One crucial action to take is making elections cheaper by limiting electoral expenditure by both the candidates and the political parties; if you ban only one category, spending will simply shift from one part of the other. A ban on political advertising is also important in making elections cheaper in today’s media-heavy world. Strengthening of the welfare state (which, of course, requires an improvement in government revenue) will also help reduce electoral corruption by making the poor less vulnerable to vote-buying. Higher taxes will also enable the government to improve the salaries of its officials, making them less tempted by venality. Of course, there is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem; without first recruiting good people, to whom you have to pay good salaries, it may not be possible to increase the tax collection capacity. Thus the first place to clean up is the revenue-collection services. The best example is the British excise service in the 17th century (collecting indirect taxes). Meritocracy, unheralded inspections and clear rules were introduced to great effect in the excise service before other parts of the British government. It not only increased government revenue but also later served as a template for improving the customs service and other departments. On the issue of government tax capability in general, see J. di John (2007), ‘The Political Economy of Taxation and Tax Reform in Developing Countries’ in H-J.Chang (ed.), Institutional Change and Economic Development (United Nations University Press, Tokyo, and Anthem Press, London). For further details on the reform of the British excise service, see Nield (2002), pp. 61–2.
See chapter 3 for the effect of trade liberalization on government finance in developing countries.
This point is made very well by Hodgson & Jiang (2006).
J. Stiglitz (2003), The Roaring Nineties (W. W. Norton, New York and London) provides detailed discussions of these cases.
See the articles in the special issue on ‘Liberalisation and the New Corruption’ in IDS Bulletin, vol. 27, no. 2, April 1996 (Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex). On the Russian case, see J. Wedel (1998), Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe (St Martin’s Press, New York).
http://www.usaid.gov/our_ work/democracy_and_governance/.
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/f/franklin_d_roosevelt.html.
M. Wolf (2004), Why Globalisation Works (Yale University Press, New Haven and London), p. 30.
As cited in J. Bhagwati, In Defense of Globalisation (Oxford University Press, New York, 2004), p. 94.
N. Bobbio (1990), Liberalism and Democracy, translated by Martin Ryle and Kate Soper (Verso, London).
M. Daunton (1998), Progress and Poverty (Oxford University Press, Oxford), pp. 477–8.
S. Kent (1939), Electoral Procedure under Louis Philippe (Yale University Press, New Haven).
M. Clark (1996), Modern Italy, 1871–1995, 2nd ed. (Longman, London and New York), p. 64.
On the record of ARA in Uganda and Peru, see Di John (2007).
More recent examples include the right to a clean environment, the right to equal treatments across sexes or ethnicities, and consumer rights. Being more recent, the debates surrounding these rights are more controversial and, therefore, their ‘political’ nature easier to see. But, as these rights are becoming more widely accepted, they look increasingly less political – especially witness the way in which environmental rights, which were only supported by the radical fringe a few decades ago, have become so widely accepted in the last decade or so that they do not look like a political issue any more.
For example, when a law regulating child labour was proposed in the British Parliament in 1819, some members of the House of Lords objected to the law on the grounds that ‘labour ought to be free’, despite the fact that it was an extremely mild law by the standards of our time – the proposed law was supposed to apply only to cotton factories that were considered most hazardous, while banning only the employment of children under the age of nine. See M. Blaug (1958), ‘The Classical Economists and the Factory Acts: A Re-examination’,
