Public Corruption

PUBLIC corruption does not have a single definition in the literature. The meaning of public corruption differs across individuals and academic disciplines. For instance, in criminal law public corruption seems to be confined to the act of bribery. In other disciplines, most scholars have taken bribery as the paradigm for a corrupt act and broadened the definition to include a variety of illegal acts. Public corruption is sometime viewed as rentseeking activities, and some other time as the violation of a public official's duty of faith towards her community.

Most often, public corruption will take place when a public official is offered a payoff in exchange for a favorable decision. By “public officials” we mean any individual who is either appointed, hired, elected, or working for the service of her constituency. Hence public corruption can take place at the federal, state, local levels.

Public corruption can also be defined as acts of nepotism where promotions are based on personal affiliations and not on merit; it can finally be defined as misappropriations of public funds for personal gain and usage.

[Page 650]It is worth pointing out that some scholars have restricted the definition of public corruption to an act of bribery only, but have broadened the definition of bribery to encompass a variety of corrupt behaviors that falls outside the traditional bribery arena. For example, bribery, in this case, is defined to include payoffs to gain access to public goods, to gain access to the use of public physical or financial assets, to be allowed to engage in illegal trade in goods banned for security or health reasons, in money laundering, or to be able to influence the judicial process.

Essential characteristics of public corruption are generally the following: first, two or more parties that include a public official act in mutual agreement; second their decisions violate the law. Third they illegally benefit from the benefit and finally they try to conceal their behavior. Basically, the process can be decomposed into the following parts: a public official, the actual favor provided by the official, the payoff gained by the official, and the payoff gained by the recipient of the act.

The definitions and characteristics mentioned so far seem to suggest that public corruption requires the presence of at least two parties. It should be pointed out that this does not need to always be the case. Indeed the public official can engage in auto-corruption. Though difficult to define, autocorruption encompasses a situation in which an official acts both as an offeror and a decision-maker and make use of his position to gain benefits to which he was not entitled.

There are many types of public corruption: Indeed the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) defines five major categories of corruption. They are the legislative, regulatory, contractual, judicial, and law enforcement corruptions. Law enforcement corruption has to do with any attempt to bribe law officers or any corrupt behavior of the latter. Examples of such corruption are bribery of law enforcement officials to prevent enforcement of drug laws; other examples include unconstitutional (police) searches and seizures, the provision of false testimony, and the submission of false crime reports. There is legislative corruption when a legislator is paid a bribe to promote a piece of legislation.

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