Systemic Corruption as a Meso-Level Phenomenon: Severe Abuse and Strategic Gain
Corruption is often considered as being very widespread. It has been quite common for authors to label societies or polities as systemically corrupt, implying that corruption is more likely than not—that corruption is so common it is the system of a country. This article suggests this is a problematic perspective because it exaggerates the role of corruption in society. To refine these sweeping and potentially stereotyping perspectives, I argue that we should think about identifying more organised forms of corruption as being pockets of bad governance within overall systems. In other words, systemic corruption should be deployed as a mid-level concept that describes collectives and groups rather than whole systems. I offer a model for how to define this and then show how the use of this alternative perspective can help clarify dynamics in anti-corruption.
