Political Corruption in the Developing World: The Effects of Colonial Rule and Decolonisation

New democracies of the ‘third wave’ of democratization differ significantly in the types and extent of political corruption. The dominant rational-choice approach to corruption explains these differences with reference to deficiencies in the design of formal political institutions. The project introduced in this paper, in contrast, makes a different argument, highlighting the importance of historical factors. More specifically, the project develops the claim that, in the developing world, colonial rule and decolonization shaped the institutionalization of different forms of political corruption; different forms of political corruption, in turn, have conditioned the ability of new democracies in the ‘third wave’ of democratization to implement efficient anti-corruption measures. The particular focus of the paper here is on the first step in this argument – that is, the question of how to explain the emergence of different forms of corruption. To address this question, the paper compares across an intermediate-N sample of post-colonial polities in Latin America and East Asia, using crisp set QCA (csQCA).