Affiliated Network for Social Accountability (ANSA-Africa)

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A vicious circle of corruption and mistrust in institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa: A micro-level analysis
September 2007
Wonbin Cho; Matthew F. Kirwin
Afrobarometer

Corruption is one of the most important constraints on economic growth and political development in Africa. Excessive state control of economic activities has turned the institutions of government into instruments to loot the economy to generate benefits for individuals and politically dominant groups. Moreover, although privatization of nationalized industries and utilities has been regarded as an antidote to corruption, the process has been dominated by crooked deals and corrupt practices. Therefore, it is difficult for citizens to determine if economic reform programs are designed to provide avenues for politicians and bureaucrats to enrich themselves or if they are genuine vehicles for alleviation of poverty in this region.

Corruption violates the rules of democracy and threatens the inclusiveness of the political community. Warren (2004: 329) argues that “corruption is always a form of duplicitous and harmful exclusion of those who have a claim to inclusion in collective decisions and actions.” Corruption is likely to deliver private benefits for those included in decisions or actions and public costs for at least some of those who are excluded from the process. For example, corruption delays access to public administration for those people who do not pay bribes. In many parts of Africa, corruption has become a pervasive almost banal practice in the provision of goods and services.

As numerous studies have shown, corruption lowers levels of popular trust in government (Rose, Mishler, and Haerpher 1998; Mishler and Rose 2001; Porta 2000; Seligson 2002; Catterberg and Moreno 2005; Chang and Chu 2006). By distorting the delivery of public works, corruption decreases the efficiency and efficacy with which public administration performs its official function of enhancing the public good. Citizens evaluate the functioning of democratic institutions on the basis of their actual performance. People are likely to show trust in political institutions only to the extent that they believe that the functions and procedures of institutions are fair and reasonable. But violations of fairness- whether through frequently reported scandals, purposively long delays in the delivery of public goods, and public officials who demand bribes in exchange for services- undermine citizens’ trust in political institutions.

Corruption may even be thought of as an informal institution that alters the rules and norms that govern how individuals act in society (Bratton 2007). As informal institutions replace formal rules, citizens realize that to follow the formal rules is to diminish one’s expected utility (Helmke and Levitsky, 2006). As more citizens arrive at the conclusion that bribery is a necessary component of interactions with the government, instances of corruption increase and trust in political institutions decreases. Citizens no longer believe that political institutions are beholden to formal rules. Mistrust in political institutions and parallel growth in informal institutions in turn assure growth in the practice of corruption.

As a stark example, we can consider the recent case of the toxic waste disaster in Cote d’Ivoire. The Dutch multinational oil company Trafigura, with the complicity of the Ivoirien government, dumped toxic waste in poor neighborhoods that resulted in the deaths of at least ten people and sickened more than 5000 people. Although the civil servants who were blamed for the disaster were sacked, days later they were reinstated (BBC 2006). One can easily imagine how a situation such as this one could lead an Ivoirien citizen to have less trust in the political institutions in Cote d’Ivoire. Impunity for the corrupt decreases trust in institutions. This lack of accountability and apparent corruption on the part of public officials contributes to the vicious circle.

This article empirically examines predictions about the relationship between corruption and mistrust through cross-national survey data collected from 17 sub-Saharan countries. While most existing studies only look in one direction, namely that corruption causes mistrust in political institutions, we systematically examine the reciprocal relationship between corruption and mistrust. The results of our investigation are consistent with pessimistic predictions: experiences of corruption act to lower trust in institutions and higher levels of mistrust in turn increase experiences with corruption.¹ This examination uses experiences with as opposed to perceptions corruption in order to measure citizens’ exposure to quotidian forms of forms of graft. We also look at both popular trust in institutions and mass satisfaction with specific government services as dependent variables. Even when controlling for social, political and economic factors we still find that the reciprocal relationship between people’s direct experiences with corruption and the two dependent variables is significant.

The organization of the paper is as follows: in the first section, we look specifically at corruption within the African context and review how scholars have explained the existence of corruption in developing nations. In the second section we provide a literature review of the studies that have examined the relationship between corruption and mistrust and develop our arguments concerning the vicious circle. The third section presents issues of measurement and empirical analysis. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of the results and implications of our analysis.

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