Appropriate for us. One of the concerns of the framers of the U.S. Constitution was corruption. They sought to contain it, which helps explain the design of the decentralized system it created.
Here's a look at how they did so.
- Click here for the article.
Harvard Law Today: You recently published a new working paper on anticorruption reform in U.S. history. What kinds of corruption was the United States facing during the late 19th and early 20th century, and how systemic was it?
Matthew Stephenson: Corruption was a serious problem in the United States in the late nineteenth and twentieth century. Indeed, one of the things that was so striking to me, as a non-historian who focuses mainly on corruption in the modern developing world, was how much the corruption problem in the U.S. a century and a half ago resembles the systemic corruption we see in modern developing countries. I don’t want to overstate the point. There are also a lot of important differences. But in the U.S. in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, we find a number of forms of corruption that will be quite familiar to students of contemporary corruption.
First, there’s a lot of corruption associated with political machines, particularly though not exclusively in urban areas. The political machines provide jobs for supporters, who use their positions to generate illicit income for themselves and the party bosses, and mobilize voters to support the candidates backed by the machine. The machines also provide tangible benefits to voters to ensure their support.
Second, while the political machines tended to dominate local governments, the practice of buying and selling public offices, or using government appointments to purchase political support, was widespread at the national level as well. Third, wealthy business interests corrupted politicians to receive favorable treatment by the government, for example by offering legislators bribes, sometimes in the form of company shares or special privileges, to provide special benefits to companies, or to look the other way when private interests were siphoning off taxpayer funds. These sorts of corruption often involved government-supported infrastructure projects, especially railroads, and natural resource extraction.
