ALINA MUNGIU-PIPPIDI HERTIE SCHOOL OF GOVERNANCE

1. CONTEXTUAL CHOICES OF CORRUPTION CONTROLWhat have we learned from chasing Moby Dick for fifteen years? ALINA MUNGIU-PIPPIDI HERTIE SCHOOL OF GOVERNANCE pippidi@hertie-school.org; www.againstcorruption.eu

2. The anticorruption impasse… • Fifteen years at it and little to show in terms of significant country or regional progress • Awareness highest than ever, but also an industry driven by its own self-perpetuation needs: spends and employs more • Public highly critical and skeptical that govt driven AC leads anywhere • An international normative and legal framework now exists, but does it make an impact?

3. Definitional impasse • We presume that ethical universalism is a default state of governance (now in UNCAC!), so corruption must be a deviation from it • But in developing countries corruption is no deviation, but rather norm (particularism) • Consequence: norm infringing AC instruments fail to deliver norm-building

4. Historical impasse • Many countries in the developing world have not yet achieved the first transformation from rural collectivist society to basic market relations based on individual property (historian Alan Macfarlane 1978) . • Consequence: but they are expected to succeed in the second transformation from particularistic to impartial government without completing the first

5. Scientific impasse • What is presented in most anti-corruption literature as a principal-agent problem is more often than not a collective action problem, since societies reach a sub-optimal equilibrium of poor governance and no domestic agency exists to push for change • Consequence: we presume AC is a win-win policy and entrust various implausible principals with the task of controlling corruption

6. Policy impasse • We study what are the shared characteristics of countries which are now free of corruption versus those which are not (‘causes’ of corruption) and presume ‘costs’ without any good counterfactuals • Consequence: we end up recommending countries to be islands, Protestants, former British colonies and old democracies and economic predators to adopt policies allowing free competition

7. The impact of UNCAC

8. The impact of ACAs

9. ECE 2004-2010

10. Gross profit rate Romanian and foreign companies compared after 2007 EU accession

11. Evolution of the government reserve fund for natural disasters 2002-2010

12. Could we approach the problem differently? 2 research questions • 1. Which one is the norm/ rule of the game (Are the majority of government transactions carried on the basis of particularism or ethical universalism?) --- ESTABLISH THE GOVERNANCE REGIME • 2. What determines the evolution from one governance regime to another and can this be influenced by human agency in the medium term? --- ESTABLISH WHAT CHANGES THE EQUILIBRIUM

13. To answer: ANTICORRP, the largest social science EU grant to-date (8 millions Euros and 21 partners) • We study waves of ‘achievement’ in controlling corruption • Achievers are historical (pre-modern and modern, older and more recent) and contemporary • We know what makes them different from non-achievers (many of them are regional outliers), what we do not know is WHY • Analytic narratives of transitions to good governance

14. Few performers…

15. Governance regimes – streamlining theory

16. Governance regime change in historical perspective

17. Chile – GG first

18. Poland – the democracy/governance gap…

19. Explaining contemporary achievers – main lessons • Not one single institution explains achievers cases, which present great variation across the group • None evolved on behalf of legal constraints alone; reducing resources and increasing normative constraints (press and civil society) was the main element (except Botswana) • Emulation worked better than conditionality; domestic agency with an emulation model • Main actors professional groups, parts of professional elites, media

20. Explaining historical achievers – main lessons • Two European paths: • - less complex and numerous communities reached good governance already in medieval times on the basis of community participation – good designs, need size controlling • - complex larger European countries evolved thru enlightened monarchies which developed bureaucracies against challengers and reached GG prior to introduction of universal franchise; independence of judiciary was last. Models hard to reproduce, as democracy and modernization multiply resources of corruption

21. Why did reforms work in the past? (When they worked) • Ombudsman: tool for political opposition • Merit based systems introduced first in the army/navy answering existential threats for monarchies • Control/audit systems introduced by monarchs as part of conflict with aristocracy • Normative constraints (voice of the people) responsible for extension pluralism • Media responsible for increased privilege abolition The transition from corrupt regimes to a regime where ethical universalism is the norm is a political and not a technical-legal process

22. To evolve out of particularism as norm= collective action strategies • Situation A. You have losers from corruption, of which some are autonomous enough to take some action / they are the principals and any strategy should be grounded their level • Situation B. You have losers, but not autonomous enough for action; you do no AC, but develop them into a group capable of inflicting some normative constraints in the future (civil society development) • Situation C. No significant domestic losers exist. Forget about AC except as an approach to aid distribution

23. And what about the arsenal? • To increase the impact of international norm building we need to conceive the UNCAC implementation and review as mechanisms to stir domestic collective action. The UNCAC can have an impact only if the entire society contributes to a check on the government. • But who will do it? The majority is not from ethical universalism countries