This chapter argues that anti-corruption is a tool of politics. This is true as soon as we recognize that it is also a tool of government, because assuring the viability of government is an essential political problem. I examine this issue from a wider perspective, viewing corruption as a “valence issue.” Parties, politicians, and civil society organizations may take advantage of the widespread popular opposition to corruption and campaign on an anti-corruption platform, especially if it is difficult for them to differentiate themselves in other ways. The decreased relevance of ideological differences in recent decades, particularly following the collapse of the Soviet Union, has contributed to the increased interest in corruption that has accompanied the establishment of the current consensus view. Also because of this motive, adopting an anti-corruption political platform has occasionally been an inevitable choice for reform-minded political actors.

This chapter provides an introduction to the book. A focus on the social construction of corruption leads to the two main conclusions. First, corruption is a tool of government, because it offers reasons for elites to remain cohesive. These incentives may be in the form of both benefits and punishments. To the first type belong the enticements of corruption, and they are reinforced whenever the ruler has the possibility to assign at will the label “corrupt” and the ensuing punishments. This helps rulers solve a problem of control, which is a prerequisite for political order and a vital necessity of any political system. However, corruption as a tool of government has fundamental flaws. The second broad conclusion is that anti-corruption is a tool of politics, because it can be used to pursue a political agenda. Additionally, corruption is a tool of politics which is available more widely, because it is a powerful “valence issue,” that is, one of those issues on which most people agree, either negatively (as for corruption) or positively (as it would be, e.g., for “competence”). However, as a tool of politics anti-corruption has many shortcomings.

This chapter discusses corruption in Russia. It proposes a view that recognizes the ambiguity between the apparent anarchy of the observed conflicts in Russia’s society and the centrality of the State, the Kremlin, and President Putin. Background information on Russia’s economy since the collapse of the Soviet Union is presented first, with a focus on distributional issues. A series of existential struggles that the state has faced and examined what is known about corruption in Russia is then discussed. For the Russian state, corruption has been a crucial tool in addressing its existential struggles and a highly contested political arena. The theme of anti-corruption has been utilized by both reformers and the Kremlin for their own purposes.

This chapter discusses corruption in the United States. In recent decades, as a narrow view of corruption has taken hold, the United States has experienced a significant increase in economic inequality and a decrease in social mobility. Despite the growing public discourse on economic inequality, concerns about the viability of a democratic system in the face of extreme economic inequalities have a long history. In recent years, corruption has been frequently invoked to describe the state of American politics, with business corporations and their ultra-wealthy owners indicated as possible culprits. In the United States, the notion of corporations having a corrupting effect dates back to the early days of the Republic, when it was feared that corporate charters could be granted by state legislatures as rewards for favors or bribes. This chapter’s main conclusion is that while illegal forms of corruption may be uncommon in the United States, its legal variants are widespread, and is further discussed in Chapter 9.

This chapter recognizes that definitions of corruption depend on a normative view of the polity, and such dependence should be recognized when debating corruption. In the context of a discussion of corruption in the United States, this chapter argues for the relevance of new “geographies of corruption,” and in particular, of legal forms of corruption. My interpretation of legal corruption in the United States is framed within a dynamic relationship between economic and political inequality, which may be mutually reinforcing.

Anti-corruption efforts struggle against the perverse aptness of corruption in satisfying that prerequisite of government which is control. Anti-corruption efforts also fall victim to the function it serves as a tool of politics. From this perspective, this chapter derives a pessimistic view on the prospects of anti-corruption efforts that are narrowly defined, on which I present some concluding considerations. They vouch for a broader approach to the question of corruption, and they touch upon the idea of modernity and one of its key ingredients: the possibility of human agency.

This chapter discusses attempts to estimate the effects and causes of corruption. Results obtained using the linear regression models have suggested a list of determinants, and of effects, of corruption. They also have implicitly promoted a view according to which we read the observed associations between corruption and other factors in causal terms. This chapter proposes a critical assessment of whether the counterfactual of a significantly different level of corruption from the one observed may be legitimate. From this discussion, corruption emerges as a part of a “dense historical matrix,” one where it is difficult to contemplate changes in individual factors while leaving others unmodified.

This chapter describes the main traits of the prevailing view on corruption. In particular, the current consensus view on corruption is all but monolithic, and at its “soft edges” we find themes that in fact deserve center stage, such as the elusive and contested nature of the concept. For example, although a narrow concept of corruption has predominated, it is acknowledged that the concept is elusive and its nature contested. Furthermore, it is frequently recognized that reference to corruption may have a certain degree of instrumentality, and specifically, that an anti-corruption discourse may be utilized as a means to settle scores with political adversaries. Another related theme at the edge of the current debate concerns the relationship between corruption and other social phenomena. On one hand, much effort has been dedicated to understanding the causes and effects of corruption. However, it is often recognized that the concept of corruption, being elusive, is also multifaceted and cannot be considered in isolation. The book intends to move these themes from the edges to the center of the debate.

Chapter 18 focuses on the important issue of teacher salaries. Teacher salaries are important because, like any other workers, teachers and prospective teachers care about their compensation and how it compares to compensation offered in other professions. The issue of teacher salaries also illustrates the effect of compensation on teacher behavior – not just whether young people go into teaching, but also who decides to become a teacher, where they teach, how well they teach, and how long they choose to stay in the profession. The chapter first discusses the issue of real versus nominal wages of teachers in the United States and other developed countries over time, followed by a discussion of relative wages, or how salaries in teaching compare to salaries in comparable occupations, and how changes in relative salaries may affect the “quality” of the supply of teachers. The chapter then compares relative teacher salaries internationally. The final sections focus on the use of the uniform salary schedule and discuss the various forms of teacher incentive pay, including a review of the impact of incentive pay on student performance.

Chapter 10 reviews the tenuous relation between the level and distribution of education and the distribution of income, beginning with early arguments about economic development and income distribution. The discussion turns to the human capital model of personal income distribution, then to whether the skills distribution predictive of income distribution is years of schooling or measures of knowledge in the labor force, then to more recent longitudinal analyses that include human capital variables. This review also assesses various empirical methodologies estimating the relationship of educational expansion and skills distribution to income distribution. The main division is between models that analyze the relationship across countries and those that analyze longitudinal data on changes over time within countries. The chapter analyzes the reasons why it has been difficult to show that even in highly educated countries, the earnings distribution does not necessarily compress as the distribution of years of schooling or skills compresses.