Centre for the Study of Corruption

For years, campaigners have lauded the benefits of transparency as a policy solution to corruption. That message was gradually refined as researchers noted that transparency was effective as an anti-corruption tool only if it led to increased accountability, and that this only happened in conditions where the overall institutional environment was conducive.

More recently, open data – data about the activities of governments and public officials which can shine light on whether they perform their duties with integrity – has again been paraded as the variant of transparency that will make all the difference.

Again, it quickly became clear that open data only helps detect and deter graft in certain conditions: first, the data must be good quality, second, there must be a group of interested and informed users, and third, there must be a way of getting the results heard, investigated, and acted upon. If open data is to work as a global anti-corruption tool, that implies a major effort to improve the quality of data that governments publish, empower actors to use the data to uncover misconduct, and then lobby governments and donors to listen to and act on the findings.

Read more ›

What do we know about the revolving doors in Westminster that we did not know a month ago?

Well, for a start we have seen that for some this is a laughing matter: on 20 March, when an urgent question was tabled in the Commons on his new role as editor of London’s Evening Standard, former Chancellor George Osborne joked that his presence in the House meant missing the newspaper’s deadline.

And why not take a light-hearted view? In 2014 the Telegraph reported that about 180 MPs (or 27 per cent) had more than one job – Osborne just appears to have six.

It’s not unusual

The revolving door phenomenon – the movement of individuals between legislative and regulatory roles and the industries affected by them – is not exclusive to Westminster. Neither is the practice of politicians holding second jobs: some of Europe’s politicians have gone as far as arguing that banning the practice would be a violation of their fundamental rights, although the rules were tightened on lobbying jobs in December 2016.

Read more ›

One of the challenges inherent in teaching courses on corruption and anti-corruption is defining precisely what the term means. And, this week saw me set out on my annual struggle to do exactly that. It’s one of the more tricky sessions on my final year undergraduate option on ‘political corruption’. In many ways, it’s easiest to follow the same logic as that of American Supreme Court Judge, Justice Potter Stewart; in 1964, when presiding over the case of Jacobellis v Ohio, he once noted about pornography that he couldn’t come up with a watertight definition of it, but he certainly knew what it was when he saw it.

That’s a fair starting point for analysing corruption, too; for the most part bribes, nepotism, fraud and such like are recognisable when you see them. But, as you dig deeper it soon becomes clear that conducting any sort of research on a phenomenon you’re defining in “I know it when I see it” terms is very difficult indeed. Corruption analysts have subsequently spent a fair amount of time thinking about what precisely it is that they are unpacking (see here and here for a couple of attempts to do that).

Read more ›

How effective is Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption drive? If you believe the latest data published by anti-corruption NGO Transparency International then progress is indeed being made. But, it’s slow going.

Trying to measure how much corruption exists is often a fool’s errand.  Corruption comes in many shapes and sizes and takes on a variety of different forms.  This doesn’t stop Transparency International, one of the world’s leading anti-corruption NGOs, from publishing an annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI).  Data is taken from a range of surveys on corruption and related issues and put in to what is effectively a poll of polls.  States are then ranked on a scale of 1 (the worst score possible) to 100 (the best).

There are many reasons to be just a little sceptical about the voracity of the data in the CPI, but that doesn’t stop it catching many policy-makers’ eyes.  No one wants to see their country going the wrong way in tables like these.  Chinese policy-makers are unlikely to be any different.

Read more ›

In recent years attempts to measure how much corruption exists have blossomed. Some approaches are based on perceptions of corruption, some on the experiences of individuals. Others use a range of proxies to measure what they argue might be corruption. Subsequently we now have broad aggregate indicators such as Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions’ Index (CPI) and the Control of Corruption variable in the World Governance Indicators (WGI), as well as much narrower and more focussed indices looking at, amongst other things, state capture, levels of financial secrecy and the quality of the business environment.

One of the most widely-watched of these attempts is TI’s Global Corruption Barometer (GCB), the latest editions of which were published late in 2016. The development of the GCB in 2003 was an attempt to move the previous emphasis away from seeking the opinions of experts and business leaders and on to ordinary people. The GCB is a public opinion survey that in 2013 asked 114,000 citizens in 107 countries about their “direct experiences with bribery” before going on to detail citizens’ “views on corruption in the main institutions in their countries”. The latest round of the GCB, published in stages through 2015 and 2016, is equally as expansive. The intention of the GCB is to bring ordinary people in to a field where their experiences and perceptions have traditionally been neglected.

Corruption is (apparently) everywhere

The GCB’s findings give plenty of food for thought. In 2013 more than one in four people around the world reported paying a bribe at some point over the last 12 months. The police and the judiciary were apparently the most bribe-prone institutions. Over half the people surveyed regarded their government as acting in the interests of preferred groups rather than the citizenry at large.

The picture was in many ways just as downbeat in the apparently less-corrupt western world. In the 2016 survey, for example, 53 per cent of citizens across 42 European and central Asian countries believed that their government was doing a poor job in fighting corruption. Perceptions were particularly gloomy in Spain (where 80 per cent of people thought their government was doing badly in this regard), Italy (70 per cent) and France (64 per cent).

Alongside data on questions like these, the 2013 survey also revealed that 65 per cent of New Zealanders – a country that is regularly vying for the top spot in the CPI – felt that over the last two years the level of corruption had increased in their country, whilst only 5 per cent felt that it had decreased. The picture was little better over the Tasman Sea in Australia; over the same time period 59 per cent of Australians thought corruption had worsened whereas, like in New Zealand, only 5 per cent thought it had got better. Things were not dissimilar in Europe; 57 per cent of Germans believed that there was more corruption in their country than two years previously whilst only 8 per cent thought there was less. Furthermore, 65 per cent of Germans thought political parties were in general corrupt, 54 per cent thought the same of the media whilst 49 per cent thought civil servants were either ‘corrupt’ or ‘extremely corrupt’. Sobering numbers.

Perception and reality

The GCB has now firmly established itself as an important part of the measurement mosaic. To TI’s credit, it reacted to criticisms of some of its other indices (principally the CPI) by introducing a detailed survey that helps bring people on the street back in to the discussion. Data such as this does nonetheless highlight two further potential problems.

Firstly, sceptics such as Claudio Weber Abramo have illustrated that opinions on corruption as revealed by the GCB “are strongly correlated with opinions about other issues”. It may well be that rather than picking up specific attitudes to corruption the GCB is tapping in to a much larger worldview. Indeed, Weber Abramo claims that the correlation is so strong that we could actually save ourselves the time and effort of measuring public opinion in this area by simply reading across from data on attitudes to things such as human rights and violence.

Secondly, many of the things that we think can help predict levels of perceived corruption (economic development, press freedom and so on) are not good predictors of how much corruption people claim that they personally have witnessed. In other words there is at times a considerable difference between the amount of corruption that people perceive to exist and the amount that they themselves experience. Only 1 per cent of Australians over the 12 months to 2013 paid a bribe, for example, yet 53 per cent think corruption is a problem. In the 2016 survey no Britons (!) reported paying a bribe, yet 57 per cent of people thought that the UK government was doing badly at fighting corruption.

This discrepancy could, of course, be a reflection of citizen awareness of grand corruption that they themselves don’t experience directly. The differences between what people think and what people experience are nonetheless often very large indeed. Furthermore, the size of these differences can differ noticeably from place to place. Such discrepancies are not simply the domain of the GCB; Eurobarometer surveys reveal similar patterns. As Paul Heywood has noted, 74 per cent of European citizens surveyed in the 2012 Eurobarometer surveys believed corruption to be a ‘major problem’ yet only 8 per cent reported any experience of bribery or attempted bribery.

Where to next?

Data on corruption is now in abundant supply. But it would be disingenuous to claim that analysis of it is an exact science. All of the organisations that produce indices (no matter whether they deal with perceptions, experiences or proxies of corruption) point out, to greater or lesser extents, the weaknesses in their respective approaches. TI and other organisations in the data-producing field may, in other words, talk up their respective efforts to quantify aspects of corrupt practice (and who can blame them), but they do also realise that they are dealing in imperfections.

The GCB offers a plethora of interesting information.  But, as with all corruption indices, we should be careful of reading too much into it. Someone, somewhere across the UK, for example, will have paid a bribe over the last 12 months, and just because the GCB didn’t reveal that statistically doesn’t mean that bribery doesn’t exist. The GCB is merely illustrating that everyday bribery is not a common facet of life in the UK whereas it is in other parts of the world.

Corruption is complex, multifaceted and riddled with nuance, and this makes quantifying it very difficult indeed. The GCB can help us spot trends and illustrate the scale and scope of particular types of corruption. But it is just an indicator not a statement of fact. If used carefully, the data can have a constructive role to play in helping us think just a little more about how the battle against corruption can be taken forward. What it shouldn’t be is taken as the gospel truth.

Dan Hough

University of Sussex

South Africa’s Public Protector has this week released a much-anticipated ‘state capture’ Report. The report offers up details of the vast influence that the Gupta family wields in the appointment of government ministers and the board members of major parastatals (see here).

The Gupta family has strong links with South Africa’s president, Jacob Zuma. One of Zuma’s wives was employed as a communications officer at JIC Mining Services while his daughter is a former director of Sahara Computers. Both companies belong to the Guptas. Zuma’s son is a former CEO of Shiva Uranium, a subsidiary of Oakbay Investments, the holding company of the Gupta family businesses. The India-born Gupta brothers (Atul, Ajay and Rajesh) have interests in mining (coal, gold and uranium), technology, energy and media. They own among other things a national newspaper and 24-hour news channel.

In 2013, the family was embroiled in controversy when a chartered plane carrying guests to the wedding of their niece landed at a military base in Pretoria (see here). It was alleged that the landing was personally authorised by the president as a favour to friends.

The Guptas’ alleged power and influence

One of the interesting parts of the Public Protector’s Report is the notion that the Gupta family engineered both the abrupt sacking of Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene, and his replacement by the previously unknown, David Van Rooyen. Zuma reversed the decision to appoint van Rooyen following a serious backlash from the business sector and billions of dollars being wiped off the nation’s stock market over just four days.

The Report supports Deputy Finance Minister Mcebisi Jonas’ public allegation that ‘the Guptas offered him the position of minister of finance before Nene was deposed. It turns out that Jonas declined this offer, as well as a bribe amounting to R600 million ($44m) and immediate cash payment of R600,000 (about $44,000). As a finance minister Jonas was supposed to implement a number of orders from the Guptas including sacking the Director General of the Treasury and other key members of executive management who were seen as stumbling blocks in efforts to secure lucrative deals from the state.

The incorruptible Jonas?

The actions of Deputy Minister Jonas are interesting when seen in light of the collective action theory of corruption (see here). Seeing that as corruption is endemic in South Africa, the collective action approach would consider an attempt to fend off the powerful Gupta family as being misguided or irrational. Considering the Guptas overwhelming political clout and the apparent arrogance with which they made their offers, most people would have yielded, reasoning that refusing to cooperate wasn’t going to change the rotten lot in Zuma’s administration. If anything, fighting the Guptas would most likely cost them their careers. Meanwhile, the Guptas would still have used their vast economic and political resources to identify a willing puppet, as indeed it seems they did in the person of David van Rooyen.

Apart from the fact that ‘working with the Guptas’ would be financially rewarding to Jonas, being appointed in place of Nene would probably appease sceptical investors. The appointment of a deputy minister of finance wouldn’t have hurt the market the way Van Rooyen’s— a former mayor of a small town— did. The whole thing would likely have been a win-win situation for all involved. All these considered, why then did Jonas make this potentially personally costly decision?

Well, his media statement (see here), suggests that he took a moral stance against what he saw as the “mockery of our hard earned democracy [and] the trust of our people….”.  But this is simply reiterating an ethics code we expect all public officers to uphold, and to declare when called upon to explain their gallant actions. It is a moral code many of those who get ensnared in the web of corruption also profess. Indeed, there is no shortage of stories of highly moral individuals getting involved in graft, either as receivers of bribes or as payers. This is in fact one of the reasons why anti-corruption research is increasingly sceptical of the alleged positive effect of ‘religiosity’ (as a proxy for moral values) in the fight against corruption (see here).

Where corruption is seen as systemic, whether or not to participate in it does not boil down to personal ethics and values; it is a consequence of institutional forces rather than a broken moral compass. There is something about the decision to resist the Guptas that goes beyond the moral convictions of Mcebisi Jonas.

Mark Granovetter’s threshold model of collective action provides a good starting point for understanding deputy minister’s laudable actions. The model treats binary decisions in which an actor, faced with two competing alternatives, makes a behavioural choice that is inconsistent with the maximum pay off he would get if he acted differently. Granovetter defines a person’s threshold for acting in the group (public) interest as the proportion of the group he would have to see acting in this manner before doing so himself.

A student with a low threshold will not wait for “gestures” from other students indicating their wish to leave a boring lecture before he stands up and leaves. Such an individual can initiate actions that benefit the common good even when this is most likely to result in significant costs to him/herself. While moral considerations may be a starting point, they are not necessarily the main reasons why a low-threshold person acts, often or at first alone. This potentially explains why two people with the same moral principles can act differently when faced with the Gupta-type overtures.

Moletsane Monyake

University of Sussex

There has plenty of news of late on MPs and their second jobs (for example, see here).  Martin Brown, recently graduated from Sussex’s MA in Corruption and Governance, takes a look at some of the challenges inherent in regulating how MPs use ‘our time’

MPs are lobbyists. They spend their time lobbying for us. They do that in order to make better laws and to scrutinise the work of government, ministers and civil servants. MPs know that it is only through careful research, consultation and consideration that good political decisions can be taken. In order to do that they meet with a wide range of stakeholders, some of those people are by necessity lobbyists. Lobbying, a term much used and abused, is an exchange of information.  Or, as Figuero and Richter (2014) put it an exchange of information …

‘… in private meetings and venues between interest groups and politicians, their staffs, and agents. Information takes the theoretical representation of a message and, in practice, may have many forms: statistics, facts, arguments, messages, forecasts, threats, commitments, signals, or some combination thereof. (Figuero and Richter, 2014)

Unfortunately for us, meetings between lobbyists and MPs tend to go unrecorded, while much of what an MP says otherwise is recorded – by Hansard, if it’s in parliament, or in the media if it is in public elsewhere. Of course we don’t pay as much attention as we should to what MPs say until lobbying goes wrong or when an MP’s behaviour comes into question. When, in other words, it deviates from:

‘the formal duties of a public role because of private-regarding (personal, close family, private clique) pecuniary or status gains; or violates rules against the exercise of certain types of private- regarding influence. (Nye 1967)

We know MPs make honest mistakes. Indeed, the MPs’ Code of Conduct and Guide to Rules (CoC) and the MPs’ Scheme of Business Costs and Expenses (SBCE) are designed to help MPs make as few of them as possible, offering guidance for better ethical behaviour, for example when his or her formal or informal duties overlap with their private interests. These mostly useful guides don’t always work because the advice on offer can be confusing: ‘the code applies to all aspects of their public lives. It does not seek to regulate what members do in their purely private and personal lives (CoC p3 2015).

Public and Private

It is difficult to draw, as they suggest, a solid line between an MP’s public and private interests. The Wittingdale case (BBC, April 2016) is an illustration of this problem, when a politician has too much discretion and is then judged to have ‘got it wrong’, defining a public issue as purely private.

In the John Wittingdale case, the former Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport, maintained that his relationship with someone working in the sex industry should remain a private matter. He thought the public should not know about some newsworthy episodes even though he had responsibility for press regulation and his office could influence what journalists write. MPs, understandably, want to protect their privacy and their Parliamentary privileges. It is they after all, who defend democracy on our behalf.

What is much less understandable is their ‘need’ to protect privileges relating to second jobs and consultancies. Winston Churchill was a strong advocate of the idea that an MP’s Parliamentary office should not be a full time commitment. Many MPs (although more on the Tory side than on the Labour side) think it is good for the public if MPs stay in touch with the ‘real world’ by working outside of the House of Commons. However, this now looks more like the type of ‘smart’ behaviour Donald Trump would argue for. Many MPs have second jobs, some are happy to admit to selling their time and political connections to big businesses. John Bercow MP, Leader of the House of Commons, clearly thinks it is still bad behaviour:

“people should be in Parliament to represent their constituents and to stand up for principles and policies dear to them. People should not be in Parliament to add to their personal fortune… I have in the past suggested a lot of members of the public would expect members of parliament to do a full-time job” (Skye News, 2015)

Public trust in MPs is still trying to recover from the MPs’ expenses scandal of 2008. Public understanding of British politics has not improved, even with better access to information about Parliament from Freedom of Information requests (Birkenshaw, 2010). We still do not know what excellent or even just ‘good’ behaviour in an MP’s office looks like. The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) reports on MPs’ office expenses, offering fiscal transparency, but even this is thin soup without any useful narrative about how MPs make decisions or what they do with their time. We can see that IPSA and the office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards (PCS) take complaints and they do question MPs. However, only a tiny number of these investigations result in Parliamentary sanctions being placed on MPs. The Parliamentary system more often defends the decisions of MPs, possibly fearing what appears to them as a slow erosion of MPs’ powers because of a small number of bad apples.

However the problem remains; how do we get better, more useful information from MPs to help us understand what they do with our time? The current system of disclosures and registers, such as the Register of MP’s Financial Interests and the Register of All Party Parliamentary Groups, is not easily searchable across years or for individual MPs and there is no easy method of comparing information across registers. Transparency International has published very useful information about the UK Lobbying Act 2014 and they outline reforms for the Lobbying Register which include some essential disclosures.

Revolving Doors

These disclosures are also essential for fixing the larger problem of ‘Revolving Doors’, when long-term benefits accrue to MPs, Ministers and Civil Servants because of their co-operation with lobbyists. Listen to what Richard Brook’s a former HMRC Tax Inspector has to say about the problems of crony capitalism in our democracy and how lobbying creates the expectation of future employment. Lobbying shifts an MP’s priorities away from their official duties towards the interests of big business.

Brooks tells us Tony Blair is the worst example of this type of deviation. Blair actively conceals the names of those he consults with and for and hides what he earns as a lobbyist through his network of companies. We should also ask does David Cameron plan to use his political contacts in the same way as Blair and should we know who those political contacts are when he uses them? The Lobbying Act 2014 asks very little of serving or retired politicians while 650 MPs are not required to keep any records at all of their meetings with lobbyists. Keep in mind that some MPs are more sought after by lobbyists than others because they are members of Select Committees or active in the Shadow Cabinet. These MPs are in demand as lobbying scandals involving ‘cash for access’ show. In 2013, Patrick Mercer MP broke ‘house’ rules when he failed to declare paid political consultancy and paid advocacy while he was Chair of the Fiji All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG).

In 2015, Sir Malcolm Rifkind MP used his position as Chair of Parliament’s Security and Intelligence Committee and argued that despite his workload as an MP and Chair of an important Select Committee, he had plenty of time for political consultancy.

Rifkind was seen to be greedy. An MP earns £74,962 pa (April 2016) with an additional £15,000 pa for chairing a Select Committee. Ben Scott analysed MPs’ disclosures of additional income from the MPs’ Register of Members Financial Interests (RMFI) in 2015, showing that: ‘73 MPs were paid £3.4million for advisory roles in 2014-15’. Scott aggregated all payments by type and noted that declared payments for advisory roles accounted for 36% and £3,444,797 of all additional income for MP’s.

It appears unlikely that the current system of self–regulation and co-regulation in the House of Commons will offer us better transparency or more accountability around how MPs take decisions. However, in that space there is an opportunity for (Labour?) MPs to lead by collective voluntary action, by making better digital declarations about meetings to provide a narrative that can fill in the gaps left by IPSA and Parliamentary Registers. Whether they are able to take it is another matter.

Martin Brown

mbmbrown0@gmail.com

UK democracy is in a crisis of confidence. These are the findings released in a report on Friday by Transparency International (TI) entitled ‘Take Back Control: How Big Money Undermines Trust in Politics’.

The headline figures undoubtedly make grim reading for the British political elite: 76% of respondents think wealthy individuals often use their influence on government for their own interests, 59% of respondents thought financial support by companies to political parties and candidates should be banned completely and 28% thought ‘most’ or ‘all’ MPs are involved in corruption.

These findings are based on the TI Global Corruption Barometer (GCB). The full results of the 2016 survey are not yet available but previous polls are also instructive. The 2013 GCB, for example, found that 66% of respondents felt that political parties were corrupt, or extremely corrupt.

The GCB is not without its methodological failings. Taken at face value the poll would mean the UK would rank somewhere between Afghanistan (performs better) and Zimbabwe (performs worse) on the same measures. Despite the legitimate, and legion, disappointments we might have with our political elite that is not a ranking that holds up to serious scrutiny. Indeed, when the same poll asks about actual experiences of corruption, the UK comes out much better.

Following the Voters’ Wishes

However, as I show in the recently published collection ‘More Sex, Lies and the Ballot Box: Another 50 Things You Need To Know About Elections’ findings such as these are consequential. Politicians feel compelled to respond to the overwhelming public belief that the system is broken. In 2010 and 2015 the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat manifestos all included some form of pledge to introduce (or at least discuss) reform of party finance. Alongside this, in the past ten years there have been two major government sponsored commissions on the subject: the Hayden Phillips Review (2006-2007) and the Committee on Standards in Public Life (CSPL) Inquiry in 2010-11.

This is no less ironic as the public overestimates how much businesses contribute and (considerably) underestimates how much individuals contribute. Although, in fairness, the knowledge that almost 50% of the financing of British parties is made up by (often large) individual donations is, perhaps, unlikely to quell public unease.

In fact, when it comes to party funding reform, we find ourselves in a situation in which policy recommendations are made – and put into manifestos – almost entirely based on public perceptions. Yet we also know this is a subject about which the public doesn’t really know much at all. Many experts also believe these perceptions to be mistaken – or at least exaggerated.

Where to from here?

TI suggest that their findings show that the ‘public want tougher controls on money in politics’. The solution proffered is to draw on the recommendations from the CSPL and cap donations at £10,000. The problem with this is the report entirely neglects to include the logical conclusion of this policy – as quoted on release of the CSPL report in 2011:

“If the public want to take big money out of politics, the only way to do so is a cap on donations. It is unrealistic to expect to be able to do that at a level low enough to achieve public support.”

You simply cannot remove a large institutional form of funding and expect parties to get by. Although Labour party membership has positively ballooned (technical political science jargon) party subs still only account for 18% of Labour’s total 2015 income.

Yet state funding continues to be unpopular with the public. When the CSPL held focus groups on the subject of increasing public funds they described a particular journey respondents generally followed. There was an initial concern about donations followed by that concern increasing and state funding becoming viewed as acceptable.  However, when facing the reality of trade-offs between caps on donations and increased state funding there was quickly a decrease in acceptability and a reluctance to introduce a cap or indeed to increase state funding. That’s no solution at all.

This, if nothing else shows you that focus group researchers do God’s work. More importantly it shows that there is an essential collective action problem, a paradox at the centre of debates surrounding party funding. The public by-and-large detest the current system – but aren’t willing to pay for it to change.

Further muddying the water is that there’s little evidence that reforms would have the desired effect. A cap on donations, for example, may or may not significantly reduce the risk of corruption, but it is even less likely to make a difference to perceptions of corruption.

As the report suggests a mistrust in politicians and the current political order is not unique to Britain, it is a (at the very least) Europe-wide phenomena. Significant state subsidisation is the norm on the continent.

As the public have little knowledge of how party funding works (and to be fair, that in and of itself is not unreasonable; Joe Bloggs has other things to worry about) it is unlikely that such reforms will work. Especially if framed as a panacea for both political disaffection and political misbehaviour. This makes it all the more perplexing that recommendations and policy reform lean so heavily on public opinion.

Any report that attempts to put party funding reform at the front and centre of public debate outside of a perceived episode of political malfeasance should be lauded. The problem TI have is that they fail to grasp a question that has foxed policy makers (and academics) for decades. What do you do when the voters are wrong?

Sam Power

University of Sussex

Corruption, so it often seems, is everywhere. Yet there are only very few universities that have teaching programmes that are dedicated to analysing it. The University of Sussex has been in the vanguard of trying to change that. It introduced a full-time MA in Corruption and Governance back in 2012 and a two-year part-time LLM in Corruption, Law and Governance taught out of Qatar in 2016. Analysing corruption won’t rid us of the problem overnight, but, via the students who come through these courses, it does have the potential to help coax and cajole (sometimes reluctant) rulers to change their ways.

According to www.nexis.com the word corruption appeared 1,240 times in UK newspaper article headlines in 2015. Fraud was even more prevalent, appearing on 4,177 occasions. The word bribery, meanwhile, came up a ‘mere’ 264 times. The types of cases covered were also wide, varied and often bewildering; on one day alone in the UK in November, for example, the Independent was analysing how the Vatican was putting reporters on trial who had previously uncovered corruption cases in the Holy See. The Times was talking about an apprentice jockey who was facing a ban from horse racing on account of deliberately riding to lose whilst the Guardian was analysing FIFA’s alleged corruption problems.

Academic research in the area of corruption has also blossomed. A search in mid-2016 for the term corruption on JSTOR, the digital library of academic publications, revealed no less than 169,941 journal articles where corruption was mentioned. Fraud, meanwhile, appeared in 105,144 articles and bribery came up on 22,971 occasions. Corruption, and concepts that are closely linked to it, are on a lot of people’s minds.

Taught programmes on corruption

The widespread interest in corruption is nonetheless not replicated in taught programmes in academia. Around the world you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of universities where corruption or related topics are the subject of a whole degree programme. More places offer specific modules that look at parts of the corruption mosaic, but they are often small parts of much bigger and broader degree academic paths.

At least some of the reasons for this are (in part) understandable. Corruption is a difficult notion to pin down. Tricky methodological challenges need to be overcome. Corruption is inherently interdisciplinary in nature, yet, despite much high-minded rhetoric, university programmes tend to remain avowedly disciplinary in focus. Finally, and less understandably, corruption has also often been understood as nothing more than a marginal problem.

Rather than shirk these challenges, the University of Sussex has chosen to rise to them. The take up on the MA launched in 2012 has been encouraging, and this prompted Qatar’s Rule of Law and Anti-Corruption Centre (ROLACC) to approach Sussex about launching a programme in the Gulf Region looking at similar questions. The product of that is a course that analyses how the rule of law can and must be at the centre of anti-corruption thinking, but also how other related but different concepts play key roles.

Getting governance right, for example, is vital in setting the groundwork for tackling corruption. Indeed, it is often work done in other, interrelated areas that is most vital. Hardwire in processes of both transparency and accountability across the whole bureaucratic machine and you will choke the oxygen out of corruption’s lungs.

Coaxing and Cajoling

The key contribution that programmes such as Sussex’s MA and LLM make is not of revealing the golden bullets that will help kill the corruption beast. If it were that easy, there would be no need for corruption and anti-corruption courses at all. It’d be a simple case of ticking off boxes on a technocratic check-list.

The role that education plays is to help students think about core concepts that academic research has revealed to be important. Transparency and accountability are just two of these, but how they translate into policy will naturally be determined by the structures on the ground. Successful anti-corruption tools can and do take on different forms in different places.

The job of Sussex’s graduates, from both the UK and Qatar, is to use the skills and knowledge they have acquired to evaluate what needs to be done in each given setting. Based on what they have learned, they need to have the confidence to use their judgement to coax and cajole those who are reticent to reform of the merits of their particular case. The great value of education is that it empowers citizens to think, to evaluate and to act. In terms of a global challenge such as corruption, there clearly is plenty for Sussex’s students to begin acting on.

Dan Hough

University of Sussex