The Quest for Good Governance: How Societies Develop Control of Corruption.

• Author: Pavlik, Jamie Bologna
• Position: Book review

The Quest for Good Governance: How Societies Develop Control of Corruption

By Alina Mungiu-Pippidi

New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Pp. xv, 296. $34.99 paperback.

Corruption is usually thought of as a major impediment to development in poor nations. As a consequence, over the past two and a half decades the causes and consequences of corruption have been vastly studied. (See, for example, Daniel Treisman, "What Have We Learned about the Causes of Corruption from Ten Years of Cross-National Empirical Research?" Annual Review of Political Science 10 [2007]: 211-44, and Toke S. Aidt, "Rent Seeking and the Economics of Corruption," Constitutional Political Economy 27, no. 2 [2016]: 142-57.) Corruption is also a major focus of international agencies, such as the World Bank. These agencies often use theories developed in academic research to guide policy decisions. Despite this focus on corruption and use of the research, successful anticorruption stories are not well known. When a country does successfully reduce its corruption, it is unclear that this success can be attributed to this voluminous body of research.

The difficulties in understanding and combatting corruption can be attributed in part to the fact that corruption is a multidisciplinary topic, causing much of the research to be conducted by academics with different specialties. Thus, it is possible that researchers in one field (e.g., economics) are entirely unaware of the findings discovered by researchers of other fields (e.g., political science), which is a problem because the studies conducted by researchers of different specialties are often complementary. In The Quest for Good Governance, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi utilizes research conducted in a variety of disciplines in an attempt to pull together some of these theories to understand how societies develop control of corruption. She links historical evidence obtained from case studies with broader theories and data, making for a uniquely dense study of how societies can reduce corruption and develop a norm of ethical universalism rather than particularism. In essence, her policy prescriptions boil down to the need to balance the incentives to be corrupt (opportunities) with the constraints that inhibit corruption.

Mungiu-Pippidi begins by defining corruption. This seemingly simple task is one of the major obstacles in corruption research. She shows in fascinating detail that there is a vast difference between how...