Corruption's Challenge to Global Governance: A Selective Balance Sheet

Abstract

Democracy is generally considered to be the most successful form of government. Yet we remain uncertain about its relationship to modernization. What is essential is not democracy but good governance, according to Alexander Pope's challenge. Political Elasticity (PE) theory provides a way of linking public administration to economic success and, in so doing, explaining Asian economic progress in the absence of liberal democracy. Using terminology based upon PE theory, Vietnam, China, and Singapore, in comparison to Ghana, Russia, and Jamaica, have been successful by manifesting classical democracy, rather than liberal democracy, primary, rather than secondary corruption, and elastic, rather than inelastic decentralization. At the conclusion, the experience of South Korea is presented to show that, in the process of reducing corruption by improving governance, it has been able to achieve globalization success, despite using an unorthodox economic approach.