| The end of World War II marked a revolutionary period in history as numerous colonies achieved sovereign statehood and adopted democratic institutions. Sadly, the high hopes of many nationalist movements in the new states were soon dashed. The specific institutions that the new democracies adopted resembled those of different advanced states in form but not in performance. In practice, corruption, nepotism, bribery, and ultimately, coups d'etat or revolutions undermined the democratic principles espoused by nationalist movements.;What conditions underpin endemic corruption, and why does it persist more acutely in some countries than others? Why do democratic institutions, such as elections, often fail to curb corruption? Why do some authoritarian regimes develop into kleptocracies while others evolve into developmental states? In this dissertation, I build a theory based on insights from the literature on principal-agent relationships to explain the origins and persistence of corruption. I argue that the level of corruption in a polity is determined not only by the absence or presence of competitive elections, but also by the number of dimensions, or major cleavage issues, that structure competition among forces attempting to influence public policy.;In particular, I suggest that non-corrupt behavior is self-enforcing when competition to influence policy is uni-dimensional for two reasons. First, competition along a single dimension prevents politicians from significantly deviating from their substantive campaign promises such that they sell out a large number of their constituents. Second, free from the problem of ensuring that politicians remain relatively faithful to their campaign promises, constituents can better focus on the agency problem of policing corruption.;The theory of corruption presented in the dissertation is applied to two countries, the Philippines and Chile, under both democratic and authoritarian regimes. The four cases are compared to each other in order to determine the influence of regime type and the structure of competition to influence policy on corruption. |
