Corruption in the Eye of the Beholder: Survey Evidence from Mainland China and Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

This article explores how and to what extent people differ in their level of tolerance for corruption and why some people show a stronger propensity to counter corruption actively, while others seem more willing to accept it. We draw on the original data collected from a survey on perceptions of corruption among university students in Hong Kong and Mainland China to answer these questions. The respondents’ perceptions of corruption are measured by how they identify corruption, understand its causes, and interpret the consequences it may bring to society. Our empirical findings show substantial differences in perceptions of corruption across and within the two regions and also reveal a strong association between the way people perceive corruption and their level of tolerance for corruption and propensity to act against it. We see that, other things being equal, different perceptions of corruption lead to different tolerance levels for corruption and influence people's willingness to take part in the fight against corruption. Our findings also suggest that it is important to address the deficit in people's understanding of corruption in order to achieve desired anti-corruption effects.     

What causes employees to whistle while they work? Factors affecting internal whistle‐blowing in the Australian Public Service

What causes employees in the Australian Public Service (APS) to internally blow the whistle on corruption in the workplace? This research examines the impact of the nature of corruption, organisational culture, and employees’ work attitudes and actions on internal whistle‐blowing in the APS. The respondents were found to internally blow the whistle for most types of corruption: fraud, conflict of interest, unlawful disclosure of government information, and perverting the course of justice. Their whistle‐blowing behaviour was, however, unaffected by observations of theft of official assets. They were also unlikely to report observations of cronyism and nepotism. Active observers of workplace bullying (those who have blown the whistle after witnessing someone else being bullied) were three times more likely to also internally report corruption than inactive observers of bullying.     

权力人腐败的机会主义动因及其矫治

人类经验表明,权力腐败实质上是权力人的违法腐败。机会主义人性行为分析证明,权力人的腐败本源于权力人的机会主义人性,是人性利己与利他矛盾内耗的外在表现。通过对"左"右倾机会主义、代理人机会主义和权术机会主义的观察也发现,如果没有有效的制度规则约束,权力人从本性上必然会利用机会甚至创造机会滥用权力,作出谋求私利最大化的机会主义"败德"行为。因此,为了防止权力人的腐败,就需要以多重制度设计抑制权力人的机会主义心理,约束权力人的败德行为,矫治权力人的权力滥用。不过,值得注意的是,人类对权力人机会主义腐败的治理将是一场需要战胜自我本性的持久战,要打赢这场反腐持久战,必须坚持不懈地推进国家反腐治理体系和治理能力的系统化、协同化与现代化。     

Restoring trust in the police: Why female officers reduce suspicions of corruption

Recent studies show a clear link between women in government and reduced concerns about corruption. Until now, it remains unclear which underlying attitudes about women explain the perception that they will reduce corruption. Using a survey question about adding women to a police force, with an embedded experimental treatment, we examine three distinct stereotypes that might explain the power of women to reduce concerns about corruption: gender stereotypes of women as more ethical and honest, the perception of women as political outsiders, and beliefs that women are generally more risk averse. We find that people do perceive women as more effective at combating corruption, and these perceptions are greatly enhanced when information about women's outsider status and risk aversion is provided.     

How Policy Entrepreneurs Reduce Corruption in Israel

This article suggests a new perspective for analyzing anticorruption policies by emphasizing the important role of policy entrepreneurs. We maintain that these entrepreneurs combat corruption in three ways: (1) by initiating attempts to reduce corrupt practices, whether through legislation or judicial decisions; (2) by being recognized as honest brokers for informants and insiders; and (3) by providing reliable information from these sources to promote scandals. Even when they are unsuccessful in getting legislation passed, anticorruption entrepreneurs reduce corruption because they raise the level of scrutiny into corrupt practices. In addition, they foment uncertainty, deterring those considering abusing their power. We test our theoretical framework on several anticorruption entrepreneurs in Israel, demonstrating that their existence increases the potential cost of corruption. By creating networks, sharing information with others, and building reputations of honesty and courage, they encourage those involved in or considering illegal activities to refrain from such actions.     

Accountable or Untouchable? Electoral accountability in Romanian local elections

While retrospective models of voting posit that voters should “vote the rascals out”, a wave of recent research has found that this is rarely the case. We investigate this question in a context in which many sitting politicians have recently been indicted on corruption charges – the municipal level in Romania, a surprisingly under-researched case in this sub-field. Romania provides a good case for electoral accountability. Not only do Romanians deeply detest corruption, the party system also contains many parties that would make it easy for voters to switch from a corrupt to a cleaner alternative. We collected an original data register of electoral and socio-political data on roughly 3200 localities together with all cases of corruption charges published by the Romanian anti-corruption agency, the Direcţia Naţională Anticorupţie (DNA), accounting for magnitude and timing of the scandal as well as the judicial outcome for the indicted mayor. In all, we find that 81 sitting mayors elected in 2012 were charged with corruption prior to the 2016 election. We test the electoral impact of corruption on the incumbent mayors on four outcomes indicating electoral accountability commonly used in the literature – retirement, vote share compared to the previous election, voter turnout, and reelection using difference and difference and a pairwise matching designs, inter alia. The results show that Romanians do punish their corrupt incumbent mayors to a quite high extent compared to the clean mayors. However, due to the large vote margins, the punishment is not severe enough to make them lose more often than similar “clean‟ mayors, although they tend to not run for re-election at much higher rates. Turnout is unaffected by corruption at the municipal level. In line with previous results, we thus find a certain amount of electoral accountability, but not to the extent that the ‘rascals are thrown out’.     

医疗腐败的成因与治理

医疗卫生系统的腐败是社会各界最关注的一种腐败。它的产生有着复杂的政治、经济、社会和文化因素,还有人们的心理活动、价值取向、文化观念等因素。治理医疗腐败要采取综合治理,从加强对医院领导干部和重要岗位人员的职业道德、反腐倡廉教育入手,以建立健全管理制度、奖励和惩罚制度、考核制度及药品招标采购的相关制度为重点,发挥党内监督和群众监督的作用,建立医院反腐倡廉的监督体系。以落实领导干部述职述廉、院务公开、＂三重一大＂制度为抓手,从长远考虑,从解决具体问题做起,逐步构建医疗腐败的惩防体系。     

Awareness of Corruption in the Community and Public Service: a Victorian Study

Corruption hurts the public and undermines government. This study of perceptions of corruption in Victoria shows that the community believes corruption is on the increase, yet this view is not shared by public servants. In general corruption is not on the radar of senior Victorian public servants. There are more perceptions of corruption in line agencies than in central agencies. Behaviours most commonly suspected and observed were hiring family and friends, conflict of interest, abuse of discretion and abuse of information. One‐ third of public servants surveyed thought there were opportunities for bribery, yet only 4% had suspected bribery and less than one per cent had personally observed it. Almost half do not believe they would be protected from victimisation should they report corruption. The data reported here poses challenges in thinking about corruption when devising integrity standards in the public service.     

Who Will Be the “Principled‐Principals”? Perceptions of Corruption and Willingness to Engage in Anticorruption Activism

Many anticorruption campaigns aim to encourage citizens to demand better control over corruption. Recent literature suggests that perceived high levels of corruption and government effectiveness in controlling corruption will limit citizens' willingness to actively oppose corruption. Using Transparency International's 2013 Global Corruption Barometer, we test these ideas across a 71‐country sample. We find that perceived government effectiveness tends to encourage anticorruption civic action, while perceptions of corruption being widespread tend to have the opposite impact in non‐OECD countries. Our analyses also suggest that the interaction between these perceptions is important; we find that, especially among those who perceive that the level of corruption is high, when confidence in the government's efforts grows, so does their willingness fight corruption.     

See No Evil,Hear No Evil? Assessing Corruption Risk Perceptions and Strategies of Victorian Public Bodies

This paper critically examines qualitative survey data from 36 Victorian public sector bodies on their perceptions of corruption risks, and strategies to mitigate these risks, as well as the integrity mechanisms in place. The findings indicate that even though corruption does not seem to be prevalent in these bodies it is not on their radar either, though fraud prevention was significantly present. The paper identifies international best practices of integrity management and inculcation of public service ethos in developed countries, and stresses three vital elements or pillars that combine both the ‘values’ and ‘compliance’ based approaches. These pillars are as follows: (1) specific corruption prevention programs and strategies that are additional to but complement existing anti‐fraud programs; (2) targeted anti‐corruption training, both for employees and for the public; and (3) effective leadership engagement and commitment to an ethical culture (Tone at the Top).     

The negative relationships between employee resilience and ambiguity,complexity, and inter-agency collaboration

Employee resilience (ER) is often needed to face demands inherent in public sector work. Some types of demands, however, may hinder its development, rather than provide the type of challenging adversity from which resilience can develop. Public sector job demands have been a long-standing issue for public workplaces and employees but are also growing in salience as organisations face an increasingly variable, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment. Drawing on the Job Demands–Resources model and the challenge/hindrance stress literature, this multi-level study of Aotearoa New Zealand civil servants (n = 11,533) in 65 public sector organisations shows that ER is negatively affected by demands such as job insecurity, unclear job and organisational goals, and inter-agency collaboration. However, organisational resource constraints are positively associated with ER. This study identifies core PA job and organisational demands that hinder ER and offers practical implications and suggestions for further research.

Points for practitioners

• Job role ambiguity, job insecurity, unclear organisational goals, and inter-agency collaboration are common job and organisational demands in public sector workplaces.
• For employees, these demands are stressors that employees do not feel they control, and may therefore hinder employee resilience: the ability to learn, adapt, and leverage networks in the face of challenges.
• Surprisingly, resource constraints, where employees have to ‘do more with less’, might help employees develop ER.
• While inter-agency collaboration has potentially many benefits, it appears to have negative spillover effects on employees unaware of it or not involved in it.
• To encourage ER, agencies should clarify both organisational and job goals, and assure job security, control, competency development, and supervisor support.

     

Intensifying Social Exchange Relationships in Public Organizations: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment

In accordance with social exchange theory, prominent streams of management research emphasize the importance of reciprocal exchange relationships between organizations and their employees. When employees perceive themselves as supported by the organization, they reciprocate with increased work motivation. However, we do not know how this knowledge can be developed into management initiatives that increase public employees’ perceived support, because severe endogeneity problems make it difficult to estimate the effect of organizational support on employee commitment outside the laboratory. We use a randomized field experiment involving more than 800 public employees to estimate the effect. We find no average effect of the organizational support treatment on the employees’ perceived organizational support. Yet, a subgroup analysis shows a positive treatment effect when the employees’ local front‐line managers felt less supported prior to the intervention. We discuss the implications for theory and management practice. ©2012 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Cheap talk or incredible commitment? (Mis)calculating transparency and anti‐corruption

Why do “tainted” politicians in high‐corruption countries adopt transparency and anti‐corruption policies that risk exposing their wrongdoing? Using the cases of freedom of information and public asset disclosure in Romania, we assess three explanations: that these policies are meant to be mere window dressing, facilitate bottom‐up monitoring, or ensure access to information for the ruling party if it loses power. We find that decision makers adopt transparency and anti‐corruption policies because they want to signal their integrity and because they underestimate their consequences. Because they assume they will be able to control implementation, decision makers discount the potential costs of damaging information being released. Sustained political competition can keep corruption and lack of transparency on the public and political agenda, shifting attention from policy adoption to implementation and leading to increased compliance. Since politicians miscalculate the consequences of their actions, signals that are intended to be cheap can end up being quite costly.     

“Not Imminent in My Domain!” County Leaders’ Attitudes toward Eminent Domain Decisions

Eminent domain is an urgent problem facing local government administrators and scholars throughout the United States. However, the literature is sparse regarding how local leaders make decisions on this hot‐button issue. A 2006 Government Accountability Office report noted a lack of data about local governments’ use of their eminent domain authority. A survey of county managers in North Carolina was conducted to redress this apparent knowledge gap. Although the findings are primarily generalizable only to other Dillon’s rule states, such data demonstrate that eminent domain applies more often for “narrow” (public use) purposes, such as water and sewer systems, than for “broad” (public good) purposes, such as economic development. Current and future property considerations also influence eminent domain decisions. [A] law that takes property from A, and gives it to B: It is against all reason and justice, for a people to entrust a legislature with such powers; and, therefore, it cannot be presumed that they have done it. —Associate Justice Samuel Chase, majority opinion, Calder v. Bull (1798)     

ATTITUDINAL EFFECTS OF PUBLIC-PRIVATE COOPERATION IN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Using data from a national mail survey, opinions on the local economic development process held by economic development practitioners working for a city, chamber of commerce and public-private agencies are compared. The data show that public-private agency officials bridge the gap between the perspectives held by chamber government officials. Economic develop- ment practitioners working for public-private agencies have more respect for both governmental employees and business people than do other economic development practitioners. They feel that it is possible to gain more control over the economic development process than do their business or governmental counterparts. And, they indicate the advantages for the local community of maintaining such control; for example, being better able to stop businesses from whipsawing disorganized communities into making unnecessary concessions.     

法治思维下的福利与反腐

随着中央反腐力度不断加大,逢节送礼的不正之风受到极大遏制。与此同时,一些传统的职工节日福利也被取消,这引发了广泛的争议:有人认为不该借反腐之名拿掉职工福利,也有人认为"反腐不反职工福利"是特权思想在作怪,是打着民意的旗号为腐败行为辩护。应当确立福利的合理范畴,区分福利腐败与正常福利的界限,使薪酬和福利设计摆脱暧昧、灰色的性质,改变福利随意发放和定位不清的现状。福利腐败的治理必须运用法治思维依法进行,必须坚持公开、公平、公正原则,必须注意区别对象、合情合理。通过具体的规章制度管理好福利,是治标;最终实现福利的法治化、正规化、制度化,则是治本。     

Utopian Thinking Under the Sign of Neoliberalism: Towards a Critical Pedagogy of Educated Hope

As the vast majority of people become detached from public forums that nourish social critique, agency not only becomes a mockery of itself, it is replaced by market-based choices in which private satisfactions replace social responsibilities and private solutions become a substitute for systemic change. As the worldly space of criticism is undercut by the absence of public pedagogies and spaces that encourage the exchange of information, opinion and criticism, the horizons of an inclusive and substantive democracy disappear against the growing militarization of public space, the attack on the welfare state, the ongoing commercialization of everyday life, and the growing isolation and depoliticization that marks the loss of a politically guaranteed public realm in which autonomy, political participation and engaged citizenship make their appearance. Drawing upon the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, Zygmunt Bauman and others the author addresses the current crisis of meaning, political agency and pedagogy, and the implications it has for developing a cultural politics that links utopian thinking not only to the complex nature of social agency and the importance of democratic public spheres, but also to the fact that active and critical political agents have to be formed, educated and socialized into the world of politics.     

Institutional checks and corruption: The effect of formal agenda access on governance

Legislative checks give whoever wields them influence over policy making. It is argued in this article that this influence implies the ability not only to affect legislative content, but also to direct public resources toward private ends. Rational politicians should use access to checks to make themselves better off – for example, by biasing policy toward private interests or creating opportunities to draw directly from the public till. Disincentives exist only to the extent that those able to observe or block corruption do not themselves benefit from it. Political opponents thus can use checks to stymie each other, but legislative checks controlled by political allies create conditions for collusion and corruption. Testing this claim against data from a sample of 84 countries, the results presented in this article show strong support for the hypothesised relationship between institutional checks and corruption.     

Do Politics in Europe Benefit from Politicising Corruption?

In this article, two unexplored trends in European electoral politics are highlighted. Using newly collected data the article tracks the politicisation of corruption in electoral campaigns from 1981 to 2011, an electoral strategy that has been increasing over time in most European countries. It then empirically tests two aspects of this campaign strategy. First, what are the factors that are systematically associated with a party’s decision to politicise corruption? Second, what are the electoral effects in terms of relative vote share for parties that politicise corruption? Using an original data-set that employs multi-level data (parties nested in countries) the results demonstrate first that politicisation of corruption occurs systematically more often among established parties from the main opposition, new parties and parties on the political right, and occurs as a function of country-level corruption, district magnitude and public party financing. Second, it is found that the main opposition and new parties that use such a campaign strategy make significant electoral gains relative to the previous election compared to parties that do not politicise corruption. Yet gains are offset in low-corruption countries. The findings demonstrate salient implications for research on party systems, corruption studies and democratic legitimacy, among other areas of investigation.     

我国亟待出台防止利益冲突法

利益冲突是市场经济国家滋生腐败的主要根源。防止利益冲突法是国家为了避免公职人员公权私用、以权谋私，从而厘清公权与私利的界限，保证公职人员廉洁从政的法律规范；它是防微杜渐、防患于未然，从源头上预防腐败的基础性法律制度。我国出台防止利益冲突法是解决现行防腐败制度不尽人意问题的必然选择，是遏制当前腐败易发多发势头的必要举措，是巩固党的执政地位的迫切需要。它有利于促进社会公平，有利于恢复我国的国际形象，也是我国政府的国际义务。