Corruption is …

The new definition of corruption from the University of Sussex.

I was walking along a wintery beach by the English Channel listening to Kickback, a podcast about corruption, because, well, it’s January and intellectual fun is pretty much all there is at that time of year. The pod comes from the Centre for the Study of Corruption (episode 107, by the way). I discovered that they had launched a new definition of corruption. ‘Not another one’, I thought having ploughed through several such definitions whilst struggling to find one that worked in the context of a book I was writing about ‘dirty money’.

This depressing thought led me to their working paper called “Defining corruption in context”. It is commendably short for an academic work, which I hoped would make it easier for what I wanted to do to it. Which was to hate it and pull it apart. We do not need yet another academic definition of corruption; what we need, to make the world (and specifically modern Britain) a better place, is a straightforward crime that people like me can investigate and prosecute.

So, I read the paper, armed with a Big Red Pen. At the end of it I was able to put the pen down, unused. The University of Sussex paper was really good. Excellent actually, seminal even. This is their newly minted definition:

“Corruption is the abuse of entrusted power for private gain which harms the public interest, typically breaching laws, regulations, and/or integrity standards.”

This definition brings together academic and practical considerations in a way that is readily understood. The new definition builds on the existing Transparency International definition of: “Corruption is the abuse of entrusted power for private gain”. This is well-known around the world, established over a couple of decades and is short enough to memorise. The new Sussex definition has three advantages over the TI original: it adds a practical explanatory context, it has a neat innovation built in, and it has direct applicability to the field of justice.

I’ll talk about these three advantages in order.

Firstly, the second half of the new definition: … “which harms the public interest, typically breaching laws, regulations, and/or integrity standards.” This puts the TI definition in a clearer context. You’ll have to read the actual paper to better understand the various contexts they have explored and I won’t repeat their discussion here. In summary, I agreed with what they said and their arguments held together against a critical eye.

Secondly, the authors say that the definition should be applied sequentially, as illustrated in the image below and their explanatory text beneath:

The Figure above (and the explanatory text beneath it) is copied from Dobson Phillips, R., Dávid-Barrett, E. & Barrington, R. 2021. “Defining Corruption in Context”, Centre for the Study of Corruption Working Paper 12. Brighton: University of Sussex.

The sequential application of the definition is an important innovation. It appeals to my fondness for legal definitions of criminal offences, where the ‘points to prove an offence’ in court may be contingent on sequential conditions. For example, to prove a simple offence like criminal damage, it must firstly be shown that damage occurred. Then that the damage was done by a person, then that person had no excuse to do the damage or, that the excuse given was unlawful (as opposed to merely unreasonable). And so on, to complete all the elements that make up the offence. This sequential approach is very common to criminal offences, which tend to be incrementally built rather than cast from a mould.

This brings me to the third advantage of the Sussex University definition; it could, in my view, be readily converted into a much-needed criminal offence. Such an offence would alter the narrative of current corruption as a distant theoretical abstract to a hardened crime that could be applied to the here and now of modern Britain.

Turning the academic definition into a crime creates the potential advantages of testing it in the crucible of an adversarial courtroom. The many theoretical contexts explored in the Sussex University paper could be judged in the real-world. This environment can often hone and temper good definitions and the Sussex definition is already a good definition.

Finally, I tested the Sussex definition against my own understanding of corruption and it survived the test. I wrote a chapter on Corruption for ‘The War on Dirty Money’ (2023). In the process of doing this, I encountered many definitions and examples of corruption. I had struggled and failed to define corruption for years, so when I was forced to write about in a book I really tried to pin it down. Unlike the clever folk at Sussex, I was unable to create a stand-alone definition of corruption, so I tried to define corruption by its opposite, whatever that was. The book and the definition was intended to be thought-provoking, it is to be found on page 297 of the book:

“Corruption is the opposite of justice.”

I did not define justice in the book, I merely said that both corruption and justice are hard to define, but you know them when you see them. Now perhaps, if we play with my definition of justice and corruption and add in the Sussex definition, both concepts become a bit clearer, in my view. We end up with the two opposite definitions below:

“Corruption is … the abuse of entrusted power for private gain which harms the public interest, typically breaching laws, regulations and/or integrity standards.”

“Justice is … the proper use of entrusted power for the public good, typically enforcing laws, regulations and/or integrity standards.”

Conclusion

I really liked the Sussex definition, for the reasons stated above. It deserves both a wider audience and practical application as a criminal offence in the real world. As for my “test” of comparing corruption and justice, I do not know if I have applied a valid test.

It seemed to work for me. Does it work for you?