Sri Lanka’s Fight Against Corruption

By Upali Cooray –AUGUST 10, 2017

Upali Cooray

“As good customs have need of laws for maintaining themselves, so the laws, to be observed, have need of good customs. In addition to this, the institutions and laws made in a Republic at its origin when men were good, are not afterward more suitable, when they [men] have become evil. And if laws vary according to circumstances and events in a City, its institutions rarely or never vary: which results in the fact that new laws are not enough, for the institutions that remain firm will corrupt it.” ~ Nicolo Machiavelli

This compilation is to explore and focus attention on the issues of political forthrightness and the fight against corruption as essential components of the process of strengthening democratic institutions. It aims at contributing a set of initial contemplations on crucial topics related to political integrity, such as the blueprint of conflicts of interest, the role of the press in monitoring the abuse of political office and, most of all, the control of the role of money in democratic elections. All these issues are built-in in democratic governance. As such, this compilation is both an attempt to identify some good and bad international practices to deal with these issues; a discussion that is domestic as much as it is international.

There is a justifiable desire to ascertain political corruption. The discussion is not about what corruption is, so much as about how one can arrive at a standard formula for analyzing the naturally flawless condition from which corrupt politicians veer. Political corruption echoes the political system in which it is based. As such, the different natures of the political ideology would modify the forms and range that political corruption takes. Thus, political corruption in a democratic body politic might take a very different form to that in a non-democracy. 

The perspective on politics from which the interpretation of corruption gives birth will play a major role in defining the political corruption.

Definitions of political corruption within restrictive boundaries fail to take into account everlasting factors, most importantly those dealing with standards of observable factors. Thus, without knowing what norms or standards of politics one should accept, it is not possible to solve problems in defining and analyzing political corruption. Another path uses the concept of ‘public interest’ to illustrate the crux of corruption.

While this definition focuses our attention on any act or set of acts that threaten to destroy a political system, one should determine what the public or common interest is before assessing whether a particular act is corrupt. Furthermore, this definition enables a person to justify almost any act by claiming that it is in the public interest. Then, if we agree that political corruption is what the public in any given society perceives as violations of the common interest, we will face even more difficulties with such an approach for two reasons. First, public opinion cannot be freely expressed on any given issue and it is debatable to use a term ‘common interest’. Moreover, studies of public opinion have depicted that in many cases public opinion about ‘common interest’ is either inconclusive or divided. Second, the reliance on a ‘common interest’ makes any equivalent analysis very difficult, since the definition of common interest would be culture-specific. What is corrupt in one country may not be corrupt in another. This leads to situations in which similar acts can be defined as infringements or not according to where they take place. 

Another group of academics have developed market-centered definitions, primarily related to demand, supply, and exchange concepts derived from, in his article ‘The Concept of Corruption’, states that economic in theory, political corruption is viewed as a particular model of agency relationship. Jacob Van Klaveren states:-

“A corrupt government official regards his public office as a business, the income of which he will, seek to maximize. The size of his income then does not depend on an ethical evaluation of his usefulness for the common good but precisely upon the market situation finding the point of maximal gain”

Each government servant determines the reward for his services in every case, according to the well-known principle of the railways’ rate policy, “charge what the traffic can bear.” The civil servant will regard his public office as a business particularly if he does not obtain a salary or obtains symbolic payment.

The market-centered approach, when compared to other approaches, to a greater extent emphasizes the mechanics of political corruption and circumstances under which it becomes possible. Moreover, the market-centered approach might be too simplistic to capture all aspects of the corruption phenomenon. Neither the politicians’ decisions nor the corrupt bureaucrats can be treated as private entrepreneurs and thus the simplistic application of market analysis is not sufficient. To make progress, one must combine an economist’s concern of modeling self-interested behavior with a political scientist’s recognition that political and bureaucratic institutions provide incentive structures far different from those presupposed by the competitive market paradigm.

As illustrated above, multiple definitions of political corruption introduced by diverse groups of academics have been proposed. However, the complexity of the phenomenon and questions about how and why it occurs makes it difficult to find a single general, satisfactory definition. The number of different types of political corruption makes this challenging

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