With an increased awareness of the detrimental effects of corruption on development, strategies to fight it are now a top priority in policy circles. Yet, in countries ridden with systemic corruption, few successes have resulted from the investment. On the basis of an interview study conducted in Kenya and Uganda—two arguably typically thoroughly corrupt countries—we argue that part of an explanation to why anticorruption reforms in countries plagued by widespread corruption fail is that they are based on a theoretical mischaracterization of the problem of systemic corruption. More specifically, the analysis reveals that while contemporary anticorruption reforms are based on a conceptualization of corruption as a principal–agent problem, in thoroughly corrupt settings, corruption rather resembles a collective action problem. This, in turn, leads to a breakdown of any anticorruption reform that builds on the principal–agent framework, taking the existence of noncorruptible so-called principals for granted.

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Why Anticorruption Reforms Fail—Systemic Corruption as a Collective Action Problem

Human cooperation is highly unusual. We live in large groups composed mostly of non-relatives. Evolutionists have proposed a number of explanations for this pattern, including cultural group selection and extensions of more general processes such as reciprocity, kin selection, and multi-level selection acting on genes. Evolutionary processes are consilient; they affect several different empirical domains, such as patterns of behavior and the proximal drivers of that behavior. In this target article, we sketch the evidence from five domains that bear on the explanatory adequacy of cultural group selection and competing hypotheses to explain human cooperation. Does cultural transmission constitute an inheritance system that can evolve in a Darwinian fashion? Are the norms that underpin institutions among the cultural traits so transmitted? Do we observe sufficient variation at the level of groups of considerable size for group selection to be a plausible process? Do human groups compete, and do success and failure in competition depend upon cultural variation? Do we observe adaptations for cooperation in humans that most plausibly arose by cultural group selection? If the answer to one of these questions is "no," then we must look to other hypotheses. We present evidence, including quantitative evidence, that the answer to all of the questions is "yes" and argue that we must take the cultural group selection hypothesis seriously. If culturally transmitted systems of rules (institutions) that limit individual deviance organize cooperation in human societies, then it is not clear that any extant alternative to cultural group selection can be a complete explanation.

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Cultural group selection plays an essential role in explaining human cooperation: A sketch of the evidence.

The most important theoretical argument concerning decentralization is that it can improve governance by making government more accountable and responsive to the governed. Improving governance is also central to the motivations of real-world reformers, who bear risks and costs in the interest of devolution. But the literature has mostly focused instead on policy-relevant outcomes, such as education and health services, public investment, and fiscal deficits. This paper examines how decentralization affects governance, in particular how it might increase political competition, improve public accountability, reduce political instability, and impose incentive-compatible limits on government power, but also threaten fiscal sustainability.

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Decentralization and Governance

States and economic growth: Capacity and constraints☆

This chapter surveys the historical evidence on the role of institutions in economic growth and points out weaknesses in a number of stylized facts widely accepted in the growth literature. It shows that private-order institutions have not historically substituted for public-order ones in enabling markets to function; that parliaments representing wealth holders have not invariably been favorable for growth; and that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England did not mark the sudden emergence of either secure property rights or economic growth. Economic history has been used to support both the centrality and the irrelevance of secure property rights to growth, but the reason for this is conceptual vagueness. Secure property rights require much more careful analysis, distinguishing between rights of ownership, use, and transfer, and between generalized and particularized variants. Similar careful analysis would, we argue, clarify the growth effects of other institutions, including contract-enforcement mechanisms, guilds, communities, serfdom, and the family. Greater precision concerning institutional effects on growth can be achieved by developing sharper criteria of application for conventional institutional labels, endowing institutions with a scale of intensity or degree, and recognizing that the effects of each institution depend on its relationship with other components of the wider institutional system.

Institutions and Economic Growth in Historical Perspective

dann zu seinem Gegenstand, der Selbstorganisation in der evolutorischen Ökonomik, zu gelangen (S. 256 ff.). Er vermutet, dass schon Adam Smith den Grundgedanken des Paradigmas „unsichtbaren Hand“ vorweggenommen habe (ebenda). Etwas verwirrend dürfte die Unterscheidung des Autors zwischen Mikround Makroebene sein (S. 257), wenn der Leser an die herkömmlichen Kategorien denkt. Gemeint sind vom Autor die einzelwirtschaftliche und die Ebene des Marktprozesses. Damit dürften die ungeplanten Ergebnisse auf der Marktprozessebene und die nicht intendierten Handlungsfolgen (wiederum bezogen auf die Marktebene) verständlicher werden. Später (S. 254) weist der Autor auf einen bedeutenden Unterschied zwischen der physikalischen und ökonomischen Selbstorganisation hin. Im ersten Fall sind die Systemelemente passiv, währen sie im zweiten Fall initiativ und mit Erwartungen sowie Absichten ausgestattet sind. Die beiden Fälle beschreiben das, was Hayek mit der Unterscheidung von geplanter und ungeplanter oder spontaner Ordnung meint. Für ihn dürfte die ungeplante Ordnung ein Phänomen der Selbstorganisation sein, während die geplante Ordnung ein Produkt der Fremdorganisation wäre. Abschließend kommt der Autor zu dem Ergebnis, dass die Übertragung des betrachteten Paradigmas auf die evolutorische Ökonomik sowohl nach Anwendungsbereich als auch nach Erkenntnisgewinn bescheiden bleibt (S. 260). Das dürfte, gemessen an der ebenfalls der klassischen Physik (Mechanik) entlehnten Neoklassik bescheiden sein. Es kann jedoch auch als Aufforderung angesehen werden, weiterzusuchen, ohne die zentralen Phänomene der Neuerung und Entwicklung aus dem Auge zu verlieren.

Joachim Zweynert

Papers

Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History