Political corruption. The internal enemy of public institutions. By EmanuelaCeva, Maria PaolaFerretti, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2021. pp. 217. $24.81 (hardcover). ISBN: 9780197567869 (hardback); ISBN: 9780197567883 (epub)
本书从政治哲学视角提出，政治腐败是公职人员利用职权追求与授权不符的议程，主张通过机构内部的“职务问责”伦理来对抗腐败，适合公共管理者和腐败研究者阅读。
Despite the vast number of articles and books written on corruption over the last 30 years, this field of study is still developing. Reflection on the concept itself and its consequences continues to yield remarkable texts. A very recent book that deserves to be reviewed for the depth of its reflections and its usefulness for public managers is Political Corruption. The Internal Enemy of Public Institutions, by Emanuela Ceva and Maria Paola Ferretti, published by Oxford University Press in 2021. For these authors, there are already many texts that deal with how corruption harms the political, economic, and social system and how to establish mechanisms for creating institutions that minimize these effects. These texts analyzed corruption as a disease treated from the outside and attacked with anticorruption agencies, external controls, and harsh sanctions. Ceva and Ferretti, however, propose an inward perspective on institutional action and failure centered on the institutional interactions between officeholders; this implies that the most important measures for fighting corruption must emerge from the organization itself and be led by the officeholders themselves. As indicated in the first chapter of the book, political corruption occurs whenever officeholders, acting in their institutional capacity, use their power of office to pursue an agenda whose rationale may not be vindicated as consistent with the terms of their mandate (p. 10). To understand this perspective, the concepts of “interrelatedness” and “institution” must first be clarified. The raison d'être of an institution comprises the normative ideals that ground its establishment and, consequently, its internal structure and functioning. The authors' theory builds on a teleological account of institutions as organizations constituted by the multilayered joint action of human beings, who act cooperatively in their capacity as officeholders (i.e., the occupants of institutional roles) to provide collective goods that are definitive of the institution itself (p. 86). Consequently, institutional roles are interrelated. Because of the structural interrelatedness, the corruption of one particular officeholder may also imply that other officeholders are incapacitated to perform the tasks entrusted to their roles (p. 65); this implies reconceptualizing anticorruption in terms of an institutional ethics of “office accountability” that draws on an institution's internal resources of self-correction. The text is of great analytical depth and quite sophisticated in its reflections, built with a rigorous logic with which it faces some of the most difficult questions that must be addressed when dealing with the issue of corruption. One of them is that of the justification of moral rejection of corruption (Chapter 3). They maintain that if our basis were purely consequentialist, we should subject it to cost–benefit analysis to justify it. Even in the consequentialism of the rule, we should show the advantages of one rule over another. It usually works, but not always. For this reason, Ceva and Ferretti defend a deontological perspective. Political corruption is normatively relevant as a problem of public ethics, even when its negative implications are absent or unclear. When officeholders act and interact in their institutional capacity, their rights and duties are not determined solely by the law or the principles of personal ethics (such as the harm principle). Their conduct is also shaped and limited by a special body of moral norms binding on an individual qua the occupant of an institutional role. Officeholders harm their partners by pursuing an agenda whose rationale is inconsistent with the terms of that power mandate; their role-based interactions give officeholders moral reasons to demand each other compliance with their duties of office (pp. 96–97). The duty of office accountability can be explained as a duty of interactive justice (because it qualifies the deontic relations between officeholders), and conversely, political corruption is a form of interactive injustice (p. 100). Another of the authors' challenges is to try to develop a concept that also helps explain corruption in non-democratic societies. Their office-accountability-based view is relevant for various kinds of systems of rule-governed roles. However, in that case, it may be that under authoritarian systems, certain corrupt actions are justifiable. It is the assumption of “noble-cause corruption” (see Miller, 2017). In that case (see, e.g., Schindler case), the authors state, “We cannot and should not disregard the background injustice of the institutional circumstances when the relevant use of power occurs.” Cases like this one allow us to see that, in certain unjust or illegitimate institutional circumstances, political corruption can be justified both because it yields end-state justice and it is only prima facie (p. 111). Likewise, the text seeks to address the problem of accountability for corrupt acts and, in particular, addresses the many hands assumptions (Thompson, 1980). In those cases, the complication occurs because the corruption of practice is the product of a complex web of repeated interactions of multiple agents at different points in time whose individual roles are hard to identify and assess. However, this does not preclude individual responsibility and corruption on the part of the actors. Even in such cases, it is sufficient to indicate that officeholders participated in a practice that fails to uphold office accountability (pp. 136–137). Any individual officeholder who partakes in a corrupt system can be held morally responsible for that interactive injustice irrespective of the size, quality, and impact of his/her individual contributions to the wrong deriving from the joint work of “many hands.” (p. 160). In Chapter 5, Feva and Ferretti criticize minimalist and maximalist strategies for preventing and combatting corruption. The minimalist strategy is essentially legalistic and focuses on punishment or corrective practices (e.g., the compensation of victims). All this leads to the risk of fostering practices of scapegoating or witch-hunting, leaving out from the investigation other officeholders who, in different ways, made that misconduct possible (p. 173). The countertendency to this minimalism is overregulation, intending to restrict room for officeholders' discretion. Even if a denser regulation intends to describe what kinds of conduct are prohibited precisely, an overly regulatory tendency risks stigmatizing any use of officeholders' discretion and the risk of the paralysis of institutional action (p. 175). Faced with these options, they propose that anticorruption should, rather, be guided by a positive vision of what the opposite of political corruption is: a public institutional system that realizes office accountability. Public institutions are not only made of rules and mechanisms but, above all, of interrelated embodied roles (p. 180). When someone assumes an institutional role, he/she acquires ipso facto a positive relational duty to use the powers learned to his/her role in the pursuit of an agenda whose rationale may be vindicated as consistent with the terms of his/her power mandate (p. 181). Based on this, it would follow that it would be internal practices that would reduce corruption, ones that can foster the officeholders' awareness of what fulfilling the duty of office accountability requires (i.e., codes of conduct and training). It would also be important to identify, for example, corruption pressure points through programs of corruption risk management. Considering the interrelation of roles, it is therefore necessary that officeholders also be constantly vigilant of other officeholders' conduct. From this point of view, whistleblowing must be institutionalized. Further support for practices of officeholders' answerability may come from the digitalization of decision-making records. To summarize, opposing political corruption should not be understood simply as a matter of promoting procedural remedies through stricter office regulations or through punishing corrupt officeholders. Instead, because political corruption is a matter of officeholders' institutional conduct, the authors argue that opposing political corruption requires a more “proactive” engagement of officeholders to restore just institutional relations as an instance of their commitment to a public ethic of office accountability (p. 196). This book, developed from a political philosophy perspective, connects with a whole functionalist tradition in sociology, in which institutions fulfill essential functions for society (see Talcott Parsons, 1951), as well as with the idea that organizations are institutionalized by embodying values (Selznick, 1957). However, the text is overly focused on a normative view of institutions and ignores cognitive elements and the importance of data interpretations in institutional settings. In any case, this book connects with approaches to organizational theory that have had a significant impact on the way public organizations are understood and managed (see Terry, 2015). Moreover, it provides a solid philosophical vision that helps to give moral consistency to the organizational theory applied to government. Therefore, it can be a fruitful source of inspiration for the study and practice of public management. Manuel Villoria is a full-time professor of Political Science and Administration at the Rey Juan Carlos University, where he is the Director of the Good Governance Observatory. He was a Fulbright Scholar in 1992 and 1993 at the University of Indiana, School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA). He has published more than 200 texts, including books, chapters, and articles on public management, corruption and ethics in public service. He has also been a public manager, holding positions such as Secretary General for Education and Culture in the Government of Madrid, and various management positions in the Ministry of the Interior of the Government of Spain. He is currently the President of the Ethics Committee of the Spanish Olympic Committee. Email: [email protected]