| Chapter 1: | Democracy without Politics? Hidden Costs of Corruption and Reform in America |
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public trust. The result, in the long run, will be more ritualized cycles of scandal, American-style, and little improvement in the quality of democratic life.
Is there a better way? The answer I propose will not please many reformers. It revolves around the revival of robust, competitive politics—more rather than less contention, driven not by visions of the civic good but rather by plain old self-interest. That sort of politics would feature more money rather than less—but perhaps more equitably distributed, particularly as we move down the political ladder—and would encourage leadership capable of creating new mass constituencies rather than just pandering to existing ones. There would be far less emphasis on separating politics from administration. The sort of public life that would result would be more fractious and even less dignified than what we see today, and it may initially strike many as more susceptible to corruption. But it would also have far more scope for democratic accountability, in the broadest sense of that term, via political processes that would more clearly affect what government does. That sort of public life is neither an unreachable ideal nor a looming dystopia; instead, I suggest, it would build upon some enduring aspects of American political culture.
Why Worry about Corruption?
The United States, despite its favorable scores on various corruption and governance indices, has more serious corruption problems than we typically acknowledge and has a way of responding to them that may only make things worse.
The notion that the United States has serious systemic corruption problems—as opposed to a few bad actors whom we simply need to remove from an otherwise healthy system—might come as a surprise. Our scores on the most widely used corruption measure—Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index (CPI)—have been favorable: for 2008 (the latest year available) the U.S. score of 7.3 on the familiar ten-point scale ranks eighteenth out of 180 countries.4 (The CPI is in no way a valid and reliable measure of corruption itself, but does support the point that the U.S. system is not generally seen as a seriously