Towards an Analytical Framework for the Study of Institutionalized Corruption

While corruption is a phenomenon that is not strange to any society, scholars have realized that it is not a universal phenomenon, as they had once believed. Rather, corruption is very much ‘context specific’. It may be... [ view full abstract ]

While corruption is a phenomenon that is not strange to any society, scholars have realized that it is not a universal phenomenon, as they had once believed. Rather, corruption is very much ‘context specific’. It may be occasional, as in the case of most developed countries, or it may be more structural, as in the case of some developing countries, such as Egypt, Venezuela, Vietnam, and others, where corruption has become embedded in the institutions of society itself. In the latter case, corruption becomes an endemic phenomenon that has to be analyzed in its multidimensional form; especially in view of the grave consequences that endemic corruption has on the political, social and economic development of nations. Moreover, the difficulty of rooting out corruption that becomes ingrained in the State's public organizations merits the diagnosis of this phenomenon in a holistic, rather than segmented approach.; something which this paper proposes to do.

This paper aims to present an analytical framework for the study of institutionalized corruption using three levels of analysis at the State, organization, and individual levels. This holistic conceptual lens is important for scholars to capture both the underlying causes and manifestations of corruption in the public sector.