by Howard T. Anderson

It is easy to be lulled into the impression that all anticorruption campaigns are the same, but they are not; those in established or aspiring democracies differ fundamentally from the ones in autocracies. Here’s why.
Periodically, anyone scanning media headlines from around the world will come across stories about campaigns to stamp out corruption. Sometimes the anticorruption crusade is being waged by an existing democracy or subdivision of one, such as a U.S. state. At others, it is an aspiring democracy such as Ukraine, as described in a previous post.
Then there are the reports that an autocratic government—China’s or Russia’s, for example—has launched a campaign to suppress corruption within its borders. In China such campaigns have been virtually nonstop since Xi Jinping’s rise to power in 2012; in 2024 The Wall Street Journal reported that under Xi’s chairmanship the ruling Communist Party had punished roughly five million persons for corruption-related offenses and quoted Xi as saying that battling corruption “is the most thorough form of self-revolution.” [Chun Han Wong, “China’s Corruption Purge Paralyzes Party,” Wall Street Journal, Jan. 2, 2024, A6] In Russia, where rampant corruption in the military as well as other sectors has long been tolerated, the war in Ukraine has sparked a sudden and aggressive crackdown. [See Robyn Dixon, “In wartime Russia, military corruption is suddenly taboo,” The Washington Post, June 11, 2024, A9.]
These campaigns should be viewed with skepticism. Anticorruption laws serve different purposes in democracies and autocracies; consequently, efforts to enforce them proceed from different motives and are intended to reinforce values that are fundamentally opposed to one another.
The Purpose of Anticorruption Laws in Democracies
Consider three examples of corruption, all based on actual cases:
- In return for bribes to public officials, a construction firm is awarded a lucrative contract to build public housing. To finance the bribes and thus preserve its profit margin, the contractor uses substandard materials and building techniques, while paying further bribes to ensure that inspectors do not report the fraud.
- An influential politician is bribed by criminal defendants to convince a judge to dismiss the charges against them.
- High government officials in charge of oil reserves maintained for national defense purposes are bribed to turn over control of them to private interests who will sell the oil for profit
All of these forms of corruption, and many others, can be found in places governed by autocracies as well as in established and aspiring democracies. The fundamental differences lie in (1) who anticorruption laws are designed to protect; and (2) what happens when evidence of corruption surfaces.
In a healthy, functioning democracy, laws against bribery, abuses of official power, and other forms of corruption are designed to protect society at large from corruption and the harm flowing from it. In the examples described above, there were multiple potential harms, some concrete and quantifiable, others less tangible, but nevertheless real: selection of contractors through corruption and financing bribes through substandard materials not only offends a society’s moral standards and inflates costs, it can also lead to human tragedies when an earthquake destroys shoddily constructed buildings; selling justice, as in the second example, violates one of the oldest standards known to civilizations; and corruptly allowing favored persons and interests to use public assets for private gain can undermine national security, among other harms. Implicit in a democratic society is the rule of law, not rule by individual humans or elite combinations of them. In the social contract of a democracy, government officials are bound by the same rules that apply to ordinary citizens, meaning that even the highest of them are subject to being prosecuted for violations of anticorruption laws.
Upon exposure of corrupt schemes like the ones summarized above, what should happen in a democracy approximates the following: first, an investigation by competent authorities whose loyalty is to the law and the entire community, not to one individual or political faction; second, the results of the investigation are reviewed by equally competent and independent public officers with the power to file charges if warranted by the facts applied to relevant law; third, trial by independent judicial officers committed to following the law and not the whims and dictates of ruling elites; and, finally, appellate and other institutions to safeguard the integrity of the proceedings and ensure adherence to law and due process.
The Purpose of Anticorruption Laws in Autocracies
In contrast, an autocracy’s anticorruption laws serve the interests of the ruling monarch, party, oligarchic elite, or Great Leader. The leaders of such societies are, in practice if not in theory, immune from being held accountable for their own corruption. Opponents of the regime, of course, are not, nor are selected scapegoats such as the Russian military officers meant to bear the blame for corruption that causes too many problems to be ignored. In the worst cases, autocratic anticorruption campaigns can mean the opposite of what the words suggest as if imitating the tyrannical government portrayed in George Orwell’s 1984; they are intended to protect the corruption of the ruling elite, while punishing even the best-intentioned efforts by anticorruption advocates to expose it. This is rule by law, not of it.
There are, to be sure, gradations of both autocracy and democracy and some nations are in transition from one to the other. In such places, the lines between competing systems can be muddled and, reflecting this, anticorruption campaigns can take an uneven course. To whatever extent autocracy prevails, however, certain rules apply: (1) the autocratic elite can break laws with impunity, including laws against unjust enrichment and other practices that in a democracy would be defined as corrupt and subject to civil and criminal penalties; (2) the autocrat can “license” others to break laws with impunity; and (3) the autocrat can punish dissent, including dissent that takes the form of calling for an end to the autocratic elite’s own corruption. Thus, genuine anticorruption activists can be punished by, among other things, being subjected to phony charges of corruption. The harassment and death of Alexei Navalny, Russian anticorruption activist and political opponent of the Putin regime (described in a previous post in this space) is a recent, egregious example of this perversion of anticorruption laws.
Licensed Corruption: The Organized Crime Model
The licensing model outlined above can be analogized to how organized criminal groups regulate illegal drug trafficking and other rackets. In the United States, for example, the criminal cartel known as Cosa Nostra developed a system to tame counterproductive struggles between and within crime “families” over control of rackets in specific regions, such as New York, Chicago, and Las Vegas. Overseeing the system was a nationwide “Commission,” which had representatives from around the country, but was dominated by the powerful New York families. The Commission arbitrated disputes about allocation of territories and other sources of conflict that had national implications, while the bosses of individual families regulated rackets and territories allocated to them. (In the New York-New Jersey area, mobsters were even enlisted to enforce agreements among otherwise legitimate companies in the garbage industry.) Crime, of course, is not the issue for a criminal enterprise—that is taken for granted. The issue is who will be permitted to control it.
Similarly, in an autocracy like Russia, corruption per se is not the issue. How could it be when the leaders may have acquired vast personal wealth by looting the country’s resources? The issue is which others will be granted licenses to steal and thereby become satellite members of the ruling elite. Unlicensed corruption, however, is akin to poaching on a feudal lord’s hunting grounds and will be punished accordingly as an affront to the powers and prerogatives of the autocrat. Wealth gained through licensed corruption helps autocrats secure and maintain political control, which in turn enables them to acquire still more wealth in a lucrative cycle for them, but a destructive one for the societies they dominate.
Summary
In summary, the meaningfulness of an anticorruption campaign is inseparable from whether societies supposedly fighting corruption observe the rule of law and have healthy democratic institutions capable of enforcing laws effectively and fairly. In autocracies, anticorruption laws are apt to be turned upside down and used to uphold the rule of corrupt autocrats and to punish their opponents, sometimes by making criticism of the regime’s own corruption a crime. Investigators and prosecutors will not evaluate cases solely on the basis of their legal and factual merits, but will be sensitive to the preferences of autocratic rulers; and the judicial system will also be staffed and structured to serve the autocratic regime, not the public. These characteristics in their embryonic form can also be used to detect a drift toward autocracy in a society claiming to be a democracy.