Varieties of Corruption: The Organization of Rent-Seeking in India
3600 Market Street, Suite 560 (5th floor)
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104
12 noon to 1:30 p.m.
Please RSVP to casi@sas.upenn.edu by Friday, September 27 - seating is limited
About the Speaker:
Jennifer Bussell is the Gruber Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research seeks to understand the foundations of democratic politics in economically developing states. She is interested in the effects of diverse formal and informal institutional constraints – federalism, coalition politics, and corruption – on the behavior of politicians in electorally-competitive environments. Her regional focus is South Asia, and she has also conducted fieldwork in Africa and Latin America. She is the author of Corruption and Reform in India: Public Services in the Digital Age (2012, Cambridge University Press).
About the Lecture:
How is corruption organized? We have few insights into how corrupt activities are structured and the ways in which rents are, or are not, distributed across various actors. Dr. Bussell will analyze the organization of corruption through evaluation of how bribes are perceived to be shared by state and non-state actors. She will first present a new, three-level typology of corruption emphasizing the substance of the benefit for which a bribe is paid, then draw on original experimental data from surveys of Indian politicians and bureaucrats to assess how the distribution of rents across actors varies as a function of the type of corruption, an individual’s position and role in government, and the degree of government centralization. She aims to show that there is considerable perceived division of rents across actors, and this distribution of rents is strongly associated with the type of corruption, though not with the level of centralization.