Does corruption have an ideology?

I have been receiving more visits from the US lately, and I am afraid these visitors may have been misled by googling the combination of "public administration" and "corruption" (see Public administrations as corrupt welfare systems). This is of course not what I meant to say: I strongly believe in society offering a series of services all of society is supposed to benefit from, such as education, health care, a prison system, garbage trucks and fire brigades. Recent ideology is that private enterprise will organize these activities more efficiently. Two decades down the line, it is time to evaluate whether this dogma is actually true, and if so, why.

The other big question is: how do we make sure that these services are really managed around the social benefits that justify their existence, and not for other, e.g. personal benefits. The Soviet system was unable to solve this question. So is ours.

The end of teaching as we know it

View more presentations from Alvaro González-Alorda

Public administrations as corrupt welfare systems

Why is it harder in some countries to cut back on their administrative bodies, normally in multiple layers, than on other public services that, at least at first sight, seem at least as important - say, education or health care? I believe these administrations historically have a different function. While the authoritarian dictatorships of Southern Europe failed to build welfare states, they did create corrupt substitutes through the control, assignment and withdrawal of civil servant positions. Now that Southern European democracies still have very limited social systems, political parties continue to rely on handing out public jobs to their supporters.

This is a corrupt alternative for the northern welfare states, and with no democratic protection against poverty in place, it is hard to see how this vicious circle of clientelism can be broken.