This month has seen the unexpected and extraordinary toppling of Najib Razak in Malaysia after a massive corruption scandal. Last month the Armenian prime minister was forced out by protesters demanding justice, the rule of law, and clean government.
In the past 18 months, we have seen corruption issues upset governments and even lead to imprisonment for presidents in Peru, Romania, South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Israel and South Korea. Voters on every continent are fed up.
Corruption is as old as politics itself, as are citizens’ efforts to root it out. But today anti-graft campaigners have new tools powered by technology. This phenomenon shows us the upside of mass data collection and social media, both of which are facing regulatory crackdowns and public scrutiny.
The Open Government Partnership, an interstate compact created by eight countries in 2011, invites members to make anti-corruption commitments in broad categories that include measures to fight political, bureaucratic, private sector and cross-border wrongdoing. Changes to law enforcement can make the biggest difference as a fresh generation of prosecutors and judges drive investigations and convictions.
Equally important, however, are public attitudes: fatalism versus resistance and activism. Communications scholars are well familiar with the phenomenon of a majority believing itself to be in the minority, or vice versa. A related concept is the “spiral of silence”.People fear isolation and tend to express their views only if they conform with the prevailing climate of opinion, at least within a particular group. This can affect election outcomes and opinion polling.
But social media can be a useful antidote. Posts, likes and retweets are all things that tell ordinary citizens not only that their voices are being heard, but that their fellow citizens are marching alongside them. Think about the framing of the #MeToo movement as a statement of support to women brave enough to out themselves as victims of something often seen as shameful and even dangerous to admit. It is a message of solidarity and strength in numbers.
We saw the same power of social media in the political uprisings that started in Moldova, the first “Twitter revolution” in April 2009, and was followed by the Iranian “Green revolution” a month later, through the upheavals of the Arab spring. Each harnessed the power of individuals realising they were not alone, and not in fact a minority but a majority, or at least a significant plurality.
Scholars who focus on systemic corruption — including Raymond Fisman of Boston University and Miriam Golden of the University of California, Los Angeles — focus on how to shift from a corrupt equilibrium to a clean one. As they point out, residents of corrupt countries are certainly aware of the wrongdoing. But they are not aware of their fellow citizens’ determination to fight it.
Quite the contrary; when corruption is systemic, it is rational even for individuals who would prefer to be honest to engage in wrongdoing so as not to avoid the “sucker’s pay-off”, in the language of game theory.
Social media can shift that equilibrium one like and one share at a time.
The example of how to confront systemic government corruption suggests that the best answers to other urgent problems — “fake news” and the deliberate dissemination of manipulative disinformation to disrupt democracy, for example — may not be to crack down on the perpetrators.
Instead, we must show beleaguered citizens, who feel that they are at the mercy of political forces beyond their control, that they are in fact the majority. Turn the spiral of silence into a wave of affirmation.
The writer is president of New America and an FT contributing editor
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