ABSTRACT

In the social sciences, corruption has been for a long time relegated to research dealing with either second or third world. In the functionalist tradition, it has been indeed often considered as a signal of a temporary dysfunction between various subsystems, in particular of the survival of old values and traditional institutions during transitions to economic modernization and political democratization. The dream of a corrupt-free first world, however, no longer exists. First of all, various international governmental and non-governmental institutions (such as OCSE, the EU, and so on among the former, Transparency International among the latter) have stigmatized the fact that first world countries have been strong exporters of corruption in the developing countries, since Western corporations actually did the bribing of corrupt politicians. Second, after the Clean Hands investigations in Italy, evidence of quite widespread systems of corruption have emerged also in countries that are usually considered as characterized by quite high moral standards in their public administration and political system (Germany, France and the UK among them).