I. Introduction

The analysis of structural corruption presented here is based on a conceptual approach for which corruption is a practice of domination. Corruption is conceived as

…a wide difference in power between the State and society -a way of accumulation of privileges through illegal or illegitimate means…-, which corresponds to institutional and social inertia, rather than to “personal volition of the actors involved”. In the dynamics of this difference in power, coming from a domination bond, the dominant agent is able to interfere immediately, and intentionally, “to worsen the situation of the dominated”. This interference is arbitrary since it depends on the will and personal desires of the dominant agent, who does not consider citizens’ objectives or goals. (^{Fragoso, 2019, pp. 6 and 7})

Based on the idea of freedom as non-domination, neo-republicanism argues that political power interference in citizen affairs is licit as long as it remains within legal framework and can be challenged; under these conditions, coercion cease to be arbitrary. The core of corruption, therefore, is a domination system that “prevents citizens from analyzing the reasons supporting norms and policies and, thus, define their interests and achieve their goals with allocated public resources” (^{Fragoso, 2019, pp. 11, 30}).

The purpose of this essay is to provide an explanation of the kind of responsibility citizens have for structural corruption, identified as repeated practices of domination. From a neo-republican perspective, fighting against corruption is not only a civic virtue, but a useful tool to preserve political freedom, that is, freedom that allows citizens to act and decide independently of arbitrary power will, whims or opinions (^{Lovett, 2018}).

The premise supporting our argument is that in repeated practices of domination, such as structural corruption, citizens who are not involved in corrupt transactions do have a political responsibility that their role as beneficiaries of their society impels them to assume. Political responsibility implies necessarily taking substantive actions against corruption and a public stance about the issue; it also entails coordination with others aimed at dismantling the very structure of corruption, that is, a process of self-inclusion of individuals in common life.

In the first section, we identify the components of a concept of structure to be applied to the features of corruption. In the second, we analyze the notion of guilt, the degrees of simple responsibility for an act of corruption, and why structural corruption involves political responsibility for those who have not committed any fault. Lastly, in a third section, we outline some ideas to undermine, from citizenship, the structure of corruption: identifying the agents with better capacities to combat the problem, activating the mechanism of receptive trust (a person’s desire for the good opinion of the others about him or her) and challenge the ideology sustaining the social system of corruption through institutional changes.

II. A Structural Problem

The literature about the causes of corruption points out two major trends. First, those considering corruption as an individual decision in which the social or political environment matters only to calculate the cost-benefit of such determination (^{Laporta, 1997, pp. 28-32}; ^{Nye, 1967} & ^{Rose-Ackerman, 1978}). Secondly, those arguing that corruption is the product of imperfect/insufficient laws or instruments to punish bribery and promote a sense of ethics (^{Klitgaard, 1988}; Johnston, 2005; ^{Rose-Ackerman, 1999}; ^{Gong & Ma, 2009}).

What we intend to demonstrate throughout this chapter, however, is the operation of a general background structure which is closely related to the link between the State and citizens, and to the practices, meanings, and appreciations that this link detonates. According to this vision, an ethical adjustment of individual attitudes and legal or administrative reforms make sense if they are aimed at transforming the structure allowing corruption and, in a second phase, if they outcome of the aforementioned structural change. At the same time, some aspects of the government-society relationship, at first glance, do not fit in corruption -such as mistrust and inequality-, but they trigger a political coexistence favoring ideologies and behaviors that exalt bribery and cheating; they are implicit factors in social interaction that have acquired solidity and become institutionalized, even informally -however contradictory it may seem (^{Giddens, 1984, pp. 23 and 24}). Considering from this broader perspective, corruption is a structural phenomenon not restricted to individual behavior and actions, which includes laws and institutions but goes beyond them -which does not imply that institutions do not have a preponderant role redefining structures.

Every social system¹ -corruption is one of them- is made up of activities that “human agents” reproduce in a certain time and place, and contains a structure, in a tacit way (Giddens, p. 25). Corruption is a social system with its own structure. In this analysis, we use the concept of structure proposed by Sally Haslanger. For her, the structures are “networks of social relations” that assume different forms according to the cultural and historical context; social relations, in turn, are shaped by practices and are not always intentional or conscious. Practices, in their simplest conception, are “interaction patterns” or behavior regularities; but only explanatory patterns of interaction, which Haslanger calls “robust”, can form a structure. In addition to the “robust” interaction patterns, there are two other types of regular practices: the “thin” ones and the “thick” ones. The “thin” regularities encompass a set of simultaneous and coordinated behaviors towards some end, such as obeying traffic signals. In the “thick” practices, in a subset of them, the participants know the “normative responsibility” of their behavior. The “robust” regularities are halfway between the “thin” and the “thick”: here, participants do not always not completely or not all of them, know or control the quality of their actions and their results. These kinds of regularities have in themselves material to be explained; as people build them collectively and unconsciously, some aspects of them that are not revealed a priori deserve to be discovered (^{Haslanger, 2014, pp. 21-23, 25}). However, “thick” practices of people in places of power support, encourage and justify “robust” practices of structural corruption. For this reason, the “thick” side, related to those who are fully aware of their corrupt behavior and act voluntarily, is also useful to understand the structure of this phenomenon.

Thus, a social structure consists of a set of relationships, in turn made up of repeated and rooted practices, understanding “practice” as a behavior depending on certain “cultural schemes in response to resources”. A structure, then, is made up of schemes and resources (^{Haslanger, 2015, pp. 3-4}).

Schemes refer to blocks of “culturally shared” concepts and norms through which “information is organized and interpreted, and action, thought and affection are coordinated”. A central feature of cultural schemes is that they take on the social meanings of a given context, that is, ‘the semiotic content of various actions, inactions, or status’. The meanings embedded in cultural schemes impact on the way individuals interact with each other, and on how aspects such as power, authority or opportunities are valued and awarded. Schemes can evolve over time and in accordance with contexts but are, in general, highly resistant to change (^{Haslanger, 2015, pp. 4-6}).

A case illustrating the function of cultural schemes in society -whose influence can be even stronger than that of the legal system in the behavior of citizens and state authorities- is the political scandal in Guatemala at the beginning of 2015. Media and judicial officials denounced a network of corruption in customs, in which businessmen bribed public servants in exchange of paying a much lower tax rate than the officially established. This case was called La Línea (The Line) because public servants communicated with businessmen through a special telephone line, by which an alternative payment of taxes was administered. These events became enormously relevant because the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG, by its acronym in Spanish) -instituted by the UN- made public thousands of telephone recordings that involved Vice President Roxanna Baldeti and President Otto Pérez Morales; both resigned from their posts under public opinion pressure and citizen demonstrations. In interviews for the media, president and vice president frequently pointed out that their actions had not been illegal, since the laws of their country had “loopholes” and were not clear enough about what was allowed or not. According to the statements of these officials, abuse of power stems from a certain ambiguity in the rules that regulate the conduct of public servants, so that, as long as this set of laws is not entirely explicit, those who hold public office will be pushed by an irresistible force to a fraudulent proceeding. In the words of the former president himself:

Here we could put a monsignor and the poor monsignor would not be able to control all the corruption that exists due to the system itself… The only thing the system is doing is dragging us along and no matter how much we do, for the government that arrives [sic] it will not be able to, really, it will not be able to… (^{Ángel, 2016, pp. 311, 319})

According to these Guatemalan authorities, corruption is neither a violation of the law nor a matter of ethical values. For Baldeti and Pérez Morales, the system itself induces corruption and makes it inevitable, and nothing can change until the system is transformed. Both public servants are right by pointing out a structure beyond personal ethics that works almost “automatically” and seems to be inescapable; however, for them, this structure or “system” is nothing more than the weakened and poorly assembled legal framework. There might be gaps in legislation allowing abuse of power not labelled as a crime, which in any case constitutes an act undermining the legitimacy of political power, which fits the category of corruption; but the normalization of bribery also implies shared social meanings like the idea that politicians or public servants might obtain additional resources to their salary at the expense of the public treasury and, if they do not do so (if they do not take advantage of the legal loopholes), they would be acting stupidly. This belief is not only behind the actions of the president and the vice president, but also behind the movements of lesser or very low rank officials: in the case of “La Línea”, the customs staff who did the “dirty” work, those who benefit from extra income, although in a much smaller amount than their bosses.

Resources, on the other hand, the second component of the structure, are things of any kind -human or non-human, animate or inanimate- with some value also of any kind -positive or negative. Resources are the material portion of structures, how structures are manifested in the world, or rather, their “putting into action” by means properly physical. In short, structures are not only mental constructions or meanings, but they also have a material side -which includes people’s skills, knowledge, or physical strength- given by resources. Resources, then, embody and justify schemes’ interactions in a social environment (^{Haslanger, 2012, pp. 415 and 416}).

In “La Línea”, for example, the “set of tools… material, [and human] goods… to perceive and respond in certain ways” is composed by devices and telephone lines, conversations on the phone, messages alluding to illegal transactions and encrypted communication codes behind them, “alternative” government paperwork endorsing the payment of taxes on certain products and the work of customs officials. In cases of corruption and other social injustices, resources also justify and reproduce the schemes at the level of material inequality. Following our example, the small customs officer of “La Línea” receives a very low wage and needs more money to provide his family with a decent way of life; he is not conscious that the ethical integrity of his political community is more relevant than covering up bribes to obtain financial compensation. Several public servants might have become involved in “La Línea” under threat of dismissal or other types of coercion, without any means or protection to denounce. In addition, these people’s professional training may be so basic that they may have little chances to find a job with a similar or higher salary than the one they receive in the customs sector. In this sense, their decision, far from being completely free, is constrained by a series of conditions related to one of the components of the structure, resources, which reinforce certain meanings, ideas, and ways of thinking (schemes).

In this way, collective cultural schemes and the organization of resources are interdependent, in a causal and constitutive sense, and create a structure only when mutually nourished and implicated. A structure, that is, a series of behaviors (practices) subject to schemes (meanings) responding to resources, holds up the social system where corruption has become endemic. In this context, citizens internalize social meanings allowing them to use public resources to fill in their economic or status needs; in this process, they barely question their sense of ethics or moral probity, and their respect for the law.

The structure of the social system of corruption is also based on a practice called particularism. Particularism is defined as “the regular distribution of public goods on a non-universalistic basis that reflects the vicious sharing of power within those societies”. In particularism, the State’s relationship with individuals depends on their social status. Citizens do not expect to be treated with justice and equality by public authorities: a similar treatment is only expected between people of the same layer of society. When bribery is the norm and not the exception, particularism establishes “the culture of privilege”, leaving out universalist principles, namely, equality of treatment and access to resources regardless of the group or class to which people belong. In particularist orders, citizens are better or worse treated, or have more or less access to public goods, depending on how close or how far they are from power. Therefore, individuals fight each other to approach and be welcomed by privileged groups, in what has been called “competitive particularism” (an intermediate phase between patrimonial and universalist political organization). Due to collective internalization of the idea of unequal treatment, participation in “competitive particularism” is more plausible than striving to transform state-citizenship bonds. Alina Mungiu-Pippidi asserts that in developing countries corruption is an eminently political problem related to distribution of power -instead, in developed countries, corruption refers to individual cases of violation of law. In some states regarded as democracies for periodic elections, modernity -a clear border between public and private spheres, and fair distribution of public goods among equal citizens- has not been firmly established, hence public administration is still considered a source of rent extraction (^{Mungiu-Pippidi, 2006, pp. 86, 87, 91 and 92}).

Once explained the practices, schemes, and resources of structural corruption, we shall make some clarifications. First, corrupt behaviors largely guided by shared social meanings (cultural schemes) do not place the causes of corruption in cultural traits of a given society -not in cultural traits as permanent values determining collective destiny.

Although structure affects people coexisting and acting, social practices shape structure and rebuild it in turn (^{Haslanger, 2011, p. 19}). Due to its dual nature, structure is not opposed to human agency, on the contrary, encompasses it. Thus, structure’s cultural features do not refer to petrified “ultimate values”, but to cognitive patterns, skills, semiotic content to interpret reality; all these aspects can be subverted by institutions and rules that claim different practices for, over time, inducing new value guidelines (^{Rabotnikof, 2003, p. 54}).

Before concluding this section, we would like to mention the concept of corruption of Enrique Camacho Beltrán and Francisco García González, a rule-based concept through which it is argued that corruption is not a cultural phenomenon. These authors argue that “corruption establishes parallel rules or conventions to the ones dictated by the law… which undermines the law’s authority by making them, at least in practice, optional”. From this point of view, in countries where rules are clear, pertinent, and acts of corruption effectively punished, people are much less likely to think of bribery as a way of protecting their rights (^{2019, pp. 1342, 1356 and 1357}). Nevertheless, this valuable concept is not completely disconnected from a cultural mechanism, it works instead as a complement in the case of structural corruption. In systemic or pervasive corruption, the set of rules parallel to formal legislation -the schemes-, as well as governmental influence and power pacts allowing impunity -schemes in which resources are also involved-, make corruption a political issue, one of beliefs and rooted behaviors, and not a matter exclusively legal.

III. Responsibility, Citizenship, and Structural Corruption

The purpose of this section focuses on a possible answer to the question of citizens’ responsibility for structural corruption, whether they are direct participants or not. It should be noted that the concept of citizenship is limited here to the individual who belongs to a political community associated with a national state, holder of rights and subject to a legal framework; this notion includes citizens residing outside the national territory, since their actions or omissions could also affect simple or structural corruption. It is also important to stress that, in its most classical political meaning, citizenship aims at individuals’ participation in public life through deliberation (Cortina, pp, 30, 39), nevertheless, meddling in political affairs is typically not allowed for non-citizens. According to neo-republican notion of corruption, freedom as non-domination, the basis for combatting structural corruption, entails citizen’s definition of the reasons behind the laws and the questioning of the content and quality of norms. Therefore, embroidering on the responsibility of migrant or non-national population exceeds the scope of this research.

Schemes, an essential part of structure, are deep, difficult to identify and extirpate; people could find themselves trapped in a network of meanings, not being able to modify contents, even if they do not share the beliefs sustaining an ideology and a set of practices. We have pointed out that structures shape individual practices -that structures are social practices themselves-, however, people’s practices also make up structures, reproduce them and could even modify them. Structures are both: the vehicle of the practices that builds social systems, and their effect. Therefore, agents and structures are interdependent, however, their link does not imply dualism (two separated principles), but rather a duality (two characters in the same entity) -what Giddens calls “duality of structure” (^{1979, p. 69}; ^{Haslanger, 2012, p. 404}). According to this notion, in contexts of strong social constraint, in which individuals seem to “have no choice”, actions are not completely diluted, namely, individuals continue to be agents, do not stop exercising some kind of power (^{Giddens, 1984, p. 15}). In other words, structure is not an impulse of nature or a mechanical traction that impels people to act in a certain way, as alleged by the heads of the Executive in the Guatemalan case to justify their conduct.

This concept of duality confirms that there is really no dichotomy between personal responsibility and structural causes of a phenomenon, since understanding a social system functioning requires the analysis of both elements: structure configuring practices and citizens who shape the structure with their practices. In her proposal about the kind of responsibility members of a society should assume for issues of social injustice, Iris Marion Young argues that in theoretical debates, personal responsibility is usually linked to work and family. Citizens are considered responsible just for keeping a paid work to support themselves and their dependents, without being helped by other people or by State institutions. This individualistic and self-sufficient approach excludes responsibility for people with whom one shares different social processes. From Young’s point of view, individuals should be held responsible not only for the sequels of their decisions and actions, but also for the effects of the social processes in which they take part (2011, pp. 10, 11 and 39). This approach to responsibility was intended for social justice issues: poverty, discrimination, well-being. Young’s approach to studying responsibility for structural corruption is useful and relevant because it underlines individual’s role for power relations in society, in particular, the significant difference of power between the State and citizens, which is the result of a domination practice such as corruption. Then, the question to be answered is how agents who are not directly involved in corrupt transactions could be responsible for corruption in a structural sense; in this regard, the responsibility for permanent and extended corruption for those not directly involved in a causal and direct way must be explained only in terms of political responsibility.

Before fully addressing political responsibility, we shall make some clarifications about the difference between guilt and responsibility. Young recovers Hannah Arendt’s concern for this conceptual distinction in her careful reading and analysis of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, a work examining the problem of guilt for massive extermination of Jews in Nazi Germany. In social and political events, orchestrated by a huge and complex bureaucratic machinery - such as the Jewish holocaust -, causing serious damage to large numbers of people, the blame of specific actors is diluted amidst a mass of individuals who collaborated actively or passively. For this reason, Arendt affirms that the guilt many young Germans claimed to have in the second half of the 20th century for the Third Reich’s politics is superfluous -“a «cheap sentimentality» rather than the more difficult and dangerous work of politics”. Blame extended to the population in general ends up acquitting the true perpetrators, those who planned and/or executed the offense (^{Young, 2011, p. 85}). Likewise, in an environment of endemic corruption, specific culprits should be identified and judged for each act of bribery, even if all members of society contribute, in their own way, to preserving that situation. Blame, according to Young, must be attributed to personal and individual actions of the agents: they should be condemned for their specific conduct; here, guilt is not linked with any kind of responsibility.

Before outlining the nature of political responsibility, it will be explained the meaning of simple responsibility, and then indicate why, from our perspective, a direct act of corruption -which implies guilt- entails responsibility in a broad sense, but with certain nuances depending on an individual’s tasks according to their social position. Philip Pettit was chosen to delineate the different sorts of responsibility because his civic republicanism allows to analyze corruption more as a form of relationship between society and the State, as a way of coexisting in the public sphere, and less as an absolutely personal decision or as unconnected individual acts.

But why do these two theoretical approaches, Pettit’s and Young’s, work together to explain responsibility for structural corruption? Both, theory of oppression and republicanism, frame citizens’ actions in their relationship with political power, with the State. Both emphasize the role of individuals, but always in their nexus with people in the collective and with power. In this sense, structural corruption, from Young and Pettit, is conditionally related to a context shaped by hierarchical relationships to which individuals should respond considering the effect of their actions on other people, beyond their personal and immediate interests. This implies, in the case of Young, assuming responsibility for the system of oppression and, in the case of Pettit, combatting domination.

According to Philip Pettit, ascribing responsibility, “in a relevant sense”, means that an agent “is a candidate for blame” if what he did is “something bad” and “a candidate for approval and praise” if what he did is “something good”. In this sense, assigning responsibility is not limited to identifying someone’s role as the causal agent of a result (Pettit, 2007, pp. 173 and 174).

Simple responsibility must be ascribed for a specific act -not for a state of affairs- and, rather than pointing out who provoked an effect, it is aimed at developing a brief analysis to resolve whether a citizen had the required conditions to be blamed or praised for such an effect (Pettit, 2007, p. 174). Although simple responsibility in its negative aspect always involves guilt, Pettit insists that responsibility chiefly seeks to set aside blame for a moment and to grasp the underlying motives, circumstances, institutional failures, among other factors, related to the environment (or to the subject in connection with his environment) that led to a certain action and its results. Through such analysis, we can understand how, despite an adverse context, a citizen acted commendably; here, responsibility is assigned in a positive sense, for having avoided damage or circumvented guilt. From this angle, the notion of responsibility fulfills an evaluative function: denoting whether a conduct was good or bad after a study of the context, alluding thus to a “historical” responsibility (^{Cane, 2002, p. 57}). The analysis to determine if an individual is candidate to be responsible must consider the three following factors (Pettit, 2011, p. 155):

Both guilt and simple responsibility gravitates around the “self”; for this reason, both correspond to moral and legal spheres, and both are assigned by specific acts (^{Young, 2011, p. 78}); we insist, however, while guilt is inclined to causality and punishment, simple responsibility entails an evaluative task of the context which led the individual to a certain action.

On the other hand, political responsibility refers to an individual or a group’s (a nation, a corporation) ability to publicly acknowledge or declare before others about their actions or omissions for the world’s state of affairs. As opposed to guilt or responsibility tout court, to be politically responsible does not require to take part directly in any action, it is only needed that agents actively or passively “support governments, institutions, and practices [that drive] to commit crimes and wrongs” (^{Young, 2011, pp. 91 and 92}).

According to Iris Marion Young, exercising political responsibility means associating, with other individuals, in public actions to intervene and transform a social order as citizens,² far from adhering to “the interests or wishes of State officials in their bureaucratic functions” (^{Young, 2011, p. 89}). In ideal terms, political responsibility should be a constant principle from which the members of a society must not abdicate; however, treating political responsibility as a duty implies very high standards of action and normative demands that few individuals can meet. It is frequently argued that in many scenarios, political responsibility simply cannot be assumed, such as cases of structural corruption. Here, people feel trapped by a phenomenon that exceeds them because they alone cannot change the relation between the State and citizenship. Nevertheless, the concept of political responsibility -as Young emphasizes- is not oriented to isolated actions; on the contrary, it specifies that institutional change and power transformation will only take place through the joint and organized action of citizens. Even so, there are those who have greater resources and tools to lead or participate in collective action.

In the box below, the reader will find a synthesis of the concepts of guilt, simple responsibility and political responsibility that may be useful to discuss the role of these three ideas in the study of corruption and structural corruption.

To end this section, based on Young’s typology on the forms of relation between individuals and a crime carried out by the State (2011, p. 81), we show how the notions of guilt, simple responsibility and political responsibility of agents are applied to corruption in four areas:

IV. Gnawing the Structure of Corruption

The concept of simple responsibility fulfills an evaluative function since it allows us to classify past conduct as good or bad and understand context’s anomalies behind it. The notion of political responsibility, on the other hand, has a normative and future-oriented function, indicating how people should behave to curb structural corruption (^{Cane, 2002, p. 57}). This section outlines ideas that could guide some strategies to attack the structure of corruption. These ideas are grouped into three themes: degrees and types of political responsibility, a mechanism of trust responsiveness, and critique of ideology.

V. Final Considerations

Structural corruption consists of a series of practices of domination -based on a considerable difference in power between the State and citizens- that are deeply embedded in the behavioral habits of people and institutions. These practices are reproduced on a daily and repeated basis by virtue of the two components that operate in their structure and that sustain each other: schemes and resources.

People directly involved in an act of corruption are guilty in the causal sense and have different degrees of simple responsibility according to their position in the government scale of charges, according to the information available to them to evaluate the context, and their degree of autonomy to make decisions. For structural corruption, political responsibility can only be attributed to individuals who are not involved in corrupt transactions but who passively accept the shared meanings (schemas and ideology) that strengthen the social system of corruption, as well as the materialization of its schemes. Political responsibility lies with citizens making up a society as “conscious moral agents” who should care about unjust actions implemented by state institutions harming their fellow citizens, and themselves tangentially.

Assuming political responsibility for structural corruption requires speaking out publicly against acts of bribery and organizing with others to act for the transformation of institutional practices. Political responsibility points to elicit changes in schemes and in distribution of public goods, promote public trust and the social importance of individual prestige, namely, the good opinion of others for our praiseworthy actions. It is important to note that not everyone is politically responsible in the same way or to the same degree.

And, although all citizens have a duty to combat structural corruption, not everyone can do so in the same way and to the same extent.

Finally, it should be noted that the Guatemalan social movement of 2015 against “La Línea”, although successful, focused on an isolated case within a system of organic corruption. This social movement, some scholars assert, was supported by the US embassy and by a fraction of the Guatemalan business community tired of opportunism and the excessive ambition of the political class of military origin that made of power a business. Social demonstrations also appealed to citizen interest to battle widespread corruption in society.⁶ Notwithstanding that the president’s and vice-president’s crimes were penalized, punishment was consumed more by circumstantial factors than by a strategy to combat the very structure of the problem that included a profound criticism of particularist schemes, based on substantive adjustments to public policies -greater legal, economic and rights equality.

Why then is “La Línea” a normatively powerful example? First, because “La Línea” illustrates arbitrary interference, in accordance with neo-republicanism, of very high-level public officials to the detriment of citizens, affecting their rights and options. Second, because it exemplifies how particularist meanings and codes -proper to the structure, according to our adaptation of Young’s term- operate in high spheres of power, and how they are transmitted to public servants of lesser rank and to population. And third, because it shows that it is possible to reduce the difference in power between the State and citizens through agency and joint action -in the case of “La Línea”, urban population called for public demonstrations, to which other sectors of society gradually joined, under the motto “#RenunciaYa”, based on inquiries made by the CICIG (^{Torres, 2015, p. 5}).