A Post-structuralist Discourse Analysis of Corruption

This article argues that a post-structuralist discourse analysis to the concept of "corruption" offers important insights into the political implications of anti-corruption discourses that are not captured by other dominant approaches in the field. To do so, the article first provides an overview of the dominant perspectives on corruption in political science and their limitations. Second, it develops a theoretical framework for a post-structuralist discourse analysis of corruption building on the conceptual tools of Foucault, Laclau and Mouffe. Finally, the theoretical framework is used to highlight a hidden agenda in the anticorruption strategy of the World Bank and the Corruption Perception Index of Transparency International that has legitimized a neoliberal order and perpetuated the asymmetric relation between the First a and the Third worlds.