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Does Democracy Check Corruption? Insights from China and India
Author(s): Yan Sun and Michael Johnston
Source: Comparative Politics, Vol. 42, No. 1 (October 2009), pp. 1-19
Published by: Comparative Politics, Ph.D. Programs in Political Science, City University of
New York
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27822289
Accessed: 14-03-2019 22:42 UTC
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Does Democracy Check Corruption?
Insights from China and India
Yan Sun and Michael Johnston
Democracy is widely expected to restrain corruption.1 Democratic institutions and pol
itics make it more likely that corruption will be discovered and publicized, allow cit
izens and political oppositions to make an issue of corruption, and facilitate recourse
ranging from public hearings to voting the scoundrels out. Other claimed advantages
of democracy include horizontal accountability via independent judiciaries and various
checks and balances; a free press; social attitudes and sanctions, the latter often imple
mented through private associations, supporting legal rules; and widespread commit
ment to the rule of law.2 Indeed, global corruption rankings show a visible, if imperfect,
tendency for democracies to cluster at the "less corrupt" end of the rankings while un
democratic societies dominate the other extreme.
But to the extent that such rankings make sense?a debatable matter?is it really
democracy that accounts for the differences? Democracy is not only institutions and
practices but also an outcome, reflecting deeper influences that also shape corruption;
to analyze societies in terms of whatever democratic aspects they seem to lack might be
to miss forces that actually are at work. Do comparisons confound democracy with
affluence, strong civil societies, and other developments? If so, poor democracies might
have few advantages, and specific points of vulnerability, in dealing with corruption.3
One test of such propositions is to examine a poor democracy's corruption prob
lems. The case in question should be well established, with democratic institutions that
have had time to work their effects,4 and should be compared with one or more un
democratic states of similar social scale. We should consider not only the overall gravity
of corruption but also differences in kind. Economic underdevelopment should be ex
amined not just as a contextual factor, but rather in terms of opportunities and institu
tions that influence corruption and democracy alike.5
This article compares two challenging but appropriate cases: India, a large but poor
democracy, and China, a large undemocratic state. The similarities between the two coun
tries include their vast populations and territories and undeniable political, economic, and
cultural importance; severe "principal-agent" problems arising from their size; particular
istic cultures that can buttress nepotism and personalism; the legacies of centralized
economies; and now economic liberalization and rapid growth. Both economic centrali
zation and overall levels of development affect corruption in complex and reciprocal
1
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Comparative Politics October 2009
ways. China had the more centralized economy for many years but began liberalization
first, proceeded with it faster, and is now the wealthier country. India's economy was quite
centralized in its own right, at least until 1992, and less integrated with the world.6
Does democratic India have any clear advantage in corruption control? Democracy
by itself does not lead to significantly less, or more, corruption. India seems to do
neither strikingly better nor worse in corruption terms than China, either recently or over
time. Rather, the corruption-checking benefits of democracy depend critically upon eco
nomic development. A developed economy provides resources and key institutions pro
tecting legitimate activities and delineating permissible ways of pursuing and using
wealth. Further, a developed economy offers alternatives to corrupt exploitation.
India's case suggests that a poor democracy, lacking those features of development,
may be vulnerable to disruptive and exploitative styles of corruption that are difficult
to check or uproot. These findings are not only of theoretical interest with respect to
corruption and democracy; they call for a reassessment of widely accepted ideas about
corruption control and liberalizing reforms.
"Democracy" here refers to institutions and processes through which those who
govern can be held accountable to citizens?chief among them, regular competitive
elections, structural guarantees of rights, and the rule of law. By this standard India
has been a democracy for most of the past sixty years, while China has not. At the
same time, India has increasingly lapsed into "illiberal democracy": an elected polity
where liberties and rule of law are secure in theory but violated in practice, as a result
of religious intolerance, massive corruption, and a disregard for the rule of law. China,
economically liberalizing but politically authoritarian, is a "liberalizing autocracy."7
"Corruption" is defined here in terms of indigenous official and scholarly ideas.
Authoritative Indian and Chinese sources both emphasize the core idea of "the misuse
of public office for private gains,"8 ideas also found in Nye's formal definition, the one
most widely used in the English language literature.9 While boundaries between the
public and the private may have been well defined in India's British-inspired system
and China's former centralized command, economic liberalization and political decen
tralization have set them in flux, introducing contrasts and gray areas we can neither
ignore nor gloss over through definitions. Thus, to realistically reflect what is seen as
corruption in practice we rely on indigenous reports, outside analyses that draw upon
them, and well-regarded studies of those countries in the secondary literature.
Democracies, Economies, and Corruption: Questions of Balance
Huntington has drawn attention to issues of balance among political and economic pro
cesses, telling us much about how a given democracy functions?or fails to do so.10
While democracy, steered by accountability to popular preferences, theoretically should
restrain corruption, on a day-to-day level effective democracy depends upon a balance
among many factors: liberty and order, elite autonomy and accountability, politics and
markets, and self-interest versus the rights of others, to name some dimensions. Political
2
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Yan Sun and Michael Johnston
and economic participation must be both protected and restrained by sound, legitimate
institutions. Open politics and economies can help sustain each other, but there must be
limits as to how, and how far, each may intrude upon the other. Control of corruption
involves not the simple presence or absence of democracy, but rather a variety of ques
tions about the ways wealth and power are sought, used, and exchanged, and about the
framework of institutions?state, political, and social?within which those processes
take place. Accountability cannot be created simply by putting elections and other in
stitutional hardware in place. It can also be difficult to sustain. In practice most democ
racies have institutional shortcomings and social expectations of varying intensity that
make corruption control more difficult.11
Thus, despite the apparent synergy between lively, competitive politics and econo
mies in most established democracies, matters can be quite different for a poor democ
racy. Underdevelopment is not just an absence of affluence; it also reflects a scarcity
of legitimate alternatives for gain, and pervasive vulnerability to exploitation. Equally
important, if less noted, is the weakness of key economic institutions?property rights, bank
ing, contract enforcement mechanisms, orderly taxation, and more. Micro-coordination
through informal social linkages can fill some gaps; still, many things taken for granted
in advanced economies?including information, orderly procedures, contract enforcement,
and the ability to safeguard gains?are lacking in poor societies regardless of regime types.
All too often they become commodities marketed by venal officials.12
Contrasting Imbalances
In 1996 one of us used those issues of balance to compare corruption cross-nationally,
not in extent but rather in variations in kind.13 One dimension was the balance between
the accessibility and autonomy ojpolitical elites?whether or not politicians are vulner
able to interest group pressures. In well-institutionalized democracies, private interests
have significant political influence but officials can still formulate and implement poli
cies authoritatively. But where accessibility significantly exceeds autonomy, officials
are vulnerable to private demands. Where elite autonomy exceeds accessibility, account
ability is weak and officials exploit private interests. The second dimension was the
balance between political and economic opportunities?whether it is relatively easier
to win power or to get rich. Huntington argues that where political opportunities are
more abundant than those for accumulating wealth, individuals are likely to abuse
power in search of wealth. Where economic opportunities exceed the political, how
ever, people tend to use wealth to seek power.14 The key issue in either case is the
relative balance of opportunities, not whether wealth or power are easily attained in
some absolute sense. The first scenario is frequent in modernizing societies, while the
second is more common in mature democracies.
Where neither citizens nor officials dominate, and where political and economic
opportunities are in balance, corruption can be restrained and alternatives to it are
plentiful. But if elite autonomy and accessibility, and/or power and wealth, are out
3
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Comparative Politics October 2009
of balance, several distinctive corruption scenarios result. In what we call Type 1
cases, elite accessibility exceeds autonomy, and economic opportunities exceed polit
ical ones. Here interest groups?particularly business interests?are strong, and polit
ical elites vulnerable. The result is the use of money, legally (via political contributions)
and otherwise (bribes), to seek influence over political elites. In Type 2 cases, entrenched
elites manipulate political access (a scarce and therefore valuable commodity) for eco
nomic gains (rent seeking). Relatively extensive economic opportunities create numerous
bidders for access, but elites control the extent and direction of rent seeking. In Type 3
cases, elite accessibility, numerous political opportunities and economic scarcities com
bine to produce insecure elites. Vulnerable to pressure, relying on patronage to solidify
their power, yet unsure of long-term power, elites amass gains as quickly as possible.15
Corruption in such settings is often unstable and rapacious. In Type 4 cases, well
entrenched elites control political competition and material rewards through a monopoly
over patronage, leading to machine-style corruption.16
Table 1 elaborates on this analysis, placing the four varieties of corruption into the
context of different regime types: (1) interest group bidding in mature democracies; (2)
centralized corruption (joint monopoly) marked by collusion among multiple businesses
interests and government figures, with the latter dominating the former; (3) fragmented
patronage leading to decentralized, disruptive corruption in weak democracies; and (4) a
bi-gemony of political elites and economic oligarchs sharing rent extraction?not a sit
uation in which business and government figures collude in pursuit of specific goals,
but rather a bilateral monopoly over patronage enabling them jointly to dominate whole
societies in autocratic fashion.
Types 2 and 3 are at issue for India and China. Both feature extensive rent seeking,
but with a key difference in the structure of extraction: China, a liberalizing autocracy,
experiences joint monopolies in its corrupt processes, while democratic India contends
Table 1 Systemic Imbalances and Corruption
Political versus Economic
opportunity
Corruption Pattern
Economic greater than
political opportunity
State versus Society Strength
Elite more accessible
than autonomous
1. Decentralized elite/
interest group bidding
Liberal democracies
Elite more autonomous
than accessible
2. Joint monopoly/
competitive bidding
Developmental states;
liberalizing autocracies;
China
Political greater than
economic opportunity
3. Fragmented patronage/
decentralized corruption
Illiberal Democracies;
India
4. Bi-gemony/
monopolistic corruption
Illiberal autocracies
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Yan Sun and Michael Johnston
with independent monopolies. Shleifer and Vishny illustrate that distinction and its
implications by an analogy to toll gates along a road. Each toll collector is a monopolist
able to allow or deny passage. But while joint monopolists might cooperate in charg
ing moderate tolls to maintain a profitable traffic flow, independent monopolists?
restrained by neither competition nor collusion?will tend to charge tolls so high as
to drive traffic onto other routes, spoiling business for all. China's joint-monopoly situ
ation imposes constraints on corruption that India lacks.17
Our theoretical and empirical distinctions?between kinds of imbalances and pat
terns of corruption?find support in leading studies of corruption. In Kang's analysis of
South Korea and the Philippines, relatively balanced competition between political and
economic elites in South Korea was the reason why corruption there did not spiral out
of control as it did in the Philippines.18 Hutchcroft categorizes capitalist systems based
on the relative strengths of state and society and the motivational logic of elites. In his
view, the developmental states in East Asia that practice "statist capitalism" are more
production oriented than the "bureaucratic capitalism" or "booty capitalism" of patrimo
nial administrative or oligarchic states in South East Asia.19 Rose-Ackerman distin
guishes among competitive, bilateral monopolies and kleptocracy models of corruption
by asking whether a range of officials and private interests participate, a ruler and a few
private interests jointly dominate, or a ruler monopolizes, a country's corruption. She
finds the latter two models the most disruptive, economically and administratively.20
India, China, and Corruption in Asia
How corrupt are China and India? Available evidence suggests no distinctly superior
performance by either. Consider Transparency International's Corruption Perception
Index (CPI) which, given criticisms on grounds of validity, precision, and variability,
we regard only as suggestive of broad contrasts, not as a definitive measure.21 To judge
by the CPI, most Asian states have significant corruption. China and India, while
not the worst cases, are not perceived favorably in terms of corruption control either.
Democratic India has actually fared somewhat worse over the years.
Do such figures, based in most years primarily on surveys of foreign business
executives, realistically reflect domestic corruption? On balance they likely do better
in China, where the presence and variety of foreign executives are much greater than in
India. Diaspora executives, who oversee the bulk of China's FDI, are often from
surrounding regions and familiar with informal practices in Chinese cultural settings.
They are thus vulnerable to and adept at illicit exchanges with Chinese officials, and
at the same time have extensive experiences by which to judge the extent and signifi
cance of such activities.22 In India's case, the offshore sector is still limited to a few
industrial enclaves and less exposed to the informal practices of the larger society, thus
creating a more amenable?yet less typical?business environment for diaspora and
foreign executives.23
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Comparative Politics October 2009
Table 2 Scores of Asian States on TI CPI, 1997-2008
Country and
abbreviation
Singapore
Hong Kong
Japan
Taiwan
South Korea
Malaysia
China
Thailand
India
Sri Lanka
TI CPI 2008
9.2
8.1
7.3
5.7
5.6
5.1
3.6
3.5
3.4
1997-2008
average*
9.21
7.96
6.88
5.62
4.55
5.05
3.36
3.33
2.95
3.27
Country and
abbreviation
Mongolia
Vietnam
Nepal
Indonesia
Pakistan
Philippines
Bangladesh
Laos
Cambodia
TI CPI 2008
3.0
2.7
2.7
2.6
2.5
2.3
2.1
2.0
1.8
Myanmar
1997-2008
average*
2.96
2.57
2.60
2.11
2.38
2.76
1.53
2.45
2.05
1.62
Note: For Pakistan, average is for 1995-99 and 2001-2008; for Bangladesh, 2001-2008;
for Sri Lanka and Myanmar, 2003-2008; for Mongolia and Nepal, 2004-2008; for Laos
and Cambodia, 2005-2008.
Source: Transparency International Corruption Perception Indices, 1995-2008,
http://www.transparency.org/policy research/surveys_indices/cpi, accessed on July 7, 2009.
Does a lower level of development account for India's somewhat poorer scores? In
sections below, connections between economic underdevelopment and problems of cor
ruption control are emphasized. But possible connections exist at the perceptual
level too. Extensive corruption is by now widely associated with development problems.
Might those asked to judge India fall back on the notions that corruption hurts
development, India is less developed, and therefore it must be more corrupt? We do
not know. Still, even after six decades of nearly continuous democracy, India is not seen
as successful in terms of corruption control.
This assessment is reinforced when one looks at democracy's anticorruption re
cord in Asia. Japan and Taiwan, to a lesser extent, are relatively well regarded, but
Thailand, the Philippines, Bangladesh, and intermittently democratic Pakistan do
not score well. Three of the five top-ranked governments in Table 2?Singapore, Hong
Kong, and Malaysia?have never been full democracies; a fourth, Taiwan, became
democratic only recently. The only long-standing democracy in that top group, Japan,
is distinguished by a tradition of modified one-party politics. The simple correlation
between the mean TI scores in Table 2 and the index of authoritarian versus demo
cratic government in the 2007 Polity dataset, on which India scores 9 and China -7, is
an unimpressive +.241 (N=19, p=.16).24 Undemocratic societies tend to receive low
CPI scores, as Table 2 also suggests, but the more democratic countries' scores range
from the lowest to the highest in the group. Looking at democratization trends
does not improve matters. Change in Polity scores between 1990 and 2007?an arbitrary
interval but suggestive of cumulative democratic trends?correlates at only +.033
(N=19, p=.446) with CPI averages. Democratic change (denoted by positive values)
does not by itself point to significant gains in perceived corruption control.
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Yan Sun and Michael Johnston
Perceptions and causality are slippery things, but in a time when the promotion of
democratic good governance is high on the international agenda, these results should be
of considerable concern. Many anticorruption strategies rely heavily on democratic
ideas, such as a strong civil society, free press, independent judiciaries, and so forth.
But if the democracy/good governance connection does not work, or if democracy in
a setting of low economic development has marked corruption vulnerabilities, then
hopes of reform through democratization may be premature or even harmful.
Economic Scarcity and Corruption
What do those ideas suggest about democratic India and authoritarian China? That poverty
makes corruption control more difficult is a commonplace observation, but we have yet to
explore in detail what economic underdevelopment does to democracy's ability to maintain
accountability, restrain rent seeking, and check official self-dealing in private markets.
Statistically, affluence is a far better predictor of CPI scores than the democracy
measures discussed above. CPI averages correlate at +.93 (N=20, p = .000) with
GDP per capita for 2007. That relationship does not just rediscover democracy under
another name: while the range of poorer, high-corruption Asian societies includes
several authoritarian regimes, such as Myanmar and Vietnam, it also features countries
at least intermittently democratic, such as Bangladesh and Pakistan, and sustained
democracies, such as India and Thailand. By contrast, two of the most affluent societies
in the region, Hong Kong and Singapore, both with strong anti-corruption records, are
not democracies. Affluence is likely both a contributing cause and a result of effective
corruption control. But economic development is complex, requiring sound institutions
of its own?institutions that might reinforce democratic processes and create alterna
tives to corruption while fostering affluence.
Economic development might affect the corruption/democracy relationship in
several ways. One is a "make ends meet" argument, as Palmier observes in his study
of South Asia: "Poor pay is a powerful pressure towards corrupt gains, if only to make
ends meet....Public servants not paid enough to fulfill their usual obligations are only
too likely to take advantage of whatever opportunities may arise for unauthorized
gains."25 One study of corruption in the Philippines is appropriately titled, "What Are
We in Power For?"26 Sachs proposes that corruption in poor countries be measured
against their poverty levels?a "relative corruption" idea he applies to Africa.27 These
connections can become systemic, as poverty encourages corruption which in turn makes
for underdevelopment.28 Another linkage, You and Khagram argue, is that income in
equality increases corruption because the rich have greater motivation and opportunities
to engage in graft in order to advance their privileges and interests, while the poor are
more vulnerable to extortion. They find that while authoritarian countries may have greater
corruption on average, the effect of inequality on corruption is greater in democracies.29
In some societies, Ghana for example, an official of a certain rank is expected
by many people to have a house, a car, and other possessions commensurate with that
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7
Comparative Politics October 2009
status, and may also be obliged to help people "back home."30 Ironically, to the extent
that democracy gives individuals of modest status access to officiai roles?a good thing
in most respects?incentives to corruption may thus grow. Corruption, moreover,
widens the inequality between those with access to power and those without, turning
that access into a marketable commodity,31 while leaving those low in the stratification
system with few alternatives for attaining their goals.32
Empirical studies of India confirm the central role of these economic incentives.
Years ago Myrdal wrote of "the low real wages of officials, especially those at the
lower and middle levels" as encouraging pervasive corruption.33 The Indian Govern
ment's Third Pay Commission (1970-1973) concluded that while higher salaries would
not guarantee integrity, "it can be confidently stated that the payment of a salary which
does not satisfy the minimum reasonable needs of a government servant is a direct
invitation to corruption."34 Wade places "acute scarcities" atop his list of causes for
India's bureaucratic graft.35 Palmier ranks poverty among three top causes for India's
corruption, the other two being ample opportunities for abuse and ineffective policing.
Quah both demonstrates the value of high official salaries in Singapore and shows that
across a range of Asian countries India's official pay scales are the lowest.36 Pavarala,
interviewing elites in the 1990s, found that a majority of bureaucrats, industrialists, and
judges blame economic deprivation for political and bureaucratic corruption, especially
at lower levels.37 Schenk points to the uniquely corrosive nature of India's poverty: "the
embedding of scarcity in a system of morally based inequality and in a set of tight
dependency relations" both perpetuating and sanctioning patrimonial relations.38
Economic scarcities rooted in China's central planning did create incentives for bu
reaucratic abuse in the Spartan era of Mao Zedong. But corruption was relatively insig
nificant compared with the reform era.39 In this later period, both structural factors and,
in more developed areas, illicit market-style connections between officials and business
have encouraged abuses.40 Still, poverty remains a leading source of corruption in poor
regions by perpetuating a lack of economic alternatives.41 There the issue revolves more
around the state's coffers and everyone's dependence upon them: perpetrators prey on
public funds and on official posts as sources of black income. In poor rural regions, the
sale of office has become the most serious source of corruption in recent years. The
appointment of ill-qualified office buyers and the diversion of development funds help
create a vicious cycle of underdevelopment and corruption with both nondevelopmental
and antidevelopmental consequences.42
Systemic Influences on Corruption
Material deprivation likely inhibits corruption control anywhere, but systemic aspects
of underdevelopment may well be particularly harmful in a democracy. In Table 1 China
is categorized as a Type 2 "developmental state" or "liberalizing autocracy," where
corruption tends toward competitive bidding among joint monopolies integrating both
official and economic interests. India fell into Type 3, "illiberal democracy," with more
8
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Yan Sun and Michael Johnston
fragmented patronage and decentralized corruption. What does that difference mean in
specific terms?
First, China offers more economic opportunities than political ones, while India
provides more political opportunities than economic ones. China liberalized its econ
omy earlier and more extensively, creating a larger and more vibrant nonstate and non
agricultural sector. Waves of Chinese officials have quit their posts to "jump into the
sea of business." Those remaining seek shares and other forms of participation in busi
ness ventures.43 India's liberalization, in addition to its later start, has met internal bar
riers in the form of strong unions, lower classes resisting privatization, and large
agrarian regions little affected by liberalization. In contrast to the plethora of Chinese
township and village enterprises (TVEs), FDI-invested firms, and other nonstate enter
prises, India's private enterprises are mostly owned by a small clique of upper classes
and castes.44 India's famed IT and other offshoring industries employ a tiny fraction of
its labor force, with a huge contribution to overall growth but limited spillover effects in
the entire economy.45
India's myriad government institutions, electoral processes, and political parties?
each at federal, state, and local levels?provide many more political opportunities than
China's one-party state, even when the structural deterioration of the Chinese Com
munist Party (CCP) is taken into account. Moreover, the Indian bureaucracy draws
its members at various levels from many classes and castes. Elections offer political
advancement to rural elites, transforming the social base of the political elite from upper
and upper-middle class, mostly urban backgrounds during the pre-independence and
early post-independence days to more rural backgrounds recently.
Such openness does not always support accountability. Big landlords constitute
50-60 percent of the members of state parliaments and bring their feudal mores of favor
exchanging with them.46 As in rural China, a constant and open "market for public
office" exists among bureaucrats and politicians eying the posts and promotions avail
able at set prices.47 Though local officials go to considerable lengths to maintain
boundaries between themselves and the citizenry, access is marketed by middlemen
and touts (some of the au courant now calling themselves "consultants") who have
a stake in making sure people continue to view government as remote and unrespon
sive.48 The 2007 Global Integrity Report shows that the most corrupt areas in India
were government accountability (sixty-five out of one hundred points), civil service
regulations (sixty-six points), and oversight and regulation (sixty-nine points).49
In China far fewer desirable political opportunities exist than economic ones. Elec
tions open up political paths at the local level only. Access to higher positions depends
on steady promotion and real or manipulated performance evaluations, and therefore
upon cultivation of patrons. State offices and managerial posts in state firms are still
desirable, but for wealth rather than power. Less substantive party positions, mean
while, have become unattractive.50 The party has difficulty recruiting and retaining
talented people for positions such as branch party secretary in urban settings because
those posts compete with far more lucrative jobs in the expanding economy. Most
nonstate businesses do not have enough willing party members to form party branches
9
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Comparative Politics October 2009
or to conduct regular activities because party identification has become irrelevant
to professional advancement. The market for public office is found more in poor
and inland regions where economic alternatives are scarce.51
India differs from China, too, in terms of elite accessibility versus autonomy?the
second dimension of Table 1. India's economic problems encourage patronage; acces
sibility of elites by private interests makes such practices fragmented. Scholarship on
clientelism identifies causal connections between democracy and corruption by suggest
ing that voters seek extrabureaucratic material benefits from political patrons.52 The lat
ter, who seek power amid weak institutions, intense political competition, and scarce
economic opportunities, use patronage to maintain power. They build personal follow
ings, not broad-based parties, yet find them hard to control and expensive to maintain;
followers, for whom loyalty depends on benefits that may be a matter of survival, shift
quickly among competing patrons.
Thus, efforts by Indian politicians to create broad organizational support often
fail because "the ordinary voter has an extremely narrow view of public responsibility
and is not willing to give time and effort without the promise of immediate material
reward."53 Wade finds the Indian electorate "primarily swayed by material and particu
laristic inducements" with "people vot[ing] for whom they think can give them the most
favor...." Institutional weakness makes it difficult for policy-oriented parties to "deliver"
in the first place; the expectations and material needs of the electorate make it even more
difficult for such parties to survive.54 Thus governments purchase short-term backing, or
engineer defections in parliament, through payoffs. Money can even recruit "muscle,"
that is, through violent or criminal groups that extort contributions, scare off opponents,
and intimidate voters.55 The result is what Fareed Zakaria calls a "bandit democracy":
"Every year elections are rigged, ballot boxes are stuffed. The winning party packs
the bureaucracy?sometimes even the courts?with its cronies and bribes opposition
legislators to defect to its ranks. The tragedy for the millions of new lower-caste voters
is that their representatives, for whom they dutifully vote en masse, have looted the
public coffers and become immensely rich and powerful while mouthing slogans about
the oppression of their people."56
Democracy under such conditions?far from unique to India?does not so much fail to
check corruption as encourage distinctive varieties of it, while rewarding expectations
that undermine reform.
China's centralized and noncompetitive structures, by contrast, tend to produce
joint-monopoly corruption. China has devolved many powers to local levels, yet deci
sion making within each level remains in the hands of the chief executive of a state
agency or public enterprise. The result is localized centralization: local chief executives
become the main locus of favor exchanges, especially in less developed and inland
regions and at lower levels where monitoring is weakest. Such local joint monopolies
over both power and material favors amount to "local predatory states" in the worst
cases.57 At the same time, joint monopoly corruption may be less disruptive for devel
opment.58 Two efficiency effects can exist, relative to a fragmented patronage system:
10
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Yan Sun and Michael Johnston
at one end, bidders for government favors, rather than squandering resources on multi
ple agencies or agents, need bribe only the principal power holders. At the other, middle
and lower-level officials do not need personal followings in an authoritarian system.
They therefore control who gets access and benefits, and on what terms. The likely out
come is not necessarily more or less corruption, but rather corruption that is more pre
dictable. Predictable corruption can be factored into plans by firms and citizens. While it
is in no way beneficial, evidence suggests that the more unpredictable a given level of
corruption becomes the more harmful it is in economic terms.59
Chinese corruption does not just consist of illicit public-private transactions. It
can also involve theft directly from public coffers. Many projects and some key sectors
remain in state hands, becoming ready targets for bureaucratic predators through pri
vatization programs, land allocation, developmental assistance, relocation funds, infra
structure projects, aaministrative funding, banking, transportation, etc. Local monopolies can
often operate more or less unchecked. Such activities not only disrupt development but also
reinforce the nexus of power and material gain underlying joint monopolies.60
Another contrast lies in access to policymaking by private interests. Indian politi
cians depend on campaign financing from the business world both to fund elections and
tighten their grip on constituencies.61 Changing technologies intensify that dependence:
in the old days when parties operated as political machines, mobilization through public
sector patronage might have been sufficient, but now reliance upon television com
mercials and pollsters makes contributions more important. Campaign contributions, a
former Central Vigilance Commissioner of India writes, "greatly affect the motivations
and actions of the politicians who benefit from them."62
The degree to which campaign finance corrupts depends, of course, more upon the
nature of the institutional regime regulating it than upon the existence of democracy
itself. Before economic liberalization, business contributed out of "its dependence on
government for licenses and permits to establish and operate its businesses and also
for patronage and protection," exercising influence both through formal lobbying and
informal, decentralized contacts with state agencies and political parties. The result was
huge returns by way of fiscal and industrial policies.63 Liberalization has cut regulation
at higher levels, but not at all levels; in fact, it has expanded corruption by marrying
economic liberalization to electoral politics. India's cliques of tycoons and contractors
have new opportunities to influence decisions at the highest levels, including policy on
divestiture of government investments, preferred buyouts of state assets, provision of
subsidized finance, selective termination of government monopolies in service sectors,
investment in new public projects, and other lucrative deals.64 The combination of weak
institutions, insecure elites, and economic scarcity makes a poor democracy all the more
vulnerable to corruption through campaign finance.
In China fundraising is not an issue for elites, or an access opportunity for business
groups, at higher levels. Much corruption occurs mainly in implementation phases at
local levels after central decisions have been made, although it is also on the rise at
policymaking levels. It has become common for localities to have offices in the capital
to lobby central ministries for projects and financing; industrial groups also seek and
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Comparative Politics October 2009
win national policy advantages.65 Whereas in India every politician and political party
needs to raise campaign funds (and most will pocket some personally as well), in China
it is the bureaucrat who accepts kickbacks. In India business groups seek patronage from
national politicians through contributions, but in China it is still impossible to reach
Politb?ro members, top state executives, or national legislators that way. In China a dif
ferent process has been on the rise?corruption carried out collectively by a public
agency.66 For example, a state agency, rather than an individual official, might accept
a kickback from funding recipients; usually the spoils are shared within the agency,
while individual culpability is avoided.67
Convergence in Corruption
So far we have asked why India's democracy is ineffective at checking corruption, while
China controls (as opposed to reducing) it in a variety of ways. Some factors, however, pro
duce comparable levels of corruption regardless of the presence or absence of democracy.
Consider, for example, relationships between politicians and bureaucrats. In the
wrangling between political and administrative figures, a democracy should have advan
tages. Periodic elections should keep politicians in check, who should in turn watch over
bureaucrats. India's tradition of sharp formal distinctions between politicians who for
mulate policies and bureaucrats who implement them should be an added advantage.
Nonetheless, since imperial times the Indian bureaucracy has been a major locus of po
litical power in its own right. The problem is collusion between bureaucrats and poli
ticians. Wade's earlier observation still rings true today. Indian politicians compel the
bureaucracy to acquiesce in their nefarious activities by controlling appointments to
"cushy jobs."68 Bureaucrats, in turn, seek political backing "to escape unwanted places
and unpopular posts" as well as to share spoils. A quid pro quo relationship thus exists.
Politicians supply opportunities and protection while bureaucrats dispense official fa
vors and patronage.69 Economic liberalization has reoriented but not fundamentally
weakened such connections. Instead of the myriad regulatory controls at the discretion
of bureaucrats, favor dispensing now manifests through "arbitrary award of contracts,
sanctioning of deals and investment projects without competitive bidding and transpar
ency. The 'license permit raj' has been replaced by the 'tender raj'."70
China has sought to separate party and state functions in local governments and
public firms. Rather than ending the overconcentration of power, however, they have
produced confusion.71 Supposedly, party organizations and officials have given up rou
tine administrative and managerial functions but retain control over key personnel mat
ters and oversight. But formal party oversight has become ineffective in most cases,
while party-bureaucracy collusion continues. One problem is that party officials are
usually not decision makers in managerial functions, where substantive power lies
and illicit deals occur. Another is that the appointment of personnel below top ranks
now falls within the prerogatives of the administrative/managerial strata, as do routine
decision powers. Yet another is that party posts are no longer desired by the best and
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Yan Sun and Michael Johnston
brightest professionals, as noted earlier. In small state firms where party officials are
internally appointed, they may even face dismissal by managers. Their posts are often
taken over by managerial personnel, encouraging collusion while rendering oversight
impossible. In less developed and rural regions, collusion between party officials and
administrative chiefs is similar to that in India. The former engage in "sale of office"
and protection, the latter in "buying of office" and the distribution of favors. Local
"corruption networks" draw layers of officials and private bribers into clusters. The
last decade has seen a surge of "cluster cases" in China, especially in poor areas.72
In the end India's weak state, with its mix of elite accessibility, political opportu
nities, and economic scarcity, has simply produced distinctive types of corruption?not
less of it?when compared to China's stronger state, elite autonomy, scarce political
opportunities, and greater economic opportunities. These overall contrasts help us under
stand why a poor democracy has not outperformed a developmental autocracy in terms
of corruption control. Economic underdevelopment, it seems, undermines democracy's
anticorruption properties not just through material scarcity, but also because it is both
effect and cause of weaknesses of key economic institutions and guarantees. Those factors
encourage corruption that is extensive, fragmented, and therefore disruptive in form.
Does corruption undermine the legitimacy of governments, in the Indian case, or of
the basic regime in either society? If so, we might expect it to be checked via democratic
(India) or liberalizing (China) reactions against official abuse. But such effects are weak
at best in both cases. In India anti-incumbency sentiments can run high, yet when the
electorate ousts one corrupt government it has no option but to bring in another. The
futility of voting the scoundrels out highlights again the importance of structural and
institutional factors in the Indian system. As one finance bureaucrat observes,
"corruption does not adversely affect the legitimacy of particular governments [because]
there does not seem to be any difference from one party to the other. Whoever comes to
power indulges in corruption, people feel. There is a total apathy towards the political
system among the public. The general opinion is that there is no difference between
Tweedledum and Tweedledee."73
Not surprisingly, the public has little trust in government generally, and the net impact
of corruption on legitimacy of particular parties is inconsequential.74 A highly fractured
society such as India's also weakens "rational public opinion" as group identities, edu
cational disparities, and other socioeconomic contrasts influence political awareness.75
Still another factor neutralizing India's democratic processes is the cooptation of
opposition groups into collusive networks of political and bureaucratic corruption.
Like ruling parties, opposition leaders too depend on private contributions.76 They
are readily available for defection at a price and easily persuaded to look the other
way on corruption matters. The judiciary, though independent, has lost effectiveness
as an instrument against corruption since the Nehru era; decisions to prosecute rest
with the executive branch, which authorizes few cases to proceed. Long delays, ma
nipulation of processes, and dubious judicial appointments make it all the more diffi
cult for media and citizen critics to demand accountability.77 Political leaders have little
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Comparative Politics October 2009
reason to blow the whistle, effective legal action is unlikely, and independent revela
tions have little effect.
In China the monopoly of the CCP means it takes the major blame for the corrup
tion of its rank and file. The CCP regime may tolerate few domestic critics, but it still
suffers when frequent comparisons are made against the relatively clean and egalitarian
Mao era on the one hand, and mature liberal democracies on the other. The former
comparison undermines the contemporary CCP's credibility from the left while the lat
ter chips away from the right. Farmers and downsized workers of state enterprises have
expressed pent-up frustration through riots; surveys reflect their deplorable transfor
mation from the core social base of the CCP to the prime victims of inequality and cor
ruption since the 1990s.78 Land grabs by rural officials have become common, while in
state enterprises mismanagement and insider privatization lead to bankruptcies and the
loss of jobs.79 Critics abroad, and some intellectuals at home, point to the CCP monopoly
as the root cause of corruption.
Compounding the liabilities for the CCP is public awareness of corruption, despite
a dearth of transparent politics. Word of mouth is a potent channel of communication in
a communal culture. Corruption stories are reinforced by first-hand experience with
state agencies, most of which charge excessive fees for routine services. Both the party
and the media publicize details of major corruption cases once they are exposed.80
The media, with the CCP's blessing, increasingly report abuses by local cadres.81
The judiciary?politically dependent but increasingly compromised by commercial inter
ests?is another major liability for the party. Criticizing corruption is not equated with at
tacking the party and remains morally and historically legitimate in Chinese society.
Chinese people, after all, staged the famous Tiananmen protests against corruption long
before the colorful revolutions of post-Soviet republics.82
Nevertheless, regime legitimacy has not been critically undermined by corruption
in post-Mao China.83 As in India, one reason is sheer pervasiveness. Corruption has
become mostly materially based, more accessible, and less exclusive than in the early
years of economic reform, and is ironically less divisive. Contemporary corruption,
moreover, is no longer seen as directly caused by central policies, but more as errant
behavior by local officials. In fact, when local protesters complain about localized
injustices, they are more likely to demand that central policies be upheld and not
distorted, not that they be changed. Another key reason may be that the top national
leadership remains clean and visibly devoted to national development. The "princeling
party"?children of top leaders including Deng Xiaoping and CCP head Zhao Ziyang?
was tarnished during the "official profiteering" of the 1980s and became a main com
plaint of Tiananmen protesters. But the leaders themselves were credibly clean and will
ing to ban family members from doing business. The children of many top leaders remain
prominent, but the success of many other ordinary individuals has defused a politically
explosive issue. Below the top leadership, a handful of provincial governors and party
secretaries, several deputy central ministers, and an increasing number of deputy provin
cial governors have been brought down by scandal. But the effect of such exposures on
regime legitimacy is mixed, undermining the party's credibility yet serving, via periodic
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Yan Sun and Michael Johnston
crackdowns, to remind all concerned of the limits of wanton transgressions. For different
reasons, neither one-party China nor democratic India appears likely to experience
sweeping political change as a consequence of corruption.
Conclusion
Democracy in a poor, developing country has not clearly proven more successful at
tackling corruption than an authoritarian developmental state. This finding contributes to
our understanding about the variability of democracy and how regime types interact with
the dynamics of corruption in developing settings. More important, it indicates the limits of
democratic corruption control. In India accessible elites and economic pressures growing
out of scarcity sustain corruption and weaken accountability, in political and bureaucratic
arenas at all levels. Closed politics and autonomous elites, along with vigorous economic
growth, may shield the top levels of China's regime from the worst corrupting pressures,
shifting the emphasis to political and bureaucratic processes at lower levels.
It is tempting to ponder the implications of these findings for an age in which
democracy is widely promoted as improving governance, controlling corruption, and
promoting development. Third wave democratization since the 1970s, economic liber
alization since the 1980s, and revolutions in the former socialist world since the early
1990s all have led to a simultaneous, if halting and uneven, proliferation of markets
and democracies. Clearly democracy as a set of values has immense inherent appeal.
But as an instrumental strategy for good governance its record is decidedly mixed in
developing and transitional countries. Economic liberalization and democratization
seem to encourage the opening up not only of official processes, but also of corrupt
ones.84 The combination may "set the world on fire"?or unleash a "Godfather" decade
or two.85 We do not know whether corruption will continue to breed illiberal democra
cies, and vice versa, in developing regions.
Liberal autocracies, on the other hand, often fare no worse in terms of controlling
corruption, and have effectively achieved developmental goals. Zakaria's observation
is sobering:
[OJver the past fifty years almost every success story in the developing world has taken
place under a liberal authoritarian regime.... It is difficult to think of a Third World de
mocracy that has achieved sustained growth rates....Those that have gone down the
path of reform are quickly stymied by the need to maintain subsidies for politically
powerful groups....[F]or all its democratic glories, [India] has slipped further and
further behind on almost every measure of human development: life expectancy, infant
mortality, health, literacy, and education.... Surely it is time to ask whether democracies
such as India, so lauded by Western intellectuals, are working for their people.86
Thus for liberalizing China and for other developing economies too, the governance
reform priority may be to build the "liberal" part of liberal democracy: rule of law,
constitutionalism, protection of property and other rights, separation of powers, and
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Comparative Politics October 2009
media openness. But given widening social inequalities under economic liberalization,
hurried moves to open up politics and elite accessibility may enhance the influence of
the already privileged nouveaux riches, contributing to further corruption in newer
forms. To the extent that such trends limit political access for less powerful groups, they
may simply create new forms of tyranny, ironically fueled by democratic and market
liberalization. As India shows, economic underdevelopment is a dilemma of institutional
weakness as well as of massive poverty, turning the very openness of democracy into a
liability in accountability terms. A poor and unregulated democracy, it seems, can
undermine liberty and the rule of law while prolonging the cycle of underdevelopment
and corruption.
A final thought has to do with sequencing of reforms. Cross-sectional comparisons
suggest that economic growth is a better platform for democracy than democracy is for
growth.87 That idea dates back at least as far as the modernization theories of the 1960s,
but the connections are complex. One reason democracies do not do markedly better at
growth is that many have mature economies given to moderate expansion, while un
democratic societies include development states as well as economically dysfunctional
kleptocracies. For corruption control and for governance more broadly, success is more
likely if an economic base is built first, with democracy following more gradually. That
is a recommendation friends of democracy might find difficult to make, but one that we
believe is supported by the cases under consideration here.
The difficulty, of course, is that events have a way of forcing our hand. The transi
tions of the past generation suggest that political change is often sharp, discontinuous,
and dramatic (if, unfortunately, likely to stall out later on), while economic reform is
slower, uneven, and impeded by the rapid decompression of politics and government.
Few would stand in the way of citizens for whom long-denied freedoms have finally
arrived. Still, development is as much a process of establishing key institutions and or
derly economic arenas, as of "freeing" people to enrich themselves. How wealth is cre
ated, and the distributions that result, matter immensely. A government, democratic or
otherwise, that delivers a significantly better life to citizens while staying out of the
political clutches of an affluent few can earn credibility. In that sense, basic social ser
vices, a regulatory framework, and the taxes required to sustain both should not be seen
as a drag on the economy or as luxuries to be deferred. They are, instead, the price of
credible governance?indeed, necessities if democratization is not to become an invita
tion for economic interests to turn politics into an auction.
NOTES
1. Larry Diamond, Juan J. Linz, and Seymour Martin Lipset, eds., Politics in Developing Countries:
Comparing Experiences with Democracy (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1990).
2. Andreas Schedler, Larry J. Diamond, and Marc Plattner, The Self-Restraining State: Power and
Accountability in New Democracies (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999).
3. Ashutosh Varshney, "Why Haven't Poor Democracies Eliminated Poverty?" in India and the Politics of
Developing Countries, ed. Ashutosh Varshney (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004).
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Yan Sun and Michael Johnston
4. John Gerring and Strom Thacker, A Centripetal Theory of Democratic Governance (New York and
London: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
5. Gunnar Myrdal, "Corruption as a Hindrance to Modernization in South Asia," in Political Corruption:
A Handbook, ed. Arnold J. Heidenheimer, Michael Johnston, and Victor T. Le Vine (New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction Books, 1989), 265-79.
6. Daniel Treisman suggests that economic development and integration into the global economy help
check corruption. Treisman, "The Causes of Corruption: A Cross-National Study," Journal of Public
Economics, 76 (June 2000): 399-457.
7. Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: W. W.
Norton, 2003), 81-87, 106-13, 251-52.
8. Nagarajan Vittal, "Corruption and the State: India, Technology, and Transparency," Harvard
International Review, 23 (Fall 2001): 20; and Yan Sun, "The Politics of Conceptualizing Corruption in
Reform China," Crime, Law and Social Change, 35 (April 2001): 245-70.
9. Joseph Nye, "Corruption and Political Development: A Cost-Benefit Analysis," American Political
Science Review, 61 (June 1967): 417.
10. Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1968): 59-71.
11. Michael Johnston, Syndromes of Corruption: Wealth, Power, and Democracy (Cambridge and New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chaps. 1-3, 8.
12. Jens Chr. Andvig, "Corruption and Fast Change," World Development, 34 (February 2006): 328-40;
Jyoti Khanna and Michael Johnston, "India's Middlemen: Connecting by Corrupting?" Crime, Law, and
Social Change, 48 (December 2007): 151-68.
13. Michael Johnston, "Public Officials, Private Interests and Sustainable Democracy: When Politics and
Corruption Meet," in Corruption and the Global Economy, ed. Kimberly Ann Elliott (Washington, DC:
Institute of International Economics, 1997): 68-73.
14. Huntington, Political Order, 59-71.
15. On elite insecurity and voracious corruption, see James C. Scott, Comparative Political Corruption
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 80-84.
16. Johnston, "Public Officials, Private Interests," 70-73.
17. Andrei Shleifer and Robert W. Vishny, "Corruption," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 108 (August
1993): 599.
18. David Kang, Crony Capitalism: Corruption and Development in South Korea and the Philippines
(London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
19. Paul Hutchcroft, "Booty Capitalism in the Philippines," in Business and Government in Industrializing
Asia, ed. Andrew Maclntyre (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 221.
20. Susan Rose-Ackerman, Corruption and Government: Causes, Consequences and Reform (New York
and London: Cambridge University Press, 1999), chap. 7.
21. The CPI is defended by its creator in Johann Graf Lambsdorff, "Measuring Corruption?The Validity
and Precision of Subjective Indicators," in Measuring Corruption, ed. Charles Sampford, Arthur Shacklock,
Carmel Connors, and Fredrik Gaining (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), chap. 5.
22. On Taiwanese and Hong Kong businesspeople in China's corruption, see Yan Sun, Corruption and
Market in Contemporary China (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 105-6.
23. Interviews with Chinese IT executives in Silicon Valley, CA, by Sun.
24. Scatterplots and data for this relationship, and for those between CPI averages and democratization
trends and affluence respectively, available at http://people.colgate.edu/ mjohnston/Sun-Johnston%20plots
data.htm. Data Sources: Transparency International Corruption Perception Indices, 1995-2008, http://www.
transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi (accessed on July 7,2009); Polity IV Project 1800-2007,
http://www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm (accessed on July 7, 2009); GDP per capita calculated from
World Bank data, http://web.worldbank.Org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/DATASTATISTICS/0?contentMDK:
20399244-menuPK: 1504474~pagePK:64133150~piPK:64133175~theSitePK:239419,00.html (accessed
on July 7, 2009); figures for Taiwan and Myanmar are 2007 IMF estimates: http://financialdatalink.
sharepointsite.net/default.aspx (accessed on July 7, 2009).
25. Leslie Palmier, The Control of Bureaucratic Corruption: Case Studies in Asia (New Delhi: Allied
Publishers, 1985), 271.
26. J. V. Abueva, "What Are We in Power For? The Sociology of Graft and Corruption," Philippine
Sociological Review, 18 (July-October 1970): 203-8.
27. Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005).
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Comparative Politics October 2009
28. Shahid M. Alam, "Anatomy of Corruption: An Approach to the Political Economy of Under
development," American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 48 (October 1989): 441-56; and Peter Ward,
ed., Corruption, Development and Inequality (New York and London: Routledge, 1989).
29. Jong-sung You and Sanjeev Khagram, "A Comparative Study of Inequality and Corruption," American
Sociological Review, 70 (February 2005): 136-57.
30. Interviews with Ghanaian MPs and party officials, Accra and Tamale, by Johnston, July 2006.
31. Khanna and Johnston, "India's Middlemen," 155-61.
32. Colin Leys, "What is the Problem with Corruption?" Journal of Modern African Studies, 3 (August
1965): 215-30; and S. K. Das, Public Office, Private Interest: Bureaucracy and Corruption in India (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 110.
33. Myrdal, "Corruption as Hindrance," 414-15.
34. Cited in Das, Public Office, 105.
35. Robert Wade, "The Market for Public Office: Why the Indian State is not Better at Development,"
World Development, 13 (April 1985): 486.
36. Jon S. T. Quah, Curbing Corruption in Asia: A Comparative Study of Six Countries (Singapore: Eastern
Universities Press, 2003): 58-77.
37. Vinod Pavarala, Interpreting Corruption: Elite Perspectives in India (New Delhi: Sage Publications,
1996), 110-11.
38. Hans Schenk, "Corruption...What Corruption? Notes on Bribery and Dependency in Urban India," in
Ward, Corruption, 110-23.
39. Julie Kwong, The Political Economy of Corruption in China (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997); and
Alan Liu, "The Politics of Corruption in the People's Republic of China," American Political Science Review,
11 (September 1983): 602-21.
40. Most notably, Minxin Pei, "Corruption Threatens China's Future," Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, Policy Brief 55 (October 2007); Pei, Trapped Transition: Limits of Developmental
Autocracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Sun, Corruption and Market; and Melanie
Manion, Corruption by Design: Building Clean Government in Hong Kong and China (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2004).
41. For divergent levels and types of corruption in post-Mao China, see especially Sun, Corruption and
Market, chap. 4. See also, Yu Jianrong, "Social Conflict in Rural China," China Security, 3 (Spring 2007):
2-17; Xinhua, "China's Procuratorate to Put Rural Officials under Corruption Spotlight," People's Daily
Online, May 9, 2008.
42. Ibid. On selling offices in China's poor regions, see Sun, "Cadre Recruitment and Corruption: What
Goes Wrong?" Crime, Law and Social Change, 49 (February 2008): 61-79; and Jiangnan Zhu, "Why Are
Offices for Sale in China? A Case Study of the Office-selling Chain in Helongjiang Province," (FED Working
Papers Series, FE 2007132, 2007).
43. Ting Gong, "Forms and Characteristics of China's Corruption in the 1990s: Change with Continuity,"
Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 30 (September 1997): 277-88; and Gong, "New Trends in China's
Corruption: Change Amidst Continuity," in China s Deep Reform: Domestic Politics in Transition, ed. Lowell
Dittmer and Guoli Liu (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 451-69.
44. Vinod Pavarala estimates upper-caste ownership of local enterprises in Andhra Pradesh at nearly 80
percent; Pavarala, Interpreting Corruption, 33.
45. Stephen Cohen, India: Emerging Power (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2001), 105.
46. Pavarala, Interpreting Corruption, 100.
47. Robert Wade, "The System of Administrative and Political Corruption: Canal Irrigation in South India,"
Journal of Development Studies, 18 (April 1982): 287-328.
48. Khanna and Johnston, "India's Middlemen," passim.
49. Ritu Sarin, Global Integrity Report: India (Washington, DC: Global Integrity, 2007), 1-119.
50. This discussion is based on surveys and investigations by various organizational departments of
the Chinese Communist Party at central and local levels, collected in Li Huibin and Xue Xiaoyuan, eds.,
Investigative Reports on China: Changing Socioeconomic Relations and the Building of the Party (Beijing:
Social Science Documents Press, 2003).
51. Sun, Corruption and Market, 145-47; and Pei, Trapped Transition, 145-46.
52. Oskar Kurer, "Why Do Voters Support Corrupt Politicians?" in The Political Economy of Corruption,
ed. Arvind K. Jain (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 68.
53. Cited in Ibid., 68-69.
54. Wade, "Market for Public Office," 479, 486-87.
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Yan Sun and Michael Johnston
55. Robert Hardgrave and Stanley Kochanek, India: Government and Politics in a Developing Nation
(New York: Wadsworth, 1999), chap. 7.
56. Zakaria, Future of Freedom, 109; see also Johnston, "Public Officials, Private Interests," 73.
57. Pei, Trapped Transition, chap. 4.
58. Shleifer and Vishny, "Corruption," 599; Andrew Wedeman, "Looters, Rent-scrapers, and Dividend
collectors: Corruption and Growth in Zaire, South Korea, and the Philippines," Journal of Developing
Areas, 31 (Summer 1997): 457-78.
59. J. Edgardo Campos, Donald Lien, and Sanjay Pradhan, "The Impact of Corruption on Investment:
Predictability Matters," World Development, 27 (June 1999): 1059-67.
60. On transaction and nontransaction types of corruption in China, see Sun, Corruption and Market,
chaps. 2, 3.
61. Bhure Lai, Corruption: Functional Anarchy in Governance (New Delhi: Siddharth Publications,
2002), 144.
62.
63.
64.
65.
Vittal, Corruption and the State, 22.
Pavarala, Interpreting Corruption, 31; and Lai, Functional Anarchy, 144.
Vittal, Corruption and the State, 38-39.
Scott Kennedy, The Business of Lobbying in China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
66. Ting Gong, "Dangerous Collusion: Corruption as a Collective Venture in Contemporary China,"
Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 35 (March 2002): 85-103.
67. Ibid. Also, Xiaobo Lu, "Booty Socialism, Bureau-preneurs, and the State in Transition: Organizational
Corruption in China," Comparative Politics, 32 (April 2000), 273-94; and Sun, Corruption and Market,
chaps. 3, 4.
68. Wade, "Administrative and Political Corruption," 286-321; "Market for Public Office," 467-89.
69. P.C. Alexander, The Perils of Democracy (Bombay: Somaiya Publications, 1995).
70. Lai, Functional Anarchy, 184-91.
71. This discussion is based on surveys carried out by the Communist Party's personnel department in
various localities, reported in Li and Xue, Investigative Reports.
72. Principal-agent problems entailed by separation of party and state, and local corruption networks, are
documented in Sun, Corruption and Market, chaps. 5 and 4, respectively. See also Pei, chap. 4.
73. From an Indian Administrative Service officer in the Finance Ministry, cited in Pavarala, Interpreting
Corruption, 151; see also Transparency International India, India Corruption Study 2005 to Improve
Governance (New Delhi: Centre for Media Studies, 2005).
74. Pavarala, Interpreting Corruption, 151.
75. Lai, Functional Anarchy, 145-46; and Pavarala, Interpreting Corruption, 151-52.
76. Das, Public Office, 194; and Lai, Functional Anarchy, 144-45.
77. Das, Public Office, 174-75, 192-95; and Zakaria, Future of Freedom, 109-10.
78. Li and Xue, Investigative Reports.
79. Chen Feng, "Subsistence Crisis, Managerial Corruption and Labor Protests in China," The China
Journal, 44 (July 2000): 41-63.
80. See the list of national and local periodicals related to corruption in Sun, Corruption and Market, 219-22.
81. "The CCP Issues Document to Promote the Media's Oversight Power," Qiao Bao, April 20, 2005.
82. Yan Sun, "The Chinese Protests of 1989: The Issue of Corruption," Asian Survey, 31 (August 1991):
762-82.
83. This paragraph draws upon Sun, "Corruption, Growth and Reform," Current History, 104 (September
2005): 262.
84. For example, Kurt Weyland, "The Politics of Corruption in Latin America," Journal of Democracy,
9 (April 1998): 108-21; and Alan Doig and Robin Theobald, eds., Corruption and Democratization
(London: Frank Cass, 1999), 37-63.
85. Amy Chua, The World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and
Global Instability (New York: Anchor Books, 2004); and P. J. O'Rourke, "The Godfather Decade: An
Encounter with Post-Soviet Corruption," Foreign Policy, 121 (November/December 2000): 74-80.
86. Zakaria, Future of Freedom, 251-52.
87. See, for example, Jos? Tavares and Romain Wacziarg, "How Democracy Affects Growth", European
Economic Review, 45 (August 2001): 1341-78.
19
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(Forthcoming 2001). ACivil Society and Social Capital: A Primer,@ by Bob Edwards and Michael W. Foley, in Beyond Tocqueville: Civil Society
and the Social Capital Debate in Comparative Perspective, Bob Edwards, Michael W. Foley, and Mario Diani, Eds. University Press
of New England Series on Civil Society.
Civil Society and Social Capital: A Primer
Bob Edwards, East Carolina University
Michael W. Foley, The Catholic University of America
INTRODUCTION
Recent debate about the role of civil society in democratic governance around the world
and the "decline of social capital" in the United States has raised a variety of theoretical and
empirical questions about the character of contemporary societies and the social and institutional
bases for sound and dynamic democracies. This debate has reached a wide audience in North
America and Europe not limited to academia. The predominant refrain in the debate, following
Alexis de Tocqueville's 160 year old analysis of democracy in America, attaches tremendous
significance to the role of voluntary associations in society. Participation in such groups is said
to produce social capital, sometimes linked to high levels of social trust. Social capital in turn is
conceived as a crucial national resource for promoting collective action for the common good.
The concept of social capital has gained increasing popularity among political
sociologists and political scientists since being introduced by Pierre Bourdieu and James
Coleman in the 1980s. i Robert Putnam's work on Italy (1993) and his provocative claim that
social capital is somehow in decline in the United States (1995a, 1995b) stimulated a flurry of
research and writing, including efforts to apply the notion of social capital in disciplines as
disparate as criminology, epidemiology and economics, not to mention sociology and political
science. The World Bank has recently institutionalized the concept in its evaluation criteria by
requiring social capital assessments for current and future projects. In the United States, major
foundations like Ford and the Pew Charitable Trusts have implemented social capital related
funding criteria.
While the concepts of civil society and social capital have raised important questions
about the dynamics of social life, the sources of citizen involvement in political life, and the role
of trust in facilitating social action, both notions have proven difficult to define and apply in a
coherent manner. At the same time, and as a result of their very success, these terms have been
stretched conceptually, at the risk of hampering, rather than facilitating, our understanding of the
social and political processes they were meant to illuminate. Without pretending to definitively
resolve these concerns, this volume is intended to help clarify the issues at stake and illustrate
the rich empirical work that has followed on the debate.
THE MANY CIVIL SOCIETIES
1
The notion of civil society owes its birth to the influential formulation of Scottish
Enlightenment figure Adam Ferguson (1995). In Ferguson=s usage Acivil society@ represented
the realm of Acivilization@ and rising standards of living based on specialization or the Adivision
of labor.@ While a civil society thus offered all the advantages of modernity, it also risked social
division, as the diverse interests of the individuals who made it up and their devotion to the
pleasures and refinements of civilization threw into doubt their willingness to unite in common
cause in defense of their liberties. As they became more Acivilized,@ Ferguson worried, people
were becoming less decidedly Acitizens@. The German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1945) took
up these same questions, likewise seeking to reconcile the increasing division of labor and
diversity of interests of modern society with the republican ideal of a unified citizenry. Civil
society is thus juxtaposed to the state, but Hegel, at least, finds the solution to the problems
posed by Ferguson in a modern and enlightened state. For the early twentieth century Italian
Marxist, Antonio Gramsci (1971), by contrast, the conflict at the heart of civil society provides
the arena in which subordinate classes may contest the dominance of the ruling class crystallized
in the state.
Consciously or unconsciously, twentieth century variants of the notion of civil society
take up this Gramscian understanding, utilizing the notion less as an analytical tool than a
polemical one and posing Acivil society@ as an alternative to the existing political and economic
order. Whether as "society against the state" in the Polish and Latin American conceptions of
the 1970s, or as a sphere of social autonomy and democratization from below among the German
Greens and the French "Second Left"during the same era, the concept served to juxtapose a
sphere of voluntary, purposive association to the forces of chaos, oppression or atomization of
the time. Competing concepts of civil society thus almost invariably bear the marks of the
political struggles within which they were born. Considerable overlap in the sorts of social actors
identified as central to "civil society" among these conceptions gives the notion an air of
universality -- suggesting that if only we could come to agreement about just who and what is
included under its umbrella, we could achieve a comprehensive theory of state-society relations.
Yet, the real purchase of the notion of civil society today is polemical and normative and tied
closely to the debates which currently shape it.ii
In each of the cases mentioned above, "civil society" crystallized projects of social
autonomy over against the dominant power(s) of that time and place. In the Poland of the 1970s,
civil society was more a wish than a reality until the explosive growth of the Solidarity
movement in 1980-81. Prior to Solidarity's emergence the context of political opportunities in
Eastern Europe under the Brezhnev Doctrine constrained the possibilities for action and
convinced thinkers like Adam Michnik and Vaclav Havel that only by carving out spheres of
authentic and autonomous action in Acivil society@ could dissidents construct a third way
between reform of the Communist regime from above and open revolt from below. After 1981
2
events in Poland outstripped theory, and what started as simply an assertion of social autonomy
in the face of Communist power quickly became a highly charged and dangerous (if ultimately
successful) political movement (Pelczynski 1988). Latin American conceptualizations reflected
both the struggle against the military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s and a widespread
conviction that conventional party politics had failed these societies. Latin American activists
and thinkers thus framed civil society not only as "society against a repressive state" but as
society in place of the parties (Garreton, 1989; Fals Borda, 1992). The leftist orientation of many
anti-government activists led to an identification of civil society with the so-called the "popular
sector" -- including a wide variety of lower-class and leftist groupings under this umbrella, but
generally excluding even those sectors of the business and professional classes who eventually
joined in the opposition.
In Western Europe during the 1970's and 1980s proponents of civil society developed
their thinking against the backdrop of the neo-corporatist arrangements that had incorporated
organized labor and business into institutionalized patterns of governance, but afforded little
access for other constituencies. Civil society was conceptualized in opposition to the status quo
of this neo-corporatist political settlement. By establishing "action spaces" within civil society
in which to create new social and cultural organizations and institutions, representatives of
environmentalist, feminist and peace movements (among others) sought to embody alternative
ways of achieving collective goods and a conceptualization of democracy at least implicitly
critical of traditional forms of representation (Melucci 1989; Dalton and Keuchler 1990;
Edwards 1995, Ch. 2). Similar notions, without explicit appeal to the term Acivil society,@ made
inroads in the United States beginning with the Anew-left@ of the 1960s (Brienes 1982),
continuing with advocates of local citizen organizing (Boyte 1980), and being applied more
generally to an array of historical and contemporary social movements (Evans and Boyte 1986).
Explicit usages of the term Acivil society@ in the U.S. context often appeared imported,
with each school of thought tending to emphasize those aspects of the concept that best suited
their particular ideological or theoretical purposes.iii The apparent crisis of the "welfare state" in
the 1970's contributed to a search for a new paradigm in the United States, as elsewhere, but the
initial results were neo-liberal remedies based on slapdash deregulation and the confidence that
open, market economies would eventually "lift all boats."iv Academic and think tank
economists, central banks and international lending institutions led by the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund, and U.S. government agencies from Reagan through Clinton
promoted economic liberalization and the unfettered play of market forces as the most efficient
means of providing public goods. The uneasy fit between these prescriptions and the notion of
civil society, with its implicit critique of purely market-driven approaches, is evident in the
World Bank's tardy attempt to incorporate the organizations of civil society into discussions of
economic restructuring and state reform in the developing world. And what the Bank usually
3
meant by Acivil society@ was more often the new professionalized service and advocacy groups
(ANGOs@) than unions, community organizations, or the traditional non-profit sector. The
eventual emergence of the term Acivil society@ in the United States, similarly, often seemed to
reflect a tardy effort to appropriate the energies of groups deemed both appropriately Acivic
minded@ and capable of replacing governmental efforts with private charity B not those likely to
demand that government do more, better, of what it had once promised to do.
As an analytical concept, the contemporary notion of civil society, and the sectoral
models to which it is attached, thus suffers from acute definitional fuzziness. At least two
related factors underlie this lack of clarity. First and most important, the definitional confusion
stems from variations across the "many civil societies" that have been the implicit empirical
basis for the varying conceptualizations of the term thanks to its origins in specific polemical and
normative contexts. At the same time, paradoxically, the notion's precision suffers from the
sheer historical and even transnational sweep of its application and the consequent temptation,
despite the variation referred to above, to treat civil society and the Asectors@ (Astate@ and
Amarket@) to which it is juxtaposed as ideal types (Foley and Edwards, 1996; Edwards and Foley
1998).
Despite this lack of clarity, the notion of civil society has the merit of calling attention to
neglected dimensions of modern societies. While largely conceived in response to the perceived
failures of the twentieth century state, the rediscovery of civil society B whether in the U.S. or
abroad, by the left or the right B also springs from a rejection of the dominant economism of
modern social thought. In this respect every variant of the civil society argument critiques the
ways that predominant economic models, whether Marxist or neo-classical, unduly limit the
kinds of social organization that "count" to those that fit clearly within either "the market" or
"the state." By directing analytical attention toward forms of social organization, collective
actors, and forms of action excluded by prevailing economistic perspectives, such efforts have
considerable heuristic value. However, when pushed too far all such sectoral models lead
quickly into efforts to specify the definitional boundaries between sectors and debates over
which groups fit what sector and to what extent. Such efforts yield largely descriptive accounts
or appeal to arbitrary classification schemes and come at the expense of empirical enquiry into
how the related social processes actually work.
Given the diversity of perspectives and conceptions associated with the notion of civil
society, it would be difficult to claim that the concept represents a distinctive "paradigm" for
social scientific inquiry. The polemical and normative turn of many of these conceptions,
moreover, means that often we are dealing more with what Seligman calls an "ethically
obtainable ideal" of civil society (1992, p. 26) than with an analytical concept capable of guiding
empirical enquiry by grounding a coherent body of testable hypotheses. The best-known version
of these conceptions in the U.S. setting, for instance, that of neo-Tocquevilleans like Robert
4
Putnam, and the one most apparent in the essays that follow, is notably silent on some of the key
attributes of civil society under other conceptions. Nevertheless, it is important to situate that
understanding in the larger tradition, if only to provoke consideration of alternative
conceptualizations more capable of addressing the evident lacunae in contemporary American
accounts. The essays that make up this volume take up various of the claims of the civil society
argument, particularly those tied to the concept of "social capital."
"Civil society" plays three broad roles in these various accounts. Foremost in recent
debate is the neo-Tocquevillean emphasis on its socialization function: the associations of civil
society are thought to play a major role, if not the major role, in building citizenship skills and
attitudes crucial for motivating citizens to use these skills.
Many proponents would add, however, that civil society carries out a wide variety of
public and quasi-public functions. The associations of civil society aid efforts or directly act to
heal the sick, counsel the afflicted, support the penniless, educate both young and old, foster and
disseminate culture, and generally provide many of the necessities and adornments of a modern
society. It does this best, some argue, when left to itself; but others insist that it could not or
would not do it as well or as extensively, without the encouragement and support of government.
The wide literature on the Athird sector@ or Avoluntary sector@ focuses on precisely those
organizations that tend to take on such quasi-public functions (see for example, Salamon 1995;
Van Til 1988; Wuthnow, 1991).
A distinctive tradition, more in tune with the European and Latin American uses of the
notion of civil society stresses the representative or contestatory functions of social
organizations outside the state. Civil society gives identity and voice to the distinct interests and
diverse points of view characteristic of a modern society; it stimulates public debate and presses
government for action on a thousand and one matters of public interest. Because of the special
circumstances in which the notion of civil society emerged for Eastern European and Latin
American writers, many of these stress the oppositional character of this role, seeing in civil
society a bulwark against the state wherever state purposes seem to threaten the plurality and
autonomy that civil society is thought to enshrine.
Those approaches which lay stress on the public and quasi-public functions which civil
society plays often take for granted its ability to produce "civic engagement" and public
spiritedness. Others, including many of the neo-Tocquevilleans, recognizing the conflictive and
divisive tendencies of certain sorts of groups, privilege only those groups thought to produce
such virtuous attitudes and behavior. But, more importantly, and whether from the left or the
right, proponents of a vigorous civil society point to the ability of civil society to realize public
ends autonomous from state power and direction. Whether the emphasis is on "the voluntary
spirit" or "social autonomy," the idea is that private initiative and organization enjoys certain
advantages over state action and can obviate some of the worst abuses and failures of state
5
power. The implicit criticism of prevailing representative institutions is rarely articulated. At
the same time, there is considerable disagreement over the role of private enterprise in such
activities. While the European left sees civil society as every bit as much an antidote to corporate
power as to the over-reaching state of the twentieth century, American conservatives propose to
stimulate the privatization of public functions and the active engagement of business within civil
society. Liberal voices (and most of the empirical research) emphasize the continuing role of the
state in stimulating, supporting and funding private initiatives.5
Neo-Tocquevillean liberals and conservative proponents of civil society tend to ignore or
actively exclude from consideration those sorts of organizations and activities associated with
advocacy and political action, considering them divisive or simply beside the point. Both the
oppositionist conception of civil society developed in Eastern Europe and Latin America and the
European-inspired conceptions associated with the "new pluralism" (Keane 1988a, 1988b), on
the other hand, put particular stress on the representative, contestatory or political function of
civil society. Civil society organizes itself not just to perform vital public functions autonomous
of the state (and corporate power) but to defend social autonomy and promote policy change and,
in the extreme, regime change. In this view, whether a politicized civil society is considered a
substitute for the party system or a complement to it, it is charged with giving expression to
societal identities and representing societies' interests and points of view. Again, there is
considerable difference between those conceptions which imagine civil society united against the
state and those which stress the irreducible pluralism of modern civil societies; but both
approaches endorse a politically activated, even combative, civil society. Political activity,
moreover, is here conceived of as group action more than individual level electoral participation
or "civic engagement," and there is consequently no necessary bias against socially homogenous
groups based in class, occupational, ethnic, religious or other social distinctions, as there is in the
neo-Tocquevillean and conservative versions.
Robert Putnam's original formulation, in Making Democracy Work, identified a strong
civil society with high levels of "civic engagement," suggesting a correspondence between
structural features of society B the density of face-to-face associations cutting across social
cleavages more than anything else B and a certain kind of political or "civic" culture (1993).
This approach, which clearly reflects a view of associations as primarily socializing agents, has
been particularly attractive to writers in the civic republican tradition, who argue that the health
of democracy depends crucially on certain moral commitments among the citizenry and that
these have their roots in traditions of community-mindedness and public-spiritedness that are
endangered in an individualist and consumerist culture.
This "civic culture" argument has deep roots in American political science. "Generalized
social trust" (trust in people in general), trust in government and public officials, tolerance, and
optimism are all seen, in many versions of the argument, as integral components of social capital
6
directly linked to its beneficial impact on participation and civic engagement and democracy in
general (Brehm and Rahn 1997; Muller and Seligson 1994; Stolle and Rochon, this volume).
This list of ingredients, however, along with a common preference for broadly "inclusive"
groups, stems from the empirical democratic theory of the 1950s, whose explicit fear was that an
effervescent and contentious civil society would undermine democracy in the face of the "threat
of Communism." The theory of the "civic culture" epitomized by Gabriel Almond and Sidney
Verba's five-nation comparative study of the same name (1963) argued that the participatory
impulse had to be tempered by a large dose of what Almond and Verba called "subject
orientation," i.e., a willingness to be led and to abide by the decisions of the authorities. Bred of
the Cold War and a profound mistrust of popular mobilization outside the most narrow channels
of then conventional political behavior, the theory highlighted virtues such as generalized social
trust and trust in government as key ingredients in "stable democracies," with the emphasis
decidedly on stability. While Putnam=s work betrays elements of this older approach, he has
been more inclined to argue that associational life (Aa vigorous civil society,@ in contemporary
parlance) itself has a significant impact on political culture, and thus civic engagement, via its
impact on Asocial capital@ and not the other way around.
THEORIES OF SOCIAL CAPITAL
Three relatively distinct tributaries of social capital theorizing are evident in recent
literature (Wall, Ferrazzi, and Schryer 1998). That associated with the work of Pierre Bourdieu
(1986) stresses unequal access to resources via the possession of more or less durable
relationships. Where Bourdieu builds his notion of social capital on essentially Durkheimian
micro-foundations, James Coleman (1988, 1993) incorporates a similar understanding of social
capital into a theory grounded in rational choice theory. Where Bourdieu=s macro-sociology
owes its greatest debt to Marx, Coleman remains within the functionalist tradition of Durkheim
and Parsons. Work by political scientists and others following the lead of Robert Putnam (1993,
1995a, 1995b, 1996), finally, presents a vision of social capital more congruent with the
Weberian assumptions of the political culture argument in American political science, in which
exogenously generated attitudes and norms such as trust and reciprocity stand alongside social
networks as ingredients enabling a society to undertake collective action.6 Bourdieu and
Coleman=s conceptions of social capital take the analogy with financial capital seriously, seeing
it as instrumental in the flow of goods and services to individuals and groups. Putnam, by
contrast, has popularized a notion of social capital which ties it to the production of collective
goods such as Acivic engagement@ or a spirit of cooperation available to a community or nation at
large.
Bourdieu defines social capital as Athe aggregate of the actual or potential resources
which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized
relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition B or in other words, to membership in a
7
group B which provides each of its members with the backing of the collectivity-owned capital, a
>credential= which entitles them to credit, in the various senses of the word@ (1986: 248-9). For
Bourdieu, social capital is one of three forms of capital (economic, cultural and social) which,
taken together, Aexplain the structure and dynamics of differentiated societies@ (Bourdieu and
Wacquant, 1992:119). Differential access to capital, not individual utility maximizing behavior,
shapes both economic and social worlds in Bourdieu=s sociology. Similarly, the fundamental
structures that produce and reproduce access to social capital are not, for Bourdieu, selfregulating markets but networks of connections, which themselves are Athe product of an endless
effort at institution.@ Bourdieu=s emphasis on Ainstitution rites,@ Athe alchemy of consecration@
and gift giving at the heart of the transformation of Acontingent relations, such as those of
neighborhood, the workplace, or even kinship, into relationships that are at once necessary and
elective, implying durable obligations subjectively felt@ (Bourdieu 1986:249-50), underlines the
Durkheimian roots of this conception.
If the mechanisms for the construction of social capital in Bourdieu=s account may appear
elusive to some readers, his understanding of how we might measure and weigh social capital
has a clarity and coherence not found in Coleman and Putnam. For Bourdieu, Athe volume of the
social capital possessed by a given agent ... depends on the size of the network of connections he
can effectively mobilize and on the volume of the capital (economic, cultural or symbolic)
possessed in his own right by each of those to whom he is connected@ (249).
Perhaps the most influential formulation of the concept of social capital, nevertheless, is
that of sociologist James Coleman. Coleman defines social capital as Aa variety of entities
having two characteristics in common: They all consist of some aspect of a social structure, and
they facilitate certain actions of individuals who are within the structure.... Unlike other forms
of capital, social capital inheres in the structure of relations between persons and among persons.
It is lodged neither in individuals nor in physical implements of production@ (Coleman,
1990:302). The forms of social capital identified in Coleman=s most extended treatment of the
subject include Aobligations and expectations,@ Ainformation potential,@ Anorms and effective
sanctions@ (grouped together because, as Coleman notes, norms are a Apowerful, but sometimes
fragile, form of social capital@), Aauthority relations,@ Aappropriable social organization,@ and
Aintentional organization@ B understood as Adirect investment in social capital@ (Coleman,
1990:306-313).
Coleman has been criticized by some commentators for the relative incoherence of this
laundry list (Portes 1998). The relationships that Coleman draws attention to, moreover, are
conceived of in instrumental terms, as elements in the rational calculations of self-interested
agents, and not, as in Bourdieu, as constitutive of individual identities and strategies. As Charles
Tilly remarks, A...Coleman feinted repeatedly toward relational accounts of norms, commitments,
and similar phenomena but pulled his punches as they approached the target. Although his
8
verbal accounts mentioned many agents, monitors, and authorities who influenced individual
actions, his mathematical formulations tellingly portrayed a single actor=s computations rather
than interactions among persons@ (1998:19).
Nevertheless, like Bourdieu, Coleman highlights the sense in which concrete social
relationships can give individuals access to crucial resources not otherwise available despite
ample endowments of human or financial capital. He underlines the limited fungibility of social
capital: Aa given form of social capital that is valuable in facilitating certain actions may be
useless or even harmful for others@ (1990:302). Moreover, he insists that social capital is
embedded in relations, not borne by individuals wherever they might go. Finally, he insists that
such subjective attributes as trust, expectations and norms are endogenous to specific social
relations. Indeed, the Atrust@ that figures prominently in Coleman=s account is not the
Ageneralized social trust@ of the political science literature, but a feature of the specific context in
which specified individuals or classes of individuals can be trusted. Thus, social capital is
conceived as Asocial-structural resources@available only in and through relationships and social
structures.
Robert Putnam=s initial interpretation, in Making Democracy Work (1993) and ABowling
Alone@ (1995), gave a distinctively Weberian and Tocquevillean reading, consonant with a long
tradition in American political science, to Coleman=s concept. Putnam defined social capital as
A...features of social life--networks, norms, and trust--that enable participants to act together
more effectively to pursue shared objectives.@ (1995:664-665). For Putnam, associations,
particularly those featuring face-to-face, horizontal relations among individuals, generate trust,
norms of reciprocity, and a capacity for civic engagement which are essential to the functioning
of a modern democracy. In the absence of a strong associational life, citizens would lack the
skills and inclinations necessary to work together on economic and political projects. Neither
informal networks nor large, national level membership groups could substitute for the powerful
effects thought to emanate from the face-to-face associations characteristic, Putnam argued, of
vibrant democracies (Putnam 1993, 1995a). A handful of aggregate indicators, readily available
in existing survey data sets, thus come to stand in for Coleman=s (and Bourdieu=s) contextspecific notion of social capital: Ageneralized social trust,@ membership in organizations, and
norms such as reciprocity, cooperation and tolerance.
Putnam=s argument has been attacked for neglecting the Adark@ side of social capital
(Portes and Landolt 1996), avoiding politics and political structure (Foley and Edwards 1996,
1997; Tarrow 1996), and under-emphasizing the role of large-scale economic changes in
undermining civic engagement in the United States and elsewhere (Skocpol, 1996). At the same
time, his conceptual framework has been criticized for incoherence, in particular for failing to
specify under what conditions face-to-face interaction can be thought to generate the desirable
civic traits of the argument (Foley and Edwards 1998; Edwards and Foley 1998). Jackman and
9
Miller=s careful re-analysis of Putnam=s Italian data, moreover, undermines the notion th...
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