Democracy Without Corruption

By AVIDIT R. ACHARYA

In the twelve years of democracy that we had since 1990 one of the biggest public grievances was against corruption by public officials. The democracy years were also characterized by unstable, short term coalition governments, the emergence of a powerful bureaucracy and weak accountability. Public accountability, in particular, was weak in the sense that it seemed, quite dishearteningly, that the same corrupt leaders would continue to be re-elected in seemingly free and fair elections.

Corruption seems to be spurred by three factors. In parliamentary systems that breed weak coalition governments, political executives are constantly consumed by the problem of securing their tenures. In our own democracy, we witnessed cabinets of up to forty-eight members, including several ministers without portfolio. Such cabinets were assembled by prime ministers who correctly predicted that if they did not offer ministerial positions to enough of the MPs in the coalition (including members of their own party) the coalitions would break down as a result of the indiscriminate use of the vote-of-no-confidence clause in the constitution.

When an executive constantly faces the strategic problems of keeping power he is likely to have very little time to devote to actually issuing reforms. In addition, in a political culture of short tenures and rapidly changing governments, each public executive is more likely to think that his short tenure is the one and only opportunity to make as much money for himself as possible, particularly if the government is equally likely to collapse no matter how corrupt or honest he is. Unfortunately, the kind of parliamentary democracy that we had in Nepal gave no incentives to executives to engage in reforms, and it provided no rewards to being honest.

Countries like Japan that have seen fifteen prime ministers in the last twenty-five years seem to have similar political institutions as we did, but seem to have better functioning democracies and lower corruption. In fact, in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index of 2005, Japan scored 7.3 on a scale of 1 to 10, with a higher score indicating lower corruption. Our own score was 2.5, indication that the level of corruption in our country was perceived to be much higher than Japan ’s. If Nepal and Japan seem to have similar political systems why then do we see such a large difference in levels of perceived corruption in the two countries? One of the reasons why we may not observe a significant effect of short executive tenures on corruption in Japan is the large effect of stronger horizontal accountability.

Horizontal accountability relates to the constraints on the actions of the executive that are imposed by his own party, competitors and the judicial system, whereas vertical accountability relates to the public’s ability to punish politicians for corruption by not re-electing them. So then if we compare countries with similar levels of horizontal accountability then we get the expected results. Italy , Greece and Argentina , for instance, all received scores of 5 or less on the corruption scale and all had 10 or more executives in the last twenty-five years, while Spain , Chile and Germany received scores of 7 or more and all had 4 or fewer executives.

In addition to governments being weak, Nepal ’s bureaucracy became more powerful relative to the political leaders, and at the same time more corrupt. Again, this could very well have been a result of short executive tenures and rational negligence. In most political setups bureaucrats are kept in check by their superiors, who are elected officials. In a system of rapidly changing executives, no executive would have enough time to discover corruption in the bureaucracy, process it and punish it. Especially when bureaucrats and executives can not only collude to hide each others’ corruption but also work jointly to increase the efficiency in collecting bribes do we witness bureaucrats grow stronger and richer relative to the political elite. Therefore, the problem of bureaucratic corruption seems to stem largely from political setups that are conducive to weak administrations.

In spite of the media’s role of serving as a moral watchdog for an otherwise voiceless public, the political leaders were not subject to very much public accountability. That they continued to be re-elected given their poor performance as policymakers and reformers is an indication of poor civil society in Nepal . In illiterate countries with relatively new democracies (and even in ones with old democracies) impressionable voters seem not to know who to vote for. In India many princes continue to enjoy political elite status simply because voters have traditionally (and religiously) regarded them as the rightful rulers. In Nepal the pro-democracy revolutionary leaders of the NC and UML, and the previous political elites of the RPP seem to have been able to win elections simply because voters thought of them as deserving power. It was not the candidate with the best program and performance capability that was elected but he who claimed to require power on account of his political elite status, or as a reward for his democratic struggles.

If democracy is to receive a second chance we would like the period of its return not to be characterized by the same degree of rampant corruption that we witnessed in the 1990’s. Ensuring that this does not happen requires more than sidelined whistle-blowing by the media. The failed efforts of anti-corruption slogans by journalists and advocates in the 1990’s, if anything, demonstrated the difficulties in inculcating a sense of guilt among the political leaders and bureaucrats. As an entire cohort of players were at fault, generalized grievances of wrong-doing went unheard, revealing the fact that the feeling of guilt is, indeed, very personal, and is diluted by the knowledge that it is shared. The next time around, we should get it right at the onset, and choose political and constitutional setups that we know will be less conducive to corruption.