An Institutional Analysis of Administrative Corruption

This article mainly seeks to provide a framework to help us reach a better understanding of the nature, causes and grounds of the rise of administrative (economic) corruption in a political-economic system. Administrative corruption refers to the misuse by a person of public powers for self-interests of a party, faction, friends, relatives and so on. It indeed appears when the public civil servants fail to make a distinction between personal and public interests in executing their public powers. On this basis, the author identifies six approaches to administrative corruption and examines the causes and grounds for the rise of corruption within these contexts. These approaches include: cost-benefit, relative deprivation, rent-seeking, employer, non-agent, patron-client and moral approaches. Each of these approaches is able to explain part of administrative corruption. The former five approaches take political and institutional grounds into their analytical agenda, which consolidate and underpin the capacity of public sector’s employee in taking personal advantage of public power – i.e. the essence of corruption. According to the author, administrative corruption is a kind of institutional dysfunction related to the institutional arrangements and political structures of a society rather than the bureaucrats’ immorality. In conclusion, the author has counted the characteristics of an effective strategy to battle corruption, which contains the policy recommendations of the five aforementioned approaches.