Political Corruption and Democratic Representatives - Emanuela Ceva and Maria Paola Ferretti: Political Corruption: The Internal Enemy of Public Institutions. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 232.)

Abstract

Ceva and Ferretti's book offers an innovative account of political corruption as “a form of unaccountable use of entrusted power” (14). Accordingly, an officeholder's conduct counts as corrupt when in her institutional capacity she pursues an agenda whose rationale cannot be vindicated as coherent with the power mandate specified by her institutional role. Among the numerous advantages of this persuasive view, one is that it offers a nonmoralized definition of corruption with explanatory and discriminatory potential (21). Another point of strength is that the authors outline an original path to anticorruption centred on developing a public ethics of office accountability. To ensure public institutions’ good functioning, officeholders must exercise their power mandate in accordance with institutions’ raison d’être and engage in practices of mutual answerability, as they are all accountable to each other in virtue of the interrelatedness of their institutional roles (25).