One of the challenges inherent in teaching courses on corruption and anti-corruption is defining precisely what the term means. And, this week saw me set out on my annual struggle to do exactly\u00a0that. It\u2019s one of the more tricky sessions on my final year undergraduate option on \u2018political corruption\u2019. In many ways, it\u2019s easiest to follow the same logic as that of American Supreme Court Judge, Justice Potter Stewart; in 1964, when presiding over the case of Jacobellis v Ohio, he once noted about pornography that he couldn\u2019t come up with a watertight definition of it, but he certainly knew what it was when he saw it.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s a fair starting point for analysing corruption, too; for the most part bribes, nepotism, fraud and such like are recognisable when you see them. But, as you dig deeper it soon becomes clear that conducting any sort of research on a phenomenon you\u2019re defining in \u201cI know it when I see it\u201d terms is very difficult indeed. Corruption analysts have subsequently spent a fair amount of time thinking about what precisely it is that they are unpacking (see here<\/a> and here<\/a> for a couple of\u00a0attempts to do that).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Definitional Challenge<\/strong><\/p>\n Traditionally, analysts of political life saw corruption as a move away from a non-corrupt state. Thinkers in Ancient Rome, for example, often saw corruption as a moral aberration. Many early analysts of corruption subsequently had a very broad understanding of the term seeing it, as Carl Friedrich once noted, as \u201ca decomposition of the body politic\u201d that came about through \u201cimmoral decay\u201d. A panopoly of behaviours were then put in to this general category, largely in the belief that they were \u201cdysfunctional and hence morally corrupt.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Over the last 50 years, the focus has narrowed considerably. It had to. Conducting empirical research is impossible without a definition that\u2019s a little more practical. That led to (an at times uneasy) consensus developing around a definition put forward <\/a>by the American political scientist Joseph Nye. He claimed corruption to be the abuse of a public role for private gain.<\/p>\n Nye\u2019s thinking can be clearly seen in the thinking of Transparency International<\/a>, the world\u2019s leading anti-corruption NGO, when it talks of \u201cthe abuse of entrusted power for private gain<\/a>\u201d. The OECD follows suit, labelling corruption as \u201cthe active or passive misuse of the powers of public officials (appointed or elected) for private financial or other benefits<\/a>\u201d. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) also sings very much from the same hymn sheet (\u201cthe abuse of public office for private gains<\/a>\u201d) as does the World Bank<\/a> (virtually the same, with just an ‘s’ added to ‘gain’). This understanding of corruption as a deliberate act where an official uses the discretion at her disposal to skew a process or an outcome in her favour is now very widely followed.<\/p>\n Making definitions work in the real world<\/strong><\/p>\n Labelling something as corrupt therefore means thinking about the constituent parts of a process. More specifically, we need to keep an eye out for four things;<\/p>\n The Winter White House<\/strong><\/p>\n When talking undergraduates through this it really does help to use real-world examples. And they aren\u2019t generally lacking.<\/p>\n Over the last couple of weeks, however, an almost copybook case\u00a0appears to have materialised in\u00a0the USA. Donald Trump\u2019s three weeks at the head of the US executive has hardly been lacking in incident, and that may be the reason that his attitude to and use of \u2018The Winter White House\u2019 has been largely overlooked.<\/p>\n Judd Legum, a journalist with ‘Think Progress<\/a>‘, nonetheless posted a series of tweets on Saturday evening (11 February) about the way the recent visit of Shinzo Abe, the Japanese Prime Minister, to the USA panned out. The US President, Donald Trump, and Abe spent time at what Trump has been describing as the \u2018Winter White House<\/a>\u2019. A nice, catchy phrase that has immediately settled in to the journalistic lexicon.<\/p>\n The \u2018Winter White House\u2019 is actually a private members club called Mar-e-Lago. Two of Trump\u2019s three weekends as President have been spent there. He dined with Abe there<\/a>. Donald Trump, furthermore, owns the club<\/a>. According to Legum, before Trump became President the joining fee used to be $100,000. It\u2019s now $200,000. The club is clearly gaining in profile and is being talked about more than ever before (including, I guess, via blogs like this).<\/p>\n Where\u2019s the problem, you may ask? Well, Mar-e-Lago is now well set to make significantly more money than it might otherwise have done. Plus, anyone who wants to curry favour with the President may think it prudent to frequent establishments that he owns.<\/p>\n Much ado about nothing? Well, no, not really…<\/strong><\/p>\n Donald Trump\u2019s presidency has already thrown up plenty of things that have got the commentariat talking. In many ways his branding of a club that he owns as the \u2018Winter White House\u2019 is understandably not quite at the top of the list of things to be worried about. But, it would appear that there is at the very least circumstantial evidence that he is using his position as the President of the USA to flag up, and indeed re-brand, a private members\u2019 club that he owns. The price of using the club has already doubled. His regular tweets on the subject can only raise its profile.<\/p>\n If the framework outlined above is any help in pinning this traditionally elusive concept down, then Trump is walking on thin ice.\u00a0 Corruption is a process and defining it involves pinpointing the constituent parts of that process.\u00a0 Only then can (and indeed should) morals and values enter the discussion. Whatever way you look at this case, there is \u2013 at the very least \u2013 a case to be made that The Donald\u2019s behaviour warrants plenty of further scrutiny in this regard.<\/p>\n Dan Hough,\u00a0University of Sussex<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the challenges inherent in teaching courses on corruption and anti-corruption is defining precisely what the term means. And, this week saw me set out on my annual struggle to do exactly\u00a0that. It\u2019s one of the more tricky sessions…<\/span><\/p>\n\n
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