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Broadly speaking, the term “corruption” ensures the effectiveness of the distinction between the public and the private. This distinction is a fundamental element in the liberal strategy to avoid absolute power which arrogates to itself actual authority without being entitled to it, as well as to prevent usurpers of sovereign power, that is, to ultimately avoid tyranny (Rousseau 1762, 197-198). Hence, corruption is, first and foremost, about public corruption (IMF 2018, 10). In this sense, the term “corruption” seeks to clarify what distinguishes the use and abuse of public power, and what purposes are to be considered private (Navot 2022, 9606).
Corruption is high-level corruption or grand corruption (Moody-Stewart 1994, 1; Rose-Ackerman 1996, 365; Duri 2020), when its logics correspond to what a wide interdisciplinary literature since the 1970s has called “crime of the powerful” (Barak 2015; Friedrichs 2015; Ross 2017) or, to be even more explicit, “power crime” (Ruggiero/Welch 2009). This means that what is decisive, unlike what is often assumed when referring to “grand corruption”, is not the amounts of corruption, but the specific way in which it is distributed.
Power crime
The term “crime of the powerful” was introduced by a strand in criminology called “critical criminology,” whose adjective “critical,” at least in the criminology originating from the Global South, is considered redundant (Zaffaroni 1988, 21; 2023, 129). It is a criminology that understands itself as a critique of domination, inequality, and injustice, beginning with a critique of the definition of the very term “crime” (Friedrichs 2018). It agrees with most feminist criminology that the very failure to consider “power crime” as a proper criminal phenomenon constitutes an act of domination (Braithwaite 2020, 62).
The term “power crime” refers to the relationship between criminality, social structure and political economy. Its roots have a long history spanning more than a century. It begins with the work of Proal’s political crime (1895) and the term criminaloid in the work of Ross (1907, 43–71), passes through the epistemological leap in criminological theory produced by Sutherland’s concept of white collar crime (Sutherland 1940; 1949; Merton 1968, 144–145), based on his concern to draw attention to a wide area of harmful behaviors that are not usually considered as criminal, due to the status of their protagonists’ occupation and social class. It also has its roots in organizational criminology (Block 1980; Block/Chambliss 1981; Wheeler/Rothman 1982) and its various typologies (Friedrichs 1996, 9–10; 2015, 25–27), including State crime (Chambliss 1989; Green/Ward 2004; Rothe 2009), particularly, in the sense of conceiving it as deviance at the institutional-organizational level of the State and violating human rights (Green/Ward 2000; 2004; 2012).
“Power crime” is a broad, heuristic and general term to evaluate the ideological, cultural, economic and political links that explain a type of organizational crime that is of a social significance far superior to conventional crime (Friedrichs 2015, 27). In Weberian terms (Weber 1922, 177–180), “power criminality” refers to the operations of Herrschaft (“domination”) in the three dimensions of social stratification (class, status, power) in a society organized under the ethical universalism of the modern state, according to which equal treatment applies to all persons regardless of the group to which one belongs (Parsons 1947, 82). In classical Marxist terms (Marx 1859, V–VI), the term refers to the structure of relations that facilitate people’s control of power and resources.
Adopting a social network perspective in the tradition of Simmel (1908; Freeman 2004, 15–16, 160; Krenn 2019), this is a term that encompasses a mixed social system, in which people with a similar level of access to resources and far superior to others, join together and co-opt state institutions for their ends. In the tradition of C. W. Mills (1956) and following Domhoff (1979) and Mann (1993), this model is based on social groups defined by their disproportionate access to knowledge, ideological or cultural, economic, military and political resources, and characterized by their ability to translate them, as sources of power, into a structure through “linkers” that coalesce into networks of power, which overlap, intersect, intertwine and sometimes merge in ways that defy simple or unitary explanations of power and its harmful social consequences.
Regarding their organizational character, in order to understand the quality and logic of social structures that allow institutionalizing businesses, in application-oriented research (Cross/Parker 2004), it is common to measure the properties of the links that make up network structures and represent them by means of social network models that explain the set of their constituents, the relationships defined in them, and their organization, which, in turn, can facilitate differentiating different types of grand corruption social networks as “cannibalistic,” “exploitative,” “parasitic” or “monopolistic” (Jancsics/Jávor 2012, 79–89). In Latin America, there have been efforts to model grand corruption social network data, particularly, in Colombia, northern Central America and Mexico (Garay-Salamanca/Salcedo-Albarán 2012; Waxenecker 2016; 2019a; 2019b; Luna-Pla/Nicolás-Carlock 2020).
Power crime consists of interactions aimed at expanding the opportunities of its protagonists, where the state is one of the main providers of criminal opportunities (Shover/Scroggins 2012, 277). The opportunities created need not produce an immediate amount of personal advantage, but can be used as a form of investment (ibid., 275). This investment generates ever greater privileges and simultaneously neutralizes social forces seeking equal opportunities. It is an expansionist logic based on the dynamics of the more unequal the distribution of opportunities, the less the desire to seek equality (Ruggiero 2015, 52), generating a self-reinforcing dynamic, and in which institutions end up being increasingly subverted, further strengthening inequality (Hellmann/Kaufmann 2004, 102). In extreme cases, the very nature of the dynamics of these social networks may amount to anomy such that individuals involved might commit crimes and suppress any awareness of personal responsibility (Simon 2014, 181–185).
Grand corruption
Extrapolated to the term corruption, “grand corruption,” as a power crime, implies behaviors of people who, in order to carry out public corruption business, possess an amount of material and symbolic resources significantly superior to the amount of resources possessed by others. Compared to the possibilities of others who are in a less privileged position (Mungiu-Pippidi 2006, 88), this asymmetry in resources, by itself, generates opportunities whose criminogenic value is more likely to be activated when leveraged in social networks.
Grand corruption protagonists have been located at the top of the state hierarchy involving political leaders and their associates (Rose-Ackerman 2010-2011, 132), with power and a very high degree of organization of their transactions, if compared to conventional crime. Their main object of transaction has been described as consisting of contracts and concessions, privatization of state enterprises and public-private partnerships (Rose-Ackerman/Palifka 2016).
This is essentially true, but not sufficient to understand the whole picture. Grand corruption networks are typically inclusive. The networks encompass both the public sector and the business sector, as well as what is considered to qualify as being part of an “exclusively criminal sector,” that is, structures that generate openly illicit profits; or, as Block (1980, 10–11, 58) has pointed out in his study on the social system of organized crime in New York City, relationships, dynamics that link members of the “under world” with the institutions and people of the “upper world.”
They all form a social network of grand corruption when their interrelations and activities serve to strengthen and/or enrich the protagonists in the three connected sectors, helping them to systematically expand their power, without losing their relative autonomy vis-à-vis the other sector, which has been called “kleptocratic interdependence” when the networks cross territorial boundaries (Greenhill 2009, 97). Within this engine of corruption, the State becomes part of an operating system of corruption, in which the different strands of the social network of power that generates the engine overlap, sharing their personnel among the public, private and criminal elements of the network and interacting through exchanges of income and services, but each retaining some autonomy (Chayes 2017, 115).
The expansionist dynamic in a highly corrupt social network is generated by the interest of each of its members to maximize the utility of their investments in the network. This not only has a central effect on the State’s capacity to act against the socially harmful activities of the network, i.e. ordinary “impunity,” but also, to the extent that the network’s power is consolidated, paraphrasing Sutherland’s “professional thief” (1937), opportunities are generated to “put in the fix” the civil, administrative and criminal consequences of the harmful nature of its actions of grand corruption (i.e. structural impunity) and even its own normative-legal classification as harmful acts (i.e. systemic impunity) (Ruggiero/Welch 2009, 298), thus fundamentally affecting the will of the State to act against these acts.
State capture
Following the model of “regulatory capture” (Ayres/Braithwaite 1991) to explain the process through which certain interests affect state intervention in any of its forms (Dal Bó 2006, 203), the expansionist dynamics of a social network of grand corruption culminates in a “captured state” (Green/Ward 2004, 107–112), i.e., a dynamic that captures each of the state institutions necessary to generate laws, administrative acts and sentences, as well as, in general, public policies, to systematically grant benefits to the members of the network.
This dynamic tends to give rise to autonomous forms of deviation from the basic rules of coexistence in a democratic state under the rule of law, creating autonomous forms of conduct aimed at expanding power, in the framework of which the impossibility of differentiating the public sphere from private economic activity becomes the rule (Huisman/Van De Walle 2010, 135–136). In this dynamic one sometimes manages to observe a paradox (Dudley 2018, 522). The protagonists of grand corruption need some components of the state to exercise their sanctioning power and enforce laws, in order to have some authority that allows them to repress opponents and protect themselves against rivals in order to maintain power. On the other hand, they also need the same components of the State to be weak, so that impunity for their own corrupt activities will continue. The balancing strategy posed by this paradox is clearly verbalized in the common saying in Latin America, attributed to both the Peruvian marshal and former president Oscar Benavides and Benito Juarez: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”
This type of power logic, far from being limited to Latin America (Nelken/Levi 1996, 9), generates an “inverted rule of law” (Simon 2019). The resulting balance of power subverts the idea of one of the fundamental principles of democracy, that no one is above the law, which, in turn, tends to erode general trust in a society (Offe 2004, 93; Rothstein/Uslaner 2005, 54; Rothstein 2011). In this type of society, instead of qualifying corruption as deviant behavior, the expected behavior is corruption, which, in turn, may remove the empirical basis for the central premise of agency theory, of the “principled principal” willing to hold the corrupt agent accountable, thus, giving way to the logic of collective action theory (Persson/Rothstein/Teorell 2013).
The above means, from a criminological perspective, that the grand corruption business is not mere market crime, based on impersonal relationships, but, in essence, the organized larceny of national resources by an elite (Green/Ward 2017, 438), based on personal relationships, that is, a “pre-modern” state in Weberian terms, or, less drastically, of a natural state in terms of the New Institutional Economy (North/Wallis/Weingast 2009). Grand corruption is not a type of equal opportunity crime (Ruggiero/Welch 2009, 298).
Adding to the criminological approach a political economy perspective, we can observe that transactions in a highly corrupt social network and its various objects express the execution of “mesocontracts” between its protagonists. “Mesocontracts” are mechanisms of economic and political governance; they are unwritten ad hoc pacts between the public and the private, through which systems are created to structurally direct and corrupt political decision-making and the design of economic policy at the different scales of the pyramids of power, taking over the space where laws were to be applied, and giving rise to a system of incentives of the State as a market (Revéiz 2016, 67). This rationale of power to privatize State intervention produces advantages and privileges and minimizes risks at the expense of the public, directly undermining the ethical universalism of the modern State.
Challenges for civil society and the academia
The challenge for civil society lies in uncovering grand corruption dynamics, make the findings known to the population victimized by it, as well as develop and support efforts aimed at unbalancing the equilibrium of the powerful.
The challenge for academia, following the perspective of C. W. Mills (1963), lies in providing data to understand the relationship between grand corruption and private troubles, the types of human nature that are being produced under these conditions, and the direction in which our society is heading if we do not stop grand corruption.
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