Arrests Are Fun. But For Every Corrupt Official Caught, Another Calmly Takes Their Place

Hough this is banal, but sometimes it’s worth reminding again: corruption is not a cause, but a consequence. The cause lies in the system where striking a deal is easier, cheaper, and safer than doing things honestly and legally.

Political science has long stopped explaining corruption as the evil will of individual people and looks at it as predictable behavior in a given environment—theory of games confirms this across many cases. Robert Klitgaard, back at the end of the 80-years, derived a short formula: corruption = monopoly plus discretion minus accountability. In other words, people steal not where there are more bad people, but where there is a monopoly on the right to decide, a wide leeway to do it "at one's own discretion" and a small probability of being held to account for the result.

Klitgaard called corruption a crime of calculation, not passion. Less emotion, more analysis of procedures and the cost of simplifying the entire system. Therefore arrests and bail are fun and very instructive, but concurrently one must do many other things. For active commentators I want to emphasize: parallelly, not instead. And likewise—when arrests occur instead of changing the system—the effectiveness will also not be high.

So, one must start by removing monopoly and discretion. The less room there is for manual decisions, the fewer of these permissions, approvals, and exceptions to the rules there are, the fewer points where people can "take".

It is important to hire people by profession, not by loyalty. Comparative studies of bureaucracies show a persistent dependency: where the state is deprived of competence rather than personal connections, corruption is lower. Let’s ask for results, not for form or process—that’s my favorite. "I work" is not identical to "I did or I have done."

And let’s continue open data. Public registers, declarations, and open procurement catch more than any number of auditors, because everyone looks at once: journalists, competitors, activists. Each of these tools narrows the field of potential abuse.

Hunting down individual people changes the picture, and this picture happily diverges on social media, but it is precisely these changes that alter the rules of the game. Because as long as the rules remain the same, another person will calmly take the place of every caught one.

Source: Artem Bidenko / Facebook