Corruption and American Politics By Michael A. Genovese and Vict ...

contending interests. Every society must contend with those challenges; none ever resolves them neatly. Therefore, while I define corruption as the abuse of public roles or resources for private benefit, I emphasize that “abuse,” “public,” “private,” and even “benefit” are often matters of contention and ambiguity. Those complications would be a fatal difficulty if our goal were only to categorize specific people and actions as corrupt, but if we conceptualize corruption as a systemic problem, particularly where it is severe, such contention or ambiguity can point to important systemic stresses and conflicts. Disputed boundaries between the “public” and the “private,” for example, can signal critical institutional weaknesses or basic changes in relationships between state and markets. Where officials flout formal rules with impunity, that may indicate that countervailing forces are weak or excluded. Where social understandings of the meaning of “abuse” are fragmented, contentious, or at odds with the law, we need to study such conflicts rather than paper them over with nominal definitions.

A Fundamentally Politicized Concept

Such definitional difficulties can never be resolved. After all, basic ideas of accountability, limits on power, and restrictions on the ways wealth and power can be sought and used arose out of political contention—that is, out of efforts by some to protect themselves against the actions of others.¹⁵ Not only were those initial ideas matters of conflict rather than of moral consensus, they continue to be reshaped though political contention today. For example, morality had little to do with the controversy over Bill Clinton's sexual escapades in the late 1990s (except, possibly, in Oscar Wilde's sense of scandal as “gossip made tedious by morality”); still, one result was that boundaries between public and private were redrawn as formerly private forms of conduct were added to the behavior standards by which chief executives and other high officials are publicly judged. In contemporary societies—particularly liberal democracies—social and political fragmentation hollow out any grand notions of overriding consensus, foster narrower behavior-focused conceptions