krasner and Risse, “External Actors, State-Building.”
2. Bellina et al., The Legitimacy of the State; Lemay-Hébert and Mathieu, “The OECD’s discourse”; and OECD, The State’s Legitimacy.
3. Lake, “Building Legitimate States”; Lemay-Hébert, “Statebuilding without Nation-Building”; and Sisk, “Elections and Statebuilding.”
4. Bellina et al., The Legitimacy of the State; Byrne and Klem, “Constructing Legitimacy”; and McLoughlin, “When Does Service Delivery Improve.”
5. Zaum, Legitimacy, Statebuilding and Conflict.
6. Eigen, “Combatting Corruption,” 159; Heilbrunn, “Post-Conflict Reconstruction,” 204; and Szeftel, “Misunderstanding African Politics.”
7. United Nations Development Programme, Fighting Corruption, 83.
8. Ibid., 87, emphasis added.
9. Böckmann, “Antikorruption: Wandel in Diskurs.”
10. Byrne, Arnold, and Nagano, Building Public Support; Independent Commission for Aid Impact, DFID’s Approach to Anti-Corruption; Marquette, Corruption, Politics and Development; Marquette, “The Creeping Politicisation”; Michael and Bowser, “The Evolution”; OECD, Setting an Agenda; Sampson, “The Anti-Corruption Industry”; United Nations Development Programme, Fighting Corruption; and United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, National Anti-Corruption Strategies.
11. Pugh, “Statebuilding and Corruption.”
12. Gilley, “The Determinants”; Gilley, The Right to Rule; and McLoughlin, “When Does Service Delivery Improve.”
13. Uvin, ‘Corruption and Violence.”
14. Pugh, “Statebuilding and Corruption,” 84; and Zaum, Political Economies of Corruption, 2.
15. Heilbrunn, “Post-Conflict Reconstruction.”
16. Seligson, “The Impact of Corruption.”
17. Rose-Ackerman, “The Institutional Economics.”
18. Persson, Rothstein, and Teorell, “Why Anticorruption Reforms Fail”; for a study of systemic corruption in Burundi, arguing for its interpretation as a collective action problem see Rufykikiri, “Grand Corruption in Burundi.”
19. In this regard, an independent media and civil society is not only important to increase awareness of corruption but also to reduce the tolerance of corruption. See e.g. Eigen, “Measuring and Combatting Corruption.”
20. Post-positivist studies on corruption go further in claiming that corruption is socially constructed, i.e. that ‘”corrupt” is what is considered corrupt at a certain place and a certain time’ (de Graaf, Wagenaar, and Hoenderboom, “Constructing Corruption,” 99). In this respect, discourses on (anti-)corruption, influenced by anti-corruption reforms and the performance of e.g. anti-corruption agencies, affect the perception and legitimacy of the state, i.e. the ‘discursive construction of the state’ (Gupta, “Blurred Boundaries,” 375). See also Schatzberg, “Power, Legitimacy, and ‘Democratisation’,” 446; Koechlin, Corruption as an Empty Signifier; Granovetter, “The Social Construction of Corruption.”
21. Doig, Watt, and Williams, “Why do Developing Country”; De Maria, “Cross Cultural Trespass”; and Heilbrunn, “Anti-corruption Commissions.”
22. OECD, The State’s Legitimacy, 23; and McLoughlin, “When Does Service Delivery Improve,” 343.
23. OECD, The State’s Legitimacy, 23, 26–27.
24. Department for International Development, Building Peaceful States, 32; McLoughlin, “When Does Service Delivery Improve,” 343; and Whaites, States in Development.
25. Gupta, “Blurred Boundaries,” 378; and Gupta, “Narrating the State.”
26. OECD, State Building; see also Bellina et al., The Legitimacy of the State, 9; and Schmelzle, Evaluating Governance.
27. Pugh, “Statebuilding and Corruption,” 86.
28. Graycar and Villa, “The Loss of Governance.”
29. OECD, The State’s Legitimacy, 20; and Rose-Ackerman, “Corruption and government,” 47.
30. OECD, The State’s Legitimacy, 25.
31. Le Billon, “Overcoming Corruption,” 76; see also Moran, “Democratic Transitions”; and Speck, “Upgrading Democracy in Mozamibque.”
32. Andersson and Heywood, “Anti-Corruption as a Risk”; Oltenau, Korrupte Demokratie? 276–83; and Warren, “What Does Corruption Mean,” 328.
33. Clausen, Kraay and Nyiri, “Corruption and Confidence.”
34. Uslaner, “Trust and Corruption”; and Uslaner, Corruption, Inequality, and the Rule of Law.
35. Anderson and Tverdova, “Corruption, Political Allegiances, and Attitudes”; Booth and Seligson, The Legitimacy Puzzle; and Chang and Chu, “Corruption and Trust.”
36. Zaum, “Corruption and Statebuilding,” 21; see also Zaum, “Statebuilding and Governance.”
37. Dorff, “Responding to the Failed State,” 67.
38. Ezrow and Frantz, Failed States and Institutional Decay, 257.
39. Lemay-Hébert, “Rethinking Weberian Approaches”; and Debiel and Lambach, “How State-Building Strategies Miss,” 23.
40. Recanatini, “Anti-Corruption Authorities,” 528.
41. Kaufmann, “Myths and Realities,” 88.
42. Boege, “Vying for Legitimacy,” 237; and Lemay-Hébert, “Statebuilding without Nation-Building,” 27.
43. See Putzel, Retaining legitimacy.
44. Debiel and Lambach, “How State-Building Strategies Miss.”
45. Lemay-Hébert, “Statebuilding without Nation-Building,” 22.
46. Lemay-Hébert, “The Semantics of Statebuilding”; see also Lemay-Hébert, “Statebuilding without Nation-Building,” 28; and OECD, Concepts and Dilemmas; and Beetham, The Legitimation of Power.
47. Debiel and Lambach, “How State-Building Strategies Miss,” 25.
48. Heilbrunn, Anti-Corruption Commissions, 1–2.
49. Doig, “Matching Workload,” 83.
50. De Maria, “Cross Cultural Trespass”; and Meagher, “Anti-Corruption Agencies.”
51. Institute for Economics and Peace, Peace and Corruption.
52. Le Billon, “Buying Peace”; and Reno, “Anti-Corruption Efforts.”
53. Le Billon, “Buying Peace,” 420.
54. Le Billon, “Corrupting Peace,” 76.
55. Goodhand distinguishes between ‘joint’, ‘private’ and ‘public’ extraction regimes depending on the involvement of government and /or private actors in extracting resource rents. The distribution of these rents may involve corruption or patronage. The extraction regimes differ in their outcome regarding political stability. Goodhand, “Corrupting or Consolidating the Peace,” 406–7, 414–5.
56. Cheng and Zaum, “Selling the Peace,” 8–10.
57. Donais, “The Political Economy of Stalemate,” 374.
58. Head, “The Contribution of Integrity Agencies,” 18.
59. Galtung and Tisné, “A New Approach.”
60. Mungiu-Pippidi, “Corruption: Diagnosis and Treatment,” 86; see also June and Heller, “Corruption and Anti-Corruption.”
61. Paris, At war’s end.
62. Börzel and van Hüllen, “State-Building and the European Union”; see also Chandler, “The State-Building Dilemma.”
63. Olivier de Sardan (“A Moral Economy of Corruption,” 26) refers to gift-giving and similar, culturally embedded practices as having ‘a certain relation of affinity’ with practices of corruption but are not corruption in themselves. These practices are bounded by ‘rules of moral legitimacy’ (Steidlmeier, “Gift Giving, Bribery and Corruption,” 26) which define whether certain practices are perceived as legitimate or illegitimate. The factor on different types and systems of corruption contends with this argumentation by further emphasising the different acceptance of diverse types of corruption. On gift-giving see further Lambsdorff and Frank, “Bribing versus Gift-Giving”; Chabal and Daloz, Africa works; Cameron et al., “Propensities to Engage in”; for a discussion of corruption types see Fisman and Golden, Corruption, 37–53.
64. Goel, Mazhar and Nelson, “Corruption Across Government Occupations”; and Nystrand, “Petty and Grand Corruption.”
65. This includes e.g. research looking at electoral consequences of corruption. See Fisman and Golden, Corruption, 204–14; and Ferraz and Finan, “Exposing Corrupt Politicians.”
66. Egnell, “Winning Legitimacy,” 221; Lindberg and Orjuela, “Corruption in the Aftermath of War,” 730; and Pugh, “Statebuilding and Corruption,” 81.
67. Miller, “Corruption and Corruptibility.”
68. Quah, “Curbing Asian Corruption.”
69. Ibid., 177.
70. Goodhand, “Corrupting or Consolidating the Peace,” 416.
71. Truex, “Corruption, Attitudes, and Education.”
72. Chabal and Daloz, Africa works; and Le Billon, “Buying Peace or Fuelling War.”
73. Chabal and Daloz, Africa works, 414.
74. Zaum, “Corruption and Statebuilding,” 25.
75. Di Puppo, “Anti-Corruption Interventions,” 221.
76. Peiffer and Alvarez, “Who Will Be.”
77. Chang and Kerr, “An Insider-Outsider Theory.”
78. Orjuela, “Corruption and Identity Politics.”
79. Lindberg and Orjuela, “Corruption and Conflict,” 221.
80. Chayes, Thieves of State, 52–60.
81. See http://widgets.weforum.org/partnering-against-corruption-initiative/ (accessed 25 August 2016).
82. Benjamin and Kimball, “Beyond Happiness and Satisfaction”; and Benjamin, “How should we Measure.”
83. Hardoon and Heinrich, Global Corruption Barometer 2013, 11.
84. See note 70 above.
85. Bridi and Fagan, After the Conflict, 3.
86. See note 71 above.
87. Walton, “Is all Corruption Dysfunctional.”
88. Rothstein, “Creating Political Legitimacy.”
89. Ibid., 325; and Rothstein, The Quality of Government, 15.
90. Ferraz and Finan, “Exposing Corrupt Politicians.”
91. In this respect, the consequences of a possible impeachment of Roussef’s successor, and leading political figure of her downfall, Michel Temer are yet to be seen.
92. See note 5 above.
93. McLoughlin, “When Does Service Delivery Improve,” 350.
94. Stel and Ndayiragije, “The Eye of the Beholder.”
95. Kuris, Holding the High Ground; and Schütte, “Against the Odds.”
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Sergio Marco Gemperle
Sergio Marco Gemperle holds an M.A. in international relations and development policy from the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. He is a PhD candidate at the Swiss Peace Foundation-swisspeace and the University of Basel, Switzerland. His research interests include theories of the state and state legitimation, and particularly the impact of corruption and anti-corruption on statebuilding processes. He holds a doctoral scholarship from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).