Corruption, Administrative

Administrative corruption is the abuse of roles, powers, or resources found within public bureaucracies. It may be initiated by line or staff officials, their superiors, or the agency clients. The latter will usually be private parties (e.g., applicants for licenses), but particularly in large and centralized governments; clients might also be individuals or institutions from elsewhere in the public sector. This entry considers the complexities of defining administrative corruption, some common varieties, major causal factors and consequences, the central role of administrative corruption and public administration theories in reform movements, and the effects of changing relationships between the public and private sectors on the basic concepts of administrative corruption.

Administrative corruption is a subset of the broader phenomenon of corruption, and is commonly distinguished from political corruption. Corrupt practices in the administrative realm, such as bribery, extortion, graft, patronage, and official [Page 481]theft, to name a few, can occur in the political arena too and, indeed, can be common in private sector administration. Indeed, some varieties of administrative corruption involve “middlemen” who station themselves at the boundaries between state and society, promising to reduce transaction costs for citizens and bureaucrats alike—even though such gains may be small or even illusory. Still, the term administrative corruption is usually reserved for abuses in the realm of government agencies and programs.

Conceptually, administrative corruption shares some, but not all, of the definitional problems that plague the analysis of corruption generally. Formal rules and roles are also usually more clearly specified in administration than in political life. But in societies with dominant and pervasive government agencies, or with very weak public institutions, the limits of the administration or its internal organization may not be particularly clear. Where the state lacks legitimacy or credibility—or, where it is dominated by a dictator, ruling inner circle, the military, or one political party—the formal and de facto norms of administration may diverge sharply. Moreover, what constitutes “abuse” may well be more than just a question of administrative process: Laws and regulations can be vague or contradictory (perhaps deliberately so). Obligations and preferences flowing from politics or social ties may not only cause rules to be broken but can also become normative systems themselves, rivaling formal rules in salience and power.

Like corruption generally, the causes of administrative corruption may be personalistic, institutional, or systemic. In the first category are factors such as venal, or poorly recruited and poorly trained personnel. The second includes not only poor institutional management but also administrative systems that encourage or conceal corruption because of their internal structures (consider a tax collection agency that gives individual agents the power to alter assessments as well as to collect funds) or incentive systems (e.g., very low pay). Systemic causes of corruption might include excessive political interference by elected officials or citizens, widespread poverty, or a lack of government legitimacy.

The consequences of administrative corruption have been a matter of much debate. Many have portrayed it as functional—as “grease for the wheels,” providing incentives to speed up official processes—or as creating informal price systems and a rough-and-ready kind of accountability that would not otherwise exist. Since the late 1980s, however, improved theory and data have shown that administrative corruption is much more like sand in the gears. There is not, after all, a finite amount of inefficiency in administrative agencies; bureaucrats—particularly the very poorly paid officials of developing states—can create much more of it if they stand to gain as a result. Bribes are thus more powerful signals that money can be made by contriving new requirements, “losing” records, or simply doing nothing until clients pay up. Regulatory and extractive functions such as inspections and tax collections are subject to a similar logic.

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