Combatting Corruption Among Civil Servants: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on What Works

Finally, given the need to attack multiple dimensions of the problem at once, and the difficulty of doing so at the level of a whole country, scholars suggest the strategy of attacking all dimensions of the problem within particular organizations. [...] The narrow focus of the impact evaluation tradition is complemented by the broader, longer-term, and more detailed examinations of the other two traditions; the question of whether and which lessons from history can be applied in contemporary contexts can be answered using insights from the ethnographic and impact evaluation traditions; and the inability of the comparative-historical and ethnograp. [...] This part of the report focuses on the importance of endogenous demand for anti-corruption reforms, the significance of addressing corruption at a systemic level, and the need to incorporate understanding of citizens’ role in sustaining corruption—despite widespread condemnation of corrupt practices in nearly all societies. [...] Schulze and Frank (2003), for example, found that the number 5 That the effectiveness of penalties is likely to be conditional on sufficient resources is underscored by Alt and Lassen’s (2014) finding of a robust association between the resources available to prosecutors and the number of corruption convictions across US states. [...] She finds that introducing a mechanism whereby subjects in the role of a citizen can report instances of bribery, which then triggers the possibility of a low-probability audit, reduces the willingness of those playing the role of public officials to request a bribe by a substantive and statistically significant 25 percentage points.