Is corruption really the biggest obstacle to development, or are we asking the wrong questions? Dan Banik speaks with renowned corruption scholar Michael Johnston about power, democracy, and how citizens can help build more accountable and just societies.
Is corruption the world's favorite scapegoat for failed development? And why are wealthy democracies so eager to lecture poorer countries about good governance while struggling with corruption at home?
In this episode of In Pursuit of Development, Dan Banik speaks with Michael Johnston, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Colgate University and one of the world's leading scholars of corruption.
Drawing on decades of research, Johnston challenges conventional thinking about corruption, arguing that it goes far beyond bribery and illegal transactions. The conversation explores how political influence, elite networks, and the abuse of power shape societies, including some of the world's most established democracies.
They discuss Johnston's influential four syndromes of corruption, the limitations of global corruption rankings, the relationship between corruption and economic development, and the dangers of politicians weaponizing anti-corruption rhetoric. The discussion also examines the shortcomings of international efforts to promote good governance.
Dan Banik
Michael, good morning and welcome to the show. You're a hero of mine. You are the doyen of corruption studies. Nobody studies corruption without mentioning your name. It's a huge pleasure to have you on the show. Welcome.
Michael Johnston
Well, thank you for your time and interest. And hello to your far-flung audience. I'm in Austin, Texas, which is a wonderful place to watch corruption unfolding day by day.
Dan Banik
I can imagine. So let's get started there, Michael. I mean, you've been studying corruption for decades. And I know that you don't like to be called Mr. Corruption, as we do often call Mr. Democracy or something like that. But what do you think has changed in the decades since you've been studying this? Do you notice any differences now in terms of corruption around the world, including in the United States?
Michael Johnston
Oh, tremendous differences. I mean, in one at one level, just at the level of definitions, we have not yet and never will settle the issue of what is corruption once and for all. But what we have seen is the the rise of an interest in institutional corruption in the category that I call influence markets and such. We have seen the rise of illiberal democracy. And here I Have in mind the Orbans, the Bolsonaros, and the Trumps of the world who use issues that ought to be of concern to anti-corruption activists, but use them for their own purposes and in some respects make corruption problems worse. we've seen that we've seen the rise of quantitative indicators and then we've seen a kind of counter revolution of people who say well let's take a look at context let's take a look at details and such so it's a it's a completely different completely different field and the biggest difference of course is that when i began this work and my goodness the mid-1970s there were about four or five of us working on it now there are people in all sorts of disciplines and in all sorts of places and what's most gratifying to me is seeing the rising generations of scholars who are going to do things that that i could never dream about frankly i mean it's going to be a very exciting time
Dan Banik
Yeah, you know, I was thinking about Nye and Heidenheimer and you and, you know, that generation of scholars. But just talking about what has changed, do you think corruption has become more sophisticated because of technology? I'm also thinking about state capture that there's a lot of focus on, you know, is there a more sophisticated practice? Maybe it's even more difficult to actually figure out what is corrupt, you know?
Michael Johnston
Exactly. The more sophistication we see comes from, for example, cross-border corruption. It used to make sense to talk about corruption in this country and in that country. Now it doesn't. It's a cross-border phenomenon. There's a whole shadow sector, an offshore sector, or a tech sector, if you will, that wasn't present years ago, where the tremendous amount of action is. The whole process of liberalization, neoliberalization and such, has in some respects aided economic development, but in other ways it has aided and abetted state capture. Instead of trying to keep reasonably clear-cut boundaries between public and private, now the boundaries are fuzzy, are fudged, are movable, and we seem to think that there is something magic about public-private partnerships when, in fact, they may be a major part of the problem.
Dan Banik
You know, there's one area where I think the needle has shifted somewhat positively in terms of corruption, at least say three decades ago when I was studying it. I got the impression in the literature that, you know, often corruption was projected as taking place in all these exotic countries, in low-income countries, etc. And then I remember, you know, reading a quote, and this may interest you perhaps, and you've heard this before, that corruption is no stranger to Washington. It's a famous resident. So for me, at least I see now wider acceptance that corruption takes place in Norway, in the US. It's not just something that is relegated to the developing world. Did you see that shift too? That's true.
Michael Johnston
That's a big shift. And yet it's the recognition has outrun our willingness to reassess our diagnosis, to reassess our remedies. I mean, we are still many ways going out into the developing world and say, you know, be like us when in fact we have we have a major we have major corruption problems of our own. Making assumptions about the spread and the efficacy of democracy i have many friends in transparency international but their whole definition of corruption the private use of entrusted power it assumes an underlying democratic framework and in many parts of the world power has not been entrusted by anyone it's been seized it's been bought it's been inherited it has been stolen and that's a very different kind of frame of reference
Dan Banik
Yeah, so let's talk about definitions, because your somewhat, I would say, perhaps a very strict minimalist definition has been very popular over the years. And as I understand it from your work, your recent books, etc., corruption is the abuse of a trust. Right. So trust is crucial. And this is something that generally involves public power or resources for private benefit. And here the operative word is, of course, public, private benefit. All of these are ambiguous.
SPEAKER_01
Right.
Dan Banik
Indeed. And indeed, even abuse, you know, what constitutes abuse. So how has that definition withstood time as you see it? Is it still something that you subscribe to? Is the abuse of public power or resources for private benefit?
Michael Johnston
I think where my thinking has evolved over the years and decades, I have to admit, is that the whole question of what use we make of a definition. At the very beginning, and of course for most people this morning, a definition draws bright line boundaries around some category of behavior. and the ambiguities and the conflicts and the complexities at the boundaries are a problem somehow to be solved. I think those ambiguities and conflicts are important information. I mean, they are where the whole public private relationship is being thrashed out and changed. They are where our analytical challenges lie. And I think we ought to be trying less for any kind of sort of pseudo precision or false precision, and trying more to look at those processes of conflict and contention by which we may change our specific definition every day. Now, I know that is going to be unsatisfying to many people, but in pursuit of development, development is a dynamic bundle of processes, and so too is is corruption. So we need to be open to those complexities and make them part of our analysis rather than something to be solved and taken off the table.
Dan Banik
So, Michael, in many of your publications, you often have numerous examples of abuse that can be understood very differently. Can you help my listeners understand what constitutes abuse in one area, one country, one context that may not always be understood in the same way as abuse somewhere else?
Michael Johnston
Well, when we in the United States give constitutional protection to political contributions, for example, those are viewed differently in different systems. Even the UK has a different standard when it comes to contributions by those outside the system. And different countries have different rules about who can contribute to whom and the like. So there is one example. Lobbying is another. It is in the U.S. like campaign contributions, constitutionally protected. Many other places it's viewed as a suspect activity, or at least as an activity that can contain a lot of corruption at its core. So, you know, there are there are some differences right there. What I would call the vulgar version of that argument, well, there must be a country somewhere where bribery is okay. That doesn't hold a lot of water. I mean, a very good scholar by the name of Judge Noonan years ago went looking for a country where bribery is okay and didn't find one. You can't ever prove that kind of negatives, but this sort of notion, well, there's a country out there where it's all okay, that doesn't happen. But what we do see in many researches respects, is a bundle of activities such as institutional corruption, Lawrence Lessig's arguments about activities that are not illegal. They're not clearly illegal, but they abuse public trust. Businesses forming quote unquote, research institutes at universities. And those institutes turn out research results that, surprisingly enough, end up favoring those companies' profits when it comes to regulatory decisions. All legal, and it abuses the public's trust in science, the public's trust in academe, which is under assault in many places. Here, I think Mark Warren has some important lessons to teach us about the meaning of corruption, especially in a democracy. The essence of corruption for Warren is that it excludes people from decisions where they have a right to participate, from decisions that affect their lives. To borrow another term, it crowds people out. of decision-making and governance. And rather than focusing on a specific group of techniques, bribery, extortion, whatever, I think that kind of imbalance of power, that kind of injustice, it's the reason why we should study corruption in the first place.
Dan Banik
Yeah, you know, this reminds me of actually a time, I think 34 years ago, I was standing for election for the student parliament here at the University of Oslo. And I was campaigning with a very silly, but I think in the end, a rather popular slogan, vote for Dan, he's your man. And my rival was from a certain country in the global south. And he felt that that was unethical, that I was campaigning. So that itself, we have very different understandings of what is legal and what isn't. But Michael, I mean, we're actually now getting to the nitty gritties, right? So it's not just a legal concept because we have to understand it in relation to its social significance, its cultural standards, right? There's also understandings of morality, justice. So all of this complicates... how we actually view or even, you know, subscribe to that term. And sometimes my view is, I don't know if you agree, that there's excessive focus on bribes and bribery, that there's this understanding that it's cash that is exchanged under the table, but that's only one aspect of corruption.
Michael Johnston
It's one that everybody more or less agrees is corrupt. It's sort of at the core rather than in that more diffuse kind of boundary around the idea. And further, corruption can be modeled. It is easy to work into an economic or bribery can be modeled. It's easy to work into an economic equation.
Dan Banik
You mean measurement is important, right?
Michael Johnston
Yeah. And so that makes the bribery rubric attractive. Compounding that, too, is over the years from an academic standpoint, a lot of people who did other kinds of things moved into corruption did one or two pieces of work and then moved on and in the process never really got to grips with the complexities that you have been bringing out very well here and that's produced a whole lot of really unperceptive literature so you know it's probably a problem many many subfields have but nonetheless a lot of simplification of the problem to bribery. Along with that is the predominance, and here I'm going to sound like I'm insulting some people I don't mean to, that much of the anti-corruption debate frames reform as a crime and punishment or a crime and deterrence kind of problem, when in fact, much of what I'm thinking of in corruption this morning, and probably you are as well, is really in that sort of gray area. What about campaigning? What about lobbying? What about forming a political coalition in some places that is the essence of democratic action? In other places, that's monopolizing people's choices and attention. And those disagreements are of the essence.
Dan Banik
So, you know, I suppose the natural question at this point is why does corruption even exist? And I know that you've been preoccupied with that question. And I found it fascinating in your work to also read that One would actually expect there to be even more corruption than there is at the moment. I mean, so what are your thoughts there? I mean, should we? It seems strange if, you know, we are all selfish, maybe. And so the question is somewhat strange to even ask you, should we expect more corruption than is the case now?
Michael Johnston
I think we should. And if you go back historically, you know, power, you know, power is imbalanced. Politics for many people for many centuries took the form of who has the biggest stick, who has the biggest pile of money, who has the biggest group of followers, the biggest army, full stop. And with my students, my undergraduates, I used to like to ask them sort of a thought experiment question. and say something like imagine that I am an absolute unchallenged dictator can I be corrupt and the students will say well yeah of course you're well I'm saying all right corrupt by whose standards who gets to decide who gets to say that there are any limits at all on my behavior and you know it goes in an interesting direction where people begin to see that the notion of corruption just doesn't make any sense at all. Unless there's someone out there to say no, to draw a boundary, to say this far and no further, you may not abuse me, my family, my property. You can't do that. And that's where the notion of corruption, limits on power, arise. It isn't a natural kind of thing. And for a lot of people, especially here in the U.S., they look at politics and they say, well, it's all argument and it's bickering and this and that. Of course it is. That's what it's supposed to be. And that's the good side of politics, especially in a democracy. And that's how we restrain our leaders and call them to account. I know this sounds like an idealistic civics book kind of point of view, but at the same time, I think it's getting back to basics a little bit. So in some respects, you know, the question for me is, why isn't there a lot more corruption? Indeed. maybe we're doing a little bit better at controlling it than we think we are.
Dan Banik
Let me offer a couple of perspectives on this. One is I feel when, you know, when I study development and I'm looking at poverty reduction, Michael, around the world, sometimes there's a tendency of blaming. And this is when I interact with my colleagues and let's say I'm in a taxi and I ask somebody in a country in the global South, you know, is your country developing? And they would say perhaps no. And the next question would be why not? And it would be corruption. So I sometimes feel that corruption gets the blame for everything. And I think that's a bit unfair. You know, it's like an easy excuse. I'd like to hear your views on that. That's one. The second one has to do with... The feeling I get when I do then ask a third follow-up question, why is there corruption? And they would say, it's all these corrupt leaders, et cetera. There's seldom an attempt to be reflective over one's own actions. So the point here is that it is often easy to criticize the person taking a bribe or being corrupt, et cetera. But we as citizens may be the first to offer a bribe to get something done in our favor, right? Speed money or whatever. And we don't question our motives. We think that is fine. It's the recipient of the bribe that is to be blamed. So any thoughts you have on that?
Michael Johnston
Well, I think those two questions are really interrelated in a way I hope to be able to keep in my mind. But the term corruption has definitely become a catch-all. It's become the explanation for everything. And That is not only inaccurate, it's misleading. Some problems, if you took, again, I used to ask my students, if you took 435 of your best friends, if you have that many friends, and put them in the US Congress, how much less corrupt do you think it would be? And, you know, oh, yeah, well, we'd all be honest. Well, OK, fine. But there would be interest groups, there'd be lobbyists, there'd be temptations, there'd be rules that are so complex that you cannot not break the rules. You know, so many of those systemic factors need to be kept in mind. The danger of the catch-all use of corruption is, I mean, first of all, it's a hot word and nobody likes it. And the demagogue A Trump, an Orban, a Bolsonaro can use that term for more or less anything they don't like and more or less any person they don't like. And, you know, you people have big corruption problems out there. Well, it's the ones on the opposite bench and the opposition. That's the thought. And so we've got to investigate the opposition. We've got to shut them down. Maybe we don't really need elections. Our current U.S. president has toyed with that notion as well. And so that imprecise use of corruption opens the door to demagogues and illiberal democracy in which we just go through the motion but don't call anyone to account. We have a big responsibility here. For example, the notion of transparency. Everybody loves transparency. Let's have transparency. Well, okay, transparency is great if there's someone out there to look in. and to use transparency with the means and the motive and the opportunity to put whatever transparency reveals to use. In other words, that's us. We need to be a part of that transparency package. Much the same thing for corruption itself, that we tend to be very tolerant when people like ourselves cut corners. I used to do survey work and, you know, we'd say, you know, something like, is it seriously corrupt government if a council member takes a bribe? Well, yes, of course that's corrupt. What about if the person next to you on your street pays the trash collectors extra to take things away? Oh, no, I don't know. That's okay. That's a slippery slope right there. And People like ourselves, we have a responsibility to keep up our end of the accountability bargain. That can be uncomfortable. It can even be risky. Oscar Wilde once said the trouble with socialism is it takes up too many evenings. The trouble with accountability is that it can be almost a full-time obsession. When people confront that, it's easier to sit back and let someone else do the work or try to put legislation in place that does our work as citizens. In the U.S., term limits are a very popular idea. We've got to cut these guys off. after X many years, the thing that they tend to forget, you've got term limits at the end of your arm in terms of voting if you want to use them, and too many people do not. Term limits throw the good guys out with the bad. It's sort of putting democracy on autopilot, and it's abdicating our role and obligations as citizens.
Dan Banik
So, Michael, let's turn to the global level. Now, the most popular way of understanding corruption is, of course, looking at these rankings. And I know you've been associated with Transparency International, talking about transparency. And Transparency International, of course, is well known for its corruption perception index. Now, I know you're not a huge fan necessarily of that, right? If I haven't misunderstood. What is your take? Because, you know, we like rankings. We want to see whether our country has improved. Are we at the bottom of the list? Are we in the middle? You know, it gives us a sense of achievement that we're going in the right direction. But these can be overly simplified. There are numerous problems in terms of methods. So what is your take on this, the corruption perception index?
Michael Johnston
In a couple of ways, it has been a tremendously valuable thing in the sense of keeping corruption high on the international agenda. directing attention to regimes or leaders that rather we look somewhere else rather than at what they're doing in their countries and such. And that's a fine thing. It has been both a boon for academic research and a way for, frankly, lazy academic researchers to plug a variable into an equation. And say they've taken the corruption into account the problem is you know first of all variations in kind. The index says in effect that corruption in norway and corruption in cameroon are the same thing they're just cameroon has more of it you know that doesn't withstand scrutiny at all. I mean, in some places, corruption is very closely linked to violence. In some places, it's an alternative to violence. In some places, corruption is the glue that holds elites together and enables them to govern. In other places, it is the basis of contention and often bloody contention among elites and their factions. Those are important kinds of qualitative variations. we need to take into account. There's also a sense too that at least a third of the civil societies in the world get left off the index each year because they don't have enough data to even qualify for an index score. You see this in the New York Times every year, You know, Cameroon is the most corrupt country in the world because its score is at the bottom of the index. Well, a lot of other places, you know, don't even have an index score because they don't take the surveys. They really almost don't have a state. Even if, you know, some of the countries have a score, I'm thinking, you know, Cameroon's south of Yemen. If you're looking at Somalia and such, is there really a state? And if there is kind of a quasi-state, do our notions of corruption even apply? And so in that sense, there's a major kind of gap there. Now, the other problem is in terms of reform, the way the indexes and indices are gathered, the way they're published, Even a very intent reform effort is unlikely to move the needle. Scores don't change. And, you know, there's a question, well, two questions for any researcher about any measure, validity and reliability. Validity, does this measure actually what we claim it does? And reliability, does it do so in an accurate way, you know, year in, year out? every time we gather the data. And too often, the lack of change in the indices is offered to us as evidence of validity, when in fact, it might be exactly the wrong thing. It might be showing us that the measures are not valid because they don't change as realities unfold .. are altered so you know those are those are difficulties as well i could go on at some length but i think these are some of the major problems and as a guide for policy you know i can you know we can say all right here's country x it has a bad score, what do we do about that does the index really tell us where to attack, what to do? Does it really promise to show the effects of any halfway successful initiative? The answers are at the very best, the jury is out and often the answers are no.
Dan Banik
And this is why it is perfect timing now to talk about your very well-known four syndromes of corruption. And for the listeners, the first has to do with influence markets. We're talking about mature democracies, advanced institutions, strong institutions. And you've used the case, we've already mentioned the US, but also Japan, Germany, Australia, France. in a lot of your work, elite cartels, where institutions are strong, but perhaps not as strong as in influence markets. It could be countries like Italy, South Korea, Botswana, in your latest book, Argentina. A third category is oligarchs and clans where The institutions are rather weak, Mexico, Russia, Philippines. I don't know if Russia is still in that category. No. Okay. And then finally, official moguls. And here in your original work, I mean, the first book, at least the one that I'm referring to, Syndromes of Corruption, I think 2005, you actually had put China in there, Michael. together with Kenya, Indonesia, and now more recently Egypt and Tunisia. So help us understand these four syndromes briefly and whether you think some of these countries have moved out of some of these categories.
Michael Johnston
Yeah, there's a lot going on. And I should add that some very good researchers, friends of mine and I are doing, I call it the son of syndromes, the revision of scheme or revisiting the scheme. And we're finding a lot that's of interest. One is that many of the indicators that are now out there, which are quite different from what were available when I first did the scheme, are strongly inter-correlated and they're not well suited to teasing out qualitative differences. And so we're having to rethink what it is we think varies among cases. And one of the things that is emerging is the style and extent of accountability. Vertical accountability of the strong to the weak, is it present or is it absent? Horizontal accountability, Andreas Shadler's famous term, do officials hold each other accountable? Diagonal accountability, officials and civil society, the news media and the like. That's very complicated turf and finding ways to measure that in persuasive kind of fashion is not easy. So we're coming up with different categories What they will be called, you know, that's an art as much as a science, frankly. We're finding that some of the categories are standing up to analysis and some of them need reassessment, in part because countries do change. Russia is not oligarchs and clans anymore. Russia is official moguls. In Foreign Affairs about a year ago, I made the case that what Donald Trump is doing in the U.S. is not just adding more corruption, but he's overlaying an influence market system with official mogul-style grabbing at the top, the Trump family enterprise, which is, I don't know if I want to put a label onto it or not. I don't know if I can. But those are qualitative changes that change how we think about the U.S. The other problem with syndrome, of course, is that in a... know a society that's relatively you know homogeneous and modest in in size and scale of you know austria maybe norway though norway is becoming a much more complex place a characterization may make sense but in the us do we want to put one label on texas minnesota new jersey and california That's an open question. So those are things we're wrangling with as we revise.
Dan Banik
What about China, Michael? Where do you put China there? Because there's an offensive, a very purposeful drive by the president to root out corruption, to punish people, etc. And China has moved rapidly from now. It's soon going to be high income later this year, the high income category. So where would you put China today? Or even India?
Michael Johnston
Yeah. China is very hard to classify i mean there's some interesting indicators about the effects of corruption she's anti-corruption campaign in china has caused the price of you know french wines and expensive cars to drop indeed that's an interesting kind of indicator and in China you have a state sector a private sector and a mixed sector that includes among other things the People's Liberation Army do we want to do separate ratings for all of them China is a a in part also in China, the East Coast versus the interior might have to rank those differently. And I think it resists a simple labeling. I would still, for now, provisionally talk about the official moguls, but would think that the emergence of elite cartels in those different sectors is a major kind of development. And That's a kind of development, a kind of corruption that can coexist with powerful economic development because it can creates a kind of useful predictability. It isn't textbook market economics, but it's a way of getting things done that can be, you know, can be extremely effective. So as you can tell from my rambling answer, China resists any simple characterization. But I think we're seeing the emergence of important elite cartels in specific sectors and regions.
Dan Banik
which of course makes me wonder also about the relationship between corruption and democracy. Or to put it differently, Michael, is there a particular form or different types of corruption that are more common in a democratic society than in, say, an autocracy? I'm thinking about India. You were mentioning accountability. Obviously, one of the good things with democracy is there's always pressure from below that you can get rid of leaders, you can get rid of situations where, you know, every five years. But of course, what happens within those five years is different. And I'm asking you this because I know you've been arguing for deep democratization as one of the main forms of reform or the ways of combating corruption. So what is your take on that relationship between corruption and democracy?
Michael Johnston
Well, there are some kinds of techniques that are characteristic of democracy. And here I'm thinking of lobbying, political contributions, the whole influence market syndrome, the institutional corruption, you know, being good examples of that. And one thing that surprised me has in a very kind of a positive way since the first syndrome scheme appeared was the level of interest in the influence markets as a as a serious corrupt problem. It was never a residual category or meant to be one just to include the West. But there was a lot of interest. There has been a lot of interest in probing just what the influence market syndrome actually is. And how do you draw boundaries about it, around it? How do you talk about law enforcement in a system where wealth interests are easily able to write and rewrite the laws? So that's an important kind of question. Another democracy connection is that, again, this notion that illiberal democracy, just going through the democratic motions with elections, opens the door to various kinds of abuses. Now, that's not an argument for me against having elections. far from it, but the sort of box-checking model of democracy. Are there elections? Yes. Is there freedom of speech? Yes. Is there civil society? Yes. That's not enough. I mean, we need to talk about the sources, the uses, and the accountability of power. And fundamentally, what all of this comes down to, I think, is imbalances. power. Some people exploit others. Thucydides, centuries ago, said that the strong do what they can and the weak endure what they must. That's an ancient truth, but it's a valid one today, maybe more so than it was 30 or 40 years ago. So, you know, democracy is no panacea. What I think of as democratization is evening out those imbalances of power. So that, as I was suggesting earlier, citizens can say, this far and no further, you know, stop abusing me, my family, and my property.
Dan Banik
You know, there's this frustration I have sometimes with the term governance or good governance. This is something that a lot of the Western, the global North donors have been preaching to the global South over the years, particularly countries that are very dependent on foreign aid. And the message is, if only you could have better governance... And if only there was greater political will or whatever that means, you know, you're going to achieve development. This is something that institutions like the World Bank were preaching, you know, some decades ago. They still do. They still do. It's not just austerity, but also good governance. And sometimes I think it's a very narrow understanding of governance or whatever is understood as good. Now, I want you to please reflect on that, more so given what has happened in the last two years. In your own country, USAID has been dismantled and there is less money in the system. In fact, there's, I think, billions of dollars of shortage in the international development assistance field. So if... Donors, even like, you know, my own country, Norway, we like to believe we are still generous. We gave 1% of our gross national income in aid, and we are one of the few that are still, you know, generous. We haven't cut yet. What should we be doing? There's not enough money going around. So this is going to have huge impact on whatever we think. is needed to combat the vice. So your thoughts on good governance, and given that there's less money in the aid sector, what should we be doing in terms of reform? What should we be prioritizing?
Michael Johnston
Governance. The term has an interesting heritage, and that is when the World Bank and other international organizations intergovernmental organizations, I should make it clear, began to talk about corruption. They ran into the limitations upon what they could do by way of intervening in a country's domestic politics.
Dan Banik
So governance was a safe term, was it?
Michael Johnston
Yeah. By treaty and by convention, those organizations couldn't reach into the politics of Hungary or Texas and start changing things. What they could talk about is governance. And it is a sort of a a bloodless, powerless, empty kind of way to talk about the process of governing a society. And what it encourages is kind of institutional box check. You know, we do this, we do that, we have an audit chamber, we have, okay, I guess we're doing all right at governance. and yet power is exploited, citizens are excluded, services are not provided, and whole social security funds are stolen. Governance leaves out the 90% of governing that we should be concerned about. And it encourages this sort of process oriented notion of reform. And so you have a lot of organizations even still putting out glossy reports. And, you know, last year we had 11 workshops and 4,300 people attended. Okay, good. Congratulations. But, you know, what did you do about the distribution of power in a society? Therein lies, for me, one of the fallacies of the notion of political will. Political will, it's kind of like the deus ex vocina, political will is going to come along and extricate us from our dilemma. Well, does Russia really have any shortage of political will? I don't think so. Does the United States? I don't think so either. Whose will? Who opposes it and the like? there is this again procedural institutional sense of well all right you know what you need is a separation of powers or a parliamentary system you need free press you need an independent judiciary you need a strong civil society Can you get to work on that by next Tuesday? Well, no, you cannot, because those kinds of things that help restrain corruption in some societies are not the causes of good governance. They are the outcomes of political struggle. And you don't get there without the political struggle. You don't get there without the, you know, politics and power checking each other and trying to insist on a A country, you know, to do these things and meet this checklist, you know, you're telling them to start at the end of the process. You're telling them to push on one end of the string and it doesn't work. There's an excellent book by Melissa Thomas that has not received nearly enough attention. It's called Govern Like Us. And, you know, sort of the notion with the U.S. and other countries go into, you know, developing countries, name goes here, and says, well, here's what we do. This is what you should do. The fallacies there are breathtaking. And the dangers there are tremendous. And Melissa Thomas brings that out in a book that, as I say, it deserves much more attention than it has had. Gutting USAID, I... I have worked with USAID. I've worked in its anti-corruption projects. I went for USAID to Kyiv and Kharkiv back in the year 2000, which, of course, is a completely different world. And USAID was trying to do the right things in many ways. It had significant anti-corruption projects. dedicated anti-corruption programs. That's all good. But think what else it was doing, too. It was, you know, educating people. I mean, you know, where do you where do we start? I would start with educating women and young girls and, you know, with that kind of social empowerment. And I also remember speaking to a conference in Washington where I made that case. Let's start with educating women and young girls. And the response I got was, well, whose budget line will support My thought is you ought to be doing that already and you should be doing it all along. That's what's been taken away by gutting USAID. The number of likely deaths is appalling. The damage to citizen empowerment to emerging very fragile civil societies is immense. I don't want to overstate the amount of good the US was doing, but at the same time, It was doing some and it was doing it in many, many places. And along comes a freely elected U.S. president in a system with some civil society or free press and everything else. who lays waste to these kinds of efforts, to these kinds of programs. Democracy has its real love, has its real risks. There's a fascinating set of surveys asking American taxpayers, what percent of the budget do you think goes to foreign aid? And even the people who were critical of foreign aid vastly overestimated how much we were spending. The U.S. could look to Norway as a constructive example of what's possible. And we should. But we never have because foreign aid was was massively misunderstood. And now one of our major constructive aid mechanisms is gone. And, you know, can it ever be rebuilt? I'm not optimistic.
Dan Banik
Yeah, well, you know, I have to say, even here, it has become a very polarized topic and people massively overestimate. In fact, I would make the argument that the foreign aid sector is more scrutinized, Michael, than any other sector. The 1% gets far more attention, critical attention, by the way, about what is not working than, let's say, defense or anything else. Just very quickly, Michael, if you were to say very briefly... What should we be thinking more of in this field of corruption studies? What needs to be highlighted more, according to you, today?
Michael Johnston
Focus on those imbalances of power that enable exploitation. Focus on enabling opposition to those centers of power. Take a more nuanced and immersive view of the realities in the developing world, rather than seeing them as these are countries that are all trying to be like us and it just takes time. Instead of that, what actually is going on? in those countries? Who actually is in power? How do they get there? What are they doing with the power they've got? Who are their oppositions? Those are the kinds of things we need to understand and too often do not. You know, much of our, in the U.S., much of our debate about developing countries is kind of based on whatever the New York Times reported last week. And here are the people in power, and here are the critics, and that's the story in country X. No, history matters, cultures, and I emphasize the term cultures matter. Those are things that, you know, that's the hard work, that's the homework that we need to do, and we too often do not.
Dan Banik
Michael, I've looked up to you over the years. I've really enjoyed reading your work. You've inspired me and a whole generation of scholars and policymakers. So to speak to you today has been a huge pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on my show.
Michael Johnston
Well, it's my honor. And I thank you for your time and interest and look forward to any reactions you might get from your very large and diverse audience.