Centre for the Study of Corruption

Professor Robert Barrington looks at Transparency International (TI)’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) and questions why commentators use the term ‘corrupt country.’

What does the annual CPI, launched this week, tell us about corrupt countries? Absolutely nothing. There are two reasons for that.

First, the CPI is an index of perceptions of corruption in the public sector. It tells us nothing about the private sector, or the role of financial institutions or professional enablers – usually located in countries with good CPI scores – in facilitating global flows of corrupt capital. The CPI does what it says on the tin: it is an index of perceptions of public sector corruption. That’s what it aims to measure, and not the many other aspects of corruption that there are.

Secondly, and more importantly, there is simply no such thing as a ‘corrupt country’. Yet the term is widely used.  For example, Boris Johnson, when accused of corruption as Prime Minister, responded “I genuinely believe that the UK is not remotely a corrupt country”. You can guarantee that many of the headlines around this year’s CPI results, as in past years, will be along the lines ‘Most corrupt countries in the world revealed‘. Likewise, many lists will appear, based on the CPI, with headings such as ‘These are the world’s most – and least – corrupt countries’ – that  particular example being from the World Economic Forum. Even TI itself has in the past fallen into the trap of using such terminology.

What is wrong with the notion of  a ‘corrupt country’? Well, it is a term that has no meaning – it is just a convenient shorthand, which no sensible commentator on corruption, or student, should ever use. It implies that a country is itself corrupt. What does that really mean? Assuming a country is composed of citizens, institutions, sectors and government – precisely which of these needs to be corrupt, and how much, for it to be a ‘corrupt country’? Does the corruption extend to all, or the majority of its citizens? Or is it that the public and private sector and government institutions are all or mostly corrupt, but not the citizens? Or is the claim that there is just a lot of corruption everywhere, such that it is part of the country’s DNA?  

In reality, life is unfailingly very much more complex than an entire country being corrupt. There can be differences between regions; between specific institutions, where one Minister is a reformer and the other is on the take; between public and private sector; and most often, between a government elite that is harvesting money for its own purposes, and the citizens and companies from whom it is harvested. Other surveys show that it is those citizens who in general feel most strongly about the injustices of the corruption of which they are the primary victims, illustrating why it is inaccurate to label them as constituting a ‘corrupt country’ without differentiating the victims from the perpetrators. 

This might sound like pedantry, but it’s actually quite important. If you believe that tackling corruption successfully requires a good understanding of the problem, then the blanket notion of a ‘corrupt country’ is likely to be a very poor starting point. For instance, if a country is corrupt, it might seem reasonable to avoid sending it aid or (in the case of Ukraine) weapons. Whereas if the health ministry is corrupt, you might try to channel aid directly to citizens, or if a particular branch of the military is corrupt, you might want to focus arms transfers to other branches.

There are alternative descriptions that give much better insights, and do not write off in two words a country’s citizens or culture as being inherently corrupt. For the CPI itself, perhaps the best would be:

‘There are high rates of public sector corruption in country x’ (or for the pedant, ‘experts perceive there to be high rates of public sector corruption in country x’).

Of course, this does not take into account variances in the public sector, or the blurred lines in some economies between public and private sectors – for example outsourced public services – but it does reflect the CPI’s results more precisely than saying  ‘x is a corrupt country’.

At a certain point, if most of a public sector is thoroughly corrupt, it is a fair conclusion that this is reflective of extensive, perhaps systemic, corruption in government (for example, Russia). There is no obvious cut-off point in the CPI scores at which this can definitively be said to be the case, and of course it does not reflect the fact that there might be a recently-elected reforming government (for example, Ukraine). But for those at the lower end of the CPI scores, sensible alternatives to ‘corrupt country’ might be:

‘The government of country x is characterised by corruption’ – or in more extreme cases, ‘the government of country x is systemically corrupt’.

What else might be said? About the CPI, perhaps not much: it is a blunt instrument whose purpose has moved over time more towards communication than analysis. But importantly, the CPI is only one of several indices and surveys. In fact, the field of corruption measurement is having a bit of a renaissance, not least due to the work of my colleague Liz David-Barrett and a UNODC project led by Alina Mungiu-Pippidi. One obvious conclusion is that given the number of sources that are now available, it is possible to get a better insight by considering several sources together. From which you might be able to say:

‘There is a high prevalence of corruption in country x’ or

‘There are corrupt(ed) institutions in country x, such as the police or judiciary’ – or ‘the police and judiciary are institutionally corrupt in country x’.

This latter example takes us from the country level to specific institutions, and in terms of a real understanding of the problem of corruption, the more granular, the more helpful. The CPI-style approach does tend to lock us into looking broad brush at country level, however accurate you try to make your terminology.  

The CPI has been around for nearly thirty years, and during that time has attracted a great deal of criticism – while still being the most widely-used and often-cited index of corruption. To its credit, TI has responded to much of the criticism, especially around methodology and transparency of the underlying data. In its early years, when it was the only game in town for corruption measurement, it is entirely understandable that both TI and others should use it as a proxy for a country’s overall levels of corruption. And where it is a government that is corrupt, that falls within most general definitions of the public sector, and it is easy to see why a government may have been taken as representative of the whole country. But time and thinking have moved on, and perhaps the most relevant remaining criticism of the CPI relates to how it is misapplied, with loose terminology such as ‘corrupt country’ exemplifying how an index that is actually doing one thing can so easily be misrepresented as something else.

At minimum, TI has a responsibility to avoid adding fuel to the fire of misrepresentation, as Harvard professor Matthew Stephenson periodically points out, by being punctilious in its own analyses and press releases. But perhaps more could also be done by TI and others to make sure that the CPI is used and cited based on what it says, not on the basis of what it does not say.

So when you look at the headlines, and lists, and press releases around this year’s CPI, don’t slip into lazy thinking such as ‘country x is more corrupt than country y’ or ‘z is obviously a corrupt country’. I’ve no doubt that I have done that myself at times, but nobody should be doing so – we stop and think about what that really means, and then speak or write words that match the meaning rather than using a shorthand that is ultimately meaningless.

The International Anti-Corruption Conference (IACC) took place in Washington DC from 6-11 December 2022. The CSC’s Dan Hough reflects on an intriguing week.

The International Anti-Corruption Conference (IACC) is the calling card of the international anti-corruption community. In December 2022 over 2,000 participants from all round the world came together in Washington DC for this biennial event. The key questions driving discussions at the 2022 jamboree were ones that anti-corruption activists everywhere will easily recognise; which anti-corruption policies, approaches, strategies and tactics work in affecting change? Which of these have had less success and why might that have been the case? What needs to be done differently? How best can the anti-corruption agenda (continue to) be meaningfully mainstreamed?

The questions that were asked through five days of at times lively discussion are certainly intellectually challenging. Implementing any answers is also practically far from straightforward. Be that as it may, those questions have relevance round the globe – corruption remains far from a preserve of any one set of countries – and that was reflected in the fact that participants had travelled from far and wide to be there.

Those participants were generally activists, although there was also the usual smattering of academics, lawyers and members of various governmental organisations. Although this particular academic has been thinking about corruption and anti-corruption for longer than he cares to remember, it was my first in-person experience of how an IACC works in practice. It was an enlightening one.

The thing you immediately notice is the enthusiasm and energy that so many activists bring to the event. There is an infectious sense of impatience and indeed a need to ‘do something’. The feeling of bamboozlement at the many acronyms evident in the conference programme soon gives way to an awareness that organisations both large and small are trying their best to make the world a better place. For regular participants in big political science conferences where methodological disputes are par for the course, where your statistical approach of choice often becomes the key discussion point and where process often seems to be much more important than outcome, the feeling of relevance and real-worldness at the IACC came as a real breath of fresh air.

The panels inevitably focussed on some themes more than others. The challenge of getting beneficial ownership legislation right was a constant topic, as was the issue of de-kleptification (a term that even those who spend their living thinking about it admit is decidedly clunky) and the nexus between climate change and corruption. Examples of folks engaging with all of these things were much to the fore.

Plus, of course, one of the key purposes of an event like this is to bring people together so that they can take discussions forward informally. The IACC offers a forum to (horrible though the term is) network, see if ideas might fly and to compare notes on how much progress is being made. The world of Zoom undoubtedly adds something to our lives, but meeting, chatting, discussing and pondering also happens offline in the corners away from the conference rooms. IACC really is an excellent forum for doing all of that.

Three gaps

And yet. Much as the event was both interesting and at times positively inspiring, I couldn’t help but feel that a few tricks were being missed somewhere along the line. Three things in particular spring to mind.

Firstly, as noted above, academia (particularly in the USA) can have a fixation on methodology. Discussing which type of multivariate regression analysis to use really can be the main point running through papers given at conferences organised by bodies such as the Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA) and the American Political Science Association (APSA). No one can accuse participants at the IACC of falling into that particular trap.

However, at times things did go too far the other way. Anecdotes and stories obviously have their place, particularly in terms of talking about lived experiences. Stepping back and injecting (just a bit of) analytical rigour does nonetheless help in coming up with more sustainable solutions. Method and theory matter not because they appear to some to add a veneer of academic respectability. It’s more that they add more backbone to the explanations and they offer great opportunities to develop solutions that aren’t relevant to one (often quite) specific context.

Secondly, there will always be some issues that get less airtime than they others. That can be for a whole load of eminently understandable reasons. Many of those who bemoan the absence of something can also actually be saying that what they *really* want is more of what they themselves research on/engage with. That’s a circle that conference organisers will never be able to completely square.

Yet it seems odd that a conference on corruption that’s being held in Washington DC engaged very little with the role that money plays in all of this. Lawrence Lessig famously talked of Congress – a building little more than three miles from the conference venue – being the home of institutional corruption. Politics ‘inside the beltway’ is the politics of influence-trading, lobbying and financial gain. That there are corruption stories to be told there would have been obvious to more or less all participants …. yet there was very little specifically on any of that. I’ve little doubt that some of this comes down to the conference organisers creating a programme around the suggested panel topics that were put to them. Maybe there just wasn’t the willingness to talk about these things. Perhaps this is where the organisers might need to go out and approach the experts to come and get involved. Either way, it felt odd that this got so little traction.

One example illustrated that quite nicely. Anthony Blinken, the US Secretary of State and an all round big hitter in the Washington world of politics, spent two hours at the IACC on Friday evening. He acted as a question-master in a (rather oddly named) fireside chat with three (impressive) anti-corruption activists. All fine. But maybe someone in Blinken’s position could have been asked to say something substantive? It would probably have been unreasonable to have expected Blinken to subject himself to a rigorous Q & A from what could have been an unpredictable audience, but to get him along and then for him to say, well, basically nothing seemed rather odd somehow.

Finally, corruption is about power. Discussions of power lead you inexorably to discussions of politics. As Mark Philp persuasively argued back in 1997, your understanding of corruption will be indelibly linked to what you understand the appropriate nature of politics to be. For some, politics is about deal-making and finding ways of getting things done. For others, those same deals and the same drive to get achieve goals can be symptoms of a system where corruption is very much in the game.

Why does that matter? It matters because purity of principle was much in evidence at the IACC. And that is in many ways to be lauded. But enacting change involves engaging with folks who you might not necessarily want to engage with. It involves compromise. It involves forgoing some things in order to achieve broader aims. In other words, moving the anti-corruption agenda forward involves engaging in politics.

There was very little at the IACC on how to get things done. We heard lots about protest (and that’s good), we heard lots about awareness-raising (and that’s good, too). But how do you get those turkeys (in power) to vote for Christmas (a Christmas that might well see them lose portions their power)? Constructive engagement has to be a part of the armoury, and more analysis of how that sort of constructive engagement might pan out in practice would have been really enlightening. To be clear, the IACC is a super event and it has a lot going for it. I’m certainly looking forward to the next one (scheduled for 2024 and taking place in Lithuania). In the spirit of nothing ever being perfect, I do nonetheless think that it might well be possible to make a good event even better.

The Centre for the Study of Corruption (CSC) is to take over as host of Kickback – the global anticorruption podcast.  Professor Robert Barrington outlines the plans.

It feels like quite a responsibility to be taking on the podcast which heads the list in CIPE’s run-down of top ten anti-corruption podcasts. Created in 2019 by Harvard law professor Matthew Stephenson, and Nils Kobis and Christopher Starke of the Interdisciplinary Corruption Research Network (ICRN), Kickback has quickly established itself as the turn-to podcast for in-depth thinking on corruption.

Kickback is not a current affairs commentary, so episodes from three years ago by luminaries such as Susan Rose-Ackermann, Paul Heywood and Alina Mungiu-Pippidi are as relevant today as when they were first broadcast.  In contrast to some podcasts with several hundred episodes in frequent short bulletins, Kickback’s style is more long-read editorial than twitter thread.  Serious experts, looking in depth at corruption, corruption theory and approaches to tackling corruption – but presented in an accessible way.

The best non-commercial podcasts series like Kickback are community efforts – in this case, produced for a community of scholars and practitioners by a community of scholars and practitioners. If you add together all those in government, business, academia and civil society with a professional interest in corruption, you probably have a community of some tens of thousands of people worldwide.  We want to serve that community as best we can.

Looking at the stats, we can see that most regular listeners are in the USA, followed by the UK and Europe, with clusters around university cities.  We want to continue to cater for these audiences, while increasing the listenership in other areas of the world, notably Africa and Asia.  We can also see that episodes which have been promoted via other channels, such as the CIPE competition, have the highest number of listeners.  So we are interested in partnering with others to increase the distribution.

What are we planning for Kickback?  First off, we’d like to hear from anyone who has a good interview to suggest.  Who would you most like to hear talk about corruption for 45 minutes?  Please write and let us know.  Secondly, we want to keep the mix of practitioners and academics, from all disciplines  – the heritage is both the ICRN and Harvard Law School, and that has given a great range of insights and experiences.  Finally, we may vary the length and style from time to time as we try to keep up with the ever-changing world of podcasts.  But for those who like Kickback as it is – rest assured, changes will be evolution not revolution.

Let me finish by celebrating what a great few years Kickback has had under the superb stewardship of Matthew Stephenson, Nils Köbis and Chris Starke.  What a great job – and a hard act to follow!  Our own CSC team will consist of Liz David-Barrett as the lead interviewer, with a supporting cast of Robert Barrington, Dan Hough, Sam Power (that’s the Sussex one, not the head of USAID) and Tom Shipley.  You can hear most of us already on previous episodes of Kickback, talking about state capture, sports integrity, the UK Bribery Act and political corruption.

One notable absence amongst the Kickback episodes is interviews with Matthew, Nils and Chris themselves.  We’ll be remedying that over the coming months – starting with Liz David-Barrett speaking to Matthew Stephenson about what he has found most interesting in Kickback’s 83 episodes to date.

To get in touch with suggestions about who you would most like to hear, contact r.barrington@sussex.ac.uk.

Where can I find Kickback?

• Soundcloud
• Stitcher
• iTunes
• Spotify
• Google Podcasts
• Apple Podcasts
• Pocket Cases
• Overcast
• Castbox
• Radio Public

What should I listen to first?

Try these:

Michael Johnston on syndromes of corruption

Caryn Peiffer on social norms

Jodi Vittori on corruption and the US military operation in Afghanistan

Daniel Kaufmann on state capture

Michel Sapin and Valentina Lana on anti-corruption approaches in France

A recent fan-led review of football governance has come up with wide-ranging and widely-supported recommendations. In the fourth installment of our series, Dan Hough, Professor of Politics at the University of Sussex, discusses the Johnson administration’s part in getting the ball rolling, assessing that the hard bit – implementing reforms – clearly starts now.

When talking about Boris Johnson’s legacy it’s unlikely that many people would start with a discussion of football. The man himself claimed to be a football fan but was hardly renowned as a genuine supporter of the ‘beautiful game’; after all, it was Johnson who once claimed he “supported all London clubs” and when asked in 2013 if he’d ever like to be Prime Minister, used a rugby analogy, commenting that “if the ball came out of the back of the scrum he’d have a crack at it”. Drinking a pinot grigio at Twickenham would subsequently seem much more Johnson’s natural terrain than standing on the old Shed End at Chelsea or the North Bank at Highbury.

A fan-led review and an independent regulator

Be that as it may, Johnson’s government inevitably found itself engaging with discussions of football. In the UK, it’s hard for it to be otherwise. The 2019 Conservative Party manifesto promised a fan-led review of football governance and indeed that review, ultimately led by Conservative MP Tracey Crouch, became a cornerstone of the government’s thinking in this area. It aimed to “to support and explore our analysis of the issues in the game, and to provide views on what might be done about them” and promised to make a significant contribution to righting some of football’s wrongs.

The recommendations were published in November 2021 (see here for a good summary) and the UK government was rhetorically supportive of them. Back in March 2022 Johnson was unequivocal in his support for one of the most eye-catching of those recommendations; the creation of an independent regulator for English football over and above the Football Association (FA). The regulator would make a significant contribution towards helping put the game’s finances on more of an even keel and to oversee who owned clubs and indeed the corporate governance structures that they then presided over.

Johnson, speaking in Parliament on 23 March 2022, again stressed “that we should indeed have an independent regulator for football” and he once more confirmed that in comments made at the most recent English professional club to go bankrupt, Bury FC, on 25 April.

In the Queen’s Speech on 10 May 2022, his government reiterated the importance of protecting clubs’ long-term financial sustainability as well as the broader interests of both clubs and fans. The expectation was that the regulator would do this and indeed that he/she would be in place by the end of the calendar year.

Liz Truss, the saviour of English football?

There’s therefore plenty of evidence of Boris Johnson and his government making positive noises about reforming football governance. Three years on from the 2019 election triumph, however, the noises have – in the cold light of day – still not built up to very much.

The big question is now whether Liz Truss is up to the job of, as the respected chief executive of Fair Game, Niall Couper, put it, “sav[ing] our national game”. Being positive, it’s mooted that a White Paper will be published in October although there is already talk of bandwidth concerns and the government’s in-tray being simply too large to be able to deal with this now. Furthermore, there are also rumours that plans for a Premier League transfer levy – something that the fan-led review explicitly recommended – will be quietly ditched. If that goes, one can’t help but wonder what else might go with it.

Talk is one thing, but action?

Given that, it’s not unreasonable to ask whether Johnson’s legacy will be as familiar in this area as it is in many others; plenty of bravado and belligerence that inevitably, sooner or later, turns into little more than bluster and bluff.

The fact that he couldn’t complete the reforms he promised means that the buck now passes to his successor. Truss has more football-supporting credentials than Johnson (for example, since becoming an MP in the area she’s grown to be a Norwich City fan and has indeed been seen at games) but there are already indications that neither she nor her advisors have any real interest in changing the way that the game is run. Bringing in governance reforms that powerful players within the game may well oppose is highly unlikely to be at the top of her to-do list.

Truss’s next steps will become apparent in due course, but in terms of Johnson and his legacy the cynic might say that this is the way that his administration generally rolled. That might be convenient (and in this case essentially untestable), but it would also be a little unfair. The fan-review did come up with widely respected recommendations and Johnson was out on his ear before they could realistically be implemented.

However, setting up a commission and offering it rhetorical support was always going to be the easy bit and Johnson will in all likelihood have known that. The more pressing question is how you deal with the politics of implementing the recommendations. Whether Liz Truss’s regime has the resilience to face down the vested interests and make at least a small contribution to bringing some financial sanity to the way football works remains the big challenge.

CSC Director Liz Dávid-Barrett has previously evidenced worrying patterns of behaviour from the Johnson administration, from attacks on accountability institutions to the installation of political allies in key public appointments and excessive use of secondary legislation. In the third installment of our series, she highlights the key areas that will indicate whether or not the Truss government is likely to shore up the UK’s increasing institutional vulnerability to state capture.

Under Boris Johnson, I have argued, the UK started to slide into a condition known as state capture. This is where a narrow interest group seeks to consolidate its power through improperly changing the rules of the game and influencing the implementation of those rules, while at the same time disabling institutions that seek to hold them to account. I set out the evidence on Johnson’s moves towards state capture in the keynote speech at this years’ Constitution Society conference, highlighting the way that he eviscerated parliament’s ability to scrutinise legislation, parachuted political allies into key regulatory roles, and treated the media and judiciary as illegitimate obstacles.

Will the change of Prime Minister lead to a reversal of this trend? This is an important question. The problem of reversing state capture is something that many are grappling with around the world. In South Africa, for example, where the captors are now out of power and Ramaphosa is trying to re-build. But also in Hungary, where opposition groups are thinking about how best to restore the integrity of institutions that have been gutted and politicised, should they get the opportunity to do so.

In the case of Truss, it’s not clear that she sees Johnson’s record of capture as a problem or wants to reverse it. Overall, it’s too early to say, but here are some things to look out for in her first few months in office. 

First of all, the appointments that a new PM makes are a key early indication. Do cabinet appointments appear to be based more on merit and expertise, or on loyalty and reward? The former indicates someone who values competence, while the latter betrays someone who wants to use their patronage power to build alliances. And how deep do changes in the civil service go? Is the new PM willing to preserve continuity by trusting civil servants who served previous administrations or rather keen to impose more loyal allies, even at the cost of losing institutional knowledge?

Truss’s initial steps here are somewhat concerning. She has awarded key cabinet roles to long-time friends and failed to retain expertise where it is embodied in individuals who may represent a challenge to her authority.

Some of the people she has appointed to the most senior roles are those who were fully signed up to Johnson’s approach. Her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, has made a number of comments about judges “interfering in politics”, and, when Owen Paterson MP was found to have engaged in paid advocacy, cast aspersions on the independent Commissioner for Standards. Meanwhile, the new Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, has signalled a wish to leave the European Convention of Human Rights, another potential indicator of a government looking to ditch limitations on its powers.

The firing of Tom Scholar, permanent secretary to the Treasury, further suggests that Truss does not value skills and experience, and wants to install someone more likely to look favourably on her tax cut plans. Of course, the very practice of firing someone from a supposedly non-political appointment sends a strong message to other civil servants about how they are expected to behave.

Second, observe how Truss deals with the accountability institutions that are supposed to check her power. What we should hope to see here is a willingness to allow parliament time to fully assess her legislative agenda, or to see her and her team engage openly with the media to encourage discussion of their plans.

Again, worrying signs during the leadership campaign included an announcement that she does not need an ethics adviser, along with her cancellation of a planned final debate with opponent Rishi Sunak and a failure to respond to an ITV request for an interview. To be fair, these were before she took on the role of premier and by contrast, she received good reviews for her first performance at PMQs, with some commentators remarking on her willingness to engage with and answer questions.

Third, look out for how Truss responds when the first integrity breaches or scandals concerning her own government emerge. These are difficult to predict, but when instances of misconduct come to light, it is critical to see how she handles them. Will she allow the institutions to do their job, or seek to ignore or undermine them as Johnson did with the Independent Adviser on Ministerial Interests and with the Owen Paterson case? Indeed, a first test case here might be how she reacts to the results of the Privileges Committee’s current inquiry into whether Johnson acted in contempt of the House of Commons.  

Under Johnson, many of the institutions proved resilient under pressure and pushed back. I concluded my Constitution Society keynote by arguing that the UK was not yet captured, but it was more vulnerable. Will Truss help shore up those institutions, or hasten their demise?

In the second installment of our series on Boris Johnson’s legacy, Professor of Anti-Corruption Practice Robert Barrington examines the good, the bad, and the ugly of the Johnson administration’s record on the fight against corruption and highlights some areas to keep an eye on in order to assess the direction of Liz Truss’s leadership in this sphere.

Six years ago, the UK was aspiring to be a world leader in the global fight against corruption. David Cameron’s Anti-Corruption Summit, convened just a few weeks before the Brexit vote, was high on aspiration and ambition. Forty-odd countries produced around 650 pledges, and the UK and US were acknowledged and praised for taking a leadership role.

With much to distract it, the momentum was lost under Theresa May’s government, though the rhetoric and commitment remained. Progress was limited, but the position looked recoverable with a suitable injection of energy and political will.

So, what of the Johnson years?  Regrettably, it’s not a pretty picture. Any sense of leadership in the wider world has been lost. Britain itself looks tainted and hypocritical, and all this has happened with the world watching open-mouthed.

Here are five things that went wrong:

1. Covid procurement and chumocracy. The catchy word chumocracy was coined early in the Johnson administration to describe the penchant for appointing political allies and ‘cronies’ to public positions, ministerial posts and the House of Lords. It started to look more distinctly corrupt around Covid procurement: the rules were suspended, contracts were awarded to Conservative Party donors and those with links to government, and fortunes were made – even when the equipment delivered was unusable or of poor quality. Investigations and Inquiries may reveal whether it was truly corrupt: for now, it bears all the hallmarks of corruption, and so needs to be disproven.

2. Standards in public life. In the end, even the Prime Minister’s Anti-Corruption Champion resigned, following in the footsteps of two independent Ethics Advisers. The multiple breaches of the Nolan Principles are well documented elsewhere. Overseas observers were generally shocked to see this in UK; some rejoiced that it confirmed what they had been saying for years. Either way, it did Britain no favours.

3. The abolition of DFID. Irrespective of the political or economic logic for abolishing DFID, it had established a reputation for leadership on anti-corruption policies and programming. Savage budget cuts and a notable de-prioritisation of corruption as an issue have meant that the FCDO is seen to have diminished rather than maintained that reputation.

4. Johnson’s performance at the Summit for Democracy. President Biden had laid on a sort-of successor to the 2016 Anti-Corruption Summit. The Prime Minister was invited to speak, and it was a golden opportunity for a re-positioning of the UK as being at the heart of these issues, after some understandably lost years. Sadly, it was more like his infamous Peppa Pig speech at the CBI conference: tone deaf to the occasion, lacking in substance and responding to the world’s needs and expectations with rhetorical flourishes and platitudes.

5. Post-Brexit procurement reforms. Another golden opportunity, which started with good intent to create a world-leading system that would deter corruption in one of the highest-risk areas of government, and prevent companies with a track record of corruption from holding UK public contracts. Then came the lobbying, the watering down and the delays. And so far, no new law at all, good or bad.

But surely something positive must have been done to tackle the corruption that Cameron and May declared was a key aspect of improving national security and prosperity? There was still the well-respected civil service team in the Joint Anti-Corruption Unit, and a Champion (until he resigned).  And indeed, there were a few positives – for example:

• The work of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee continued in spite of the Johnson government, and did a superb job in highlighting the UK’s role in facilitating grand corruption and kleptocracy, and the threat that posed to the country.
• As the Ukraine invasion increased the pressure to do something about Russian money in the UK, the Economic Crime Act was passed. This included the requirement to register the beneficial owners of property owned by overseas companies, which had been promised in 2016; and some improvement to Unexplained Wealth Orders.
• The UK’s commitment to public registers of beneficial ownership was a message that was further promoted around the world, with some success.

The Johnson legacy will be hard to recover from on the global stage. But there are a number of things the Truss government could do to improve things. There is no sense so far that these are a priority, although there is a glimmer of hope that the new Security Minister, in whose brief these things fall, had shown understanding and commitment in his role as Chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.

Here are some tests by which we can assess Prime Minister Truss on her own leadership in this area:

• The speed of the delivery of the UK’s new Anti-Corruption strategy – due in December 2022 – and its strength will be an early indication of the Truss government’s commitment to anti-corruption domestically.
• It is worth keeping an eye on the second Economic Crime Bill in order to assess whether its ambition matches the scale of the problem.
• The Committee on Standards in Public Life’s Standards Matter recommendations should be adopted wholesale. Indeed, they should probably be strengthened given that, since their formulation, the Johnson government bequeathed a greater insight into how the system of checks and balances for public standards can be evaded.
• You can have all the laws in the world, but will likely make no progress without law enforcement resourcing. Experts estimate that the resources for key agencies like the SFO and the NCA’s anti-corruption unit need to be at least doubled.
• When, or if, the government appoints an Ethics Adviser and Anti-Corruption Champion, and who they are, will give considerable insight into the government’s approach.
  
  

We need just look across the Atlantic to see how damaging a negative reputation for corruption can be to a country’s international standing and strategic relationships.  It is not a legacy to be proud of; but the new Prime Minister can make decisions which will help to repair some of the damage.

In the first of our series on the legacy of Boris Johnson’s premiership as it relates to corruption Rebecca Dobson Phillips, Lecturer in Corruption Analysis at the University of Sussex, discusses how Johnson’s actions exposed the compromises inherent in the system of standards in public life and reflects on the implications for our understanding of both political and bureaucratic accountability.

It is difficult to reflect on Johnson’s legacy as Prime Minister, without observing the apparent contempt he displayed for many of the rules and conventions that are designed to hold those in power to account. Even before his premiership, his reputation was littered with concerns about his approach to the truth, his close encounters with conflicts of interest and his susceptibility to diplomatic gaffes—at least one of which likely resulted in serious personal costs for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. But it is as PM that his maverick attitude to accountability has really tested the UK establishment.

It’s unnecessary to recite all his alleged transgressions. But from the prorogation of parliament and his failure to sanction breaches of the Ministerial Code to being accused of stuffing the Lords with Tory donors and his suspected misleading of parliament on breaching COVID rules, it is clear that in appearance at least Johnson’s premiership has pushed the boundaries of the expected and acceptable. However, despite much performative outrage and some genuine concern that his actions could or would fatally weaken the system of public standards they appear to have done little more than illuminate many of the compromises that were already inherent in it.

His prorogation was deemed unlawful. His party’s attempt to bend the rules in Owen Paterson’s favour when he was found to have engaged in “paid advocacy” ultimately failed. There have never been robust safeguards on appointments to the House of Lords, so PMs have always had considerable leniency in awarding peerages. His Ethics Adviser—whom he was highly criticised for disregarding—was always just that, an “adviser”, and his advice could therefore be ignored if expedient. The PM already had ultimate authority over the Ministerial Code, with the power to change it, initiate investigations into breaches and to decide on sanctions.  

Indeed, given his reputation, substantive changes to the system of public standards are surprisingly limited. His update to the Ministerial Code in April 2022 was met with indignation for removing the expectation that Ministers should resign when found to have breached the Code, except in cases of “knowingly misleading parliament”. However, it was in line with a Committee on Standards in Public Life (CSPL) recommendation, which suggested graduated sanctions as opposed to a blanket expectation to resign. It is true that Johnson did not implement a range of other CSPL suggestions that would have strengthened the hand of his Ethics Adviser, including handing over authority to initiate investigations and determine breaches, but then neither had any PM before him.

Johnson’s government was eventually brought down by “sleaze”—his apparent support for and promotion of an MP accused of sexual misconduct—but it was the political (rather than bureaucratic) fallout this caused within his own party that ultimately removed him. While he remains under investigation by the House of Commons Privileges Committee for contempt of Parliament, which could lead to the highest level of bureaucratic sanction—a recall petition and by-election in his constituency—this too ultimately ends in a political process, albeit one involving only a tiny section of the electorate. There is currently sustained political pressure to halt the investigation, which has been bolstered by a legal “opinion” on its legality, and there is wild speculation about Johnson’s eventual return to front-bench politics; neither possibility can be ruled out.

Perhaps then the real legacy of Johnson’s premiership in this area is that we have been supplied with a case study on how the system works when faced with a PM that eschews controls on their behaviour beyond the purely political. Those concerned about the failures of the standards system to hold Johnson to account for his numerous transgressions therefore need to consider the delicate balance between bureaucratic and political accountability in the UK system and ask: Is this a bureaucratic problem or a political one? Does it need a rules-based solution or a political/democratic one?

There is risk involved in focusing on the inadequacy of the rules and individual breaches at the expense of a more holistic view of the essential role of political accountability. Ultimately politics rules the fates of politicians; and yet our political system seems woefully inadequate to the task of sanctioning those that fail to adhere to even the most basic standards of public life.

Dr Sam Power, Lecturer in Corruption Analysis at the Centre for the Study of Corruption, University of Sussex has co-authored a new report on election financing during the UK 2019 General Election. The International IDEA report was co-authored with Dr Kate Dommett, University of Sheffield; Dr Amber Macintyre, Royal Holloway; and Dr Andrew Barclay, University of Sheffield. The report finds that many types of campaign activity, especially digital campaigning, is not reflected in spending categories and that different political parties are not consistently coding the same activity under the same category.

This article was originally published on the International IDEA Blog on 15 June 2022.

While the the United Kingdom is often considered to have one of the most transparent political finance systems, it is still unclear how more than 1 in every GBP 10 was spent at the last UK general election. This is one of many findings from the International IDEA’s latest report, ‘Regulating the Business of Election Campaigns: Financial Transparency in the Influence Ecosystem in the United Kingdom‘, which investigates the companies, suppliers and individuals that political parties spend money on.

Getting to grips with the flow of money in politics is essential for understanding how the wider influence ecosystem at elections operates. Suppliers consult on election messaging and polling, provide social media tools and devise large-scale advertising campaigns. And as the Cambridge Analytica Scandal showed—such services during election campaigns matter and can be the cause of great public concern.

Mapping the influence ecosystem at elections – new trends and old realities

The new report looks at the UK as a case study to begin mapping this terrain. The country has one of the most transparent political finance regimes in the world. One of the particularly novel regulations is that if a political party spends over GBP 200 on anything at an election, they are required to provide an invoice from the supplier. These invoices are then released, with other details of election spending, on the Electoral Commission’s political finance database. By going through every invoice, and manually coding the service provided into new categories, the report confirmed much that was either assumed or found things that simply were not known about election campaigning in 2019.

For example, much has been written about digital advertising and, indeed, the democratic implications of the increased use of the online space. But the UK Electoral Commission’s political finance database is yet to capture how prevalent these trends are. There is no category for ‘online’, or ‘social media’ advertising. There is simply a catch-all ‘advertising’ designation. This means that researchers attempting to gauge the extent to which advertising occurs online had to previously rely on (very educated) guesswork, often based on keyword searches for prominent examples of companies (like Facebook and Google). This neglects that other suppliers (like consultants or advertising agencies) may—as a part of the service they provide—place online ads. The report found that of the over GBP 10 million that was spent on advertising, 73 per cent was done online. And over 50 per cent of this was on social media ads specifically. This suggests, for anyone thinking about how to regulate modern political advertising, online is key.

And yet, old realities still matter. Lost amongst some of the more alarmist perceptions of this new political world is that campaigning is still very much a ground game. The Internet is not the only fruit. In fact, by far the most prominent form of spending by parties—coming in at over GBP 21 million—was through campaign materials. This includes printing posters, leaflets and leaflet delivery which make up just over 40 per cent of all spend. That is not to say that online trends aren’t concerning. A little money can go a long way at elections as it is much cheaper to advertise online. Likewise, the GBP 50,000 spent on a campaign consultant might form the message which is then put out in a GBP 2 million leaflet drop (and targeted to certain demographics on Facebook). But the fact remains, most election spend is on incredibly functional—and much less immediately newsworthy—services.

What is unclear?

Despite all this, there is much that the report cannot fully capture. During the project, the research team placed all invoices that they couldn’t categorise into a separate ‘unclear’ heading. This might happen for several reasons. It might be that a blank invoice was submitted, or no invoice was provided at all. Some were blurry, and one even had a post-it note over the description of the service. Finally, there were some that would be so vague as to be useless—like the invoice that was for ‘persuasive and shareable content for the general elections’. Whilst some of these are, of course, more unclear than others, this remains a problem. It is impossible to tell exactly what 14 per cent of total election expenditure in 2019 was spent—that is a GBP 6.6 million black hole.

What can be done?

This matters. It is currently possible to provide very little meaningful information about services, or to deliberately abstract the information that political parties disclose. Therefore, it is impossible to make a reasonable judgement about what is, or is not, a problematic democratic practice. The report suggests a number of actionable legislative reforms that should be introduced to address these transparency deficits. The categories that are used in the Electoral Commission’s database should be updated to better reflect the realities of modern campaigns, particularly as it relates to digital advertising. More should also be done to standardise invoicing practice to reduce the possibility of genuine error or deliberate obfuscation. These are small reforms that will have a big effect. They will embed the UK’s reputation as a model of best practice. More importantly, they will allow the public to better understand how elections are changing—and map the actors that operate within the wider influence ecosystem—to more carefully diagnose any larger, perhaps more existential, democratic concerns.

Political finance transparency plays a key role in safeguarding the integrity of political processes and institutions. International IDEA is committed to supporting countries in developing digital solutions for political finance reporting and disclosure and to conduct in-depth country case studies in advancing the evidence-based global policy debate for better political finance transparency.

International IDEA’s report “Regulating the Business of Election Campaigns: Financial Transparency in the Influence Ecosystem in the United Kingdom” was drafted by a team of UK experts, led by Dr Kate Dommett (University of Sheffield) and Dr Sam Power (Centre for the Study of Corruption, University of Sussex), in collaboration with the Institute’s Money in Politics Programme. The report is available at the following link.

Mark Knights, Professor of History at the University of Warwick, uses pre-twentieth century historical data to examine Britain’s long struggle with corruption and what can be learned from it today. Knights writes that anti-corruption is not always a linear journey and that good governance rests on the difficult task of finding the right balance between the necessary trust given to officials and the distrust required to scrutinise and constrain any abuse of that trust

In my recently published book Trust and Distrust: Corruption in Office in Britain and its Empire 1600-1850 I examine Britain’s long struggle with corruption during a key stage in the formation of the state and empire. Social scientists don’t often use historical data – and even more rarely anything before the twentieth century – but they should, since there are lessons to be gleaned from it. This blog tries to lay some of those out (and further analysis can be found here).  

History suggests that anti-corruption is a long-term process, consisting of multiple moments of reform rather than a single ‘big bang’. Britain took about 250 years to move towards a recognisably ‘modern’ framework. The pace of reform accelerated after 1780 but the advances then rested on much earlier changes, innovations and debates. So it’s worth thinking hard about the factors that prevent change.  

Britain’s example (replicated elsewhere) suggests that socio-cultural factors such as friendship, gift-giving, kinship and patronage are deeply embedded, lead to cronyism and capture of institutions, are hard to shift and mean that the boundary between licit and illicit behaviour is often shifting and difficult to define. Clarifying such boundaries, and societal norms more generally, is more than a top-down process of regulation – it also requires extensive public debate and even contest. That debate took place in Britain in a relatively free press from the seventeenth century onwards, something that was vital for a national conversation about ethics (even if this frequently centred on corruption as ‘scandal’). Without ethical conviction, rules were disregarded or evaded (as was repeatedly shown in domestic and imperial contexts).  

Public pressure was also important in prompting top-down action – in the 1640s, 1690s, 1780s, 1830s the state responded to popular pressure. Much of that agitation resulted from macro factors such as war, which forced governments to raise taxation and increased a public desire to scrutinise how the money was spent, and periods of ‘moral renewal’, when religious sensibilities accelerated secular action.  

State-formation is also a slow process. Indeed, for much of the pre-modern period the state was not a purely public entity but was reliant on private agents to deliver its objectives, such as justice and war. Hybrid public-private entities abounded: the East India Company, which created an eastern empire, was a private company given a state monopoly, and at home even jails were semi-private institutions, run by governors who were allowed to profit from their prisoners. Spelling out the dividing line between public and private was a process that took time – and was often calibrated through gross violations of what the public or government or a corporation saw as acceptable levels of profit for the semi-private agents, even if what was ‘acceptable’ was a key point of debate. 

History also suggests that we might want to think about systems of corruption as well as individual or institutional failings. The concept of ‘systems’ first arose in the seventeenth century when it was applied to astronomy, music, the body, religion and eventually to politics too. In the eighteenth century commentators started talking about a ‘system of corruption’ and ‘corrupt systems’. A systems approach saw different fields as interacting: the corrupt parliamentary system rested on a corrupt financial system which funded corrupt wars which a corrupt elite used to feather their own nest. Many critics became convinced that corruption needed to be seen in the round rather than piecemeal, an idea that seems worth more attention. If today you leave the financial system out of reform, for example, you’ll neglect an important part of the interlocking pieces.  

Other important terms, such as ‘interest’ and ‘trust’ similarly took off in the seventeenth century, enabling the development of ideas such as ‘conflict of interest’ and ‘breach of trust’. Trust is a particularly important notion in Britain’s corruption history, since it was a legal concept that moved from private estate law to public law, as a way of describing the obligations of office-holding. Trust required duties of selflessness, accountability, integrity and care that we now see as central to the standards required in public life. The wider point is that legal cultures really matter and shape how anti-corruption both evolves and is conceived (and hence also that different cultures will mean that anti-corruption has to be fitted to local contexts). Trust has also to be balanced by a measure of distrust, effected through formal means (national accounting bodies, for example) and informal means (through whistleblowers and the press). The art of good government rests on finding the right balance between the necessary trust given to officials and the distrust required to scrutinise and constrain any abuse of that trust. That’s a challenging task that needs constant reflection. It was certainly something the eluded politicians in Britain for several centuries. 

Anti-corruption is often highly political, in many senses of the word. It was often used in British history to pursue personal, group and partisan interests. So we should ask what political (and indeed social, economic and cultural) work the allegation of corruption is doing at any one time and who or what benefits from it. Partisanship, in the British case, was a mixed blessing – on the one hand, it helped expose and pursue corruption, but on the other it often narrowed the debate away from systemic issues, polarised resistance to change and was dismissed as motivated by self-interest. Yet political support for non-partisan solutions was essential. The 1780s commission for public accounts, which formulated many principles that are recognisably the maxims of modern anti-corruption (officials should put aside their self-interest and have their public duty uppermost; they should separate private and public interests; they should not charge arbitrary fees for their services; they should properly account for public money) was not composed of politicians but had the support of the governments of the day, which needed to satisfy the public clamour for reform. Non-partisan commissions with political backing can be effective.  

Finally, history suggests that anti-corruption is not always linear, with a threshold which, once passed, will always be maintained. For example, the parliamentary accounts committee, set up to make public expenditure more accountable, was abandoned after 1714 and not restored until 1780; and even now we seem to be retreating back into eighteenth century cronyism, patronage, conflicts of interest and the erosion of hard-fought principles and values. If that is right, we would do well to reflect on Britain’s long and painful struggle with corruption and learn its lessons.