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Paul Heywood, University of Nottingham

Rethinking corruption: hocus-pocus, locus and focus

Academic research on corruption and how to combat it has vastly increased over the last twenty-five years. However, the jury remains out on whether such an increase in productivity has helped reduce corruption in the real world. Indeed, some evidence suggests that global concerns about corruption are on the increase, even if we have no reliable way of measuring precisely the extent of the problem. The apparent mismatch between the attention focused on corruption and our collective capacity to make a practical difference naturally raises questions about what might be going wrong. This paper seeks to offer a preliminary response to such questions, by focusing on three issues: the way in which corruption has been conceptualised in much mainstream academic research, resulting in ‘magic bullet’ solutions based on institutional reconfiguration (hocus-pocus); the tendency of much research and anti-corruption advocacy to concentrate on nation-states as the primary unit of analysis (locus); and the lack of sufficient differentiation between different types and modalities of corruption beyond crude binary divisions (focus). Another way of presenting the argument is that approaches to studying and fighting corruption have been characterised by social theories developed in the mid-twentieth century being used to underpin practical remedies developed in the late twentieth century, but applied to a twenty-first century context that no longer matches the initial propositions.

Paul Heywood has been Sir Francis Hill Professor of European Politics at the University of Nottingham since 1995. Before joining Nottingham, he taught at the University of Glasgow and at the University of London. He also worked for the Economist Intelligence Unit, London (1989-93). Paul is author, co-author or editor of sixteen books, including the Routledge Handbook of Political Corruption (2015) and more than eighty journal articles and book chapters. His research focuses primarily on political corruption and integrity management, as well as institutional design and state capacity. He was recently appointed Programme Leader of the £3.6m BA/DFID Anti-Corruption Evidence Partnership (2015-18), and is currently the UK expert Research Correspondent on Corruption (2012-16) for the European Commission's DG Home Affairs, helping to produce an EU Anti-Corruption Report. He has worked closely with Transparency International since the late-1990s, and joined the Board of Trustees of TI-UK in 2015. In 2006, Paul was appointed Adjunct Professor at the University of Hunan (China), where he is Senior Adviser to the Center for Clean Governance. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (elected 2002), a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (elected 2012), and a Fellow of the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education (elected 2013).