Combating Political Corruption: The Case of Armenia in the Context of the United Nations Convention Against Corruption
Endemic corruption has been a destructive legacy of the communist rule inherited by most successor states of the Soviet Union. While some post-Soviet states have managed to significantly reduce corruption, others are still among the worst performing count
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oduction The United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC)2 (2003: III) describes corruption as an insidious plague which hinders the economic development of countries, undermines democracy, cripples prosperity, and poses other threats to human security to flourish. Corruption has always existed in every society, and it has been characterized by different connotations in various historic periods. In the post-Cold War era, it has emerged as a core policy concern; therefore, the phenomenon has received wide academic attention. As Heywood (1997, p. 418) notes, in the mid- 1990s, it became apparent that “no nation was immune to the corrosive impact of political corruption.” Though there is a vast amount of literature on corruption, there is no universally accepted clear-cut definition. Instead, there are numerous definitions of corruption proposed by known institutions, which try to describe the essence of a corrupt act. The World Bank defines a corrupt act as offering, giving, receiving, or soliciting, directly or indirectly, anything of value to influence improperly the actions of another party. Transparency International (TI) defines it as the abuse of entrusted power for private gain. As to classical definitions of corruption in literature, the one by Joseph S. Nye (1967, p. 966) is worth mentioning here: “behavior which deviates from the formal duties of a public role because of private-regarding (personal, close family, private clique) pecuniary or status gains; or violates rules against the exercise of certain types of private gaining influence.” This definition encompasses behaviors such as “bribery (use of a reward to pervert the judgment of a person in a position of trust); nepotism (bestowal of patronage by reason of ascriptive relationship rather than merit); and misappropriation (illegal appropriation of public resources for private-regarding uses) (Nye, 1967, p. 966).” The definition resembles
S. Galstyan (*) Theodor-Heuss-Kolleg, the Robert Bosch Stiftung and MitOst Association, Berlin, Germany © Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018 P. C. Kratcoski, M. Edelbacher (eds.), Fraud and Corruption, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92333-8_12
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the one by Dwivedi (1967) which besides abovementioned behaviors also covers other unfair means adopted by government employees and the public alike in order to extract some socially and legally prohibited favors. Most of the definitions indicate that there are two sides involved in a corrupt act, namely, the public and the private sectors. As the emphasis of this chapter is on political corruption, attention is therefore primarily devoted to the public sphere. A considerable amount of literature on corruption highlights that in developing and post-Soviet countries it has destructive effects. Scholars, such as Tanzi (1998), Amundsen (1999), Stefes (2006, 2008), and Olken and Pande (2011), consider corruption as something endemic primarily in former communist states and in the developing world. As Tanzi (1998, p
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