How does democracy leads to corruption ?
Answers
Explanation:
Corruption – broadly defined as the misuse of public office for private gains [1, 2] – costs every country a large amount of financial, political and social resources every year. Research on the causes, consequences and combat strategies of corruption are manifold and very revealing. Previous studies indicate, for example, that well-established democracies show lower levels of corruption than authoritarian regimes or young democracies [3,4,5,6]. At the same time, high levels of corruption undermine democracy. By diverting rare resources from disadvantaged people, it damages the rule of law, social justice and lowers the trust of citizens in political institutions and processes [7, 8].
The reciprocal democracy-corruption nexus has already been analyzed in several studies and is nowadays well-established [9,10,11,12,13,14,15]. Previous research shows that democracy does not guarantee clean and transparent governance at all and democratic systems are still fighting against corruption [16,17,18,19,20], even in countries that are often seen as almost free of corruption. Yet, frequent scandals like in the United Kingdom, Iceland, United States or Spain illustrate that corruption is a serious problem in nearly every state in the world (e.g. [21]).
This Special Issue focuses on the relationship between corruption and the impact of democracy from diverse perspectives and different regions and countries around the world. Specifically, the following articles consider the role of democratic institutions in curbing corruption, the interrelation between democratic values and corrupt behavior, and the importance of corruption in democratization processes in post-conflict states. The findings of this issue illustrate that there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution for preventing corruption, yet there are certain mechanisms and elements in democratic and democratizing countries that support anti-corruption.
Starting with one of the core institutions of democratic political systems, two contributions investigate the legislative power of parliaments in the fight against corruption. In her article “Framing Corruption: How Language Affects Norms”, Ramona Zmolnig analyzes the still unexplored relationship between political decision-making and political framing. She examines correlations between the way politicians perceive and communicate corruption and the commitment of these political actors to the legislative fight against corruption in an established democracy like Austria. The study is based on a manual dimension-reduced coding-process of nine years of political communication that refers to corruption in the Austrian National Council. The author indicates that the perception of corruption as an individual misconduct and a weakness of character of certain actors – individuals as well as collectives such as parties – leads to insufficient anti-corruption laws and the prevention of necessary policy reforms in a democratic country as Austria.
Felix Goldberg argues that political scientists still have not agreed upon a conceptual distinction between lobbying and corruption. Most scholars consider these concepts separately and distinguish them by their legality. While influencing political decision making by means of corruption is an illegal act, lobbyism is an accepted way to represent the interests of the business community. However, the boundaries of the two phenomena are not always clear-cut. Therefore, the author provides a systematic differentiation and conceptual comparison between corruption and lobbying. He presents a framework in which both terms can be distinguished based on theoretical considerations in investigating their negative effects to democracy. He argues that lobbying becomes corruption as soon as it is a source of exclusion from a democratic process. Thus, distinguishing lobbying from corruption helps to understand when they substitute each other and when they occur complementarily.