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).
Ceva and Ferretti's account concerns all public institutions, including political institutions at the basis of the democratic process, as the book's frequent references to campaign finance and representatives’ conduct show. However, while their view opens a fascinating path for analyzing political institutions, the authors do not explicitly develop the implications of their account in this regard. My contribution aims to caution against two possible difficulties that such a development may occasion. First, because parliaments’ raison d’être seems the object of disagreement, the definition of representatives’ power mandate may be either too or not enough demanding and, as a result, the notion of political corruption is either over- or underinclusive. Second, because representatives seem to be accountable to different actors (i.e., their party, their peers, their constituency, their voters, the citizenry at large), practices of answerability may be more difficult to implement than expected.
In Ceva and Ferretti's view, officeholders’ power mandate consists in the rights and duties that they acquire in virtue of their institutional role so that their interrelated action can sustain their institution's raison d’être (95). This in turn comprises the “normative ideals that motivate its establishment and, consequently, its internal structure and functioning” (56). While the authors reckon that political institutions’ raison d’être is likely complex and dynamic (89), as well as subject to reasonable disagreement (104) and contestation (110), they seem to assume that political institutions, much like other state institutions, do have a distinctive raison d’être, though perhaps one that is not always publicly acknowledged by all. While in her comment Alice el-Wakil points out that political institutions’ raison d’être is highly contested, this intuition can be radicalized by noting that politics itself is constitutively open-ended and that it is part and parcel of politics to determine what its raison d’être is.Footnote 1 If this is the case, normative prescriptions linked to officeholders’ power mandate cannot be grounded prior to the political game but are always the product of power struggles among political actors.
Even if one rejects this objection, the fact of reasonable disagreement still makes it problematic to pin down one specific raison d'être so that it is possible to derive officeholders’ power mandate from it. To see in greater detail how this plays out with a key political institution, let us consider the case of parliaments in liberal democracies in the three following examples.
(1) Sarah's campaign has been generously funded by the coal industry and as a representative she pushes this industry's agenda;
(2) Nilde is a member of a workers’ party, and she always prioritizes their interests in her legislative activity;
(3) Peter has been elected on a left-leaning program, but he ends up pursuing a different agenda because socioeconomic conditions have changed.
According to some, parliaments are supposed to advance the interests of all citizens through an agonistic process of negotiation among representatives, each defending some sectional interests of society.Footnote 2 From this raison d’être it seems to follow that Sarah is not doing anything wrong, so long as she publicly declares it. However, if one views parliaments and each representative in them as meant to advance the common good or all citizens’ interests equally,Footnote 3 Sarah's agenda cannot be vindicated as coherent with her power mandate, and her actions pursuing that agenda should be considered corrupt. Similarly corrupt would turn out to be Nilde's conduct if she prioritized workers’ interests. Curiously, while we may disagree over whether Sarah's example counts as an instance of corruption, I take it that Nilde's conduct does not intuitively strike us as corrupt.
Other scholars allow representatives to define their view of the common good based on their partisan commitments,Footnote 4 so that each representative's power mandate would derive from her own party program. In this case, however, Peter's conduct, which is based on a new agenda compared to the one he was elected on, would count as corrupt, and while he may seem to betray the trust that his voters have put in him, I do not think we would intuitively call his actions corrupt. These difficulties also arise if we endorse a formalistic view of parliaments’ raison d’être as simply entailing some form of legislating activity.Footnote 5 If representatives’ power mandate is simply to make the laws, regardless of the goals they should have in mind when they do that, then even if Sarah did not tell her voters that she supports the coal industry, she would not do anything wrong. And this seems implausible.
In sum, reasonable disagreement about parliaments’ raison d’être yields substantially different, incompatible, and at times implausible, charges of corruption.
Ceva and Ferretti may reply that their public ethics of office accountability is exactly devised to handle such cases: when an institution's raison d’être is unqualified and controversial, and the terms of an officeholder's power mandate are open to contestation, her duty of accountability requires her to engage in practices of mutual answerability. These practices are not simply meant to retrospectively assign responsibilities for wrongdoing (129), but are also aimed at “fostering an increased normative alignment in interpreting how officeholders should discharge their power mandate between those who hold answerable and those who are held answerable for their uses of a power of office” (141).
El-Wakil seems to suggest that citizens, as outsiders, are only owed ex post answerability rather than prospective accountability that serves as guidance for officeholders’ conduct. We can, however, read Ceva and Ferretti as including citizens in the practices of mutual answerability that are meant to reach normative alignment on a shared interpretation of representatives’ disputed power mandate. This second reading does not dispense the authors from one further problem, though: To whom are representatives answerable? According to the classical principal/agent model, representatives are accountable to the public at large through the mechanism of elections.Footnote 6 Depending on the electoral system, representatives’ reelection will hinge on a specific constituency (in single-member district), or on a specific party structure (in multi-member district with closed party list), or on a larger portion of party voters (in multi-member district with open primaries). These are all different subgroups of citizens, who may have different interpretations of their elected officials’ power mandate. Hence, on the one hand, representatives will effectively be accountable to different subgroups of the citizenry, based on constituency apportionment.Footnote 7 On the other, the interpretation of parliaments’ raison d’être and representatives’ power mandate is such a central issue in democratic life that all citizens should be involved in its determination. This second difficulty of applying Ceva and Ferretti's account to political institutions like parliaments unveils how difficult it is to establish clear practices of answerability as second-order processes meant to deal with the first-order difficulty of determining parliaments’ raison d’être.
In conclusion, while Ceva and Ferretti's framework is a perfect fit for administrative institutions with clearly designed raisons d’être, this contribution casts some doubt over its application to political institutions, such as parliaments. And yet, it also shows how thought-provoking and path-breaking their analysis of corruption and their theory of office accountability are for all political theorists reflecting on democratic institutions.
