Corruption, Inequality, and the Rule of Law: The Bulging Pocket Makes the Easy Life

Corruption flouts rules of fairness and gives some people advantages that others dont have. Corruption is persistent; there is little evidence that countries can escape the curse of corruption easily-or at all. Instead of focusing on institutional reform, Uslaner suggests that the roots of corruption lie in economic and legal inequality and low levels of generalized trust and poor policy choices. Economic inequality provides a fertile breeding ground for corruption and, in turn, it leads to further inequalities. Just as corruption is persistent, inequality and trust do not change much over time in my cross-national aggregate analyses. Uslaner argues that high inequality leads to low trust and high corruption, and then to more inequality, an inequality trap and identifies direct linkages between inequality and trust in surveys of the mass public and elites in transition countries.

Eric M. Uslaner is Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he has taught since 1975.