ABSTRACT
Administrative corruption was long a neglected area of research in American public administration. This neglect was due primarily to the axiomatic belief of earlier scholars that American public administration was inherently moral. While domestically, American policy analysts rationalized the need for applied ethics, students of the structural-functional approach shifted attention to the developing countries, pointing to the functional contributions of political and bureaucratic corruption to political and economic development. During the 1970s, as a result of American scandals, public administration and political science research was characterized by a rather prolific growth in the literature of corruption in developed countries, particularly in the United States. Influenced by the developmental approach of the 1960s, corruption was associated with the process of modernization. The theoretical tenet that corruption is a dependent variable of development is false. Corruption is universal. It can thrive and propagate itself in any level of political and bureaucratic development.
