Who Corrupts the Corrupt? From the Individual Corruptor to the Selection and Reproduction of Corrupt Actors

This article, the seventh and final contribution to Part I of a research series on corruption, examines the mechanisms through which corrupt individuals and the networks supporting them are selected, promoted, protected and reproduced. Moving beyond the conventional representation of corruption as a relationship between someone offering undue benefits and someone possessing the power to grant them, the article analyses how corruption can also be used to accumulate power, build relationships of dependence, reward complicity, penalise integrity and reproduce extractive minorities. It also examines the role of intermediaries, clientelist relationships and mechanisms governing access to opportunities for corruption. The analysis connects these mechanisms with macroeconomic and systemic corruption, institutional capture and transformation, and the normalisation of exceptional practices, understood as a process through which repeated unlawful conduct, in the absence of effective corrective action, may become institutionally tolerated. The article concludes the first part of a seven-article research series that documents and explains the shortcomings of three decades of anti-corruption efforts through an examination of their macroeconomic and systemic consequences, three major anti-corruption gaps, the limitations of prevailing definitions, the results achieved, and the mechanisms through which corruption is reproduced. The scale of corruption, institutional transformation and their economic and social consequences raise a broader historical hypothesis: Has a Corruption Revolution taken place? Such a transformation could help explain the processes of decline identified by numerous scholars and could have consequences comparable to, or even greater in certain dimensions than, those of the Industrial Revolutions, but predominantly in the opposite direction. Part II of the series will examine real-world cases that may contribute to a better understanding of corruption and the mechanisms underlying processes of decline.