24
constraint. This social identity shifts the officials’ utility function from a simple self-
regarding utility maximization to a social or group-utility function.
56
Dependent Variable: Corruption
As discussed earlier, corruption is most conventionally defined as the exercise of public
power for private gain. Although there are many forms of corruption, such as graft,
embezzlement, nepotism, bribery, gift-giving, involving varied public and private actors,
I will focus exclusively on the forms of corruption involving government officials. This
type of corruption is also known as bureaucratic or political corruption, and broadly
involves the usually illegal practice of rent seeking, where rent seeking is defined as an
official soliciting a rent from a firm or individual, or a firm soliciting a concession from
an official. In contradistinction to the demand side of corruption represented by rent
seeking, “rent seizing” is a practice on the part of an official to seize state assets by
altering institutional constraints in order to allocate these assets to firms or individuals for
rents, patronage, or other rewards.
57
In this study, I focus on official corruption, both rent seeking and seizing, which depends
on particularism—or the granting of favors to the members of officials’ kinship and
patronage networks. These types of corruption entail an official using his/her formal
power for the benefit of certain groups, and include organizational corruption.
Organizational corruption refers to a public agency exploiting its regulatory or monopoly
power to gain monetary or material gains for the organization.
58
The reason I focus on
particularism versus transactional bribery is that this type of corruption is more difficult
to curtail and more costly both in an economic and political sense. The difficulty in
curtailing particularism is that the incidences of corruption might be more difficult to
discover given the iterative nature and long time horizons of exchanging favors, and the
fact that these networks implicate large numbers of individuals for each incidence. Also,
particularism is supported by social norms and is thus not as responsive to simple
56
Douglas 9.
57
Ross.
58
Xiaobo Lu, “Booty Socialism, Bureau-preneurs, and the State in Transition: Organizational Corruption in
China,” Comparative Politics 32, 2000: 275.
Convention