1Four Lessons about Corruption from Victorian Britain* Christopher Kam Department of Political Science University of British Columbia [email protected] Draft: 17 September 2007 © 2007 Christopher Kam 1. Introduction Free and fair elections are integral to representative democracy, but putting these institutions in place is not easy. Apart from the possibility that democratic losers may resort to violence to reverse their defeats after the election, they also have incentives to bribe voters and buy elections beforehand. Corruption of this latter sort transforms elections into venues of economic rather than political exchange, and because it is so firmly rooted in narrow self-interest, it is extremely difficult to stamp out. This was certainly true in Britain, where electoral corruption persisted throughout the nineteenth century despite repeated efforts at reform. The British experience is hardly unique: Developing democracies go through similar growing pains with traditional patron-client relationships giving way not to free and fair elections but to corrupt electoral competition. The advantage of studying the British historical record is that we know that eventually electoral corruption was suppressed. Moreover, the nature of the corruption and the efforts taken by the Victorians to combat it are exceptionally well-documented. Examining these records suggests four cautionary lessons about the nature of electoral corruption. These lessons press home the fact that that institutions are sometimes consequences rather than causes of behavioural change (Grief 2006), and that as result we often fail to identify which institutions “matter” and how. Until we have a clear view of how we came to have free and fair elections in advanced democracies like Britain, it will be hard to implant them in developing democracies. * Please feel free to cite this work, but bear in mind that it is very much a work in progress; the results presented here remain tentative and subject to revision as my data collection efforts progress.22. Bribery, Treating, and Elections Petitions in Victorian Britain The three Reform Acts passed in Britain in 1832, 1868, and 1885 were hugely important in transforming Britain from a corrupt, clientelistic oligarchy into a modern democracy. The Acts are chiefly remembered for extending the franchise, but the redistribution of seats and redrawing of constituency boundaries that accompanied the Acts were equally critical to Britain’s democratic development. These redistributions acted to free the borough seats of the aristocratic influence that controlled the surrounding counties and open them to electoral competition, albeit to visibly corrupt electoral competition (Gash 1953, 127; Hanham 1959, 263).1 Three types of corruption prevailed in borough elections: bribery, treating and colourable employment. Bribery involved a direct payment in cash or kind to the voter, treating was the free provision of food and drink to voters, and colourable employment, the practice of engaging voters in nominal jobs. All three activities were grounds to void an election result from at least 1696 onwards (O’Leary 1962, 8). Even so, the readiness with which candidates engaged in these practices is reflected (albeit imperfectly) by the fact that between 1832 and1885 over 15 percent of election contests resulted in a petition (i.e., a legal action disputing the conduct of the election), the figure rising as high as 30 percent after the 1852 election.2 Only with the passage of the 1883 Corrupt and Illegal Practices Act did election petitions and corruption tail off. It is not obvious what caused the decline in electoral corruption or precisely when the decline in corruption began. That said, the witness (voters, agents, candidates) who testified before the parliamentary committees charged with hearing these election petitions provided detailed information on the costs and methods of 19th century electioneering, and these data (on the overall costs of election campaigns and the prices of bribes, for example) afford some insight into how electoral corruption was suppressed.3 Before considering these data, however, let me sketch the 1 Boroughs were (roughly speaking) urban areas, though they ranged in nature from provincial villages to large cites. County seats were (again, roughly speaking) larger, rural seats. 2 On average, 1/3 of these petitions were dismissed, 1/3 were withdrawn, and 1/3 succeeded, that is, the election was either declared undue and the seat awarded to one of the losing candidates, or voided altogether and a new election held. Over time, however, the success rate increased to about 50 percent. 3 One might reasonably worry that these election petitions are subject to some form of selection bias. The financial demands of petitioning may actually moderate any selection bias, however. The high cost of a petition probably ensured that mildly corrupt elections were not frivolously petitioned against, whilst the great expense attached to the worst cases of corruption would probably have left the parties financially incapable of petitioning. This logic suggests that the material brought before the petition committees was drawn from the middle of the distribution of corruption, cases in which corruption was serious enough on the winning side to induce the loser to gamble on a petition and yet not so extensive or serious as to exhaust the parties financially.3standard (economic) model of corruption. My intent is not to set up a straw up man to knock down (though the brevity of the sketch might leave that impression), but to identify the set of assumptions and arguments that many current scholars tend to accept as starting points for further research on corruption. These assumptions and arguments can then serve as vantage points with which to consider the data. 3. The Logic of Corruption The standard economic treatment of corruption takes corruption as a by-product of the state’s monopoly on the allocation of public goods (Lederman, Loayza, & Soares 2005). This monopoly provides elected officials (and bureaucrats) with the motive and means to extract rents from citizens and firms who require those public goods. Corruption is, on this view, a supply-side problem (Kurer 2001), i.e., provided to the public by those who control the state. The logical solution to this problem is to expose politicians to electoral competition.