Political Corruption

Abstract

This book discusses political corruption and anticorruption as a matter of a public ethics of office. It shows how political corruption is the Trojan horse that undermines public institutions from within via the interrelated action of the officeholders. Even well-designed institutions may go off track if the officeholders fail to uphold by their conduct a public ethics of office accountability. Most current discussions of political corruption and of why it is wrong have concentrated either on explaining and assessing it in terms of an individual’s corrupt character and motives or a dysfunction of institutional procedures. This book brings out the common normative root of these two manifestations of political corruption. It discusses them as instances of the same relationally wrongful practice that consists in an unaccountable use of the power of office by officeholders in public institutions. From this perspective, political corruption is an internal enemy of public institutions that can only be opposed by mobilizing officeholders to engage in answerability practices. In this way, officeholders are responsible for working together to maintain an interactively just institutional system.