This chapter explores three particular circumstances where integrity has been found to be breached in tennis, namely doping, match-fixing and other less serious offenses, such as failure to report or failure to cooperate. The chapter goes on to explain anti-doping jurisprudence in tennis, the nature of proceedings, the relevant burden of proof and the intricacies of “intent” and “fault,” as well as the standard of “no fault or negligence” and “no significant fault or negligence.” The section on anti-corruption examines match-fixing by athletes and third parties, and also by umpires and other officials, as well as the sanctions imposed under relevant rules. These offenses are typically associated with legitimate betting and may involve money laundering and other non-predicate offenses.

This chapter turns to the relationship between the courts and the executive branch of government. The executive branch is ordinarily the most powerful branch of government, and when courts act to hold the executive to account, they are often at risk. The charged relationship between courts and the executive arises not only from the political tension that is generated by holding a powerful executive to account, but also from the different structural and functional characteristics of the executive and the judiciary. The chapter analyses these characteristics, noting that courts must act fairly and independently deciding the disputes that come before them and the executive must act to protect the state and its inhabitants and govern effectively. The chapter then illustrates the dynamic relationship between the courts and the executive by exploring three difficult contexts for that relationship: illiberalism and authoritarianism, emergencies and crises, and corruption by members of the executive branch.

Chapter 3 tests the book’s theory in Brazilian mayoral elections, drawing on evidence from fieldwork, secondary sources, and administrative data. Consistent with theoretical expectations for a setting with wide scope and low capacity, Brazilian incumbents suffer from a large incumbency disadvantage. While fiscal institutions structurally condition incumbent capacity and generate persistent levels of incumbency bias, exogenous shocks to capacity lead to changes in incumbency bias over time and across subnational units. This chapter illustrates that changes in fiscal transfers lead to variations in incumbency bias. It also exploits Brazil’s Fiscal Responsibility Law of 2000 as a natural experiment to determine how institutional shocks shape capacity. Using a differences-in-differences design,it demonstrates that incumbency disadvantage only emerged in municipalities running deficits – where the law was binding. This appears to reflect changes in public goods spending rather than in personnel spending – a proxy for patronage. The chapter also establishes that term limits increase incumbency disadvantage by attenuating performance voting and increasing costs of ruling.

For more than seven and a half decades, India has enjoyed the moniker of “world’s largest democracy.” In addition to this distinction, the country is the most enduring democracy in the developing world. India adopted universal suffrage in 1947, despite an extremely low per capita income. Since then, the country has sustained its commitment to democratic governance despite poverty, inequality, unprecedented diversity, and sprawling geography (Varshney 2013). This makes India both an important outlier as well as an exemplar for poor, multiethnic democracies the world over (Stepan, Linz, and Yadav 2011).

This chapter defines time inconsistency as the difference between the actual frequency of amendments and the one calculated on the basis of constitutional rigidity (Chapter 6). It proceeds to demonstrate that time inconsistency is proportional to the length of the constitution in all democracies. The reason is that “length” is correlated with “detail” (that is, the number of words per subject). This chapter provides empirical evidence that the length of constitutions is related to lower per capita income and higher corruption. These findings are consistent with the empirical research in US states that demonstrate that length of constitutions has a negative impact on GDP per capita, a positive one on unemployment, a positive one on Gini coefficients (inequalities), and a negative one on policy innovativeness (Brown 2021).

Arguments that corruption is “grease for the wheels,” benefiting economic growth, are difficult to sustain. State-level findings show that extensive corruption tends to leave a state poorer, and more economically unequal, than states where the problem is less significant. Citizens’ ability to respond to those difficulties by political means is in turn influenced by corruption itself, general levels of political participation, the strength or weakness of trust in officials and fellow citizens, the amount and quality of political news coverage in the mass media, and a state’s social composition. Problems of low trust could conceivably be addressed via effective universally applied public policies, but those in turn can challenge, and be challenged by, key aspects of America’s long-term bargain between government and citizens and by citizens’ expectations of each other. Corruption often undermines trust, and trust can underwrite effective reforms, but the relationships are complex and contingent upon levels of trust that are neither too low nor too high.

Health care comprises a major segment of the US economy and is a critical influence upon citizens’ quality of life. The quality of health care and access to it are negatively affected by corruption. So too is citizen compliance with public health policies, a fact that became apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic. Stay-at-home orders, for example, were significantly less effective in states with more extensive corruption. Low levels of trust in government contributed to those disparities. Such effects are more pronounced in poorer areas and Black communities. Racial contrasts in vaccine equity – access to vaccinations and related services – were pronounced and, again, reflected levels of corruption. Particularly intractable problems of collective action posed by structural corruption and structural racism must be addressed if disparities in the quality of health care are to be reduced.

Can citizens check corruption through political participation policies? What the latter might mean can be a hotly contested question: smaller government, decentralization, deregulation, and term limits for elected officials are all significant reform ideas, but none qualifies as a silver bullet and all have their potential negative consequences. Factors such as representation of women in public office, news media coverage, and levels of education can have more influence on states’ levels of corruption. Political competition and lobbying regulations are also significant influences. Controlling campaign financing is a widely supported idea, but contributions, like lobbying, enjoy First Amendment protection, and the full consequences of various contribution limits, matching funds, and candidate-subsidy schemes are difficult to anticipate. Good politics might conceivably make for better government, but what those ideas might mean in practice and how to get there are controversial issues.

The question of how corrupt the United States is has no single answer. After all, we lack an accepted definition of corruption and cannot directly measure what is usually a clandestine or contested kind of activity. Some corruption is clearly illegal, but other activities widely seen as corrupt, or corrupting, are legal – in some cases, constitutionally protected. There are different categories of corruption – at a minimum, it is important to distinguish between illegal and legal corruption – and the country is comprised of fifty different states, each (as Daniel Elazar has argued) a civil society in its own right, and each with multiple institutions where corruption might take root. Finally, the causes and consequences of corruption can differ significantly from one policy area or economic sector to the next. In this chapter, we lay out our agenda for analyzing American corruption, with an emphasis on the diversity of the federal system and the importance of looking carefully at different aspects of policy and politics.

Police killings of Black Americans are influenced not only by specific law enforcement situations but also by corruption – where corruption in a state is more extensive, police killings are more frequent. State-level factors may seem remote from local policing, but in fact the constitutional and political connections are strong and deep-rooted. Police killings of Black Americans also reflect contrasts in the states’ political cultures and aspects of communities’ racial composition. Median income levels and the economic gaps between Black and White populations also influence the patterns of police killings. Lobbying activities, political party competition, and police unionism contribute to overall levels of accountability. These diverse and often deep-rooted influences, many of them linked to the expectations communities have of their police and the attitudes of police toward their work and the surrounding communities, show that dealing with the problem of police killings of Black Americans will require fundamental changes of many sorts.