Corruption and forms of government

Abstract

Among the causes of corruption there are or may be cultural, structural or institutional one. It is worth asking whether, among the latter, there is the one that distinguishes, within democratic states, between presidential and parliamentary forms of government. In the understanding that the comparison, applied to a given country, cannot be made on homogeneous magnitudes, because we are comparing a reality and a mere conjecture.

The author starts from the basis of Spain (a parliamentary regime according to the 1978 Constitution), where all indicators, regardless of their degree of reliability, show high levels of corruption, especially in the period of economic expansion 1996-2008.

The paper, which of course begins by highlighting the difficulty of offering a precise and universal concept of corruption, as well as the convergence between the two forms of government, concludes that the institutional causes of corruption do not necessarily include the form of government. In particular, he argues that parliamentarism does not necessarily mean an improvement over presidentialism.