Centre for the Study of Corruption

On February 10, Transparency International UK launched its new report, ‘Lifting the Lid on Lobbying’.  As lead researcher, The University of Sussex’s Liz David-Barrett sets out the main findings below.

Lobbying is a critical part of the policy-making process in a liberal democracy.  If we imagine a world without lobbying, that would require politicians and civil servants to be experts in a vast range of areas.  But it would also require them to be prophets, able to foresee all of the future consequences of their policies for the many different stakeholder groups in society.

The fact that interest groups influence policy, then, is not a problem, but it does raise difficult questions about how to ensure that everyone who needs a voice has one and that the level of access and influence available to different groups is fair.  Moreover, lobbying is not just about the making of laws and policies.  Groups lobby to win contracts, to influence appointments to public bodies, and to shape the way that funds are allocated.  What is at stake is how public money is spent and whether it serves the public interest.

Ultimately, these questions place an enormous burden on politicians and policy-makers to ensure that they make decisions on the basis of sound evidence and can make thoughtful judgements among competing claims.  This also requires the public to place great trust in policy-makers.

That trust is severely challenged at the moment.  TI’s last Global Corruption Barometer found that 59% of UK respondents believed that the UK government is ‘entirely’ or ‘to a large extent’ run by a few big entitites acting in their own best interests.  In common usage, the term ‘lobbying’ is shorthand for something exclusive, dirty and unfair, something corrupt.

These concerns were shared by David Cameron, when he was opposition leader.  In 2010, he described lobbying as the next big scandal waiting to happen and promised to regulate it more effectively.  Yet our research revealed 14 new scandals related to lobbying and the revolving door that have emerged since his speech.  And that is just the scandals that came to light.

Why is this?  What’s going wrong with lobbying in the UK?

First, transparency is severely lacking.  We found that the vast majority of lobbying in the UK occurs behind closed doors.  Disclosure of lobbying meetings is only required for official ministerial meetings and those with Permanent Secretaries. Yet a great deal of policy-making and lobbying takes place elsewhere, as our interviews with both policy-makers and lobbyists confirmed.

Lobbying of parliamentarians, lobbying of all but the most senior civil servants, lobbying of local government officials and elected members, and lobbying of a vast number of public agencies can take place without records of the meetings being disclosed. Indeed, even lobbying targeted at Ministers need not be disclosed if it occurs outside Departmental meetings.

Another problem here concerns the role of ‘big money’ – that is, large donations by individuals – in financing political parties.   It seems that money might be buying influence, whether in the form of access to policy-makers, honours, or peerages.

A second set of issues relates to the integrity of policy makers.  Recent scandals have revealed politicians and crown servants who were willing to abuse their powers to benefit a private interest group, did so in exchange for payment, and failed to declare such payments.  Other scandals relate to the revolving door, whereby individuals trade on knowledge or contacts gained in public employment when they leave public office (or in anticipation of leaving public office).

These cases suggest that some individuals see public office as an asset which can be traded.  Their behavior showed disregard for the rules which were supposed to shape their conduct, as well as a shocking lack of respect for the spirit of those rules.  We also found that the rules regulating the conduct of politicians and public officials vary considerably in the different national and devolved institutions of the United Kingdom.  This seems a recipe for confusion, and poor accountability.

The third issue is access.  Lobbying looks corrupt when it grants or facilitates preferential access to some groups or individuals, or serves only narrow interests rather than the broader public interest.  It is inevitable that some organisations and individuals are better equipped to engage in public policy and lobbying than others, but policy makers should account for this. While it is impossible to ensure that all groups have equal access, our research suggests that, in the UK, money can buy access.  This prompts suspicions that access is unfair and that decisions are taken to serve the interests of those with greater resources.

Policy-making is becoming more technical and complex. One consequence is that politicians and civil servants increasingly look to external experts for advice, including advisory groups, academic institutions and think tanks.  The current UK government has also created ‘management boards’ responsible for overseeing the strategic direction of individual departments.

While these new governance mechanisms may be necessary, it is not clear that the rules and regulation have caught up.  The process of selecting members of advisory groups lacks transparency, raising risks that external advisors might promote their own agendas.

Secondments into government from private-sector companies also raise questions.  When management consultancies provide staff off the public payroll to work on technical details of policy or implementation in government departments, there is a risk they might shape policy to suit themselves or their clients.

The Lobbying Act ostensibly sought to address these issues, but it is grossly inadequate.  First, it defines lobbyists and the lobbied too narrowly, so that only a tiny proportion of those involved in lobbying are covered by its rules.  Second, the requirements for disclosure on those lobbyists that are included are minimal, far weaker than similar disclosure requirements in the United States for example.  Finally, the sanctions for those who are found to have breached the Act are insignificant, a paltry amount compared to the sums spent on lobbying.

Our new report sets out 15 recommendations to reform lobbying in the UK.  Let us hope that the incoming government will be ready to take up the challenge.

As has been discussed previously on this blog and elsewhere, party finance reform – notably an increase in public funding – is an increasingly popular response to the myriad of financial challenges that political parties face in the 21^st century. The advantages and disadvantages of state funding have been discussed at length by academics, practitioners and politicians alike, with perhaps the biggest ‘pro’ being that it provides the opportunity to rid (or at the very least limit) politics of the undue influence of so-called special interests and wealthy donors. Michael Koss takes this argument a step further by showing that an increase in state funding becomes more likely ‘the more the discourse on political corruption identifies state funding as a remedy against corrupt practice in party politics’. Whilst these arguments are undoubtedly (at least to me) fascinating, what is also interesting about party funding reform – and, indeed, reform more generally – is the unintended consequences that are thrown up when reform occurs.

An example of this forms the basis of a new study by Harvard based PhD candidate Andrew B. Hall. In a study of five state legislatures – Arizona, Connecticut, Maine, Minnesota and Wisconsin – which have strong public funding programmes, or ‘clean election laws’ (the name is, perhaps, instructive of the motivation for implementing said reforms), Hall came up with three key findings. Firstly, as expected (and intended), public funding reduced the financial advantage of incumbent politicians. Secondly, and also as expected (and intended), public funding made elections more competitive. Finally, there was also an unintended consequence, the increase in public funding makes polarization in the state legislature worse. That is to say, legislation that introduces a robust public funding regime creates a disadvantage for moderate party candidates. The reason for this is that individual donors and what Hall calls ‘access oriented interest groups’, donate money in different ways and for different reasons.

The work brings to mind that of Iain McMenamin who shows that, in terms of business financing of political parties, ‘money is multi-lingual’. Donations can be either ideological or pragmatic (for a review of McMenamin’s 2013 book, see here). Ideological donations are donations to a specific party which holds some form of ideological affinity with the donor, whereas pragmatic donations are given without any notion of political affiliation, just to the party which is perceived to hold the most power. In the American context, Hall shows that we can understand ‘access oriented interest group’ donations as largely falling into the latter category which, intentionally or not, tends to favour more moderate candidates. Individual donations, however, fall into the former category, which tends to favour polarising candidates. This is because, unlike pragmatic interest groups, individual donors are much less likely to spread their donations across candidates of different parties, to ensure some form of influence (perceived or otherwise). Individual donors are much more likely to donate to those for whom they have a strong ideological affiliation, who also tend to be on the polarised end of the political spectrum. Therefore, funding reform which introduces significant state subsidy, limits donations from ‘access oriented interest groups’ and privileges individual donations, increasing polarisation in the state senate.

The findings also represent a much larger discursive point when engaging with corruption more generally. There often exists an unspoken dichotomy between acceptable and unacceptable influence. That individual donations are a positive sign of a functioning and vibrant democracy despite the fact that they may lead to ‘a polarized, and probably less functional politics’. Whereas special interest donations (from ‘access oriented interest groups’) tend to represent everything that is wrong with modern democracy and some sort of pervasive, shadowy, Bilderberg-esque influence over politicians – who have little interest in actual, y’know, public service preferring to make as much money from politics as possible before retiring to a cushy job in the private sector. The reality, of course, as these findings show is a little more complicated than this – no reform is perfect, democracy is messy and a trade-off will have to occur.

Beyond this is also the notion that donations are almost intrinsically corrupt if the group donating – or indeed the person being donated to – represents something that one does not agree with. There often seems to be a fairly thin line between what represents a corrupting influence and what does not and that line tends to be drawn alongside some form of normative political judgement. One man’s lobbyist (yuck!) is another man’s advocacy group (hooray!).

This was further shown by reports at the end of 2014 that a new study had tried to answer the question of whether power actually corrupts. One of the lab experiments is described by a co-author of the study as follows:

“Participants played what is called a dictator game. The dictator, referred to as the “leader” in the experiment, could decide how to apportion a sum of money between himself or herself, and his or her team. They had to make choices between serving the greater good – doing what’s right for public welfare by increasing the team’s payout – or serving oneself, thereby increasing the leader’s payout but destroying public welfare.”

The problem here is that the act of selfishness, and to a certain extent hypocrisy, is being (mis)taken to be a necessarily corrupt act. Furthermore, not serving the greater good is also seen as representative of a corrupt act. A person in a position of power (who I may or may not agree with) acting selfishly and not serving the greater good is not necessarily committing a corrupt act, just as a special interest group (who I might not agree with) donating a large sum of money to a politician (who I might not agree with) does not necessarily represent a position of undue influence. That is not to say that the action (or exchange) is desirable, but it is to say we should be wary about screaming (insert expletive of choice) corruption whenever we are presented with something that we disagree with.

To return to the study to hand. The work of Andrew Hall is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, it shows us that, at least in the context of the USA, an increase in state funding (at the expense of private funding) leads to certain interesting and unintended consequences. However, American politics is nothing if not exceptional, so I would be curious to see if these findings hold up in other contexts – particularly in the advanced industrial democracies of Western Europe. Secondly, the work of both Hall and McMenamin raises broader theoretical questions about what should – and  should not – be considered an illegitimate, or indeed corrupt, exchange. It is by engaging with this literature and building on it ourselves that we can draw these lines in an ever sharper way.

Sam Power

University of Sussex

Swaziland doesn’t appear in the western news that often, but when it does it’s rarely for the ‘right’ reasons. And, once again, that’s been the case in recent days. In similar fashion to a celebrity whose life is plagued by narcotics and alcohol abuse, the Swazi government continues to frame itself as a victim of circumstance rather than being responsible for its own demise. On New Year’s Day the country’s textile industry suffered a serious blow when the USA, a major recipient of textile exports from Swaziland, decided to withdraw its trade agreement with the nation (see here).

The reasons behind such aggressive action are to do with the non-compliance of the government in establishing legal sanctions protecting its labourers. Although Prime Minister Barnabas Dlamini states that the country will not suffer as a result, the predicted outcome is a loss of over 17,000 jobs, a devastating blow to a population of approximately 1million, which is already suffering from a high unemployment rate. Ironically, the King has also recently authorised a project worth US$90million, to build an oil storage facility in the country (see here). He proudly stated that it would “have a 90 million litre fuel capacity to last Swaziland 90 days. It [will also] store 42 million litres of diesel and 38 million litres of petrol and result in the creation of at least 300 jobs”. The tender for this project was not open, and neither was it approved by parliament. The contract has been given to the South African company, Kantey & Templer Consulting Engineers, which was also contracted to build a new airport in the country. Naturally, rumours of malpractice and patronage have begun to circulate amongst the political elite. What interests the monarch has with Kantey & Templer have yet to be uncovered. Such extravagance is viewed as unnecessary, particularly at a time when the nation will most likely require such funds to deal with the inevitable unemployment crises.

Quite what is going on here is not clear.  But it is something that certainly merits further attention as Swaziland struggles to keep its economic head above water.

NS

How best should political life be funded? The question is hardly new, and it should come as no surprise that it’s received coverage on this blog before (see here and here). For some the introduction (or expansion) of the state funding of politics is one way of fighting the influence of big business in political life. For others state funding brings with it more problems than it solves, and it’s subsequently viewed more sceptically. The more interesting work moves beyond this and tries to work out how different funding regimes can lead to different types of corruption (see here). Be all that as it may, debates as to how politics should or shouldn’t be funded have taken on a peculiar new dimension in Germany in recent weeks. And this debate has done plenty to muddy the decidedly murky waters yet further.

Germany has a system of party funding that comprises three basic elements. Party members pay subscriptions, individuals and corporate entities can donate money directly and parties that poll above 0.5 per cent of the vote in national elections receive subsidies from the state. Some parties rely particularly heavily on membership dues, others do better in terms of the donations they receive whilst some are particularly reliant on state funding. Table 1 illustrates the balance per category for each of the main parties represented in the German parliament (as of 2011).

Table 1

Party Funding in Germany

Who gets what and how (in per cent)?

Source; Bundestags-Drucksache, 17/12340

* Most of this money (around 55m Euro in total in 2011) is made of by contributions from elected officials such as MPs, MEPs, local councillors and members of regional parliaments (MdLs).

Germans (and Germany-watchers) regularly dissect the traditional arguments about the virtues of this system (see here for a good summary of the main issues). Are smaller parties over compensated? Does the not inconsiderable state subsidy make life just a little too easy for the parties? Do parties with free-market ideologies (such as the FDP in this case) benefit unduly from donations from business? And so on. The focus none the less tends to be on the traditional parties. Every once in a while there will be a piece in a Sunday supplement about the challenges that micro-parties face, but the attention of both the popular and academic world tends to remain on the big six. Two rather peculiar developments in the Autumn of 2014 have changed that just a little.

In October 2014 the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a new and spikey right-wing anti-Euro movement that entered the European Parliament in 2014 (having narrowly missed entering the federal parliament in Berlin the year before), began selling gold in its online shop. They sold it in the form of gold coins (the 490 Euro replica German Mark coin was particularly popular – it sold out within days) and gold bars. In the first 11 days of business the party had managed to persuade over 800 people to part with their cash to the tune of around 1.6m Euro (see here, in German, for more on this).   Even the AfD was surprised by the uptake.

The AfD’s metamorphosis in to a gold-selling business has had a direct and an indirect effect on its coffers. On the one hand the profits flow directly in to the party’s bank account and help it carry out its activities. On the other hand it also means that it can claim more money from the state.  Why?  The party is currently entitled to claim around 5m Euro on account of the votes it has received in recent elections, but it can only get that if it can illustrate that it has raised the same amount of money itself.  If it can’t, then it will only get funds proportionate to what it has raised (so, if the AfD raised 4m Euro from members’ contributions, donations and other business, it could claim 4m of the 5m it is theoretically due from the state). So, the more gold it sells, the more money German taxpayers give the party.

It didn’t take long for a reaction to the AfD’s money-making wheeze to materialise. Protests were lodged, investigations were undertaken. Indeed, the Bundestag’s administration conducted a thorough enquiry in to whether the AfD’s behaviour in any contravened Germany’s ‘Party Law’. Much to the consternation of the President of the Federal Parliament (effectively the Speaker), Norbert Lammert, it didn’t and the gold-selling continued. Cue lots of head-shaking from the German political class. Lammert, meanwhile, called for the Home Affairs Select Committee to change the law precisely to outlaw this type of shenanigans.

If that wasn’t enough, the current law was made to look even more ridiculous in early December. Another party, ‘Die Partei’, found an altogether different way of getting the state to fund its activities. The ‘Partei’ is rather like the Monster Raving Looney Party (MLP) in the UK, taking a light-hearted, satirical look at all things political. The major difference to the MLP is that on account of Germany’s electoral system the ‘Partei’ only needs relatively few votes to make it in to parliaments – and this it did in 2014, sending Martin Sonneborn to the European Parliament after polling a mere 0.6 of the vote.

‘Die Partei’ is well known for coming up with schemes and ideas that are aimed at making others look just a little silly.  So we perhaps shouldn’t have been surprised when the Partei announced that if the AfD could sell gold, then it could sell money. The Partei announced that for 105 Euro you could buy 100 Euro from them, for 25 Euro, meanwhile, you’d get 20 Euro. Much to the Partei’s surprise, 80,000 Euro has already landed in the party’s account, and orders totaling over 163,000 Euro have come in. Following the same logic as the AfD, the 5 Euro profit on every transaction moves the party that little bit closer to claiming the 240,000 Euro it claims it has access to from state coffers (see here for more on this).

Whether the ‘Partei’ actually sees any of that money remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure; ingenious actors can make even the most well-thought through system look like the proverbial ass. The German party-funding regime is short on neither laws nor judicial attempts to interpret them, but that hasn’t saved it from two parties trying (successfully) to ‘play the game’. What can we learn from this? Firstly, party funding regimes never stand still as rational actors do their level best to get the most (in financial terms) out of them. Secondly, normative assumptions about what is and what isn’t appropriate behaviour will differ considerably; for some the AfD and ‘Die Partei’ are chancers bringing the system in to disrepute, for others they are simply quicker and more nimble than their bigger, more established opponents who may well be unhappy simply as they themselves didn’t think of similar schemes first.  Is, in other words, selling a victoria sponge at a summer garden party any different to selling gold on the open market (or indeed cash to those who want to pay more for it than its face value)? The method (selling something for profit) and the end product (that profit flows to your party of choice) are the exactly same.  One thing is none the less for sure – it’ll be worth watching how the German political class deals with these unconventional challenges to the party funding regime.

Dan Hough

Another year, another CPI.  The world’s most well-watched measure of public sector corruption was published on 3 December and the usual suspects were in pretty much their usual places.  Denmark (92 out of 100) pipped perennial rivals New Zealand (91) and Finland (89) for the top spot, whilst North Korea and Somalia once more share the dubious honour of coming joint 174^th and therefore last.  A number of countries can be celebrated as apparent success stories; the Ivory Coast, Egypt, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, for example, all improved on their 2013 performance by five points, whilst Afghanistan, Jordan, Mali and Swaziland added four points to their previous totals.  At the other end of the spectrum Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey dropped five points (from 50 to 45, and with that from to 64^th from 53^rd), whilst Angola, Malawi and most notably China – despite an ongoing and high-profile anti-corruption campaign from leader Xi Jinping (see here and here for more on that) – dropped four places.

So much for the nuts and bolts of the results, which can be dissected in all their glory here.  What can and should we read out of all this?  In order to answer that question it is worth stepping back and remembering how the index works and what TI is trying (successfully and unsuccessfully) to do with it.  The CPI is a composite index and a variety – 12 in 2014 – of data sources are used to create what is effectively a poll of polls on perceptions of public sector corruption in a given country.  TI provides a detailed account of where its data comes from (see here) and also how it uses it.  The CPI was first published in 1995 when it included 41 countries, with New Zealand achieving the best score (i.e. nearest to 10, as it was then) and Indonesia the worst (nearest to 0).  By 2014 the CPI had expanded to 175 countries.  The data produced is used, in varying ways and for varying purposes, by journalists, other anti-corruption organisations and not least politicians, and the CPI has undoubtedly developed into the key brand name in the study of corruption worldwide.

The CPI’s prominence has certainly not shielded it from criticism.  Indeed, criticising the methodology that underpins the CPI has become very commonplace.  Steffan Andersson and Paul Heywood, for example, see a number of basic problems (see here).  Firstly, the CPI measures perceptions of corruption rather than corruption itself.  Secondly, there are fundamental definitional problems that should lead us to be very unsure of what respondents actually understand the term corruption to mean.  Indeed, frequently it appears that the terms bribery and corruption are used interchangeably and are for many one and the same thing.  Thirdly, the CPI suffers from ‘false accuracy’ and there is no way of knowing what the real difference between scores that are closely grouped together is in practice.  A difference, in other words, of just a few points can lead to countries being a fair distance apart in the league table and yet we are not at all sure that these differences actually reflect what is happening in the real world.  Finally, responses to the various surveys are very likely to be shaped by – whether directly or indirectly – the assumptions and attitudes of the western business community; for the simple reason that the majority of people asked have roots in this particular milieu.

Other analysts have also not been slow in coming forward with their criticisms.  Steve Sampson, speaking for many in the development studies community, is sceptical of what he regards as “corruption becoming a scientific concept” as measurement tools like the CPI can, and have, easily become objects of political manipulation (see here for Sampson’s at times biting critique).  Even fellow quantifiers such as Theresa Thompson and Anwar Shah from the World Bank have criticised some of the statistical techniques that TI have employed (see here). They leave no one in any doubt as to how grave they think the CPI’s methodological shortcomings are when they state that “closer scrutiny of the methodology … raises serious doubts about the usefulness of aggregated measures of corruption” and “potential bias introduced by measurement errors lead to the conclusion that these measures are unlikely to be reliable, especially when employed in econometric analyses” (Thompson and Shah, 2005, pp-8-9).  Stephen Knack’s careful dissection of the CPI (here) also makes uncomfortable reading for TI defenders; he argues, for example, that scores are frequently not based on the same set of sources that were used for that country in the previous year.  This is evidence, he claims, of the unreliability of scores even within one country, let alone on a cross national basis. He also raises further significant issues about the independence – in a statistical sense – of the data used, claiming that many of the ‘statistically significant’ changes that TI claims to have uncovered would not in reality be so if “appropriate corrections for interdependence” had been made.

For its part, TI has certainly tried its level best both to be open about the methodological shortcomings of the CPI (as well as its other corruption indices) and also to adjust them wherever possible.  The founder of the CPI index, Johann Graf Lambsdorff, for example, is careful to acknowledge some of the methodological issues inherent in all composite indicators and he is always careful to describe changes in country scores from year to year as changes in perceived corruption rather in actual corruption levels.  TI has also tacitly admitted that the CPI has its limitations by the very fact that it has developed a whole host of other indices – such as the Bribe Payers Index and the Global Corruption Barometer – looking at both the perceptions and experiences of specific groups of stakeholders (ranging from businessmen to households).  One of TI’s founders, Jeremy Pope, has been rather more explicit, claiming that “the CPI’s major usefulness is in the past” and the TI has to be “a lot more sophisticated these days” (quoted in Andersson and Heywood, 2009, p.755).

And yet, all these criticisms not withstanding, the CPI has done one indisputable thing; it has put the issues of corruption and anti-corruption well and truly on the policy map.  Indeed, as Andersson and Heywood astutely observe;

“We should not underplay its significance in the fight against corruption: its value goes beyond the stimulation of research activity, since the publication of the CPI each autumn has generated widespread media interest across the world and contributed to galvanising international anti-corruption initiatives, such as those sponsored by the World Bank and the OECD” (Andersson and Heywood, 209, p.747).

Even staunch critics of the quantification of corruption have begrudgingly admitted that “whatever its limitations” the development of the CPI has “undoubtedly done much to promote the anti-corruption agenda” (see here).  It is also doubtful that any of the more nuanced second and third generation indices that both TI itself and other organisations have developed would have seen the light of day if the CPI hadn’t existed before them.

So, with all that in mind, we should be careful of perhaps reading too much in to the data that has been produced.  But we should also perhaps be wary that cynicism gets us nowhere and that TI, for all its sins, continues to push the analysis of corruption to the forefront of our thinking.  And that alone should be reason enough to cut the CPI just a little slack.

Cui Lianhai is a name that next to no one in the UK will have heard of.  Until recently Mr Lianhai was a CCP (Chinese Communist Party) apparatchik, minding his own business in the nondescript town of Qinjiatun in Jilin Province, North-East China.  That changed in June, when Mr Lianhai was sentenced to 20 years behind bars (see here).  His crime?  He was revealed to have claimed an average of 278 Yuan (approximately 28 pounds) a day in travel expenses.

Mr Lianhai’s commute may not cost him quite the same as it does each of the thousands who cram in to commuter trains around cities like London everyday, but from the outside looking in, and putting it decidedly diplomatically, no matter how much he’s added on to the true cost of his daily journey, the punishment still looks a little on the heavy side.  Mr Lianhai’s case is also not unique; Xinhua, one of China’s most well-known news outlets, has revealed that more than 6,000 CCP officials are currently under investigation by CCDI (China’s anti-corruption agency) inspectors for fiddling their travel expenses, with 2,350 in the state of Heilongjiang (in Manchuria) alone.  Padding the expenses account can certainly get you in to trouble (as British MPs know better than most), but, still, 20 years in prison?  This is heavy duty stuff.

The anti-corruption drive being pushed by China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has not been slow to put the indiscretions of both heavyweights (known as ‘tigers’) and no-names (‘flies’) like Mr Lianhai under the microscope.  By the end of August 2014 nearly 75,000 of the CCP’s 86 million members had been investigated for corruption, with over a quarter found guilty of their alleged indiscretions.  Xi’s strategy for rooting out corrupt practices has been two pronged; publicly prosecute a small number of big names as well as a much greater number of lower officials down the bureaucratic hierarchy.  The aim?  Send a message to everyone else that they could be next if they don’t buck their ideas up.

Impressive though all of this sounds, the chances of it prompting long-term change are slim.  Anti-corruption campaigns in China are nothing new, and CCP leaders have regularly used them as flimsy cover for either stabilising their own positions and/or as a tool for purging political opponents.  Indeed, there have been no less than four such discernible campaigns since Mao passed away and all of them have followed largely similar patterns; scare your opponents, show you’re in charge and punish a significant number of people with either fines or jail terms.

If Xi were serious about tackling corruption, then prosecutions would be only one part (and a relatively small part at that) of a much bigger package.  In practice, the structures that underpin Chinese public life are the problem, and tackling them is much more difficult.  In practice, Xi needs to move China, however slowly, in three broad directions.  Firstly, Xi needs to make an effort to limit the amount of bureaucratic discretion available to Chinese public servants.  In a system where transparency and openness don’t come naturally, the more discretion you give individuals the more you should expect them to take personal advantage of it.  Tackling the kickback culture that pervades much of China’s regional and local government is not easy, but creating rules based systems that shape decision-making would be one way of making a start in terms of tightening things up.  That doesn’t have to undermine one-party rule, but it does have to – slowly but surely – mean that rules shape decision-making.

Secondly, the CCP may well keep internet usage on a tight leash, but if it really wants to root out corrupt behaviour then it needs to support rather than curtail the right of the media to investigate allegedly corrupt acts.  Turkeys, you might argue, may also vote for Christmas, but if the CCP is serious about tackling corruption it needs to find a way to channel the not inconsiderable public discontentment with their corrupt elites in to the anti-corruption process.  Sina Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, is one tool for doing this (for more on this, see here), but there are others.  The CCP needs to show it’s moving with the times and aware of that.

Finally, and even more fundamentally, the Chinese government needs to find a way to increase the role of citizens not just in reporting corruption when they see and experience it, but also of having rather more say in how they govern themselves.  This does not by any stretch mean the implementation of democracy a la the West; on the contrary, the CCP would have an opportunity here to develop new ways of bringing citizens in to the discussion in ways that it finds appropriate.  Small steps are likely to be better than no steps at all, and there is some evidence that the CCP is aware of this.  Not that we see radical change happening, but local elections, for example, already take place in more places than many in the West probably realise.

Xi’s problem is that these challenges have as much to do with the quality of governance as they do with directly tackling corruption.  The former comes before the latter, and that remains true no matter how many low level expenses cheats end up in prison.  If you’re not on this journey, in other words, for the long haul, you’re not on it at all.

Dan Hough
University of Sussex