Separating the Siamese Twins of ‘Good Governance’

The idea of corruption has long been associated with secrecy. In this paper we investigate the importance of transparency to corruption and find that corruption can not only exist in an environment of end-to-end transparency, but it can also flourish therein. Indeed, end-to-end transparency appears to provide enormous advantages for the application of grand scale corruption, as it provides both a false sense of legitimacy and a way to interface freely with legislators. As such, we theorize that institutions looking to bend legislation in their favor will increasingly act entirely in the sunshine. We see this empirically and we color our argument with salient examples. We also explore examples of zero cost corruption and running tallies, both important results of transparency which allow special interests to gain low cost leverage over legislators.

By Nsubuga, Ranalli & D’Angelo – November 8, 2017