Fighting Systemic Corruption: - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

Luchando contra la corrupción sistémica:
The Indirect Strategy

Bo Rothstein

Abstracto: While attention to corruption and anticorruption policies has increased dramatically in re-
search and in policy, the results of many anticorruption and so-called good-governance programs have
so far been unimpressive. I argue that this lack of success can be explained by the reliance on a theoretical
approach–namely, the “principal-agent theory”–that seriously misconstrues the basic nature of the cor-
ruption problem. En este ensayo, I contend that the theory of collective action is a more fruitful foundation
for developing anticorruption policies. I suggest that policy measures based on a collective-action under-
standing of corruption will be much less direct–and ultimately more effective–than approaches derived
from the principal-agent theory. Taking inspiration from military theorist Basil Liddell Hart’s “indirect
approach” strategy, I argue that decision-makers should focus on policies that change the basic social con-
tract, instead of relying solely on measures that are intended to change incentives for corrupt actors.

When politicians want to signal that they are very

serious about a problem, they sometimes describe
themselves as being “at war” with it. Well-known
examples include the “war on poverty,” the “war on
drogas,” and the “war on terror.” As the number of
studies demonstrating corruption’s considerable neg-
ative effects on almost all measures of human well-
being has risen, the war analogy has been extended
to the fight against corruption.1 The current presi-
dent of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari, Por ejemplo,
declared a full-scale “war against corruption,” mak-
ing it a centerpiece of his 2015 election campaign and
early administration.2 The war metaphor can be ex-
aggerated or misplaced, but in the case of corruption,
it may not be so far-fetched. Primero, the effects of cor-
ruption on population health are so profound that
people are literally “dying of corruption.”3 Second,
fighting corruption can be so dangerous–with pow-
erful economic, political, and criminal interests fight-
ing for its preservation–that high-level anticorrup-

bo rothstein holds the August
Röhss Chair in Political Science
at the University of Gothenburg.
He is the author of The Quality of
Government: Corruption, Social Trust,
and Inequality in International Perspec-
tivo (2011), Social Traps and the Prob-
lem of Trust (2005), and Just Institu-
tions Matter: The Moral and Political
Logic of the Universal Welfare (1998).

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tion officials often feel that their work puts
their and their family’s lives at risk, in some
cases forcing them to flee their home coun-
try.4 Third, despite a number of large-scale
anticorruption “attacks,” especially during
the last two decades, corruption has proved
itself to be a very resilient, often well-orga-
nized and -entrenched enemy.5 Still, grande-
scale armed conflicts are rarely accountable
to democratic law, implying that war is not
the best metaphor for dealing with corrup-
tion through democratic means. Sin embargo,
the strategic thinking about armed conflicts
has useful applications in the fight against
corruption. The main purpose of this es-
decir, entonces, is to analyze anticorruption ef-
forts through the lens of military strategy–
En particular, that of military theorist Sir Ba-
sil Liddell Hart–to see what can be learned
from theories about success and failure in
military conflicts.

To observe the fight against corruption
from this strategic perspective, we need to
know a number of things. Primero, what is our
current position in the conflict? En otra
palabras, how have we been doing? Are we on
the retreat or the offensive, or is the situa-
tion more like Eric Maria Remarque’s 1929
novedoso, All Quiet on the Western Front? Sec-
ond, what type of conflict is this likely to
ser? Should we expect to meet a guerrilla-
like enemy or an army on open fields?
Tercero, what do we know about the enemy
o, more precisely, what type of enemy are
we talking about? Where is he and what are
his weaknesses? And fourth, what sorts of
tactics and strategies are known to be suc-
cessful when attacking corruption? Should
we opt for a blitzkrieg, or is this more like-
ly to be a war of attrition? Which strategy
is more likely to produce victory given the
enemy’s location and weaknesses?

From a social-science perspective, estafa-

temporary anticorruption efforts are look-
ing quite good compared with those of the
1990s, when there was very little interest in

studying corruption among academics, y
it was something of a taboo in policy cir-
cles.6 Standard textbooks (in economics,
political science, and public administration,
Por ejemplo) paid little serious attention to
the problem. Hardly any comparative data
existió, and most disciplines were domi-
nated either by structural variables (como
modernization theory or Marxism) or be-
havioral variables (such as microeconom-
ics or studies of electoral behavior).

All of this started to change in the mid-
1990s. The “institutional turn” in the so-
cial sciences, pioneered by Nobel prize–
winning economic theorists Douglass C.
North and Elinor Ostrom, paved the way for
thinking about the effects of institutions on
human prosperity and well-being. Thanks
to their work, we now have quite a good the-
oretical understanding of why some societ-
ies have good and others dysfunctional in-
stitutions (both formal and informal). Y-
fortunately, poor institutions are common,
stable, and detrimental to prosperity and
human well-being, due in part to the fact
that they generate corruption. Además,
there is now a large amount of comparative
(and to some extent also longitudinal) datos
on corruption, as well as many case studies
and historical accounts of corrupt regimes
and anticorruption campaigns. A search of
academic journals for articles including the
term “political corruption” yielded a mea-
ger fourteen articles (!) en 1992, but as of
2014 delivered more than three hundred.7
The general public’s awareness of the det-
rimental effects of corruption seems also to
have increased dramatically. Recent com-
parative surveys have found that, entre
some populations, corruption is perceived
as a more serious problem than unemploy-
mento, poverty, and terrorism.8

Effective political mobilization for “clean
government” has occurred in some coun-
intentos, including in Romania and South Ko-
rea in 2017.9 Además, since the 1990s,
many countries have adopted more strin-

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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesFighting Systemic Corruption: The Indirect Strategy

gent laws against corruption and estab-
lished special anticorruption units. El
United Nations Convention Against Cor-
ruption was signed in 2003 and has now
been ratified by more than 170 countries.
Además, many national and interna-
tional development and aid organizations
have put anticorruption high on their agen-
da, lifting the taboo against tackling corrup-
ción. De este modo, compared with the situation
twenty years ago, there is room for some op-
timism, since many of the “weapons” need-
ed in this conflict seem now to be in place.
Sin embargo, the results on the ground have
so far not been very impressive. It is diffi-
cult to trace any major positive results from
the many good-governance programs that
the World Bank and other international de-
velopment organizations have launched
since the mid-1990s. Alina Mungiu-Pippidi
has summarized the new era of anticorrup-
tion work as one of “great expectations and
humble results.”10 Political scientist Fran-
cis Fukuyama adds that the international
development and aid community “would
like to turn Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya,
and Haiti into idealized places like ‘Den-
mark,’ but it doesn’t have the slightest idea
of how to bring this about.”11 In his recent
book Analysing Corruption, political scien-
tist Dan Hough notes that “success stories
are depressingly thin on the ground.”12 Al-
though some countries have improved, no
much of the change can be attributed to
donor-led programs or initiatives.13

A particularly painful result is that de-
mocratization seems not to be a surefire
cure for corruption. Economists Philip
Keefer and Razvan Vlaicu found that “in
2004 more than one-third of all democ-
racies exhibited as much or more corrup-
tion than the median non-democracy.”14
They argue that in a country that has re-
cently democratized, politicians have no
or a low reputation and thus no means of
making credible electoral promises to the
citizenry. Politicians must therefore rely on

local patronage networks and provide tar-
geted goods to their supporters in direct ex-
change for votes. En otras palabras, in order to
attain office and to stay in power, they un-
dermine the quality of public institutions
por, Por ejemplo, handing out public-sec-
tor jobs or targeting benefits directly to
their presumed political supporters. Estafa-
sequently, a young and fragile democracy
will typically overprovide targeted goods,
such as public-sector jobs and public works
projects, while at the same time underpro-
viding nontargeted goods, such as univer-
sal health care, education, rule of law, y
protection of property rights.15 This argu-
ment is supported by the research of polit-
ical scientist Michele D’Arcy, who showed
that between 1985 y 2008, scores on mea-
sures of corruption in sub-Saharan Africa
have increased considerably, and that this
negative development is “primarily driven
by the 38 countries which have experienced
increased levels of democracy.”16 System-
ic corruption, in which corrupt practices
are the rule in interactions between citi-
zens and public officials, seems thus to be
a hardened and difficult enemy. This im-
plies that current anticorruption strategies
are in need of some serious rethinking.

A society free of corruption is probably

as likely as a society free of crime. Cómo-
alguna vez, both crime levels and the prevalence
of corruption vary dramatically between
countries (and in many cases within coun-
intentos). The rate of intentional homicides is
121 times higher in Jamaica than in Singa-
pore.17 Since most of what we call corrup-
tion is illegal, we should not be surprised
by the existence of similarly huge varia-
tions in corruption levels between coun-
intentos. Corruption also takes many forms,
from outright demands for high bribes in
exchange for health care to more subtle ex-
changes of personal favors regarding the
recruitment or promotion of civil servants.
De este modo, when we speak about anticorruption

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147 (3) Summer 2018Bo Rothstein

políticas, we are usually thinking of various
forms of systemic corruption.

If anticorruption policies are to be ef-
fective, we ought first to ask: where is the
problema? The availability of increasingly
large data sets has expanded our capacity to
conduct advanced statistical analysis about
what differentiates countries with high and
low levels of corruption. One problem in
this research is that many of the variables
with a statistically high explanatory power
are so fundamental on a structural-historical
level that they are not susceptible to change
through political action. Por ejemplo, contar-
tries dominated by Lutheranism, that are
geographically relatively small, that have
not had a history of exploitation by colonial
powers, and that have been relatively ethni-
cally homogeneous have fared better against
corruption than other countries.18 These
research results are valuable and scientif-
ically correct, but since they point to fac-
tors that are inaccessible to current policies,
they have very little relevance for policy-
fabricantes. A cancer patient asking her doctor
for a cure is not helped by the advice that
she should have chosen other parents. Como
political scientist John Gerring has stated,
researchers “sometimes confuse the notion
of statistical significance with real-life sig-
nificance.”19

A related problem is the importance of
“normatively impossible” variables. por ejemplo-
amplio, some countries seem to have started
successfully to address systemic corrup-
tion after having experienced the national
trauma of losing a war.20 It goes without
saying that this is not a policy solution we
can recommend.

In terms of determining the enemy’s lo-
catión, the other spectrum of explanations
focuses on behavioral issues like the level
of integrity and the standard of ethics of
politicians, civil servants, and other pro-
fessional groups in the public sector.21 To
some analysts, it goes without saying that
a country with high moral standards in the

civil service would not suffer from system-
ic corruption. The problem with this type
of analysis is that the explanatory variables
are hard to distinguish from what is to be
explained. It is close to a tautology to say
that low levels of corruption in a country
can be explained by a high ethical stan-
dard among politicians, jueces, and civil
servants. En realidad, this line of reasoning
does not have any explanatory power; en-
stead it is more a repetition of the data.

The alternative to structural and behav-
ioral explanations is to focus on the sig-
nificance of institutions. Most important
is that institutions are constructed, repro-
duced, and sometimes destroyed by hu-
mans and thus, in principle, open for policy-
induced change. It is possible to defeat the
“enemy” of poor institutions. El segundo
thing about institutions is that we can ob-
serve huge variations in institutional qual-
ity between countries, and to some extent
at the subnational level as well.22

Institutions can be formal or informal,
but which of these should we target to low-
er total levels of corruption? This is an is-
sue to which there now seems to be a clear
respuesta: the importance of formal institu-
tions has been much overrated. Using pan-
el data for 189 countries, Mungiu-Pippidi
has shown that the existence of an anticor-
ruption agency or an ombudsman office in
a country has no statistical impact on the
control of corruption.23 A case in point is
Uganda, which has remained corrupt af-
ter numerous interventions by the World
Bank and bilateral donors had established
an institutional framework that, according
to the Swedish International Development
Cooperation Agency, was “largely satis-
factory in terms of anticorruption mea-
sures.”24 In fact, Uganda’s formal institu-
tions of anticorruption regulation score 99
out of 100 points in the Global Integrity
2009 índice; yet according to existing mea-
sures, the country remains one of the most
corrupt in the world.25

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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesFighting Systemic Corruption: The Indirect Strategy

The main evidence against the impor-
tance of formal institutions comes from
two large-scale surveys carried out in 2010
y 2013 by the Quality of Government In-
stitute. The surveys consisted of interviews
with about 120,000 persons (for the most
part in EU countries) and asked detailed
questions about citizens’ experiences and
perceptions of corruption, as well as per-
ceptions of impartiality and competence
in three public service sectors (health care,
cumplimiento de la ley, and education). Estos
questions made possible the construction
of a European Quality of Government In-
dex capturing corruption, impartiality, y
competence in the delivery of these public
services. These surveys are unique in that
respondents were sampled from official
regions in EU countries, making it possi-
ble to study subnational variation. Resultados
showed significant subnational variation in
corruption (and the related issues of com-
petence and impartiality) in about one-
third of EU countries. The most dramatic
subnational differences were found in Italy,
where the best performing regions in the
North are almost as clean as Denmark,
while some of the Southern regions score
at the same high levels of corruption as Ser-
bia and Romania.26

From a policy perspective, this result
sends an important message. Italy has had
the same formal national institutions (semejante
as its laws and courts) for one hundred fif-
ty years. The dramatic regional differenc-
es show that whatever the quality of the
national institutions, they seem to hardly
have had an impact on the level of corrup-
tion “on the ground.” This result implies
that the strong focus on changing nation-
al formal institutions, such as the intro-
duction of special national anticorruption
agencies and more stringent laws, is in all
likelihood misplaced. This is not to say that
national laws against corruption are unim-
portant, but it is obvious from the Italian
example that they are far from sufficient.

As of today, many if not most highly cor-
rupt countries have stringent formal laws
against corruption.

Does the lack of traction of formal in-
stitutions imply that corruption is some-
how “ingrained” in the traditional culture
in Sicily and other highly corrupt societies?
This is the widespread understanding in
anthropology,27 but to an increasing degree
also in economics.28 The difference seems
to be that many anthropologists, believing
in cultural relativism, describe corruption
as an inevitable artifact of culture, largely
disregarding the vast amount of empirical
research showing its detrimental effects on
almost all aspects of human well-being.29
Economists, por otro lado, blame the
cultures of highly corrupt societies, label-
ing them “dysfunctional.”30

If by “culture” we mean the general mor-
al orientation of the population in question,
hay (al menos) two problems with both
of these understandings of corruption. El
first is a lack of empirical support. por ejemplo-
amplio, respondents in the Afrobarometer
survey for eighteen sub-Saharan African
countries were asked their views on scenar-
ios in which an official either “decides to lo-
cate a development project in an area where
his friends and supporters live”; “gives a job
to someone from his family who does not
have adequate qualifications”; and “de-
mands a favour or an additional payment
for some service that is part of his job.” Be-
entre 60 y 76 por ciento de la 25,086 re-
spondents considered all three examples of
corruption to be “wrong and punishable,"
while only a small minority view such ac-
tions as “not wrong at all.” Furthermore,
only about 20 percent deem these actions
“wrong but understandable.”31

Corroborating these data, political sci-
entist Sten Widmalm found similar re-
sults in the Indian context. In a survey
at the village level, Widmalm finds that
there is surprisingly large support among
the population for what is often referred

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147 (3) Summer 2018Bo Rothstein

to as the Weberian civil-servant model:
as many as 77 percent of the villagers re-
sponded that they deemed it “very im-
portant” that civil servants “treat every-
one equally, regardless of income, estado,
class, caste, gender and religion” and that
civil servants “should never under any cir-
cumstances accept bribes.”32 Yet another
study analyzing grassroots organizations’
mobilization against corruption in cultur-
ally diverse places like India, the Philip-
pines, Mongolia, and Uganda has shown
that these organizations have a very simi-
lar perception of the malfeasance they are
up against.33 In a separate large-scale ex-
perimental study of propensity to contrib-
ute to public goods, researchers found that
when given the same institutional setup,
students from highly corrupt Romania are
no more likely to cheat or “free-ride” than
students from Britain or Sweden.34 In ad-
condición, political scientist Eliška Drápalová
has shown that nearby cities in highly cor-
rupt regions in Europe, sharing the same
“culture,” can have very different levels
corruption.35

An oft-cited study showing a large vari-
ation in the propensity of United Nations
diplomats from different countries to pay
their parking tickets in New York need not
be interpreted as a support for the “cultur-
alist” hypothesis.36 The reason why diplo-
mats from highly corrupt countries did not
pay their parking tickets may be that “stan-
dard operating procedure” in their home
countries is that refusing to pay a parking
ticket has no legal consequences.

The moralizing, culturalist understand-
ing of corruption espoused by economists
is also deeply problematic from a policy per-
perspectiva. Blaming the culture of a nation is
not very different from saying that its peo-
ple are bad or dishonest, which is not a good
starting point for achieving broad-based
policy change. The problem is that such
analyses mistake formal institutions for
culture as a moral orientation. Para examen-

por ejemplo, according to economist Amir Licht and
colegas, “Cultural orientations represent
general societal emphases that are deeply
ingrained in the functioning of major so-
cietal institutions, in widespread practic-
es, in symbols and traditions, y, a través de
adaptation and socialization, in the values
of individuals.”37 In a similar vein, econo-
mist Paul Collier has written that culture
consists of both “beliefs” and “social net-
works.”38 I maintain that informal institu-
tions and moral values or beliefs are two dif-
ferent things. Philosophers have long ar-
gued for a fundamental distinction between
“moral norms” and “social norms”: mor-
al norms “justify the relevant normative
principle,” while social norms consist of
the “presumed social practice.”39 If travel-
ing in a country where the “presumed social
practice” for getting medical treatment for
one’s children is to pay bribes to health per-
sonnel, most parents would likely pay the
bribe. Sin embargo, they could still be morally
upset and convinced that doing so is ethi-
cally wrong. Similarmente, a doctor in a systemi-
cally corrupt health care system may moral-
ly disapprove of the practice of taking mon-
ey “hidden in an envelope,” but it makes
little sense to be the only honest player in
a system where this is the presumed social
practice.40 The costs for an honest police-
man in, Por ejemplo, a Mexican police force
can be very high. The point is that dysfunc-
tional informal institutions and networks
are not necessarily to be understood as part
of a culture, if we define “culture” as a pop-
ulation’s moral beliefs and values.

En otras palabras, cultural values and ac-
tual practices are not always consistent.41
The question then becomes whether there
is some social entity between formal insti-
tutions and moral culture that can solve
this problem. Political economist Elinor
Ostrom put forward an answer, sugerir-
ing that we should distinguish between
“rules in form” and “rules in use” (cual
she also called “work rules”).42 In a similar

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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesFighting Systemic Corruption: The Indirect Strategy

manner, political economist Peter Hall has
suggested that between culture and formal
institutions exists an informal institution
called “standard operating procedures.”43
These rules are informal but well known
to the participants in a community; mayoría
important, they do not necessarily reflect
their adherents’ moral orientations. Ellos
are thus similar to what the philosophers
label “social norms.” In a thoroughly cor-
rupt setting, even people who think that
corruption is morally wrong are likely to
take part because they see no point in doing
otherwise.44 With the phrase “the system
made me do it,” political scientist Rasma
Karklins neatly encapsulates the distinc-
tion between understanding corruption as
ingrained in the moral fabric of a society
and its people versus understanding cor-
ruption as a series of “standard operating
procedures” that may force people to act in
ways they think are morally wrong.45
Analytically, we have now located where

the enemy is entrenched. It is for the most
part neither in a society’s formal institu-
ciones, nor in a dysfunctional culture of
“bad” values or beliefs among the popula-
tion in systemically corrupt countries. Para
the most part, corruption is entrenched in
a society’s (or organization’s) “standard
operating procedures.” And there are an-
thropological analyses that support this un-
derstanding of corruption.46 Daniel Jordan
Herrero, Por ejemplo, concludes that “al-
though Nigerians recognize and condemn,
in the abstract, the system of patronage that
dominates the allocation of government re-
sources, in practice people feel locked in.”47
What locks them in is thus not a set of dys-
functional moral values but a set of dysfunc-
tional “standard operating procedures.”48
With this understanding, the question is
now why the international anticorruption
regime has not been blessed with more vic-
tories and why the enemy has been so re-
silient. The bulk of anticorruption policies

from the World Bank and many other de-
velopment organizations have been guided
by an economic approach called the princi-
pal-agent theory.49 Corruption, the theory
dice, can be remedied if the honest “prin-
cipal” (such as a president, gobierno, o
head of company) changes the incentives
for its dishonest and corrupt “agents,” so
that they will find it in their rational self-in-
terest to stay away from corruption. To put
it simply, since the “agents” are thought to
be rational utility maximizers, the theory
suggests that when the fear of being caught
is higher than the greed that drives corrupt
comportamiento, corruption will decrease. De
this theory flows a fairly direct and head-on
estrategia: more stringent laws, more sur-
veillance, less administrative discretion,
and tougher punishments. In previously
trying to answer why, en la mayor parte, un-
ticorruption policies based on this strate-
gy have failed, I have pointed at the short-
comings of principal-agent theory itself.50
The most obvious problem is that if erasing
corruption were just a matter of changing
incentives, the problem should have been
solved long ago, since there is no lack of
knowledge about how to structure an in-
centive system. Simplemente pon, if the principal-
agent theory were correct, eradicating cor-
ruption should have been a piece of cake.
The problem with the principal-agent
theory is that the policy solutions it gener-
ates depend on a certain type of actor (el
benevolent and ethical principal) who is
not a rational, self-interested utility maxi-
mizer. This implies that the primary mov-
er is a type of agent that should not even
exist according to the central axiom of the
theory. In most systemically corrupt sys-
tems, it is the agents at the top–the pre-
sumed principals–who earn most of the
rents from corruption. Obviamente, semejante
principals will have little motivation to
change the incentives for their opportunis-
tic agents who are engaged in corruption.
As Robert Rotberg has demonstrated, cor-

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147 (3) Summer 2018Bo Rothstein

ruption can be successfully addressed from
above by determined political leaders who
can credibly demonstrate the will to do it.51
Sin embargo, it is also quite rare that systemi-
cally corrupt societies produce such lead-
ers. In any case, if we could find or create
principals who are determined and seri-
ous about curbing corruption in a country
long plagued by systemic corruption, semejante
principals would need to send very strong
signals to make their commitment to an-
ticorruption seem credible to the popula-
ción. As is well known from noncoopera-
tive game theory, creating such “credible
commitments” is not an easy task.52

Together with colleagues from the Quali-
ty of Government Institute, I have suggest-
ed a theoretical alternative: a saber, eso
systemic corruption should be understood
to be a collective action problem. More precise-
ly, because of the implicit lack of trust, es
what I call a social trap.53 In such situations,
agents are not motivated by utility maximi-
zación, but by what they perceive will be the
most likely strategy of most other agents in
their society. The theory that human behav-
ior is based on reciprocity rather than ra-
tional utility maximization has gained sub-
stantial support in recent experimental re-
buscar. It shows that agents are willing to
do “the right thing” provided that they have
reason to expect others to do the same.54 As
Ernst Fehr and Urs Fischbacher have stated:
“If people believe that cheating on taxes,
corruption and abuses of the welfare state
are widespread, they themselves are more
likely to cheat on taxes, take bribes or abuse
welfare state institutions.”55 Understand-
ing corruption as a collective-action prob-
lem or social trap produces very different
policy solutions from the incentive-based
solutions derived from principal-agent the-
ory. Effective policies against corruption
must destabilize the corrupt equilibrium.
This requires a signal of credible commit-
ment to the population from the govern-
ment to convince the majority of corrupt

agents that most other agents are willing to
cambiar. The question is what these messag-
es of credible commitment are, which types of
policies can send them, and how those pol-
icies should be implemented from a strate-
gic point of view.

A specific problem in the field of anticor-
ruption policy-making is to find a balance
between taking “context” into account–
since every country has its quite specific
corruption problems (as well as history and
cultura)–and formulating a more gener-
al theory from which to derive actionable
políticas. The argument against “one-size-
fits-all” policies has been very common in
the anticorruption literature, En particular
from anthropologists, but I argue that it can
only be taken so far, lest we end up with
one theory of corruption per country (o
región, city, or village).56 An analogy can be
made to medical research: while there ex-
ists much universal knowledge about how
to cure many types of illnesses, profes-
sional clinical physicians never prescribe
a treatment without carefully examining
the individual patient.

The argument so far gives one clear re-

sultado: a saber, that the anticorruption “re-
gime” is in need of a new theoretical ap-
proach. Since systemic corruption is a
conflict zone, I will enlist one of the most
famous military theorists of the twentieth
siglo: British writer and historian Sir
Basil Liddell Hart.57 Respected scholars in
this field have lauded Liddell Hart as “the
greatest thinker about war in this century,"
“the most formidable military writer of
this age,” and “one of the most profound,
original and influential military thinkers
of modern history.”58 Liddell Hart’s the-
ories have had, and continue to have, un
“enormous” influence over thinking about
military strategy in the Western world.59
Liddell Hart’s most famous theory of war
estrategia, “the indirect approach,” originat-
ed from a critique of the “head-on” attri-

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tion strategies used by the armies on the
Western Front during World War I.60 Lid-
dell Hart was not only a war strategist and
historiador, but a social scientist who “was
constantly comparing events, individuals
and situations to find generalizations that
would hold across time and space.”61 He de-
veloped the “indirect approach” by analyz-
ing more than two hundred eighty major
military campaigns from ancient to modern
times to understand which strategies were
most likely to lead to victory.62 This is not
the place to give a complete account of this
complex strategic theory. But Liddell Hart
considered his theory as not only a military
estrategia, but “a law of life in all spheres” to
be applied wherever there is “room for a
conflict of wills.”63 It is in this spirit that I
suggest anticorruption strategies would be
a suitable area for the use of his theory.

Liddell Hart’s central argument is that a
direct attack on the enemy by military force
hardly ever works, but instead leads to a
hardening of the enemy’s resistance and
willingness to continue fighting. En cambio,
he argues, victory more often comes from
finding and attacking the enemy’s “Achil-
les heel . . . in order to dislocate an oppos-
ing psychological and physical balance,"
as historian Richard Larson has written.64
This can be done, Por ejemplo, through a
blitzkrieg-type surprise attack, en el cual
the strategy is to avoid direct attrition-
al confrontation with the opposing army
and instead penetrate in depth to reach
behind the main forces and attack supply
líneas, headquarters, and especially centers
of communication. This creates defeatism
and causes “psychological dislocation”
among enemy troops and leadership.65

The indirect approach can also take the
form of breaking the enemy’s will to fight
in a slower and more incremental way.
One of Liddell Hart’s many examples is
the British naval blockade of Germany
during World War I, which lasted sever-
al years and led to an extreme shortage of

food and other essential goods in Germa-
ny. De este modo, the indirect approach can involve
direct physical attacks, as in the blitzkrieg
tactic, but does not have to. The effect that
produces victory was, according to Liddell
Hart, “the dislocation of the enemy’s psy-
chological . . . balance.”66

The main goal thus is not to destroy the
enemy’s material capacity to fight, but his
psychological will to do so, his “equilibri-
um” of control, morale, and supply.67 Lid-
dell Hart argued that of the hundreds of
military campaigns he analyzed before for-
mulating his theory, only in six “did a deci-
sive result follow a plan of direct strategic
approach to the main army of the enemy.”
And even these six provided little justifica-
tion for the direct approach.68

The relevance of Liddell Hart’s work to
the formulation of anticorruption strate-
gies is clear. The “direct approach” includes
policies built upon the principal-agent the-
ory, which attack corrupt behavior head-
on with increased control, stricter punish-
mentos, and less discretion of the agents.
The direct approach also often focuses on
going after the “big fish.” The indirect ap-
proach has a clear resemblance to respons-
es based on collective-action theory, cual
focus on reciprocity, changing perceptions
about “the rules of the game,” and break-
ing a corrupt equilibrium. Liddell Hart’s
theory is “elastic” in that it does not pre-
scribe any specific tactics for winning mil-
itary conflicts; it is context-dependent and
eclectic in approach. As Mearsheimer sug-
gests, the “indirect approach” theory “did
not emphasize any single instrument; el
means depended on the case at hand.”69
Disrupting the moral equilibrium of cor-
rupt agents can either be achieved through
a “big-bang” approach (many things are
changed at about the same time in the same
direction) as I have suggested elsewhere;70
a blitzkrieg approach, as Hong Kong and
Singapore seem to have employed;71 o un
more gradual approach, as political scien-

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147 (3) Summer 2018Bo Rothstein

tist Anders Sundell has promoted.72 There
may also be combined approaches, semejante
that an initial gradual approach paves the
way for a big-bang change, leading to a new,
low-corruption equilibrium.73 The impor-
tant lesson we can take from Liddell Hart is
thus not in the specific selections of means,
such as choice of policies or political tactic
for anticorruption, but the importance of
the “indirectness” of the general strategy.

Is it possible to give a concrete example

of a successful indirect approach to con-
trolling corruption? The answer is yes: en
a recent policy report, Making Development
Work, my colleague Marcus Tannenberg
and I have listed five indirect strategies for
which we claim there is reasonable empir-
ical support. Among these are provision of
a functioning system of taxation, género
equality in the public sector, and free and
universal public education.74 I will focus
here on education. Such reforms were in-
troduced in many Western countries during
the nineteenth century and seem to have
had a considerable long-term effect on their
levels of corruption. Data on mean years of
schooling exist for seventy-eight countries
de 1870 onward; the correlation with a
standard measure of corruption for 2010
is surprisingly high (Pearson’s r = 0.76).75
Además, a country’s historical level of
education turns out to be more correlated
with corruption levels than initial wealth or
degree of democracy. The historical litera-
ture about school reforms also comes with
a number of surprises: Por ejemplo, eco-
nomic theories (whether modernization
theory or Marxism), which suggest educa-
tion develops alongside economic growth,
do not fit. Bretaña, the most industrialized
country, was a latecomer in free universal
public education, introducing it in 1905.

The first country to modernize its educa-
tion system was militaristic and autocrat-
ic Prussia, which launched massive educa-
tional reforms in 1807, one year after its hu-

miliating defeat by Napoleon’s “army of
citizens” at Tilsit in 1806. Sweden and Den-
mark followed. The goal of all of these mas-
sive reforms was the same: state-building
by way of creating new bonds among citi-
zens and between citizens and the state. Como
sociologist John Boli has stated, free uni-
versal public education was established to
create “new citizens for a new society.”76
Shortly after being defeated by Germany in
1871, France introduced its own education
reforms in order to make “peasants into
Frenchmen.”77 These reforms’ universality

signalled a decisive break with the voluntary
and particularistic mode of medieval and
early modern education, where learning was
narrowly associated with specialized forms
of clerical, craft and legal training, and exist-
ed merely as an extension of the corporate in-
terests of the church, the town, the guild and
the family. Public education embodied a new
universalism which acknowledged that ed-
ucation was applicable to all groups in soci-
ety and should serve a variety of social needs.
The national systems were designed specifi-
cally to transcend the narrow particularism
of earlier forms of learning. They were to
serve the nation as a whole.78

This argument should not be interpreted
as a historical-structural explanation imply-
ing that countries are forever bound by their
history when it comes to controlling corrup-
ción. On the contrary, hemos demostrado que
countries that still had very little free univer-
sal education by the 1870s (such as Finland,
Japón, and South Korea) managed to catch
up during the interwar period and now have
much better scores for control of corruption
than would be expected based on their nine-
teenth-century education levels.

There are several reasons why reforms
such as free universal public education qual-
ify as an example of the indirect approach to
combating corruption. Primero, these reforms
did not attack corruption directly by, for ex-
amplio, imposing more stringent laws and

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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesFighting Systemic Corruption: The Indirect Strategy

increased surveillance. De hecho, they were
ostensibly not even aimed at reducing cor-
ruption at all, but merely had that side ef-
fect. Segundo, education is known to increase
levels of social trust, thereby changing in-
dividuals’ psychological sense of what can
be expected from their fellow citizens. Fol-
lowing the logic of collective action, semejante
generalized trust is an important ingredient
for controlling corruption. Tercero, free uni-
versal public education was for many citi-
zens the first public good they got from the
state that was beneficial for them as indi-
viduals (well before pensions and other so-
cial reforms). Until these reforms were es-
tablished, the state was for most citizens a
hostile entity only serving the particularis-
tic interests of a small elite. With the intro-
duction of free public education, citizens got
a stake in a well-functioning public sector
and thus found a reason to oppose corrup-
ción. To some extent, reforms like these are
similar to what Michael Johnston has ad-
vocated for (in this issue and elsewhere) en
his proposal for “deep democratization” as a
force against systemic corruption.79 Fourth,
the institutionalization of public education,
in addition to creating a bond of loyalty be-
tween citizens and the state, produced a
large new professional sector of teachers
and school leaders, who in turn helped pro-
duce citizens’ loyalty to the state. Last, estos
costly, large-scale reforms have served as an
important signal of the state’s commitment
to principles of impartiality and equality:
the ideal behind free universal public edu-
cation is that every child, no matter her or
his economic or social background, debería
get a reasonably fair chance in life.

Italy fits this pattern surprisingly well. Como
mentioned above, contemporary Italy has
very stark variations in corruption between
its Northern and Southern regions. El
country introduced a radical educational re-
form in 1859, with three years of free edu-
cation for every child. Sin embargo, the reform
was implemented only in the North, mientras

regions in the South almost completely dis-
regarded it.80 As a result, illiteracy levels in
Southern Italy were surprisingly high well
into the 1930s, and the effects on corrup-
ción, as well as a lack of a social contract be-
tween citizens and the Italian state, exist to
this very day.81
The example of universal public educa-

tion should only be seen as an illustration
of the general argument about the effica-
cy of an indirect approach to curbing cor-
ruption. As emphasized above, the indi-
rect approach does not prescribe any spe-
cific tools. En cambio, the means used must
resonate with the historical and social con-
texto. Limiting anticorruption efforts to di-
rect changes to the incentive structure for
public officials (stricter laws, more con-
trols, less discretion for civil servants, hard-
er punishment, etcétera) is not likely to
trabajar. Such efforts to change formal insti-
tutions are often necessary, but they are in
all likelihood not enough. From the theory
of collective action comes a different mes-
sage: a saber, the importance of changing
what people have come to understand as
the “standard operating procedures” when
they interact with public officials. The main
goal should be to convince the population
that the basic social contract is about to
change and to give them a stake in the ex-
istence of a well-functioning public sector
that can deliver important goods to them
in an honest and competent manner.

Those in power and those who mobi-
lize to oppose corruption will have to en-
sure that their commitment to anticorrup-
tion is not seen as cheap talk, but instead
includes efforts that are likely to change
general perceptions about the state’s pri-
orities. This is likely only possible through
large-scale efforts like the universal educa-
tional reforms described above.

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147 (3) Summer 2018Bo Rothstein

notas finales
1 Ben W. Heineman and Fritz Heimann, “The Long War against Corruption,” Foreign Affairs 85

(3) (2006): 75–81.

2 Wale Adebanwi and Ebenezer Obadare, “When Corruption Fights Back: Democracy and Elite In-
terest in Nigeria’s Anti-Corruption War,” Journal of Modern African Studies 49 (2) (2011): 185–213.
3 Sören Holmberg and Bo Rothstein, “Dying of Corruption,” Health Economics, Policy and Law 6 (4)

(2011): 529–547.

4 Adebanwi and Obadare, “When Corruption Fights Back”; and Michela Wrong, It’s Our Turn to

Eat: A Story of a Kenyan Whistle Blower (Londres: Fourth Estate, 2009).

5 Sarah Bracking, ed., Corruption and Development: The Anti-Corruption Campaigns (Nueva York: Pal-
grave, 2007); and Dan Hough, Analysing Corruption: An Introduction (Newcastle upon Tyne, United
Kingdom: Agenda Publishing, 2017).

6 Michael Johnston, “From Thucydides to Mayor Daley: Bad Politics and a Culture of Corrup-

ción,” PS: Political Science and Politics 39 (4) (2006): 809–812.

7 Bo Rothstein and Marcus Tannenberg, Making Development Work: The Quality of Government Approach

(Stockholm: Swedish Government Expert Group for Aid Studies, 2015).

8 Leslie Holmes, Corruption: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: prensa de la Universidad de Oxford, 2015).
9 Andreas Bågenholm and Nicholas Charron, “Anti-Corruption Parties and Good Government,"
in Elites, Institutions and the Quality of Government, ed. Carl Dahlström and Lena Wängnerud (Nuevo
york: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 263–282.

10 Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, The Quest for Good Governance: How Societies Develop Control of Corruption

(Nueva York: Prensa de la Universidad de Cambridge, 2015).

11 Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization

of Democracy (Nueva York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014).

12 Hough, Analysing Corruption.
13 Robert Klitgaard, Addressing Corruption Together (París: The Organisation for Economic Co-oper-
ation and Development, Development Assistance Committee, 2015); and Robert I. Rotberg,
The Corruption Cure: How Leaders and Citizens Can Combat Graft (Princeton, NUEVA JERSEY.: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2017).

14 Philip Keefer and Razvan Vlaicu, “Democracy, Credibility, and Clientelism,” Journal of Law Eco-

nomics & Organization 24 (2) (2008): 371–406.

15 Philip Keefer, “The Poor Performance of Poor Democracies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Com-
parative Politics, ed. Charles Boix and Susan Stokes (Oxford: prensa de la Universidad de Oxford, 2007),
886–910.

16 Michele D’Arcy, “Rulers and Their Elite Rivals: How Democratization Has Increased Incen-
tives for Corruption in Sub-Saharan Africa,” in Elites, Institutions and the Quality of Government,
ed. Carl Dahlström and Lena Wängnerud (Nueva York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 111–128.
17 Data from United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Global Study of Homicides 2013 (Viena:

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2014).

18 Daniel Treisman, “The Causes of Corruption: A Cross-National Study,” Journal of Public Econom-
circuitos integrados 76 (3) (2000): 399–457; Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. robinson, "El
Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation,” The American
Economic Review 91 (5) (2001): 1369–1400; and Alberto Alesina and Eliana La Ferrara, “Ethnic
Diversity and Economic Performance,” Journal of Economic Literature 43 (3) (2015): 762–800.
19 John Gerring, “The Relevance of Relevance,” in The Relevance of Political Science, ed. Gerry Stoker,

B. Peter Peters, and Jon Pierre (Londres: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 36–49.

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20 Paul Collier, “The Cultural Foundations of Economic Failure: A Conceptual Toolkit," Diario

of Economic Behavior & Organization 126 (2016): 5–24.

21 Paul D. collins, “Introduction to the Special Issue: The Global Anti-Corruption Discourse To-
wards Integrity Management,” Public Administration and Development 32 (1) (2012): 1–10.
22 Davide Torsello and Bertrand Vernand, “The Anthropology of Corruption,” Journal of Manage-

ment Inquiry 25 (1) (2016): 34–54.

23 Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, Contextual Choices in Fighting Corruption: Lessons Learned (Berlina: Hertie School

of Goverance, 2011).

24 Rothstein and Tannenberg, Making Development Work, 34.
25 Ibídem.
26 Nicholas Charron, Victor Lapuente, and Bo Rothstein, Quality of Government and Corruption from
a European Perspective: A Comparative Study of Good Government in EU Regions (Cheltenham, United
Kingdom: Edward Elgar, 2013); and Nicholas Charron, Lewis Dijkstra, and Victor Lapuente,
“Mapping the Regional Divide in Europe: A Measure for Assessing Quality of Government
en 206 European Regions,” Social Indicators Research 124 (3) (2015).

27 Daniel Jordan Smith, A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria
(Princeton, NUEVA JERSEY.: Prensa de la Universidad de Princeton, 2007); and Torsello and Vernand, “The Anthro-
pology of Corruption.”

28 Minero, “The Cultural Foundations of Economic Failure”; and Amir N. Licht, Chanan Gold-
schmidt, and Shalom H. Schwartz, “Culture Rules: The Foundations of the Rule of Law and
Other Norms of Governance,” Journal of Comparative Economics 35 (4) (2007): 659–688.

29 Ver, Por ejemplo, Giorgio Blundo and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, Everyday Corruption and the

Estado: Citizens and Public Officials in Africa (Londres: Zed Books, 2006).

30 Minero, “The Cultural Foundations of Economic Failure," 5.
31 Rothstein and Tannenberg, Making Development Work. The Afrobarometer surveyed individuals
from Benin, Botswana, Cape Verde, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mo-
zambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
32 Sten Widmalm, “Explaining Corruption at the Village and Individual Level in India: Findings
from a Study of the Panchayati Raj Reforms,” Asian Survey 45 (5) (2005): 756–776; and Sten
Widmalm, Decentralisation, Corruption and Social Capital: From India to the West (Thousand Oaks,
California: sage Publications, 2008).

33 Pierre Landell-Mills, Citizens against Corruption: Report from the Front Line (Leichestershire, United

Kingdom: Matador & Partnership for Transparency Fund, 2013).

34 John D’Attoma, Clara Volintiru, and Sven Steinmo, “Willing to Share: Tax Compliance and

Gender in Europe and America,” Research and Politics 4 (1) (2017): 1–10.

35 Eliška Drápalová, “Good Apples on Bad Trees: Explaining Variation in Levels of Corruption
in Southeuropean Local Government” (Doctor. diss., European University Institute, Badia Fie-
solana, Firenze, 2016).

36 Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel, “Corruption, Norms, and Legal Enforcement: Evidencia
from Diplomatic Parking Tickets,” Journal of Political Economy 115 (6) (2007): 1020–1048.

37 Licht, Goldschmidt, and Schwartz, “Culture Rules," 682.
38 Minero, “The Cultural Foundations of Economic Failure.”
39 Geoffrey Brennan, Lina Eriksson, Roberto E.. Goodin, and Nicholas Southwood, Explaining Norms

(Oxford: prensa de la Universidad de Oxford, 2013), 89.

40 János Kornai, Hidden in an Envelope: Gratitude Payments to Medical Doctors in Hungary (Budapest:

Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study, 2000).

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147 (3) Summer 2018Bo Rothstein

41 Katja Gelbrich, Yvonne Stedham, and Daniel Gäthke, “Cultural Discrepancy and National Cor-
ruption: Investigating the Difference between Cultural Values and Practices and Its Relation-
ship to Corrupt Behavior,” Business Ethics Quarterly 26 (2) (2016): 201–222.

42 Elinor Ostrom, Understanding Institutional Diversity (Princeton, NUEVA JERSEY.: Prensa de la Universidad de Princeton,

2005).

43 Peter A. Sala, “Policy Paradigms, Social Learning and the State,” Comparative Politics 23 (1993):

275–296.

44 Donatella della Porta and Alberto Vannucci, Corrupt Exchanges: Actors, Recursos, and Mechanisms

of Political Corruption (Nueva York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1999).

45 Rasma Karklins, The System Made Me Do It: Corruption in Post-Communist Societies (Armonk, N.Y.:

METRO. mi. Sharpe, 2005).

46 David Sneath, “Transacting and Enacting Corruption: Obligation and the Use of Money in
Mongolia,” Ethnos 71 (1) (2006): 89–122; and Cynthia Werner, “Gifts, Bribes, and Develop-
ment in Post-Soviet Kazakstan,” Human Organization 59 (1) (2000): 11–22.

47 Herrero, A Culture of Corruption, 65.
48 Adebanwi and Obadare, “When Corruption Fights Back.”
49 Mehmet Ugur and Nandini Dasgupta, “Corruption and Economic Growth: Un metaanálisis
of the Evidence on Low Income Countries and Beyond” (Londres: eppi-Centre, Ciencias Sociales
Research Unit, Institute of Education, University of London, 2011).

50 Anna Persson, Bo Rothstein, and Jan Teorell, “Why Anticorruption Reforms Fail: Systemic Cor-
ruption as a Collective Action Problem,” Governance 26 (3) (2013): 449–471; and Bo Rothstein,
“Trust, Social Dilemmas and Collective Memories,” Journal of Institutional Theoretical Politics 12 (4)
(2000): 477–503.

51 Rotberg, The Corruption Cure.
52 Gary J. Miller and Andrew B. Whitford, Above Politics : Bureaucratic Discretion and Credible Commit-
mento (Nueva York: Cambridge Univeristy Press, 2016); and Douglass C. North, “Institutions and
Credible Commitment,” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 147 (1) (1993): 11–21.
53 Bo Rothstein, Social Traps and the Problem of Trust (Cambridge: Prensa de la Universidad de Cambridge, 2005).
54 Chistina Bicchieri and Erte Xiao, “Do the Right Thing: But Only If Others Do So," Diario de

Behavioral Decision Making 22 (2) (2009): 191–208.

55 Ernst Fehr and Urs Fischbacher, “The Economics of Strong Reciprocity,” in Moral Sentiments
and Material Interests: The Foundations for Cooperation in Economic Life, ed. Herbert Gintis, Samuel
Bowles, Robert Boyd, and Ernst Fehr (Cambridge, Masa.: The mit Press, 2005), 151–193, 167.

56 Torsello and Vernand, “The Anthropology of Corruption.”
57 Julian Lindley-French and Yves Boyer, The Oxford Handbook of War (Oxford and New York: Ox-

prensa de la Universidad de Ford, 2012).

58 Juan J.. mearsheimer, Liddell Hart and the Weight of History (Ítaca, N.Y.: Prensa de la Universidad de Cornell,

1988), 1.

59 Alex Danchev, “Liddell Hart’s Big Idea,” Review of International Studies 25 (1) (1999): 29–48, 29.
60 Brian Bond, Liddell Hart: A Study of His Military Thought (Londres: Cassell, 1977).
61 mearsheimer, Liddell Hart and the Weight of History, 10.
62 R. A. Mason, “Sir Basil Liddell Hart and the Strategy of the Indirect Approach,” Royal United

Services Institution Journal 115 (1970): 37–41.

63 Danchev, “Liddell Hart’s Big Idea," 29.
64 Robert H. larson, “Book Review of John. j. Mearscheimer’s Liddell Hart and the Weight of History

(Prensa de la Universidad de Cornell, 1988),” The American Historical Review 96 (1) (1991): 171.

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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesFighting Systemic Corruption: The Indirect Strategy

65 mearsheimer, Liddell Hart and the Weight of History, 89.
66 Mason, “Sir Basil Liddell Hart and the Strategy of the Indirect Approach.”
67 Basil H. Liddell Hart, Thoughts on War (Staplehurst, Reino Unido: Spellmount, 1999).
68 Mason, “Sir Basil Liddell Hart and the Strategy of the Indirect Approach.”
69 mearsheimer, Liddell Hart and the Weight of History, 89.
70 Bo Rothstein, “Anti-Corruption: The Indirect ‘Big-Bang’ Approach,” Review of International

Political Economy 18 (3) (2011): 228–250.

71 Rotberg, The Corruption Cure.
72 Anders Sundell, “Understanding Informal Payments in the Public Sector: Theory and Evidence

from 19th Century Sweden,” Scandinavian Political Studies 37 (2) (2014): 95–122.

73 Bo Rothstein and Jan Teorell, “Getting to Sweden, Part II: Breaking with Corruption in the
Nineteenth Century,” Scandinavian Political Studies 38 (3) (2015): 238–254; and Jan Teorell and
Bo Rothstein, “Getting to Sweden, Part I: War and Malfeasance, 1720–1850,” Scandinavian
Political Studies 38 (3) (2015): 217–237.

74 Rothstein and Tannenberg, Making Development Work; and Eric M. Uslaner and Bo Rothstein,
“The Historical Roots of Corruption: State Building, Economic Inequality, and Mass Educa-
ción,” Comparative Politics 48 (2) (2016): 227–248.

75 Ibídem.
76 John Boli, New Citizens for a New Society: The Institutional Origins of Mass Schooling in Sweden (Oxford:

Pergamon, 1989).

77 Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (stanford, California:

Prensa de la Universidad de Stanford, 1976).

78 Andy Green, Education and State Formation: The Rise of Education Systems in England, France and the

EE.UU (Nueva York: Calle. Martin’s Press, 1990), 79.

79 Michael Johnston, Corrupton, Contention and Reform: The Power of Deep Democratization (Leva-
puente: Prensa de la Universidad de Cambridge, 2013); and Michael Johnston, “Reforming Reform:
Revising the Anticorruption Playbook,Dédalo 147 (3) (Verano 2018): 50–62.

80 Martin Clark, Modern Italy, 1871–1982 (Londres: Longman, 1996).
81 Spencer Di Scala, Italy from Revolution to Republic: 1700 to the Present (Roca, Colo.: Westview

Prensa, 2009).

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147 (3) Summer 2018Bo Rothstein
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