Political Corruption

The paper sketches two main traits of interpretations of political corruption and of the conception of its wrongfulness within the contrasting normative accounts of public order in both republican and liberal terms. The authors analyze the limitations of both approaches and postulate that political corruption occurs when a public official makes a distorted use of entrusted public power for the pursuit of a surreptitious agenda. The authors argue that viewing political corruption as such allows for capturing a wide array of cases, and allows for identifying and explaining cases of individual and institutional political corruption. Additionally, they argue that the postulated definition of political corruption has the possibility of highlighting the distributive patterns that political corruption can cause in terms of access to material resources, as well as to citizens’ rights and opportunities.