لنستخرج كنوزا من المعرفة و الإبداع و العلم و الأفكار
ABSTRACT Public perceptions and attitudes are central to an understanding of the significance
of corruption in Europe and in democracies generally – this for a number of reasons including the meaning of the term ‘corruption’ itself. But the investigation of perceptions and attitudes is fraught with difficulties, philosophical as well as practical. If these difficulties appear to invite the conclusion that investigation in this area is a forlorn enterprise, three challenges make it worth while to persist: The significance for democratic stability of public appraisals of official conduct deemed illegitimate; growing concerns about this conduct; and a relative lack of information in the area. Each based on a single West European country, or on a specific comparison, the papers making up this special issue together highlight four important themes – a genuine understanding of which will be crucial for intellectual progress in this area.
KEY WORDS: Corruption, perceptions, evaluations, action
There can be no greater threat to the permanence of our democracy and our
democratic liberties than that the public should get it into their heads that
national or local government is irregular, subject to improper influences or
even corruption and bribery. (Herbert Morrison, 1947)
If political corruption is significant for the welfare of less developed countries (where
bribery can help to perpetuate relative states of lawlessness and insecurity which in
turn act as brakes on economic development), then its potential significance is hardly
less for the older established democracies of places like western Europe, simply
because of what is at stake – or might be at stake. Della Porta and Vannucci (1999)
have argued, with respect to liberal democratic regimes, that corruption in a
democracy is in effect the corruption of a democracy, meaning that where corruption
occurs in these regimes, its effects, or potential effects, are such as to undermine, or
considerably weaken their claim to be ‘democratic’ at all.
However, it is important to distinguish between two ‘levels’ of impact in the sense
that one can have corruption that is exposed and corruption that is not exposed, and
the effects of the exposure of corruption will not be the same as the effects of the
underlying phenomenon. Moreover, the exposure of corruption is only likely to have
any significant effect if it provides the basis for scandal where the latter requires: (1)
The transgression or presumed transgression of values, norms or moral codes; (2) by
certain people whose positions make them ‘scandal-prone’; where (3) ‘nonparticipants’
disapprove of the actions/events/incidents and articulate their
disapproval by publicly denouncing what has happened, or is presumed to have
happened.
The analysis of moral codes and of what publics expect of politicians and public
officials is therefore crucial for an understanding of the significance of corruption in
modern democracies. It is crucial for at least two other reasons besides. First,
whatever else it might mean, the term ‘corruption’ refers to an infringement of rules –
where a ‘rule’ is a criterion of behaviour that indicates right and wrong ways of doing
things; is something that can only exist in virtue of social interaction, and is
something whose infringement is to some greater or lesser degree morally
condemned in the group whose social existence gives rise to it. Therefore, to
describe given acts as ‘corrupt’ is to condemn them as illegitimate according to the
standards of one’s own group or at least the group with which one identifies – which
in turn means that we cannot know what counts as corruption unless we know
something about the moral codes of the group to which the person seeking to apply
this label belongs.1
Second, democracies are regimes that are by definition responsive to public
opinion – but on the other hand, public opinion is not an exogenous variable as far
as the actions and initiatives of governments are concerned: Publics take their cues in
terms of their attitudes and policy preferences from what agenda-setting authorities
define for them as ‘problems’ and from what they define for them as viable means of
addressing those problems. So public attitudes and moral codes are central also to
how authorities respond to the exposure of corruption and similar forms of
misconduct. On the one hand, authorities’ responses are significantly influenced by
public reactions; on the other hand, these responses themselves tend to define
misconduct as a ‘problem’ worthy of attention and thus to trigger certain moral
reactions. So the problem of responding to corruption and misconduct is to a very
large extent a problem of the management of public concerns – as Herbert Morrison
well understood. Indeed, it may not be going too far to suggest that political elites
are in this area driven less by the desire to ensure that the behaviour of those in the
public domain is in fact clean (as they understand ‘clean’) than by the desire to
ensure that it is perceived to be clean. After all, anti-corruption measures may be
inconvenient in all sorts of ways and their effectiveness must (given that corruption is
a clandestine activity) always be attended by a degree of uncertainty. On the other
hand, public disapproval of those in authority undermines that authority by
definition; and in an age of mediated communication it is a risk that can be averted
only if the authorities’ attention to it is constant. There can be little doubt that it was
these two conflicting sets of imperatives that lay at the base of what was for many
years the dominant strain in the strategy of British political elites for dealing with the
exposure of corruption and misconduct, namely, to treat the perpetrators as ‘rotten
apples’: To subject, that is, identified cases to investigations that dealt with the
offenders – but that also repeatedly insisted on ‘the general integrity of institutions
and the robustness of the procedures involved in dealing with the offences’ (Doig,
2003, p. 178).
