Why Dutch officials take bribes: a toxic mix of factors
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Why Dutch officials take bribes: a toxic mix of factors Madelijne Gorsira 1
& Wim
Huisman 1 & Adriaan Denkers 2 & Linda Steg 3
Accepted: 21 September 2020/ # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The aim of this study was to gain an in-depth understanding of the factors that underlie public officials’ engagement in corruption. Given the significant public interest, we gained permission from the Dutch Ministry of Justice to analyze multiple confidential criminal files of cases in which Dutch public officials took bribes from private companies. Extending previous research, we analyzed three types of factors, individual factors, organizational factors, and factors related to the relationships between corrupt officials and their bribers. Moreover, for the first time, we considered the interplay between these three types of factors. The results suggest that public officials’ engagement in bribery is rooted in a combination of individual, organizational and relationship variables that influence and reinforce each other, creating a toxic mix. This implies that the battle against bribery can be fought on multiple fronts, whereby changing one critical factor may cause the mix to lose its toxicity.
Introduction A public official who takes bribes from private companies in exchange for awarding favorable contracts puts government decisions ‘up for sale’. This endangers fair competition, fair prices, and trust in the government as a whole [1, 2]. To effectively counter corruption in the public sector, insight into the factors that explain it is vital. The present study aims to gain a better understanding of factors related to actual corruption that occurred in the Netherlands in the past decade. The aim of this study is to better understand why Dutch public officials engage in corruption. Many academic disciplines have proposed explanations for corruption. However, the vast majority of empirical research has focused on finding explanations for * Madelijne Gorsira [email protected]
1
Department of Criminal Law and Criminology, VU University Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1105, Amsterdam 1081 HV, the Netherlands
2
Erasmus School of Law, Section Criminology, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Campus Woudestein, Burgemeester Oudlaan 50, Rotterdam 3062 PA, the Netherlands
3
Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences, Department of Social Psychology, University of Groningen, Grote Kruisstraat 2/1, 9712 TS Groningen, Netherlands
Gorsira M. et al.
corruption on the national level [3, 4]. While such studies may provide insight into why corruption is widespread in some countries and less prevalent in others, they do not explain variations within countries. In particular, these studies do not provide insight into why corruption is more likely to occur in some organizations than in others, why within organizations some people engage in corruption while their colleagues do not, nor why certain employees engage in a corrupt collaboration with a particular other. Thus, besides country-level factors, also organizational factors, individual factors and r
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