Radical Right: Voters and Parties in the Electoral Market

China he argues that the communist party has become a rapacious and self-serving elite accountable only to itself, profiteering at the expense of hundreds of millions of helpless Chinese citizens. Because each of the four syndromes of corruption has its own systemic logic and implications and differs in crucial ways from the others, the remedies for each must differ as well. Johnston criticizes simplistic anticorruption measures that may have little impact and can be strategically manipulated by politicians. It makes little sense to call for leaders to show political will to limit corruption when they themselves are the source of state capture and other corrupt acts. Similarly, naive moralizing about a system of laws backfires when the law itself is used as a veil to obscure corrupt shemes. Contemporary corruption is sophisticated and involves a host of “illicit connections between wealth and power” (195). One important proposition that needs more careful exploration involves Johnston’s suggestion that over time societies transition from one type of corruption to another, and that this development may have positive political consequences. Maybe so—but these transitions may may also have consequences harmful to the consolidation of democracies and systems of justice, such as increasing popular cynicism about the workings of government. In addition to its conceptual and empirical contributions this work excels as a sourcebook and overview of the existing literature on political corruption, reflecting Johnston’s lifework in this field. Yet, as he also notes, much more comparative research on corruption is urgently needed. Indeed, corruption studies can well serve as a key to a new perspective on comparative politics analysis.