Political corruption. The internal enemy of public institutions. By Emanuela Ceva , Maria Paola Ferretti , Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2021. pp. 217. $24.81 (hardcover). ISBN: 9780197567869 (hardback); ISBN: 9780197567883 (epub)

• Published date: 01 January 2024
• Author: Manuel Villoria
• Date: 01 January 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13779

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION IN PRINT

Political corruption. The

internal enemy of public

institutions

By Emanuela Ceva, Maria Paola Ferretti,

Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2021.

pp. 217. $24.81 (hardcover). ISBN:

9780197567869 (hardback); ISBN:

9780197567883 (epub)

Manuel Villoria

Department of Public Law and Political Science, King Juan Carlos University,

Vic

alvaro, Madrid, Spain

Email: manuel.villoria@urjc.es

Despite the vast number of articles and books written on

corruption over the last 30 years, this field of study is still

developing. Reflection on the concept itself and its conse-

quences continues to yield remarkable texts. A very

recent book that deserves to be reviewed for the depth

of its reflections and its usefulness for public managers is

Political Corruption.The Internal Enemy of Public Institu-

tions, by Emanuela Ceva and Maria Paola Ferretti, pub-

lished by Oxford University Press in 2021.

For these authors, there are already many texts that deal

with how corruption harms the political, economic, and

social system and how to establish mechanisms for creating

institutions that minimize these effects. These texts analyzed

corruption as a disease treated from the outside and

attacked with anticorruption agencies, external controls, and

harsh sanctions. Ceva and Ferretti, however, propose an

inward perspective on institutional action and failure cen-

tered on the institutional interactions between officeholders;

this implies that the most important measures for fighting

corruption must emerge from the organization itself and be

led by the officeholders themselves.

As indicated in the first chapter of the book, political

corruption occurs whenever officeholders, acting in their

institutional capacity, use their power of office to pursue an

agenda whose rationale may not be vindicated as consis-

tent with the terms of their mandate (p. 10). To understand

this perspective, the concepts of “interrelatedness”and

“institution”must first be clarified. The raison d’être of an

institution comprises the normative ideals that ground its

establishment and, consequently, its internal structure and

functioning. The authors’theory builds on a teleological

account of institutions as organizations constituted by the

multilayered joint action of human beings, who act cooper-

atively in their capacity as officeholders (i.e., the occupants

of institutional roles) to provide collective goods that are

definitive of the institution itself (p. 86). Consequently, insti-

tutional roles are interrelated. Because of the structural

interrelatedness, the corruption of one particular office-

holder may also imply that other officeholders are incapaci-

tated to perform the tasks entrusted to their roles (p. 65);

this implies reconceptualizing anticorruption in terms of an

institutional ethics of “office accountability”that draws on

an institution’s internal resources of self-correction.

The text is of great analytical depth and quite sophisti-

cated in its reflections, built with a rigorous logic with

which it faces some of the most difficult questions that

must be addressed when dealing with the issue of cor-

ruption. One of them is that of the justification of moral

rejection of corruption (Chapter 3). They maintain that if

our basis were purely consequentialist, we should subject

it to cost–benefit analysis to justify it. Even in the conse-

quentialism of the rule, we should show the advantages

of one rule over another. It usually works, but not always.

For this reason, Ceva and Ferretti defend a deontologi-

cal perspective. Political corruption is normatively relevant

as a problem of public ethics, even when its negative

implications are absent or unclear. When officeholders act

and interact in their institutional capacity, their rights and

duties are not determined solely by the law or the princi-

ples of personal ethics (such as the harm principle). Their

conduct is also shaped and limited by a special body of

moral norms binding on an individual qua the occupant of

an institutional role. Officeholders harm their partners by

pursuing an agenda whose rationale is inconsistent with

the terms of that power mandate; their role-based interac-

tions give officeholders moral reasons to demand each

other compliance with their duties of office (pp. 96–97).

The duty of office accountability can be explained as a

duty of interactive justice (because it qualifies the deontic

relations between officeholders), and conversely, political

corruption is a for m of interactive injustice (p. 100) .

Another of the authors’challenges is to try to develop a

concept that also helps explain corruption in non-

democratic societies. Their office-accountability-based view

is relevant for various kinds of systems of rule-governed

roles. However, in that case, it may be that under authoritar-

ian systems, certain corrupt actions are justifiable. It is the

assumption of “noble-cause corruption”(see Miller, 2017). In

that case (see, e.g., Schindler case), the authors state, “We

cannot and should not disregard the background injustice

of the institutional circumstances when the relevant use of

power occurs.”Cases like this one allow us to see that, in

Accepted: 14 November 2023

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13779

186 © 2023 American Society for Public Administration. Public Admin Rev. 2024;84:186–196.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/puar