| Review of: | Rotten States? Corruption, Post-Communism, and Neoliberalism by Leslie Holmes |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Mahabat Baimyrzaeva |
| Reviewed in: | Public Administration Review |
| Date accepted online: | 02/11/2007 |
| Published in print: | Volume 67, Issue 03, Pages 594-596 |
Book Reviews: Corruption and Legitimacy Problems in Postcommunist States
Corruption is not just one of the many challenges that postcommunist states face but is preeminent among them, as it actually prevents these states from dealing with other problems. Leslie Holmes's
Holmes argues that corruption undermines the legitimacy of the state and proposes several connected hypotheses to explain his point. First, he suggests that the spread of neoliberalism fosters corruption by undermining the legitimacy of the state, as it focuses on ends over means and aims to reduce the role of the state. This effect has been especially significant in postcommunist states with fragile institutions. His second hypothesis is that the communist legacy-fuzzy boundaries among state institutions and between the state and society, ideology that values ends over means, and the absence of the rule of law-has also contributed to the spread of corruption in these countries. Holmes's third hypothesis is that increased attention to corruption negatively affects the public's perception of state legitimacy. As a consequence, the author argues that "in the early stages of the transition from communist power," postcommunist societies needed a "strong democratizing state" (12).
Holmes focuses on five states as case studies: Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and China. Special surveys were commissioned for the first four states in 2000. The author complements findings from these surveys with interviews, a wide range of materials from secondary sources, and evidence from other postcommunist states.
The book consists of eight chapters. The second chapter deals with the "definitional and taxonomical aspects" of corruption (17-43). Although Holmes believes that "there can be no universally accepted definition of corruption" because of different perspectives and cultural interpretations, he suggests five criteria by which to distinguish official corruption from other related categories for purposes of the book. Holmes defines official corruption as an act that involves (1) an actual or aspiring official who (2) has authority conferred by the government and (3) pursues particular interests against the general interest of the public in (4) a clandestine and knowingly illegal manner and whose actions (5) would be perceived as corrupt by significant sections of the population (30). Holmes argues that building a comprehensive hierarchical typology of corruption is a challenging task for methodological and empirical reasons, but he remains optimistic about its possibility.
In the third chapter, Holmes relies on publicly available information to review corruption cases, mostly from the states that make up his case studies. He also reviews and analyzes survey evidence on the effects of the media on public perceptions of corruption in these countries. He concludes that the media in these countries cover corruption extensively, provide most of the knowledge that the public has of corruption, and therefore heavily influence the public's perception of corruption in state institutions.
In chapter 4, Holmes identifies four methods by which to measure corruption: legal statistics, perception-based estimates, experience-based or proxy estimates, and before-and-after assessments. He provides a detailed analysis of the types, strengths, and limitations of each while referring to a wide range of studies on corruption. He argues that, in the absence of better methods, the findings must be treated as valid if all methods give generally similar results. Through this combined approach, he confirms that official corruption among policy, customs, and court officials has been a serious problem in several states.
Chapter 5 discusses how corruption affects individuals, the environment, the economy, society, other countries, and politics and legitimacy. This well-documented chapter highlights the seriousness of the problem for postcommunist states. One notable finding is that respondents to the commissioned surveys overwhelmingly agreed that corruption undermines the legitimacy of their government. More than 79 percent of Russians (highest among the five countries) thought it did so to a large extent, and 63 percent of Hungarians (the lowest) did so as well (168).
Chapter 6 addresses psychological, cultural, and system-related factors that cause corruption. System-related factors include the legacy of communism, the multiple and simultaneous transitions (e.g., economic, political, legal) that created abundant opportunities for corruption, and the near absence of a middle class. They also include international and ideological environments driven by a market ethos that has influenced the direction of reforms in postcommunist states. Holmes concludes that "the single most important explanation for corruption in the postcommunist world is that the system is still crystallizing and consolidating, and that most postcommunist states are ultimately weak states" (206).
Holmes critically reviews current measures of fighting corruption, their impacts on the states, and their potential advantages and drawbacks in chapter 7. This chapter also discusses how Western states, international organizations, transnational corporations, and civil society influence the dynamics of corruption in postcommunist states. His point, that "international organizations need to work more closely with civil society, rather than fund states to police themselves" (252), deserves the attention of international development agencies concerned with corruption in these countries.
The concluding chapter asks whether territorial and population size, culture, ethnic homogeneity, and approaches to transition reforms correlate with corruption levels. Those variables are the criteria that Holmes used to choose his case studies. According to his "tentative conclusions," the first three variables do not substantially correlate with corruption, but the approach to economic reform does.
This book is useful for students, researchers, and practitioners interested in corruption in the postcommunist world. Readers will benefit from the author's extensive knowledge of both subjects. The review of the corruption literature makes the book invaluable for those who wish to familiarize themselves with a wide range of research on the subject. It is notable that Holmes not only uses Western literature, as often is the case in comparative research, but also draws skillfully on the research of scholars from the countries he studies. The interested reader will find the third chapter's discussion of important corruption cases and rarely available survey findings invaluable. The author's knowledge of some of the local languages and his close collaboration with local experts significantly enrich the book and offer the attentive reader many fresh insights. Still, the work suffers from two shortcomings: contradictory arguments and the limitations of methodology.
Holmes's arguments are elaborate but not always consistent. He argues at the beginning of the book that the spread of neoliberalism contributed to the increase of corruption in postcommunist states. For example, he claims, "Radical or fundamentalist neoliberalism, with heavy emphasis on deregulation, does not provide a suitable model for a strong democratizing and legitimizing transition state" (13). But his conclusion challenges this claim: "postcommunist states that have adopted most radical economic reforms are perceived to have lower levels of corruption; countries that start to falter in their reforms often then begin to become more corrupt" (275). He then continues to argue that "neoliberalism can play a very useful role in postcommunist states in overcoming the communist legacy and setting economies on the right path" (296). Holmes acknowledges this obvious contradiction and tries to explain it by referring to the "communist legacy [that] should be factored in the equation" (277), although he undertakes a comparison of these states on the premise that "all of them shared
This contradiction could have been alleviated if Holmes had leveraged one of his earlier arguments: that neoliberalism can weaken the grip of former communists on the system if "economic liberalization is tied to a real democratization of politics, including a dramatic increase in transparency and rule of law" (200). But his "approaches to reform"-the variable he argues best explains rates of corruption-is a proxy for economic reforms only (270). Holmes therefore neglects to account for the role of other important factors in transitioning states, such as administrative and political reforms. The consensus among international development agencies since the early 2000s is that not only economic but a combination of institutional reforms (economic, political, administrative, judicial) is essential for good governance. Indeed, the least corrupt postcommunist states-Hungary, Slovenia, and Estonia-have done better compared to others in all of these reform areas.
In terms of methodology, a more nuanced, deeper inquiry would have better permitted the author's generalizations. Holmes considers suspected correlates of corruption in isolation. Instead, his study might have benefited from considering the combined effect of different causal variables on corruption. This is particularly necessary because three of the five states from which Holmes draws his case studies are less corrupt Central and Eastern European states, which makes generalization to the most corrupt postcommunist states in the Caucasus and Central Asia problematic. Holmes should have selected a more representative sample and performed more thorough process tracing.
In conclusion, Holmes argues that in order for these countries to become strong democratizing nations, their "state institutions must be strengthened and cleansed" (278) simultaneously. But he does not elaborate on what kinds of institutions would be less vulnerable to corruption. This is the burning question that reformers need to answer. Perhaps he should have looked beyond the broad strong/weak dichotomy to take into account other problems of state legitimacy. Some scholars, for example, have considered the erosion of the capacity of jurisdictions to deal with social, economic, cultural, and political issues in the context of globalization (the "disarticulation of state"-see Frederickson 1999); declining confidence in traditionally structured institutions to address such contemporary challenges as demographic and cultural diversity (Denhardt 1999); not to mention unpopular policies that have alienated large segments of people from their governments. These examples point to the limitations of traditionally structured institutions that are struggling to deal with increasing complexities in society. Thus, moving beyond generic references to "effective" or "strong states" to embrace fine-grained approaches to institutional structures and processes might be more revealing for researchers and more useful for practitioners.
Overall, this book is a rare attempt to bridge the research on the legitimacy of state institutions, corruption, and postcommunist societies. As such, it is a valuable contribution to the literature in this area.