Low-Trust and High-Trust Equilibria in Politics: Party Patronage and Political Corruption as Coordination Games

Abstract

Political corruption as well as party patronage are generally said to be “self-sustained phenomena” (della Porta/ Vannucci 1999: 255): “Corrupt exchanges facilitate the emergence of new norms, and these norms make corruption more and more attractive” (ibid.). The same is said to hold true for patronage practices: “the transformation from a ‘classical’ to a political bureaucracy is, once initiated, an irreversible and quickly escalating process” (Seemann 1978: 24–25; my translation). Political patronage is said to be an “action-reaction process” leading to ever “higher levels of party membership in the top bureaucracy” (Mayntz/ Der-lien 1989: 400) and provoking increasingly fierce “orgies of reciprocal gouging” (Moe 1990: 246) whenever a change in government occurs — with adverse consequences for the ‘governability’ of the whole political system. Similarly, corruption is said to undermine the trust so essential for the proper functioning of a polity, leading inescapably to higher levels of corruption: the “loss of trust within a political system caused by corruption leads to a further spread of corrupt practices” (Borchert 1999: 9; my translation). Patronage- and corruption-practices create a “spiral of malfunctioning” (della Porta/ Vannucci 1999: 256) that will only come to a halt “when resources are depleted” (Bicchieri/ Duffy 1997: 479). According to this ‘vicious-cycle’-view on patronage and corruption, once a political system is infected with mutual mistrust and ‘deviant political behavior’, the sickness will quickly spread and soon infect the entire body politic.