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Corruption, Anti-Corruption, and Political Competition

Though previous research makes clear the costs of corruption, the literature is much less sure of both its causes and the most effective ways to fight it. In this paper I examine existing efforts to explain corruption, discuss their weaknesses, and pose the beginnings of a theory of ‘clean government’, a regime stuck in a low-corruption equilibrium. This theory builds on existing work in political science and economics, and focuses on the role of various aspects of political competion in ‘cleaning up’ and exacerbating corruption by politicians and bureaucrats. This paper is a preliminary exercise for a larger, potentially dissertation-sized project, that asks: under what political-institutional conditions do anti-corruption reforms effort succeed? 1