The buying of influence and the selling of power

In Europe and North America, corruption exists and determines outcomes on a scale that is scarcely recognised but embraces fields as diverse as politics, sport and climate change.

It has permeated society in the West in ways that cannot be ignored, and corruption is increasingly recognised by the public.

As part of a global survey of citizens’ attitudes to corruption, carried out by Transparency International, interviewees recently expressed an extraordinarily high level of distrust in key institutions in both Europe and America. When asked: “Do you regard political parties as corrupt or very corrupt?”, nine out of 10 Italians, three-quarters of Americans and almost the same percentage of Czechs replied yes. Parliaments did not fare much better: two-thirds of Canadians and more than half of British citizens found their legislatures to be corrupt or very corrupt.

For the most part, these responses do not reflect a personal experience of bribery. Rather, they reflect a general view that government itself is corrupt and represents the interests of small elites who control decision-making and the allocation of resources. This perception has led to the rise of protest parties of the left and right in Europe, and increasingly aggressive criticism of the politics centred on Washington, DC in the US.

Corruption is regarded as much more than a question of bribery or slightly more subtle financial pay-offs. For the most part, contemporary corruption in the West is not the corruption of brown envelopes but the corruption of influence, in which politics and institutions (including sports associations) are captured by people or interest groups for illicit gain and their own organisation’s benefit. Looked at another way, it is the buying of influence and the selling of power.

Corruption is one of the principal drivers of inequality at both global and national level, and is increasingly recognised as a major problem for both the world economy and national politics. It is no accident that in the US midterm elections of 2014, 1 per cent (32,000) of the wealthiest 1 per cent of donors gave 30 per cent of disclosed political contributions, and that those with firm connections to Wall Street were the largest contributors. The consequence is a vicious circle in which corruption by influence reinforces the position of the top 1 per cent.

Because corruption in Europe and North America is not centred around bribery but is rather a struggle for the capture of resources, it may appear it has a less dire effect on the public than direct bribery. This conclusion would not be justified. A patient forced to pay a bribe to receive health care at a hospital in the developing world, which should be free of charge, will be likely to complain at least in private. A patient being prescribed a more expensive drug without his knowing, but for which he has to pay, is unlikely to find out and complain. Both patients will be cheated by a system of corruption: but where a network linking health managers to pharmaceutical companies gains influence, it can skim off profits or illicit gains without having to resort to a hierarchy of bribes.

This more subtle form of corruption is alive in different countries in different ways but affects all walks of life, from politics to justice, from banking and finance to the corporate world (notably pharmaceuticals, construction and defence), in sport and even in the case of action designed to combat climate change.

Unmasked: Corruption in the West by Laurence Cockcroft and Anne-Christine Wegener is published by IB Tauris