As opposed to in-house provision, governments around the world often purchase goods and services from the third-party suppliers (Neupane, Soar, & Vaidya, 2014). With a large amount of money at stake, complex procurement... [ view full abstract ]
As opposed to in-house provision, governments around the world often purchase goods and services from the third-party suppliers (Neupane, Soar, & Vaidya, 2014). With a large amount of money at stake, complex procurement procedures and lack of transparency make governmental procurement especially vulnerable to corruption (Kühn & Sherman, 2014). The corruption often involves multiple players and is structured like a network, which hardly occuring without the collusion of many parties involved across multiple levels. The corruption therefore implicate secret vertical and horizontal relationships between bidders and procurement officers, and among bidders (Wensink & Vet, 2013). Multiple actors engaging in multiple interactions form a corruption network in which officials take the criminal initiative, extort or accept bribes from the bidders, bidders and subcontractors bribe government officials in exchange for favorable decisions (Wiehen, 2006).
Although corruption networks on governmental procurement is relatively stable (Nielsen, 2003), they are difficult to study as they are illegal and covert. Few studies investigate a corruption network empirically in a systematic way (Jimenez-Salinas Framis, 2011). An in-depth micro study of a corruption network is critical for our understanding how it operates: its social structure, heterogeneous mechanisms and subsystem. Thus the purpose of this study is to examine the structural properties of a corruption network identified in a case using social network analysis (SNA), which is a tool of identifying, measuring, visualizing and analyzing the social structure of ties formed among people, groups and organizations (Scott, 2012). By focusing on network parameters, such as density, centrality, cliques, structural holes with relational data collected from multiple sources, we pieced together a public procurement corruption network for this case. Three question will be addressed. 1) who and what organization are involved? 2) how are the corrupted actors connectd? 3) what are the structural attributes ?
