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The intention of this paper is to classify the various forms of corruption in order to operationalise the concept for analytical and practical purposes. The paper outlines different forms of corruption, and defines it as a particular state-society relationship, making a distinction between political corruption and bureaucratic corruption. Two other distinctions are also added, namely between “individual” and “collective” forms of corruption, and corruption as a mechanism of either “upward extraction” or “downward redistribution”. The author sums up to the basic argument that the fight against corruption will have to be placed within a broader agenda of democratisation.

The main forms of corruption are bribery, embezzlement, fraud and extortion. Even when these concepts are partly overlapping and at times interchangeable with other concepts, some of the basic characteristics of corruption can be identified through these concepts.

The decisive role of the state is reflected in most definitions of corruption, which is conventionally understood and referred to as the private wealth-seeking behaviour of someone who represents the state and the public authority. It is the misuse of public goods by public officials, for private gains. The working definition of the World Bank is that corruption is the abuse of public power for private benefit. Another widely used description is that corruption is a transaction between private and public sector actors through which collective goods are illegitimately converted into private regarding payoffs.

Political or grand corruption takes place at the highest levels of political authority. It is when the politicians and political decision-makers, who are entitled to formulate, establish and implement the laws in the name of the people, are themselves corrupt, and use the political power they are armed with to sustain their power, status and wealth. It is when policy formulation and legislation is tailored to benefit politicians and legislators. Political corruption can thus be distinguished from bureaucratic or petty corruption, which is corruption in the public administration, at the implementation end of politics. Petty corruption has also been called “low level” and “street level” to name the kind of corruption that citizens will experience daily, at times, in their encounter with public administration and services like hospitals, schools, local licensing authorities, police, taxing authorities and so on.

The money or benefits collected through corruption is “privatised” to various degrees. It may be extracted for the benefit of an individual who will share nothing or very little with his equals, or it may be extracted for the benefit of a particular group with some coherence and unity. This has led to a second analytically important classification of corruption, namely between private and collective forms of corruption.

An understanding of corruption that include the possibility that it might be “collective”, institutionalised and organised in the interest of the ruling elite itself is vital to analyse the causes and logics of grand scale systemic corruption. To analyse who, in aggregate terms, benefits the most from corruption will also be required to understand the vested interests anti-corruption initiatives will be up against, and to identify the political/institutional levels most relevant for reform.

The question “who benefits from corruption” could, however, be taken one step further. In aggregate terms corrupt practices will generate a flow of resources either from the society to the state (“extractive” corruption, or corruption “from above”), or from the state to the society (“redistributive” corruption, or corruption “from below”). In what can be called the theory of redistributive corruption, the state is the weaker part in the state-society relationship. Analysts tend to have weak states in mind when they are focusing on the “subversive” groups and their “state destructive” capacity, i.e. the degenerative effects of corruption on the state institutions and the national economy.

Concluding Remarks To make a strict and narrow definition of corruption that restrict corruption to particular agents, sectors or transactions, like corruption as a deviation from the formal rules that regulate the behaviour of public officials, can be handy for fighting corruption when the problem is limited. But because narrow (legal) definitions may ignore vital parts of the problem, like the lack of political will to curb corruption in certain regimes, broader and more open-ended definitions, like corruption in terms of power abuse, will have to be applied to address the situations of pervasive and massive corruption. Even when the effect of democratisation in curtailing corruption is still much debated and not very strong according to available statistics, one basic and practical argument is that corruption can only be reversed by democratising the state. Economic and political competition, transparency and accountability, coupled with the democratic principles of checks and balances, are the necessary instruments to restrict corruption and power abuse.

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