Corruption and the Architecture of Paramilitary Bureaucracies: Comparing the American and the Russian Police

Abstract

Despite institutional change, corrupt networks have been tremendously successful enterprises at the expense of the public good; returning and evolving with new elements. For public sector corruption to prosper, bureaucracies must possess certain structural characteristics which facilitate criminal behavior. Although public organizations have been largely studied, it is less clear how their structure creates opportunities for deviance. Given the understudied field of paramilitary bureaucracies and the deleterious consequences of corruption for socioeconomic development and (inter)national security, we seek to understand: “How and why does the structure of police organizations facilitate corruption?” To address this question, we draw upon organizational, covert networks, and organized crime theories, and test them using a conditional uniform graph test on a dataset that includes the formal hierarchical structures of the modern police forces in Russia and the United States. We show that despite operating in largely different institutional regimes, the Moscow and the Los Angeles police department exhibit similar structural characteristics. Police bureaucracies’ structures are efficient in performing complex tasks, but are highly conducive to concealment, creating numerous temptations and opportunities for corruption. Lastly, we show that police organizations are scale-free networks which makes them extremely vulnerable to corruptive pressures.