Introduction

In their new book Political Corruption (2021), Emanuela Ceva and Maria Paola Ferretti present a deontological account of political corruption, understood as an interactive injustice that affects public institutions and public officials in all regimes. The aim of the present contribution is to contextualize the authors’ arguments in relation to democracies and through the lens of democracy theory. I propose to expand on one of the book’s main theses—namely, that public officials have a moral duty of office accountability towards their colleagues that stems from the very nature of institutions as systems of embodied and interrelated rule-governed roles. If we accept the validity of this thesis, we could expand on it as follows: In a democratic context, representative officeholders should be accountable not only to their colleagues, but also to citizens, since the latter also occupy an embodied and interrelated rule-governed role in democratic institutions. Consequently, the moral burden of ensuring that public authorities and the public administration operate in a way that conforms with public ethics does not lie exclusively with officeholders or oversight agencies, but, at least in part, with the citizenry. Finally, this contribution shows how democratic innovations could contribute to fighting corruption and realizing the conception of public ethics advanced in the book.

Key Insights from Political Corruption

Ceva and Ferretti devote the first two chapters of their book to developing an analytical definition of political corruption. They begin by defining an institution as ‘a system of embodied and interrelated rule-governed roles’ (pp. 22–23), a definition that has the merit of emphasizing the relational or interactive nature of institutions. Every role within an institution is linked together with others in such a way as to contribute to the realization of the institution’s raison d’être. The coordinated action of all officeholders is necessary (although not always sufficient) for an institution to remain oriented toward its core purpose. The authors then clarify that corruption is political when it affects public institutions and public officials. This form of corruption is a multifaceted phenomenon that affects both those strictly political institutions that constitute political authority (e.g., parliament, the cabinet, courts, the public administration, etc.) and public-sector institutions that depend on political authority (e.g., public schools, public hospitals, armed forces, government agencies, etc.).Footnote 1

An institution is thus a normative superstructure that regulates relations between officeholders. To receive power of office and carry out a mandate within this web of relations is to obtain a particular normative status, which confers rights and duties that cannot be exercised beyond the confines of this superstructure. At the same time, mandates never fully determine the actions and decisions of officeholders, meaning that some margin of interpretation is unavoidable, if not desirable, in practice. Given this discretion, as well as the interactive nature of institutions, officeholders have a moral obligation to behave in accordance with the terms and logic of their mandate, so as not to undermine institutional teamwork. In other words, officeholders have a duty of office accountability, which requires them to be able to demonstrate that their institutional actions conform to the nature and rationale of their mandate.

Political corruption is then defined negatively as a deficit of office accountability, which occurs when one or several public officeholders, acting in their institutional capacity, pursue an end that is inconsistent with the terms of their mandate and thus alien to the institution’s raison d’être. For Ceva and Ferretti, officeholders and their actions represent the only unit of analysis in the diagnosis of political corruption, which is a 'form of unaccountable use of entrusted power' (p. 22). Personal motivations are irrelevant, as are any consequences. Whatever form it takes (summative, morphological, or systemic), corruption is therefore an objective, internal malfunction within an institution resulting from the free choices and behavior of officeholders.

The book’s central chapter offers an assessment of political corruption from a normative perspective.Footnote 2 The authors emphasize once again that public institutions function well only when they fulfill their raison d’être. Their functioning can be impeded either by external factors, such as an economic or environmental crisis or a war, or by internal ones, such as dysfunctional procedures or, indeed, political corruption. Political corruption alters and undermines from within the system of rule-governed roles that constitutes the essence of an institution. Whenever officeholders act corruptly, they wrong their colleagues, with whom they are in a relationship of structural interconnection and interdependence whose purpose is to ensure the proper functioning of the institution. Corruption therefore constitutes a form of relational or interactive injustice, in the sense of a wrong to one’s fellow officeholders (p. 99). This deontological approach is perhaps the book’s most relevant contribution. It entails that political corruption is always wrong in and of itself, regardless of its motivations and consequences. However, although political corruption is always wrong qua relational injustice, the gravity of a particular act of injustice depends on other moral considerations. For example, a corrupt act might constitute a pro tanto injustice whose gravity depends on the benefit it brings in terms of distributive justice. Furthermore, when a corrupt act is committed within a gravely illegitimate institutional framework, it might represent a prima facie injustice that is fully redeemed by the nobleness of its cause.

The fourth chapter offers a discussion of the consequences of political corruption and the assignment of responsibility. The authors identify two additional duties that apply whenever the duty of office accountability is breached. First, officeholders must be answerable—that is, willing to explain and justify their actions if invited to do so by colleagues. This discussion can yield one of the following three outcomes: (1) the action in question is not corrupt, (2) the action in question is corrupt, but it represents a pro tanto or prima facie injustice, or (3) the action in question is corrupt and unjustifiable. In the third case, the corrupt officeholders are liable and a further additional duty to redress their actions falls on them. More specifically, they are assigned one of the following three forms of responsibility: retroactive, prospective, or interrelated. Importantly, when an entire institution fails to fulfill its raison d’être, which is usually the case in the presence of morphological and systemic corruption, all officeholders must assume interrelated responsibility.

In the concluding chapter, the authors address the issue of anticorruption. On the one hand, institutions can benefit from the supervision of external anticorruption authorities, and it is possible to design institutions that strongly disincentivize corrupt behavior. On the other hand, corruption is always possible given the inevitable discretion enjoyed by officeholders. Procedures, rules, mechanisms, controls, and sanctions are necessary, but insufficient, in the absence of an internal public ethics that clarifies how each officeholder should behave. In order to address this lacuna, the authors sketch a three-pronged public ethics that provides the means to resist, detect, and respond to political corruption. First, officeholders should act responsibly and in accordance with the logic of their mandate (duty of office accountability). Second, they should be willing to explain and justify their actions if pressed, as well as to supervise the actions of their colleagues (duty of office answerability). Finally, if their actions, or those of any other officeholder, prove to be corrupt, they should undertake anticorruption measures and restore the proper ethical relationship within the institution (duty of anticorruption).

Political Corruption in Democracies: Citizens as Objects and Subjects of Public Ethics

The fact that the contours of institutions are sometimes fuzzy represents an unaddressed challenge to Ceva and Ferretti’s argument, which is conditional upon knowing who exactly belongs to the normative superstructure that ties officeholders together. Think, for example, of a surgeon who acts within the context of a specific hospital unit, which is, in turn, embedded within a public hospital, the regional healthcare network, and, at the highest level, the entire national healthcare system. Which institution, or which institutional level, does Ceva and Ferretti’s thesis refer to? Although the problem here is primarily conceptual, such a clarification is relevant to the assignment of moral responsibility. In a democratic context, this problem of boundaries is further complicated by the fact that officeholders are more closely linked to the citizens than in any other political regime. The close relationship with citizens is evident in the case of officeholders with representative functions and elective offices (e.g., MPs and mayors).Footnote 3 Given these ties between elected representatives and voters, it is not clear who belongs to public institutions in a democracy. This puzzle is not satisfactorily addressed in Ceva and Ferretti’s book, and, consequently, citizens are de facto absent from their theory of political corruption, an exclusion that is, however, questionable.

Imagine the case of a politician who pledges to defend certain views and pursue certain goals during an election campaign, but, once elected to parliament with thousands of votes, works behind the scenes to promote the interests of a friend’s company. Following the book’s argument, this is an example of political corruption, because the officeholder is pursuing an agenda, or plan of action, that is incompatible with the logic of their institutional mandate.Footnote 4 Moreover, on Ceva and Ferretti’s account, these corrupt actions are wrong, because they instantiate an interactive injustice toward other officeholders within the institution. Now, the interesting question raised by the above example is: Who is affected by this interactive injustice? As Miller (2023, p. 18) puts it: 'are those who are entitled to vote in a democracy themselves institutional role occupants of the institution of government?' For Miller, the answer is negative, because Ceva and Ferretti’s framework explicitly equates institutional role occupants with 'officeholders possessed with a power mandate'. It follows that, since they do not formally work in a public institution with a corresponding employment contract, ordinary citizens cannot be considered officeholders and hence should be excluded from the community of mutually accountable officeholders. This interpretation is, however, reductive. While formal employment and corresponding legal obligations are frequent attributes of institutional belonging, they are far from necessary. Indeed, Ceva and Ferretti explicitly conceptualize institutions as objects of ethics, a point which is repeatedly emphasized by their characterization of an institution as a 'normative order of interactions' (e.g., pp. 11, 99), a web of 'multilateral deontic relations between officeholders' (p. 24). From this perspective, citizens are part of the normative order of embodied and interrelated rule-governed roles that constitutes democracy. The role of the citizen is fundamental to the raison d’être of democratic institutions. In fact, to be or become a citizen of a democratic state is precisely to obtain a particular normative status which confers political rights and duties that cannot be exercised by outsiders. Most emblematically, the institution of elections creates a normative superstructure that ties together and regulates the roles of citizens (qua electors) and representatives.Footnote 5

Even Ceva and Ferretti (p. 27) briefly hint at this possibility in a footnote, writing that the relevant 'community of mutually accountable members […] may extend to cover the citizenry at large when we consider a democratic governmental organization'. They reiterate the same point in a recent commentary on their book: 'within democratic institutions, citizens too act sometimes in an institutional capacity, for example, when they exercise their right to vote' (Ceva and Ferretti 2023, p. 12). Once citizens are (descriptively) recognized as role occupants within democratic institutions, Ceva and Ferretti’s theory of political corruption can logically be expanded in two significant ways. First, citizens can be conceptualized as members of the community of mutually accountable officeholders, and hence as the object (i.e., recipients or addressees) of public ethics. This means that, in the example above, the legislator is not just wronging their parliamentary colleagues, but also the citizenry as a whole. One the one hand, if citizens are kept in the dark about officeholders’ corrupt actions, their political participation will be grounded in ill-informed and manipulated judgments about public institutions. Hence, secrecy compromises citizens’ capacity to act on their institutional rights and duties. Furthermore, even in the absence of a 'surreptitious agenda' (Ceva and Ferretti 2017, p. 218, 2018, p. 6), the citizens are being wronged from the point of view of interactive justice, because the legislator is not abiding by the mutual duty of office accountability, which is the cardinal principle of public ethics.

Second, Ceva and Ferretti’s public ethics can now grant a more expansive and active role to citizens as agents in the fight against corruption, insofar as they are subjects of public ethics. This implies that the burden of ensuring that public institutions operate in a way that conforms with the three duties of public ethics no longer rests exclusively with officeholders or with external oversight bodies, but also, at least in part, with citizens. The exact demands of public ethics on citizens will vary according to the context and the type of corruption at issue. Clearly, individual citizens cannot be held morally responsible for the idiosyncratic and corrupt actions of individual legislators or teachers. Even if they did not personally cause or take part in corrupted practices, however, citizens still have a 'second person [moral] duty' (p. 184) to be vigilant and demand answerability from public servants. This duty does not require them to constantly surveil all officeholders, but simply to be alert and receptive if they ever come across instances of corruption. Nor is this duty imperative, as it may be morally permissible for citizens to counterbalance it with other relevant moral considerations stemming from their personal ethics. Moreover, this duty can be discharged in manifold ways that allow for varying degrees of demandingness. For example, citizens can contact the concerned officeholder directly, report the problem to the relevant institution, or engage in whistleblowing in public media. They can also decide not to vote for the corrupt officer or party in the future. Furthermore, if confronted with cases of systemically corrupt institutional practices, citizens must take on an interrelated responsibility. Even if they cannot be blamed for having caused or contributed to this systemic failure, citizens share (with each other, as well as with public servants) an obligation to restore the just normative order of interactions that has been subverted by morphological or systemic corruption. Individual citizens are not expected to personally initiate anticorruption procedures or to carry them out on their own. They are, however, required to acknowledge and support institutional acts aimed at correcting the deficit in office accountability.

Democratic Innovations as Anticorruption Tools

To recap, because citizens belong to the community of mutually accountable officeholders that constitutes democratic institutions, they are subject to Ceva and Ferretti’s public ethics. They should thus be included in those institutional actions and practices aimed at resisting, detecting, and responding to political corruption. In what follows, I provide an overview of how democratic innovations could help institutions and officeholders to adhere to public ethics and hence better realize their raison d’être.Footnote 6 Democratic innovations are defined as 'institutions that have been specifically designed to increase and deepen citizen participation in the political decision-making process' (Smith 2009, p. 1).

The first duty of officeholders is accountability. This means that they should preemptively put themselves in a position to be able to demonstrate that their actions are consistent with the logic of their mandate. Ceva and Ferretti argue that certain institutional practices can increase officeholders’ awareness of this duty and thus tackle corruption at its root. Codes of conduct, risk-management programs, and the rotation principle could be introduced at least for the most corruption-prone positions (pp. 182−183). Furthermore, sortition could be used to deal with certain decision-making situations where there is a high risk of corruption (Bagg 2022). The lottery principle is known for its 'sanitizing effect' on decision-making (Stone 2011, p. 36). This means that any reason, whether compliant or corrupt, is excluded as a motive during the decision-making process, minimizing the risk of deviations from the mandate. In contexts where the risk of corruption is particularly high, sortition can help exclude illegitimate influences, thus promoting integrity. Hence, some offices could not only be rotated regularly, as acknowledged by the authors (p. 183), but also assigned by lot to candidates on a shortlist who are preselected on the basis of their qualifications or electoral success.

The second duty of officeholders is to be answerable. They should be willing to publicly explain and justify their own actions if invited to do so by their colleagues or by an independent oversight agency, as well as to monitor the actions of their colleagues. The authors discuss at length the example of whistleblowers and other practices, such as random checks or internal audits (pp. 184−190). On top of this, democratic innovations that facilitate reflections and discussions could also be employed to monitor high-risk procedures or environments.Footnote 7 For example, the use of information technology (e.g., digital platforms and Blockchain registries) could make it easier for citizens to access relevant information, question officeholders, and seek clarification about suspicious situations. Generally speaking, many of the existing practices of consultation and co-government could help identify cases of political corruption. On the one hand, we can think of the public consultation procedures in Switzerland and Lichtenstein, the community planning processes in the United Kingdom, the public meetings and hearings in the United States, or even public opinion surveys. Deliberative–democratic practices such as citizen juries, citizen forums, deliberative days, or the citizen initiative review practiced in Oregon—could also prove to be useful consultative and anticorruption tools. On the other hand, co-governance practices—such as participatory budgets in Brazil, the youth forum in the European Union, or the citizen decision-making assemblies used in Ireland and Canada—could also play an important role in fighting corruption. All these forms of citizen inclusion facilitate dialogue and the circulation of information, and thus also the identification of corruption. Finally, forms of grassroots direct democracy—such as the optional referenda or popular initiatives practiced in Switzerland—could empower citizens to call for investigations into certain decisions or simply to draw public attention to institutions suspected of corruption.

The third duty of officeholders is to commit to anticorruption. They should self-correct in the event of corruption, working to restore the 'just normative order of interactions' (p. 191) with their colleagues. As revitalizing measures, the authors cite the four-eyes principle and the use of digital archives to track every decision-making procedure (p. 192). Once again, consultation and co-governance practices, particularly deliberative ones, could provide valuable support when it comes to developing corrective measures capable of remedying the interactive injustice caused by corruption.

Finally, single-issue legislatures (SILs) could also enhance the fight against the corruption of elected representatives and, more specifically, members of parliament. SILs are decentralized legislative bodies composed of several representative councils, each with independent jurisdiction over a single policy area, such as healthcare, public finance, defense, etc. (Guerrero 2014, 2020; Valsangiacomo 2021, 2022). The members of SILs are selected—via a lottery or an election—to represent citizens on a narrow and specific set of issues, very much in contrast to the existing model of generalist legislatures. The expected positive correlation between the use of SILs and decreased corruption of members of parliament is theorized by Guerrero on several grounds (Guerrero 2014, 2020). To begin with, when public debate is dominated by a handful of extremely salient topics, other important issues are left in the shadows, thereby increasing the risk of manipulation and corruption (Guerrero 2020, p. 864). SILs would reduce this risk by ensuring that the most important policy areas always receive a minimum degree of consideration. Of course, this would not eradicate corruption at the root, but it would at least make it easier to identify weak points in the decision-making process: A scenario where a member of the council for national defense has ties with a pharmaceutical lobbyist is less critical than one where the representative sits in the council for health, or one where the lobbyist works for the armament industry. Moreover, with SILs, representatives would acquire an issue-specific mandate, which could make it easier for citizens to understand and judge their actions. In turn, this lower epistemic burden could facilitate citizen oversight of elected officeholders, placing the former in a better position to demand accountability and answerability from the latter. Finally, in the case of lottocratic SILs, sortition would make any attempt to bribe members of parliament even more complicated and costly (Guerrero 2020, p. 866).

Conclusion

To conclude, a few caveats to the proposed expansion of Ceva and Ferretti’s theory should be mentioned. The first one concerns the issue of scope. While the discussion has largely focused on strictly democratic institutions and elected officeholders, most public servants are not appointed democratically (e.g., teachers, doctors, judges, bureaucrats, policemen). Think of the case of a public-school teacher who, in return for a favor from the parents, inflates a student’s grades, or who, on the basis of personal convictions, refuses to teach mandatory subjects from the national curriculum. This teacher is acting in an unaccountable way and violating the rationale of their mandate, thereby wronging their colleagues at the school. But does this interactive injustice extend to citizens too? Like all public institutions, public schools serve the needs and interests of the citizens. In particular, their raison d’être is to provide free education to citizens, whose children have a right to attend these public schools. This service is created and authorized by the citizens, or their political representatives, and is largely funded with their taxes. In this sense, it seems at least plausible to consider citizens as interrelated role occupants in relation to the institution of public schools. The same hypothesis might apply, by extension, to the many other non-governmental and non-representative public institutions that operate under a public mandate issued by democratically legitimate political authorities.

Second, once citizens are seen as subjects of public ethics, there is a theoretical possibility that they themselves might act corruptly in their institutional capacity as citizens and electors (Miller 2023). In this sense, the present contribution should be placed in the context of a broader theory of citizenship, which can shed light on the moral rights and duties of citizens, without reference to political corruption. Not surprisingly, a similar enterprise has already been undertaken to some extent, albeit with different aims, by Bocchiola and Ceva (2017). With the help of two theories of citizenship (republican and liberal), the authors explain which specific citizen rights are violated by political corruption. The final suggestion here is thus to further investigate which duties, in relation to political corruption, can be attributed to citizens on the basis of existing theories of citizenship.