Regulation and Corruption: Claims, Evidence and Explanations

Abstract

Does regulation cause corruption? In a field dominated by economics, the public administration literature has opened the peripheral view of social scientists by bringing evidence to bear on three different claims: that regulation causes corruption but under certain conditions; that it is the quality of regulation to hinder corruption; and, that anti-corruption regulation can aggravate the problem of corruption. After having reviewed and discussed the claims, we turn to recent advances in the literature and make suggestions for future research. We make the case for drawing more attention to regulatory policy instruments and point to the crucial stage of rulemaking. Next, we introduce novel ways to model causality and identify how regulation may explain corruption, contrasting the statistical worldview with set-theoretic explanations. Finally, we critically discuss the state of play with measures of corruption and how to improve.