Corruptionary and the Comparative Study of Political Corruption:
A Review Essay
Kenneth E. Bauzon, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Political Science
Saint Joseph’s College – New York
Brooklyn, New York 11205
Seldom
does one come upon a piece of work that blends within itself the
essential elements of a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a book of anecdotes
all at once. Such work is Corruptionary, recently published by the
Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CenPeg) in April 2008.
The work’s title itself is a clever contraction of two terms,
i.e., “dictionary” and “corruption” which
encapsulates the work’s essential purpose of providing a down-to-earth,
easy-to-understand interpretation of the meaning of a list of terms,
concepts, and idioms that inhabit the language and the culture of
corruption in the Philippines. Thanks to CenPeg’s conceptual
guidance, a group of resourceful students from the University of
the Philippines in Manila took it as a summer project to fan out
into the country, ventured into the interstices of public bureaucracy
and various communities, and sought out bureaucrats and ordinary
citizens alike who have knowledge, information, and experience to
share about the subject and language of corruption. The result is
a uniquely rich volume containing nearly four hundred entries which,
in subsequent editions, are certain to expand.
These entries, however, are much more than just vocabulary terms
in which one could become well versed. In addition to the hilarity
in which certain situations are described, they also reflect, often
with pathos, the social situation, the motives, and the positions
of subordination and superordination, and of power and powerlessness
in which the participants find themselves. While corruption is found
to one degree or another in societies throughout the globe, the
entries herein included further reflect the distinct nature of Philippine
society characterized by a scarcity of goods and services among
the vast masses of the population, on one hand, and, on the other,
an abundance of the same at the very top of the social pyramid in
which a tiny percentage of individuals and households (in relation
to that of the entire population) enjoys power and privilege. As
described in an article a few years ago, this social setting lends
itself to the politics of patronage and the inevitable corruption
that goes along with it in which goods and services are shared among
the population, not as a matter of entitlement that we would expect
in a democratically governed society but, rather, as a matter of
privileged access common in rigidly stratified societies in which
the dispersal of these goods and services to the recipient depends
on the whim and good graces of the patron.(1)
This is an important cultural element that characterizes the mode
of exchange in the evolution of capitalism – and to which
capitalism attaches itself for its own perpetuation and validation
– found in the Philippines during this current juncture of
history.
One
finds in the Corruptionary ample examples of the “tricks”
that George Orwell used to describe the English language in his
classic essay, written in 1946, entitled “Politics and the
English Language.”(2) In this
essay, Orwell enumerated these tricks (to which he added the adjectives
“swindles” and “perversions”) as follows:
a. Dying metaphors (in which metaphors are “twisted out of
their original meaning”), b. Operators or verbal false limbs
(in which “banal statements are given an appearance of profundity”),
c. Pretentious diction (in which a simple statement is dressed up
in order to “dignify the sordid process” of politics
which it conceals), and d. Meaningless words (in which passages
that utterly lack meaning could not in any sensible or rational
way be reconciled with reality). Why, then, do these tricks persist
as they appear to do in the Philippine context? To this query, Orwell
could only offer a general insight borne out of his own experiences
during his time as a critical observer. “In our time,”
he wrote, “political speech and writing are largely defense
of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule
in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the
atom bombs, can only be defended, but only by arguments which are
too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with
the professed aims of the political parties.” “Thus,”
he concluded, “political language has to consist largely of
euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness,” all
with the intended purpose of “concealing or preventing thought”
on the part of those who have something to gain from doing so.(3)
It
is thus obvious enough that corruption persists because something
is to be gained by it. If so, one is logically led to ask: Who benefits
from it? On one hand, one could say that a large, private segment
of the population benefits from it if one looks at each instance
of corruption from the grassroots level all the way to the top of
the social ladder as a transaction between two private parties exchanging
goods and services for the private benefit of each. The conception
of the “public” is taken out of the equation in these
transactions if by this term we mean benefits flowing out of these
private transactions into the public domain, which is a virtual
impossibility. Indeed, the term “public” becomes relevant
in these private transactions only to the extent that “public”
assets and resources – which rightly belong to the public
at large and entrusted to public institutions – are privatized
by those who engage in these types of transactions, including public
officials in various agencies and branches of government who have
lost their moorings and who use their public positions without scruple
or hesitation for private gain.
Bearing
out the persistence of corruption in the Philippines are numerous
studies. One such study was conducted by a well-established polling
organization, the Social Weather Stations (SWS). In its latest survey,
entitled “The 2006-2007 SWS Surveys of Enterprises on Corruption,”
conducted within the Transparent Accountable Governance Project,
the SWS has found that, since its two previous surveys between 2000
and 2004, there has been “no abatement in the public perception
of corruption in the government. While the 2006-2007 trend shows
the government’s apparent sincerity in fighting corruption
to be not as bad as before, perceived insincerity prevailed in 17
out of the 29 agencies rated. Incidents of bribery in typical government
transactions hardly changed, and any decline in the past has not
been sustained…. On the other hand, while corruption in thee
private sector remain smaller compared to the public sector, it
has not shown a sustained decline, i.e., there is need to step up
measures of the private sector to police its own ranks.” (4)
Another
such survey is by a business-oriented polling organization called
Transparency International, which tracks instances and forms of
corruption worldwide. It also provides an annual ranking of one-hundred
and sixty-three countries in terms of the pervasiveness of corruption.
In its Global Corruption Report 2007, in its Table on Corruption
Perceptions Index 2006, the Philippines is ranked in the bottom
121 most corrupt countries in which rank such countries as Benin,
Gambia, Russia, and Rwanda, among others, are clustered together.(5)
It
is quite apparent that the phenomenon of corruption is common to
all societies and that it has earned a distinct subfield by itself
in the study of comparative politics.(6)
Corruptionary as a distinct work is certain to enrich the literature
representing the Philippines as a case in point, giving scholars
from around the world additional literature which enhances their
understanding.
________________________________________
End
notes:
-
Please see Kenneth E. Bauzon, “Clientelism or Dependency?:
Towards a Redefinition of ‘Nation’ in the Philippines,”
in Rajeshwari Ghose, ed., Protest Movements in South and South-east
Asia; Traditional and Modern Idioms of Expression (Hong Kong:
University of Hong Kong, 1987), pp. 137-157.
- For
full text of this essay, please visit: www.george-orwell.org/Politics_and_the_English_Language/0.html.
- Ibid.
- For
specific details of the survey, please see www.tag.org.ph.
- Please
see Transparency International, Global Corruption Report 2007,
in: http://transparency.org.
- See,
for examples, the following works: Arnold J. Heidenheimer and
Michael Johnson, eds., Political Corruption: Concepts and Contexts
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002); Roberta Ann
Johnson, ed., The Struggle Against Corruption: A Comparative Study
(New York: Palgrave, 2004); and Robert Klitgaard, Controlling
Corruption (Berkeley, Ca.: University of California Press, 1988).
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