RE-THINKING THE PERVASIVENESS OF CORRUPTION IN WESTERN COUNTRIES

This paper studies the pervasiveness of Corruption in Western societies. Corruption has often been presented as higher in developing or (former) transitional economies than in the North-West part of the world (Western Europe, North America). Internationally used ranking of countries classified by the level of Corruption (i.e. Transparency International, World Bank) show that most of Western countries are on the safest side. Nonetheless, there are studies (Johnston, 2005; Shaxson, 2011) highlighting that Corruption is very diffused also in these area of the world, even if the available international ranking do not necessarily show Western countries as particularly tainted by Corruption. This apparent incongruent result may be due to the forms that Corruption takes in Western societies. Administrative Corruption or blatant extortion from public officials may be less diffused than in other areas of the planet. Nevertheless, State Capture and/or Grand Corruption (these two sub-phenomena are often equivalent) are present and may take extremely sophisticated (and less visible) forms. This paper investigates on the mechanisms of Corruption in the West, rather than measuring it numerically, through case-studies. Case studies are a method which is useful to research on particular mechanisms and to shed light on relatively under-researched phenomena (Bryman, 2016).