ABSTRACT
Almost since the origins of recorded history, there have been instances of political corruption as chronicled by political scientists, sociologists, public officials, lawyers, and, of late, public-management scholars. Traditionally, political corruption has been viewed as aberrant political behavior by which the private gain triumphs over the public good, even if hard-and-fast definitions are difficult to agree upon.1 The conventional wisdom, however, is generally more benign, holding that political corruption is simply a manifestation of relatively primitive economic/political cultures and that as sociopolitical maturation occurs, the old habits will naturally fall by the wayside (see Dobel 1978; Caiden and Caiden 1977). This hypothesis was implicitly confirmed by Almond and Verba in their classic The Civic Culture (1960), in which the nation-states with the highest presence of “civic culture” were seen to be less affected by political corruption.
