1.1 Introduction

How corrupt is the United States of America?

In several respects AmericaFootnote ¹ appears to be a well-governed society – indeed, a leader in the past three decades’ global struggles against corruption. As we shall see, it definitely experiences corruption of several sorts, and at several levels, and yet it is prosperous (if in strikingly uneven ways), ranks as one of the world’s oldest democracies and, despite recent travails, its tradition of the rule of law remains fundamentally intact. Its Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) of 1971,Footnote ² amended in 1974 and several times thereafter, was one of the earliest attempts by a modern democracy to check corruption by regulating the sources and flow of election campaign funding. Its Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (1977),Footnote ³ aimed at preventing US-listed corporations from engaging in corruption in other countries, was the first of its kind. In the late 1990s, the US was a prime mover behind the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Anti-Bribery Convention,Footnote ⁴ although some saw that as an effort to impose American-style rules upon its economic competitors. In 2003, it became one of the earliest signatories to the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC).Footnote ⁵ The country does well on some international corruption rankings: The Hertie School of Governance Index of Public Integrity (IPI) uses six different scales to rank countries in terms of opportunities for corruption and constraints upon it, and for 2021, it gives the US a score of 8.83 on a scale of 10. That is good for sixth place out of 114 countries, and Hertie’s related forecast predicts that the US situation will remain stable (ERCAS, 2022). Thus, from some perspectives, the United States presents an overall corruption profile that some other countries might envy.

And yet …

Whenever one of us (Johnston) mentions research on corruption to members of the American public, the near-universal response is along the lines of “If you want to see corruption, come look at (my town/my state).” Over a century ago, Andrew D. White (Reference White1890) proclaimed the governments of American cities “the worst in Christendom” because of what he saw as the intrusion of politics into the provision of public services. American scandals such as New York’s Tammany Hall, Teapot Dome, Watergate, the adventures of Bill Clinton, and of course the many issues raised by Donald Trump and his administration have made headlines around the world. Lately, global indicators have signaled reasons for concern: On the 2022 Transparency International Corruption Perception Index, the US score was just 69 out of 100 points, compared to 78 in 2000 and 76 as recently as 2015 (TI-CPI, 2022), putting it in 24th place among 180 countries. America’s 2020 score of 1.07 on the World Bank Control of Corruption dimension ranks near the 83rd percentile out of 214 countries but reflects a marked decline from 1.41 (89th percentile) as recently as 2012 (World Bank Institute, 2021). Gothenburg University’s 2020 Quality of Government Expert Survey (Nistotskaya et al., Reference Nistotskaya, Dahlberg and Dahlström2021), which ranks countries on aspects of administration such as merit hiring, impartiality, and political interference, places the United States only slightly above the median. Hertie points to freedom of the press (35th place) and judicial independence (19th) as emerging concerns in the US. A September 2020 survey of 1,902 likely American voters ranked political corruption (38%) “higher than COVID-19 (35%), law & order (29%), racism (27%), health care (26%), climate change (19%), immigration (14%), and guns (8%)” in response to the question, “Which three of the following [from a list of fifteen] are the most important issues facing the country?” (Selleck, Reference Selleck2020). A survey taken in May 2022 found that only 20 percent trust “the government in Washington to do what is right just about always or most of the time”; in October of 1964, the result was 77 percent. By 1974, Watergate drove trust figures down into the 30–40 percent range or lower, where (except for the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks) they have remained ever since (Pew Research, 2022).

Our opening question – “How corrupt is America?” – thus has no single answer. If nothing else, most corruption is clandestine, with some large but unknown share of it likely never coming to light. Moreover, many of its corruption issues do not fit neatly under any one-line academic definition but rather are intertwined with inequality, distrust of government, and the fundamental fairness of politics and the economic system. How can we reconcile that apparent contradiction?

We argue that four fundamental complexities, all of them obscured in various ways by country-level corruption rankings, must be kept in mind.

First, “corruption” is not any single measurable problem. After decades of scholarly work, we do not even have a settled definition. In fact, corruption is an inherently contentious concept (Johnston, Reference Johnston2014: Ch. 1–3) originating in objections to the ways some people pursue, use, and exchange wealth and power to the detriment of the rights and interests of others. A look at any day’s news shows that when Americans object to corruption, they are not always talking about the same things.

Second, America is not a single social or political entity. The federal government is but one of the 93,269 units of government enumerated in the 2017 Census of Governments (US Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 2020),Footnote ⁶ and while it is undeniably preeminent, the fifty states exercise general sovereignty. They in turn were home to 3,142 county governments – some of them inactive, having had their functions shifted to other jurisdictions; 35,748 municipalities and townships, 12,754 school districts, and 38,542 special-purpose government districts charged with a bewildering range of functions including transportation, conservation, utility provision, and promoting tourism. The powers of all kinds of local government are conferred, delimited, and can be changed by their home states (National League of Cities, 2022) subject to the overall authority of the United States Constitution. Interstate compacts (Bowman, Reference Bowman2004), and entities such as the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the Tennessee Valley Authority, span state boundaries. The scope and powers of those units of government vary greatly, but all exercise or draw upon public powers to tax, spend, and regulate, affecting citizens and communities in diverse ways. They are political arenas in one way or another, whether their top officials be elected or appointed. All are vulnerable to corruption.

Third, in liberalized systems such as the United States, corruption can be deeply embedded in the routine and legitimate institutions and workings of politics and the economy. There is much that many citizens may perceive as corrupt or corrupting – notably, the ways in which political campaigns are financed, “revolving door” practices by which elected officials and bureaucrats move into the lobbying sector, and the general social and cultural influences of wealth – that is fully legal or at least not clearly illegal. Indeed, two broad sorts of activity seen by many as corrupting – lobbying and political campaign contributions – enjoy First Amendment protection. As a result, definitions of corruption based solely on lawbreaking, and officials’ claims that “I have broken no laws,” and conceptions of corrupt processes that are limited to explicit quid pro quo deals,Footnote ⁷ often seem incomplete or unsatisfying. That is a major problem for anyone seeking a stable bright-line definition of corruption, but it does not make the concept purely a matter of opinion. Recent research on “institutional” (Thompson, Reference Thompson2018; Lessig, Reference Lessig2013) or “influence market” corruption (Johnston, Reference Johnston2005; Johnston, Reference Johnston2014), and perceptive analyses drawing upon democratic theory (Warren, Reference Warren2004) and republican and realist schools of political thought (Philp, Reference Philp2018; Philp and Dávid-Barrett, Reference Philp and Dávid-Barrett2015; Bukovansky, Reference Bukovansky2006), make “legal corruption” a central concern. In our empirical discussions to come, we examine that issue in detail, and we will also treat trust – in government and among citizens – and its weakness or absence, as major aspects of corruption as Americans perceive it.

Fourth, any discussion of corruption as a phenomenon or as a political issue must recognize that its incidence and influence range far beyond legislation, specific government decisions, and electoral processes. As we will show in the chapters to come, corruption influences law enforcement, economic policy, citizen participation and trust in the political system, health-care provision, and public responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, to name just a few concerns. While it would be an exaggeration to say that the United States is mired in a systemic corruption crisis, its manifestations and consequences are far-reaching.

No single book can address all these complexities, but we will emphasize a number of important unifying issues. In addition to focusing on enduring causal influences such as demographics, political culture and its historical origins, and formal institutions, several chapters will consider what we call structural corruption – that which is embedded in enduring characteristics of states, long-standing institutions, legal frameworks, and past and current public policies. Such factors reflect and perpetuate the imbalances of power at the heart of much corruption. As we will discuss in Chapter 5, there are significant parallels between structural corruption and concepts of institutional or systemic racism. For that reason, we are not primarily concerned with the statements and actions of individuals, and will not simply aggregate such actions in a state or community, label them “corrupt” (or racist), and leave it at that. Instead, we examine the ways corruption (like racism) can become embedded in, and protected/sustained by, public policy, institutions, and the basic values of states as civil societies.

As a consequence, the implications of our approach for corruption control and reform are large and sobering. There are no quick or technocratic fixes for structural corruption, any more than there are for structural racism, and when we add trust to the picture we see much more at stake than just stolen funds, substandard services, and skewed results in specific elections – serious as those concerns undoubtedly are. Real and lasting changes will require fundamental reassessments of power relationships, social values, governance and accountability, the role and limits of self-interest in a free society and market economy, and how those factors shape the ways we treat each other. Only then will we be treating corruption with the full seriousness it deserves, and only then can we put the insights in this book to use in the struggle to build a more just, and better-governed, society.

1.2 Two Forms of Corruption: Legal and Illegal

In the last years of the nineteenth century, George Washington Plunkitt, a New York State Senator and Tammany Hall wheelhorse, would sit on the bootblack stand in New York City’s Tweed Courthouse and hold forth on what he called “practical politics.” One of his most memorable notions, recorded along with many others by journalist William L. Riordon for his book Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, was that of “honest graft”:

A century and more later, “honest graft” has an ironic ring to it at best, and Plunkitt’s defense would not get him very far in court. But he does raise some important analytical questions. Just what is it that makes corruption corrupt? Not everything illegal is corruption, but is all corruption necessarily illegal? “Corruption” is an old and perennially contested political and analytical concept. Far from having a fixed and natural interpretation, the idea has gone through a variety of meanings and reinterpretations, and several sorts of behavior by powerful individuals seen as unacceptable today drew little concern, or were seen viewed just as “part of the game,” in the middle of the twentieth century. The most widely applied academic definitions (for examples of a long-running debate, see Nye, Reference Nye1967; Heidenheimer, Reference Heidenheimer1970; Scott, Reference Scott1972; Philp, Reference Philp1997) have rested on the law or other formal standards governing the actions of public officials and those with whom they deal. But Plunkitt gives us an enduring example of the ways in which meanings of corruption can be contested, negotiable, and quite congenial to some while unsatisfying for others.

Law-based definitions of corruption may strike many people as too narrow. There are actions that are fully legal, or at least not clearly illegal, that still strike many as creating or capitalizing upon unfair advantages for well-placed individuals and groups while working to the disadvantage of the many. Moreover, few would be satisfied with the notion that morality or ethical conduct consists simply of not breaking the law. Corruption in this broader sense need not involve the exchange of material benefits – not always easily proven in any event – nor even a particular action: Some corrupt arrangements are made in order to prevent things from taking place over time. In fact, the core of the issue is much more fundamental: For Warren (Reference Warren2004), the essence of corruption in a democracy is the “duplicitous exclusion” of citizens from decisions affecting their lives. That argument aligns with a 2015 Rutgers/Eagleton New Jersey Poll that found 54.8 percent strongly agreeing, and 24.3 percent somewhat agreeing, with a statement that “people like me get overruled by big political contributors” (Johnston, Reference Johnston2019; for details and similar survey results, see Chapter 4). It is worth reiterating here that the overwhelming majority of those contributions are given, received, and publicly reported within the law and enjoy First Amendment protection as a form of speech.

In recent years, scholars including Dennis Thompson (Reference Thompson2018) and Lawrence Lessig (Reference Lessig2013) have analyzed institutional corruption – legal uses of wealth and influence that nonetheless abuse public trust and threaten or harm citizens’ legitimate interests. For Lessig (Reference Lessig2013: 2),

Thompson (Reference Thompson2018) illuminates further complexities by pointing out that such corruption can simultaneously aid and impede the stated functions of the institutions where it occurs – for example, by speeding up some processes while diverting them in unanticipated or undesirable directions. Legal or institutional corruption can also take the form of old-boy and old-school networks; the common practice of lobbyists’ assisting legislative staff in drafting bills; “research institutes” funded by corporations, and sometimes housed by universities, whose mission is primarily to generate data favorable to the corporations; and various revolving-door practices, to name but a few. Such issues are by no means unique to the United States; for revolving-door relationships, for example, the French have the wonderful word pantouflage. Indeed, Johnston (Reference Johnston2005, Reference Johnston2014) argues that they are part of an “Influence Markets” syndrome of corruption common to many affluent market democracies. But despite the legality of such activities – along with the fact that within often-vague but and politically contested limits, some of them contribute to the vitality of democratic politics – in an age of widening inequalities, they can be prominent concerns, and matters of sharp resentment, when citizens talk about how corrupt America might be.

For some, the idea of legal corruption may go too far in terms of loosening our conception of an already slippery concept. For others, it may be a welcome addition to an important analytical debate. In any event we will show, in coming chapters, that legal corruption is widely regarded as commonplace in the US and many of its states. Further, we will see that patterns of both legal and illegal corruption vary among the states in ways that make theoretical and empirical sense. Thus we are not examining only specific kinds of official misconduct, but rather issues and abuses that fall under a broad social conception of corruption and that address the issues raised by Warren, Thompson, and Lessig.

1.3 That Fifty-Ring Circus

When Americans talk about “the government,” they usually mean the federal government, and frequently speak of it – erroneously – as though it were a remote entity existing only in the District of Columbia that, for now,Footnote ⁸ is part of no state. But the states are just as clearly major concerns – if anything, even more embedded in citizens’ daily lives via their own functions and those of the local governments they empower and control. In the first quarter of 2023, combined state and local government expenditures added up to an annual rate of over $3.7 trillion (FRED, St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, 2023; see also Urban Institute, 2021); in most years the states, and localities of all sorts, spend at roughly equal rates on aggregate. Those expenditure figures include revenues from higher-level governments, but states and localities play a major role in defining targets and purposes for intergovernmental spending. As of 2022, state and local governments collectively employed 19.3 million people – a figure almost seven times as large as the federal civilian total of 2.87 million (Statista, 2023). Federal employees and agencies, for their part, are not confined to majestic marble buildings in the nation’s capital; around 90 percent of federal civilian employees work in various locations in the fifty states (OPM, 2017). Depending upon the governmental function and varieties of grants that may be involved, many of those federal officials work closely with state agencies in their policy areas. Thus, federal highway officials based in a state capital may interact with their state counterparts more frequently than with other federal functionaries in that same city who administer other programs. Those relationships can help create significant state-level discretion and leverage for negotiation. Even when federal funds bring with them certain requirements and restrictions, control does not completely follow the dollar.

The state of California, by itself, would be the world’s fifth largest economy (Forbes, 2019); Texas, in 2019, was the world’s fourth largest oil producer (American Enterprise Institute, 2019). The states are constituting elements of the federal republic; by some accounts, the states formed the federal government, while others contend that the people played that role (a good summary of that historical debate appears in Leach [Reference Leach1970]). They are the basis for representation in the two federal legislative houses – directly, in the Senate, and via population, in the House of Representatives – and presidential elections are decided by electoral votes apportioned among the states according to the size of their delegations in the House and Senate. Their political systems are the recruiting and training ground for many federal politicians, and the major political parties are in substantial part collections of state-based organizations. Party systems can differ among the states – Minnesota’s Democratic Party is officially the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL) while New York, for a long time, had four parties – the big two plus the Liberal Party (now defunct, but replaced in some respects by the Working Families Party) and the New York Conservative Party. Other states such as Maine and Vermont at least occasionally elect Independents as state or federal officials.

Critical to our analysis is the fact that the states, as Elazar (Reference Elazar1984) observed, are civil societies in their own right with distinctive histories, political systems, economies, and political cultures. They are central to many citizens’ identities and interactions (“You can always tell a Texan, but you can’t tell him much …”). Americans pay state (and local) taxes of various sorts, vote in state elections, and carry state-issued driver’s licenses; many have at least a nodding acquaintance with their state’s history and follow their state universities’ sports teams. They have been raised and socialized into systems of laws, norms, and expectations that reflect and perpetuate their states’ traditions. If they move to other states, they can encounter contrasts (various state liquor laws being a prime example) but will likely bring some of their former states’ outlooks with them, creating complex mixtures of political cultures – and, at times, tensions among them – in their new home areas. Those state political cultures were a primary concern for Elazar, as they will be for us in chapters to come. These are the reasons why, when we consider politics, governance, and corruption, we speak of a “fifty-ring circus”: The states are not administrative subdivisions of a larger and dominant federal government. Rather, they are active and important social systems and political arenas, ones in which contention, conflict, innovation, stalemate, policy choices – and corruption – are constantly happening in diverse ways, with profoundly important consequences.

State-level politics and policies make an immense difference in Americans’ lives, as we have been reminded in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. Influence within their political systems can be valuable; while not all states gather and publish comparable data on lobbyists, one estimate of their spending at the state level in 2019–2020 was $3.5 billion (Open Secrets, Reference Secrets2022). At various times the states have had corruption cases both epic and minor. The political parties’ strength and coherence varies markedly from state to state, and many states have a handful of dominant industries – consider oil, gas, and real estate in Texas, tobacco in North Carolina and Kentucky, aerospace in Washington, and financial services in New York – that wield outsized influence over politics and policy. It is interesting to note, in that connection, that many citizens see corruption as worst at the federal level, and least concerning at the local levels, despite the “look at my town” responses noted above and the political clout of those dominant interests in their state capitals. To some extent that may reflect more extensive press coverage and public attention – and, likely lower levels of trust – at higher levels, and a friends-and-neighbors attitude toward local dealings. Whether or not those perceptions are linked to actual levels of corruption – and we will never know with precision – they are part of the larger political and social issues of corruption.

Each year the US Department of Justice publishes data on corruption convictions in the federal courts (the most recent report is Department of Justice, 2021). Inevitably, a variety of attempts to rank the states in terms of corruption have been the result (see, e.g., Blake, Reference Blake2021). Between 2001 and 2020, the data show that some 2,071 state and 5,188 local officials were charged with corruption in federal courts, with 1,893 state and 4,579 local defendants being convicted. Private citizens charged in connection with those same cases add another 5,593 defendants and 4,968 convictions to those totals. For reasons we will discuss in greater depth in Chapter 2, state-by-state rankings derived solely from convictions data (see, e.g., World Population Review, 2022) can be misleading. Still, those totals show that any attempt to answer the question “How corrupt is America?” must place major emphasis on the states, and on the local governments they create and control. Equally, the debate over legal or institutional corruption, and the ways in which public perceptions of corruption connect with misgivings about questions of fairness, challenge us to examine manifestations of corruption that lie outside the boundaries of illegality. Those two goals – to take the states and their diversity into account and to focus on contrasting varieties of corruption – will guide our work in the pages to come.

1.4 A Plan of Attack

We will examine and compare both illegal and legal corruption in the fifty states using three proxy measures of corruption, one of them is an innovative perception-based measure, applied to the states as whole political systems and to the three branches of their governments too. We show that those measures vary among the states and branches, sometimes in surprising ways but in ways broadly consistent with theories and findings about corruption in other settings. We then turn to corruption as a factor influencing several important political and policy concerns. We conclude with some general observations about corruption in America, what those findings suggest in terms of wider issues, and what our methods and findings tell us about paths for future research and reform. The parts and chapters of the book are as follows.

*****

America does not face the sorts of imminent economic and political crises commonly associated with extensively corrupt systems, but that does not mean we should congratulate ourselves or blithely tell the rest of the world it should just try to be like us. When it comes to outright lawbreaking corruption, we apparently have a great deal to be concerned about, particularly as corruption seems to project its negative influence into a great many aspects of social life, the economy, public health, race relations, and basic functions of government. But that is only part of the picture: legal corruption, as we have seen, is widely regarded as extensive and deepens estrangement between citizens on the one hand and their public institution and officials on the other. Of at least equal concern in our analysis is the corrosive distrust that seems to accompany corruption, both as a cause and an effect of corruption: Why should I follow the rules if so many others are cutting corners or lining their pockets? Why should I vote when elections are rigged by big money, and when officials do not care about people like me? Responses to corruption, therefore, cannot be limited to crime-prevention or punishment models; at stake is the nature and quality of government, the role and importance of citizens, and the ways in which a nation of over 330 million people might somehow govern itself in ways that are effective and just.

Let us begin, then, by considering the dilemmas of measurement, and how some innovative data might illuminate the seriousness of two basic kinds of corruption – illegal and legal – across the fifty states.