In this book, we shall look at corruption primarily as the maldistribution of federal resources. There are other ways to look at corruption (e.g., in the administration of justice or corruption at the state level), but that shall not be our focus here. Instead, we shall examine how agents of the government—in particular the president and the Congress—distribute scarce resources in ways that run contrary to the public interest. In focusing on this, we shall be getting to the heart of the republican political philosophy articulated by James Madison.
We Americans take our government to be a republic, but in point of fact we have never been able to check corruption effectively. On the contrary, it has spread over time. Why has our republican rhetoric not matched civic reality? Answering this question is our purpose in the pages that follow. We shall show that political corruption is a consequence of the growth of that government, specifically growth beyond the original boundaries established by the Framers of the Constitution. As the government expanded beyond its initial purpose, the system of checks and balances meant to keep corruption in line began to break down, in some cases even making a bad situation worse.
Here, we shall examine corruption from an institutional perspective, rather than an ethical one. In other words, we will not explain corruption as a consequence of too many bad guys and not enough good guys, but rather of structural defects in the constitutional regime itself.
While making our argument, we embrace a Madisonian treatment of the subject. To be clear, this is not to imply that Madison’s take on the Constitution was the only one, or that it was the correct one. Almost as soon as the Constitution was ratified, there grew a wide divide among those who were crucial in its construction and ratification. Madison, for instance, squared off against George Washington and Alexander Hamilton on questions regarding public finance; and this was just a few short years after he had been closely allied with them. All three men were integral in the design of the new government, and for them to disagree as they did suggests that legalistic assertions about the Constitution’s “correct” meaning are often facile. It meant different things to different people—then and now. Therefore, we are not privileging Madison’s view as an empirical matter; we are not saying that Madison understood what the Constitution really said while Hamilton and Washington did not. We are rather asserting that his larger theory about republican government, and how he applied it to the Constitution, was insightful, and that we would be wise to heed his counsel.
Heavily influenced by Calvinist theology, Madison broke with classical political theorists to argue that civic virtue could not explain why republican governments flourish or perish. Indeed, his lack of faith in public morality is one reason he dedicated so much time to developing sturdy governmental structures; he believed that they were the only sure guards against corruption that a true republic could ever enjoy.
According to Madison, corruption is intimately connected to factionalism. He begins his famed Federalist #10 by worrying about the “violence of faction,” a very evocative phrase, and claiming that the principal job of a “well constructed union” is to “break and control” this danger. He explains:
By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.
This gives us a very useful definition of corruption: it occurs when the government does violence to the public interest or individual rights by allowing factions to dominate public policy for their own ends. It is incompatible with a republican form of government, and so its suppression is at the very heart of the Madisonian project.
Importantly, in the Madisonian schema, corruption is not limited to venality, although it certainly includes it. This might come as a bit of a surprise. After all, Madison opens Federalist #10 by talking about violence, so it is easy to figure that corruption is caused by bad people who hurt others for their own ends. Yet later on Madison implicates the whole human race in factionalism, arguing that the potential for corruption is, in fact, “sown into the very nature of man.” He goes on:
A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.
So, everybody is capable of factionalism. Indeed, people are wont to war against one another even when there are no real issues to divide them. In those cases, they will just make something up!
Factionalism is unavoidable, particularly in a form of government that relies upon what Madison calls the “republican principle,” or the idea that rulers should be chosen by the citizenry. If people can be riven by factionalism, then so too can their representatives in government. In that case, per Madison, “the most numerous party, or, in other words, the most powerful faction must be expected to prevail.” This helps explain why so many republics had failed up to that point in the world’s history; the very idea upon which they were premised sowed the seeds of their own destruction. A few years prior to the Federalist essays, Madison wrote a short treatise called Vices of the Political System of the United States, where he poses this paradox:
In republican Government the majority however composed, ultimately give the law. Whenever therefore an apparent interest or common passion unites a majority what is to restrain them from unjust violations of the rights and interests of the minority, or of individuals?
Typically, Americans today take majority rule as a normative standard, as if it necessarily signals the true public interest. Yet Madison clearly rejects this principle, though he admits that majority rule remains essential to republican government.
Worse, Madison sees another path by which corruption in a republic can occur: legislators are too often subject to forces other than the interests of their own constituents. In the Vices, Madison claims:
Representative appointments are sought from 3 motives. 1. ambition 2. personal interest. 3. public good. Unhappily the two first are proved by experience to be most prevalent. Hence the candidates who feel them, particularly, the second, are most industrious, and most successful in pursuing their object: and forming often a majority in the legislative Councils, with interested views, contrary to the interest, and views, of their Constituents, join in a perfidious sacrifice of the latter to the former.
This is a prototypical explanation of what rational choice theorists have since labeled the “principal-agent problem.” In other words, how can voters get their representatives to do their bidding in government? That is easier said than done; as Madison notes, concern for the public interest is often a weak factor in the considerations of legislators. And the people as a whole are not always a reliable guardian against legislative malfeasance:
A succeeding election it might be supposed, would displace the offenders, and repair the mischief. But how easily are base and selfish measures, masked by pretexts of public good and apparent expediency? How frequently will a repetition of the same arts and industry which succeeded in the first instance, again prevail on the unwary to misplace their confidence?
So, republican government is prone to factionalism and corruption. First, we have the potential for the majority to demand policy deleterious to the public good. Second, we have legislators who are prone to put their own interests ahead of the common interest. Little wonder that, up to that point in world history, a true republic was more a myth than reality.
Yet Madison was committed to turning the theoretical into the actual. He believed that majority