The Dynamic of Normalizing Corruption in Government Institutions

Abstract

Institutional corruption imposes high costs on society and the provision of public goods. Therefore, many scholars have studied the problem of corruption from different angles, but corruption is a complex phenomenon and hard to reduce to a simple formula or model. There is a great number of studies about the causes of corruption, but they do not examine the dynamic that creates this problem. The failure to identify how corruption starts makes many anti-corruption initiatives fail because these initiatives adopt a strategy without considering whether that strategy effectively targets the root causes of corruption. . Thus, this dissertation examines the dynamics of normalizing corruption in government institutions, using law and economics as a tool for the analysis. In particular, the dissertation is developed from a model that Blake Ashforth and Vikas Anand launched in their paper, “The Normalization of Corruption in Organizations.” Normalizing corruption in institutions can be divided into two stages, each of which has two pillars. The first stage is normalizing corruption among individuals. At this stage, corrupted behaviors are just the decisions of individuals who have incentives that push them to become involve in corruption. The first pillar normalizing corruption at the individual level is the individual decision to engage in corrupt behavior. As rational economic actors, individuals decide whether to engage in corruption by assessing its costs and benefits. If the material benefits of corruption are higher than the costs, individuals have financial incentives to engage in corrupt behavior. Nonetheless, because engaging in wrongful behavior incurs psychic costs, people often try to find a way to rationalize their actions. This is the second pillar of normalizing corruption at the individual level. As more individuals engage in corrupt behavior, they work together to rationalize their actions until corruption is routinized and people within an institution accept it. In other words, corruption reaches a tipping point at which corruption is normalized corruption at the institutional level. In this level. Corruption is collective action instead of individual action. Corruption at this stage is transformed to be part of the institutional culture. This happens by standing on two pillars. The first one is socializing corruption where the newcomers are induced to view corruption acceptable, and in some situations desirable. When corruption is socialized, corruption becomes a social norm that individuals unconsciously internalize and to which they conform their behavior in order to be accepted by the institution’s members. The second pillar is legitimizing corruption, which is seen in institutions that suffer from systematic corruption. In this pillar, corruption is legal and supported by the rule of law, and sometimes by the public opinion. As a response to the problem of normalizing corruption, I adopted the UNDP suggestion, which is the ‘sandwich situation’. Sandwich situation means that defeating corruption combines a “top-down” and a “bottom-up” approach. The top-down anti-corruption approach is adopted by governments and can include the compliance approach, the integrity approach, or both. On the other hand, the bottom-up approach is implemented by citizens, the institutions of civil society, and the media.