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Nigeria earns millions of dollars yearly from crude oil; has vast resources and huge market potentials considering its large population. Thus, Nigeria has opportunities to be among the rich nations of the world enjoying economic prosperity, development, and well-being. Contrarily, Nigeria ranks lower in all global indices for measuring development and good life, mainly due to politicoadministrative elite corruption which this study investigates. Data was collected through secondary sources, and content analyzed. Spoil system and political game theories were used in the analysis of how politico-administrative elite corruption engenders underdevelopment. It was found that the elite engages in anti-people activities like nepotism in appointment and recruitment, electoral fraud, looting, and deprivation of social justice to enrich themselves and have more power and wealth, thereby robbing the state of necessary resources and institutional capacity needed to derive development. Politico-administrative elite corruption and non-politico-administrative elite corruption were juxtaposed, and it was discovered that the politico-administrative elite corruption is responsible for Nigeria's underdevelopment and plights. The practice of open and e-government that leverages ICT to deploy modern technologies that detect, pre-empt, and consequently prevent corruption are recommended - not relying on our law enforcement agents hunting and prosecuting corrupt politicians after looting and hiding the loots abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper investigates whether corruption has contributed to the rise of the shadow economy in Uganda. Using autoregressive distributed lag bounds testing approach and granger causality econometric methods we find a positive relationship between corruption and the size of the shadow economy in both the long- and short-run. Additionally, the causality results reveal a bidirectional causal relationship between the shadow economy and corruption, and vice versa. These findings suggest that, for the case of Uganda, an increase in corruption contributes to the rise in the size of the shadow economy and vice versa, all else equal. Given the complementary relationship between corruption and the size of the shadow economy, addressing widespread informality in the country would require; first, reforming the political system to tackle political corruption and go after politicians who use their influence and power to circumvent institutions. Second, carrying out institutional reforms to address political patronage and influence peddling would go a long way into addressing systemic corruption which in turn could help mitigate the spread of informal sector activities. Third, strengthening the enforcement of existing laws to identify and punish culpable public officials who use their offices for private gain would also address the level of informality in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that in the U.S. diplomatic appointments and government positions are given on the basis of political patronage. It mentions a reform led by Charles Guiteau in 1891, who wanted U.S. President James A. Garfield to appoint him as the minister in Vienna, and was rejected by the president due to lack of political connections.

The article applies the model of the clan-state / captured state on the case of Azerbaijan. It discusses the types and forms of informal political institutions in Azerbaijan and explains restructuring of the informal networks that has occurred after Ilham Aliev's arrival to the presidential office. The core of the article are several mini case studies based mostly on an analysis of local media resources and a primary data collected during field researches conducted in 2006-2014. The article shows that Azerbaijan's informal political structures based on clientelism and endemic corruption have de facto taken over the country's formal political scene and using manipulated public tenders transfer a large proportion of oil rents to bank accounts of the ruling elite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Renewed interest in the linkage between finance and the state has led historians to reexamine corruption. While there is scholarly consensus that the royal sale of appointments (beneficio) corrupted governance and weakened royal authority in a stagnant Spanish empire, the historical record suggests otherwise. Beneficio allowed social newcomers to buy their way into the judiciary. Traditional elites thought that these newcomers were innately corrupt and that making them judges violated distributive justice, or the fair awarding of entitlements by traditional notions of merit. Between 1650 and 1755, enlightened thinking challenged these precepts. The idea that corruption entailed violating royal laws in office gained strength. Performance mattered more, and accepting money for appointments instead of considering traditional merit was part of a utilitarian approach. Thus in 1675 absolutist governments in Madrid began selling appointments to alcaldes mayores in New Spain to gain oversight, appropriate resources, and weaken the viceroys, who lost half, if not more, of their patronage power. Beneficio therefore strengthened the monarchy and should be seen as part of yet another cycle of royal reforms beginning in the late seventeenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the years he was involved in French parliamentary politics, Alexis de Tocqueville was obsessed with the issue of political corruption. This article presents the first sustained analysis of Tocqueville’s speeches and writings on French corruption. It examines Tocqueville’s initial encounter with corruption during his run for parliamentary office, his sophisticated account of the sources of corruption, and his strategies for reforming French politics. The article contends that taking seriously Tocqueville’s struggle against corruption has the effect of complicating several conventional interpretations of his thought. In his speeches and writings on corruption Tocqueville shows himself remarkably willing to compromise with, even to work with, centralisation. And he argues that in a nation like France which lacks substantial local self-government, a vibrant parliamentary politics could be an effective means for promoting energetic civic participation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Social scientists largely see ethnic politics as inhibiting public goods provisioning within developing democracies. Such parties are thought to uniformly rely on distributing excludable benefits to co-ethnics, rather than on providing public goods to all. We argue that ethnic parties can vary substantially in how they mobilize support and behave in office. Much of this variation depends on the breadth of the identity they activate. Although “narrow” ethnic parties do indeed entrench patronage politics, the rise of more “encompassing” ethnic parties can actually improve levels of voter autonomy, expand the effective size of winning coalitions, and increase spending on broadly available public goods. We develop and test this argument with evidence from the Indian states, including a nationally representative survey of 20,000 Indian voters and a panel data set of 15 major states over four decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are all too few examples of good urban governance in the ‘South’. One city which improved its performance dramatically after 1992 was Bogotá, the capital of Colombia. It joined the ranks of exemplar cities and its former mayors toured the world advertising this ‘miracle’. Unfortunately, after 2008, the city’s administration became mired in corruption and its image ratings have dived. The current administration has so far failed to revive trust in the city’s governance. Based on interviews with key personalities in the city, this paper examines the causes of Bogotá’s recovery and its recent relapse. Bogotá’s experience is useful to students of urban governance in showing not only how a city in the ‘South’ can improve its performance but also that any improvement is fragile. A decent working relationship between technocrats and politicians is critical in guaranteeing both public support and progress in implementing major public works. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The state, rule of law, and democratic accountability are the three basic components of a modern political order. The state concentrates and uses power, while law and democracy constrain the exercise of power, indicating that there is an inherent tension between them. This article looks at ways in which the state and liberal democracy interact in three areas: citizen security, patronage and clientelism, and the formation of national identity. In all three areas, state and democracy act at cross purposes in some domains, and are mutually supportive in others. The reason for this complex relationship is that both state and democracy are themselves complex collections of institutions which interact on a multiplicity of levels. Understanding the relationship between state and democracy is important in policy terms because many recent initiatives to improve the quality of governance assume that state quality and democracy are mutually supportive, something that is not fully supported by the empirical evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article contributes to a growing literature on the character of leadership, democracy and governance espoused by post-liberation governments, focusing on the African National Congress (ANC) as a political party. The article provides a brief overview of the two most common approaches to analysing the ANC's transition from a national liberation movement to a political party in an electoral democracy, the dominant party approach and what is termed the Fanonesque perspective. Neither is found to be wholly satisfactory, for largely the same reason – their tendency to present what is effectively a caricature of the ANC, by selectively highlighting features of its practices that conform to a pre-determined pathology, rather than acknowledging the ANC's complexity, variability and essentially contested nature. In developing an alternative approach, the paper draws from an earlier body of literature on single-party–dominant states in post-independent Africa that was empirically driven and comparative in nature. Such an approach can help us develop a more realistic, less sensationalist interpretation of ANC rule in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Picking up a theme that runs through David Hayton's work, this article examines corruption in the later Stuart period through a case study of Samuel Pepys. The latter's diary can be read alongside the public record of parliamentary inquiries and vilification in the press, allowing us a rare opportunity to study corruption simultaneously through the eyes of a perpetrator and his critics. Pepys reveals ambiguities in how corruption was defined and defended. At the same time as he criticized corruption in others, he took bribes and extorted favours but either lied about them when confronted, or excused them as lawful gifts from friends and those grateful for his services, arguing that his acceptance of them never worked against the king's interest. His critics, on the other hand, queried the compatibility of his private advantage and the public interest, and depicted him as greedy, hypocritical and unjust. Pepys thus illustrates contested notions of corrupt behaviour. The attack on Pepys also shows the political motives behind campaigns against corruption: the libel published against him was part of the murky world of popish plot intrigue, with clear overtones of both catholic and sexual misdemeanour. Popery and lust were associated with corrupt behaviour. Pepys's story was part of a larger one about long-term shifts in the nature of officeholding, state formation, the public interest, patronage and the culture of gift-giving that needs further exploration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the issue of patronage in the granting of auctioneer licenses in the U.S. in the Early Republic era, focusing on the case of Pennsylvania governor William Findlay. It examines how Findlay chose auctioneers and comments on charges of corruption against him for his patronage practices following the 1819 financial panic. The author considers the context of the liberal and regulated facets of early American markets. Other topics include the relationship between auctioneers and merchants, the role of patronage in a democracy, and issues of trust and value.

Duncan McCargo's influential model of 'network monarchy' enables us to understand how King Bhumibol Adulyadej has mobilized his nationwide patronage network to shape contemporary Thai politics. This model, however, focuses mainly on the conflicts between reform-minded virtuous leaders (represented by Bhumibol) and unprincipled, self-serving politicians, and pays insufficient empirical attention to the porous boundaries between the two. The author makes up for this weakness by unravelling the historical process through which Bhumibol has developed a symbiotic, if ambiguous, relationship with Banharn Silpa-archa, regarded as the epitome of unscrupulous rural-based politicians. The author shows that the two have used each other for their respective political purposes. In an effort to protect and advance his personal and dynastic interests, Bhumibol has found it necessary and expedient to rely on Banharn as a valuable political ally. Banharn, for his part, has relied on the king and his proxies to legitimate and consolidate his authority at the local level. By casting light on this interdependence between the two seemingly contrasting types of leader, the paper contributes to a further elaboration of McCargo's model and, more generally, to a deeper understanding of the complexity of Thailand's patronage politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the lessons that can allegedly be learned from the corruption of Bell, California municipal government officials in 2010. An overview of political corruption throughout U.S. history, including the U.S. President Andrew Jackson's perspective on patronage in politics, the prevalence of a spoils system and the civil service reform movement's efforts against corruption, is discussed. The role that the form of municipal government by city manager plays in political corruption is also discussed.

This article analyses discourses of poor work ethic in Botswana from the colonial 1930s to the first decade of the new millennium. The traditional Batswana ethos stressed the importance of hard work, but in the early 1930s British colonial administrators had begun to complain about the Batswana chiefs, leading to colonial policy changes intended to address attitudes to work. Despite these changes, the issue of poor work ethic remained a critical topic of discussion by the colonial hierarchy in the mid-1940s, and a long-running debate has continued ever since, targeted today at the post-colonial public service. This article shows how debates about poor work ethic intensified in the post-colony owing to political patronage, corruption and politicisation of the public service by Botswana's ruling élite. This discourse describes the erosion of a traditional ethos of self-help and self-reliance and decries its replacement by a syndrome of over-dependence on the state by the people. Meanwhile, numerous attempts by government to address poor work ethic have produced unimpressive results. Although a meaningful quantitative comparison of colonial and post-colonial work productivity would be difficult to achieve, an analysis of the evolution of discourses surrounding work ethic in Botswana can yield insights into changes in attitudes of people and the state toward work and social welfare from the colonial period to the present. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 2002, Kenya's new National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) undertook to investigate and ensure the recovery of all public lands illegally allocated by the outgoing government. A Commission of Inquiry into the Illegal and Irregular Allocation of Public Land, chaired by the lawyer Paul Ndung'u, was appointed. The commission's report sets out the illegal land awards made to powerful individuals and families, provides important information about the mechanisms by which public land was misallocated, and shows how the doctrine that public land should be administered and allocated ‘in the public interest’ was consistently perverted. This paper explores what the Ndung'u report tells us about the role of the legal profession in the illegal and irregular misallocation of public land. It makes clear that the legal profession, far from upholding the rule of law, has played a central role in land corruption, using its professional skills and networks to accumulate personal wealth for itself and others. This stands in contrast to the role of the legal profession in promoting good governance and the rule of law envisaged by donors of international development aid. This paper focuses on ‘local’ land grabbing, and argues that the ‘global land grab’ or ‘investor rush’ needs to be understood alongside local manifestations of land privatisation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the practices and perceptions of corruption in two tsunami-affected villages in the Hambantota District, South Sri Lanka. Using an ethnographic approach to low level corruption, the paper focuses on narratives emerging from the study villages. Practices of corruption are associated with discretionary powers and the system of political patronage, which place local office holders, local politicians, and wealthy households on the receiving end of corrupt systems. Perceptions of corruption encompass ideas of morality and state–society relations. The manifestation of corruption in post-tsunami Sri Lanka is shown to coincide with a pre-existing unequal and iniquitous development landscape, which became enmeshed in circumstances characteristic of the post-tsunami environment. The paper highlights a theme neglected in the post-tsunami literature on Sri Lanka and contributes to the few intensive ethnographic accounts of corruption in South Asia. It emphasizes the broader relevance of the study for understanding issues of governance and post-conflict development in Sri Lanka. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The concept of clientelism has lost descriptive power. It has become indistinguishable from neighboring concepts and is applied across analytical levels. Using Gerring's ( Polity 31:357-393, ) characterization of a 'good' concept, I establish the core attributes of clientelism, which, in addition to being an interest-maximizing exchange, involves longevity, diffuseness, face-to-face contact, and inequality. Using secondary sources and fieldwork data, I differentiate clientelism from concepts such as vote-buying and corruption and determine its analytical position at the microsociological level. I argue that labeling sociopolitical systems as clientelistic is awkward since, operating at a higher analytical level, they have characteristics beyond microsociological clientelism and they affect the political nature of the clientelism they contain. I conclude that differentiating clientelism by confining it to the microsociological level will aid theory-building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine the ways in which a politics of caste empowerment that became central to democratic politics in much of north India in the early 1990s altered the ways in which the state was popularly imagined. Many people began to perceive state institutions as inherently corrupt sources of political patronage that, having long served to perpetuate upper-caste dominance, could now be used in the same way by a new class of political leaders to empower lower-caste groups. Within this context, corruption was tolerated, sometimes even celebrated, as a means to lower-caste empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accounts of state failure in the developing world frequently highlight a logic of “spoils politics” in which a government and an opposing faction vie for control of the state and the accompanying spoils. Attempts to buy the opposition off play a key role in this logic, and an informational problem often complicates these efforts. Because of limited transparancy, the government generally has a better idea about the actual size of the spoils than the opposition does. We formalize this aspect of spoils politics as a signaling game in which the government has private information about the size of the spoils and tries to co-opt the opposition by offering a share of the spoils. The opposition can accept the offer or reject it by fighting. Consistent with the strong empirical finding that the probability of civil war is higher when income is low, the probability of breakdown increases as the size of the spoils decreases. We also study the effects of uncertainty, the opposition's military strength, the cost of fighting, and power-sharing agreements on the probability of fighting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks into the political corruption in the Middle East. The author traces the cultural as well as the historical aspects of graft and corruption. The author points out that the oil economy is often cited as a major contributor to corruption. Significantly, political patronage also played a big role in the corrupt bureaucracies. the author points several cases of political corruption.

Using the state and its resources has constituted a vital form of consolidating power for Africa's rulers. However, donor-sponsored reforms have threatened to curtail the opportunities of African leaders to maintain their regimes in power. Donor reforms introduced under structural adjustment programmes have sought to reduce the size and scope of government as well as to cut state spending and thereby curb the possibilities of state patronage. Reforms have also attempted to contain corruption and improve state governance. In Uganda, however, the relationship between donors and the government has reproduced patronage government. The donors have hailed Uganda as a major case of economic success in Africa. They have provided it with large amounts of financial assistance to support the implementation of reforms. High levels of foreign aid have provided the government with public resources to sustain the patronage basis of the regime. Moreover, in a context where wide discretionary authority was conferred on governing elites in the implementation of reforms, public resources could be used in unaccountable and non-transparent ways to help the government maintain its political dominance. The donors have begun to realize belatedly that they have been propping up a corrupt government in Uganda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides some reflections on the problem posed by ostensibly perverse phenomena like political patronage, corruption and crony capitalism for modernising narratives, which are currently enjoying a renewed popularity. In the light of an ethnographic example from Indonesia, it is argued that the continual attempt to relocate such phenomena to terrains not properly modern precludes the possibility of serious analysis or moral/political assessment of these phenomena. The starting point for any genuine engagement with these issues is the recognition that these phenomena are as internal to modernity as the modernist discourses that seek to externalise them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the relationship between the differential economic performance of capitalist developers in Asia and the types of patron-client networks within which their corruption operates. Key differences in the patron-client networks in several Asian countries; Influence of the patron-client network on the types of rights exchanged through corruption and the terms of these exchanges.

In part A. The patronage era we explain of the changing organization of public employees from patrons to spoilsmen, (Part B. Civil service and militancy, explains the evolution from spoilsmen to civil servants to militant unionists). Commonly, each transformation has been related only to some failing of its preceding form: patronage ended because of its corruption, civil service began because of its promise to stop corruption, and militancy spread because of the inadequacies of civil service. In contrast to these different explanations of each transformation of government employment, we offer the same explanation for each change: a public choice theory assumption that the new organizational form more efficiently maximized the mixture of votes, power, and income that politicians seek. Thus, when poor immigrants promised votes for insurance from urban hazards and businessmen promised graft in return for accommodations, spoilsmen effected the exchanges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivated by the government's patronage and corruption, massive political protests in Iraq have mobilised the majority Shia population and weakened Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi. He is caught between an intensely disgruntled population and an equally stubborn ruling elite. In a heavily armed population with a recent history of civil war, there is a salient risk that popular demands will be pursued through violence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article gauges the American students perspective on the recent developments related to the evidence of corruption in high places in the country. The students are asked whether appearance of corruption is as dangerous as actual corruption. The students are asked to research financial contributions given to the elected official by members of the U.S. healthcare sector and evaluate for themselves whether the critics of the role played by corruption in political campaigns have raised legitimate concerns.