Thread by @hamarquette

THREAD. @drcarynpeiffer & I have a paper out in @Gov_journal today, a response to a critique by Persson, Rothstein & Teorell of our 2018 Governance paper on grappling with ‘real politics’ of corruption.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.111…

It’s the first time we’ve done this sort of thing, & I have to say it was a bit 😱but also quite cathartic 🤓

It can sometimes feel like you need to take the ‘Anti-Corruption Research Pledge’ anytime you write a paper:

‘Of course, we all know corruption is a bad thing, however…’.

If you don’t, you risk being accused of saying that corruption is a ‘good thing’. Which we were...

In our 2018 article, we look in part at examples where corruption provides solutions to genuine problems that people face in dysfunctional political systems & in contexts where scarcity of resources leads to significant challenges for ordinary citizens.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.111…

This isn’t necessarily an original observation, but we argue that is essential for understanding why some types of corruption persists in some contexts.

dlprog.org/opinions/corru…

Persson, Rothstein & Teorell didn't agree with us, I think you can say...

You can find their paper that we're replying to here - onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.111….

Our reply covers 3 of their critiques.

1. We argue that their primary focus on intra-group trust over the many factors involved in shaping collective action calculations risks shifting blame onto society, rather than corrupt elites, effectively depoliticizing anti-corruption.

For why this matters, all you need to do is to look at @TransparencyUK's report out today.

transparency.org.uk/publications/a…

2. It’s totally possible to think about the functions that some types of corruption may help to fill in some contexts without having to argue that corruption is beneficial in the aggregate.

And ignoring functions can lead to unintended consequences that we’re currently often blind to.

Actually, you can look at our research with @PakRosi on bribery in Uganda’s health sector to see an example of what this looks like in real life.

theconversation.com/what-we-found-…

Understanding and shifting incentives and easing people toward non-corrupt behavior is showing promise in research like @ACE_soas and @ICTDTax among others. We need important insights such as these. Pledge or no pledge.

ace.soas.ac.uk

(This brought us back to Colin Leys talking about ‘moralists’ in corruption research back in the 1960s. We tend to have a policy-oriented literature that is implicitly moralistic in a way that hampers realistic policy interventions. But we digress...)

https://twitter.com/DFID_RED_GCSD/status/1141992822494642176

Finally, 3. Context does matter & we need to stop trying to find a single “magic key” theory to explain all of corruption. It’s not working, and it won’t work.

Political context matters. Sectors matter. Types of corruption matter.

curbingcorruption.com

As the late, great (much missed) Bob Williams said 20 years ago: “instead of putting all of our eggs in one conceptual basket [on corruption], there is a need to examine a range of related concepts.”

20 years on, the field is taking up this challenge.

From @pmheywood's important ‘hocus, pocus, focus & locus’ to @ICR_Network to @corruption_red to @Sussex_SCSC to @GI_TOC & many, many others, the field is exploding with innovation & exciting ideas. 🥳

nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/preview/838326…

In the end of our paper, we come back to the added value of the functionality lens. Our focus on “real world politics” reflects our belief that more of the field's time should be spent in this space.

A couple of years ago @fp2p asked “how can the anticorruption movement sharpen up its act?”

oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/how-can-t…

He said: “Let's see corruption specialists working with those trying to crack real world problems – like bad roads, or poor quality health and education services – rather than sitting with other anti-corruption experts talking about corruption...

... and so risking being pulled into generic and abstract debates about indicators. Corruption is a part of many big problems in development, but it is rarely the only part”.

This doesn't mean it's not a problem or it's a good thing, but to just be more focused on the end game.

So thanks to the editors of @Gov_Journal for giving us the chance to reply. In the end, it was fun. @DrCarynPeiffer & I are very much looking forward to future research on this, with more ‘focus’ and more ‘locus’.

We’ll see about the hocus pocus…

ps I'm working on getting an open access link up that I'll put on my webpage along with the journal link, but in the meantime, here's the link again onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.111…