The wave of protests known as the Arab Spring led to the ouster of long-time rulers and spurred reform throughout the Arab world. Yet those developments haven’t resulted in progress toward limiting political corruption, according to Transparency International, a watchdog group that compiles an annual nation-by-nation index of perceived official corruption. Indeed, since the start of the Arab Spring, many of the affected countries have actually fallen in that group’s rankings.
Political reforms alone are no guarantee against corruption, says Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, a professor of democracy studies and director of the European Research Centre for Anti-Corruption and State Building at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. When new governments come into power, they often treat the state as a source of spoils that political elites can distribute to private interests. That’s true even of duly elected governments. Out of 27 countries where corruption controls have weakened since 1996, 10 are electoral democracies, according to data cited by Mungiu-Pippidi.
“Scholars have intensively studied the first step of democratization: gaining freedom,” she says. “Yet the next step—achieving fair governance—remains under-studied and far less well understood.” Aiming to fill that gap, Mungiu-Pippidi turned her attention to asking why some democracies are able to control corruption and others aren’t.
The explanation lies in the strength or weakness of institutions that allow people to engage in collective action. Where such institutions are strong, Mungiu-Pippidi argues, they operate as a constraint on those who hold power. To test that idea, she conducted an analysis of data from 153 countries. She used an index developed by the World Bank Institute for measuring a country’s level of corruption and correlated that information with data on factors that reflect the ability of people in each country to act collectively.
Mungiu-Pippidi found that factors such as the degree of media freedom, the number of civil society associations per capita, and the number of Internet connections per capita each had a strong association with low levels of corruption. The model that she developed explains nearly 78 percent of cases in her sample, and that finding bolsters her argument that efforts to rein in corruption depend on a vibrant civil society.
Her analysis provides lessons for foundations and other groups that want to support newly minted democracies. These organizations, Mungiu-Pippidi suggests, should focus on including an anti-corruption component in programs that they sponsor—“a component that would develop collective action.” In particular, she says, philanthropic groups should involve elements of civil society “in the auditing process of these programs, and really make the stakeholders part of the control mechanism.”
Read more stories by Corinna Wu.