Abstract
Numerous studies have linked a range of economic, social, and institutional variables with corruption in government. Yet, most of this literature overlooks the management of public officials themselves. This is a relevant omission: almost all corrupt exchanges involve public officials. This article reviews studies—36 in total—that do address civil service management and anti‐corruption. It finds that prior works assess a narrow set of civil service management structures. Meritocratic recruitment and, less robustly, pay levels have been associated with lower corruption. By contrast, robust evidence on how corruption relates to other established public personnel management areas—such as distinct pay structures (rather than levels), promotion, transfer, and job stability practices—is largely unavailable. The article thus calls for research assessing the effects of a broader set of civil service management practices to gain a deeper understanding of corruption, and how to curb it.
Highlights
Since the early days of public administration as a research field, corruption containment has been among the central aims civil service reforms have sought to achieve (Wilson 1887)
The bulk of the corruption literature does not address the structure and management of executive government, instead focusing its search for corruption correlates on society, the economy, and macro-political institutions
Our review comprises the critical assessment of 36 studies. We identified these studies as follows: first, we searched the online archives of nine highranking journals in political science and public administration for all papers published since 2000 that had corruption in their titles or abstracts
Summary
Since the early days of public administration as a research field, corruption containment has been among the central aims civil service reforms have sought to achieve (Wilson 1887). As we shall argue in this review article, empirical evidence on how the organization and management of civil service systems relate to corruption remains scant. Most experimental work is published in economics journals, while articles published in public administration and political science are divided almost evenly among mostly observational quantitative and qualitative studies.
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