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Integrity Systems, Values, and Expectations: Explaining Differences in the Extent of Corruption in Three Spanish Local Governments a
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Fernando Jiménez , Mónica García-Quesada & Manuel Villoria a
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Department of Political Science and Administration , University of Murcia , Murcia , Spain
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Institute of Political Science Louvain-Europe, Catholic University Louvain , Louvain , Belgium c
Department of Public Law and Political Science, King Juan Carlos University , Madrid , Spain Published online: 14 Jan 2014.
To cite this article: Fernando Jiménez , Mónica García-Quesada & Manuel Villoria (2014) Integrity Systems, Values, and Expectations: Explaining Differences in the Extent of Corruption in Three Spanish Local Governments, International Journal of Public Administration, 37:2, 67-82, DOI: 10.1080/01900692.2013.836666 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01900692.2013.836666
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International Journal of Public Administration, 37: 67–82, 2014 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0190-0692 print / 1532-4265 online DOI: 10.1080/01900692.2013.836666
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Integrity Systems, Values, and Expectations: Explaining Differences in the Extent of Corruption in Three Spanish Local Governments Fernando Jiménez Department of Political Science and Administration, University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain
Mónica García-Quesada Institute of Political Science Louvain-Europe, Catholic University Louvain, Louvain, Belgium
Manuel Villoria Department of Public Law and Political Science, King Juan Carlos University, Madrid, Spain
Our article attempts to explain the differences in the extent of corruption related to urban planning in three Spanish local settings, all of them being important touristic resorts: Marbella, a municipality in the Costa del Sol with a very high level of corruption; Lanzarote, in the Canary islands with a high incidence of corruption despite its pioneering role in establishing innovative policies to limit urban (touristic) growth; and Menorca, in the Balearic Islands where corruption has been very low. We argue that the explanations focusing on the different features of the local integrity systems (LISs) face difficulties to account for the variations in the incidence of corruption across these Spanish municipalities: despite some interesting differences, the LIS of the cases considered is basically quite similar. Thus, we turn to the analysis of social values and social expectations on the political system by local citizens, testing whether a different set of citizens’ values and expectations on the behavior of local decision makers may explain this local variation in corruption practices. The article presents the results of a public opinion survey on values and expectations administered in the three cases. Against our expectations and the literature on the topic, no significant difference in shared social values and expectations has been found. The article shows that, as for an empirically tested explanation of the cross-local variations in the degree of urban corruption in Spain, the jury is still out. Keywords: corruption, integrity systems, social expectations, urban planning
INTRODUCTION Although corruption has been assumed to exist mainly in developing countries, indicators such as the Corruption Perception Index of Transparency International (TI) or the Good Governance Indicators of the World Bank show that political corruption affects many European countries. A recent report by TI on anti-corruption measures in 25 European states has given further qualitative evidence “that a number of countries in Southern Europe – Greece, Correspondence should be addressed to Fernando Jiménez, Department of Political Science, University of Murcia, Ronda de Levante, 10, Murcia 30008, Spain. E-mail:
[email protected]
Italy, Portugal and Spain – have serious deficits in public sector accountability and deep-rooted problems of inefficiency, malpractice and corruption, which are neither sufficiently controlled nor sanctioned” (TI, 2012, p. 3). This systematic assessment shows that European countries “that perform worst on global indicators measuring the ‘control of corruption’ also run the highest budget deficits” (TI, 2012, p. 10), indicating that the impact of corruption reverberates throughout the economy of a country, as it affects the allocation as well as the distribution of national resources (i.e., Ades & Di Tella, 1997; Della Porta & Vannucci, 1997; Dreher & Herzfeld, 2005; Drury, Krieckhaus, & Lusztig, 2006; Gupta, Davoodi, & Alonso-Terme, 1998; Hodgson & Jiang, 2007; Kauffman, Kraay, & Zoido-Lobatón, 1999; Mauro,
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1995; Rose-Ackerman, 1978, 2001; Tanzi & Davoodi, 2001; Thomas et al., 2000; Wei, 1997). Whilst those indexes and reports focus exclusively on corruption at the national level—that is, affecting national institutions and actors—practitioners and analysts agree that corruption problems in Western countries exist also at the subnational level (see Andersson, 2008; Council of Europe (CoE), 2000, 2007, 2009; Erlingsson, Bergh, & Sjölin, 2008). This is a sentiment that a majority of Europeans share. According to the Special Eurobarometer 325 (2009), 81% of the European citizens believed in 2009 that corruption exist at the subnational level, an increase from 75% in 2008. Overall, respondents from the South and East of Europe believe that corruption is widespread in national and local institutions: 9 out of 10 respondents in Greece, Bulgaria, Hungary, Malta, Cyprus, Slovenia, Portugal, and Romania, and more than 8 out of 10 in Italy and Spain, consider that this is the case. Corruption may affect certain regions within a country more severely. A recent survey by the Quality of Government Institute canvassing 34,000 European Union citizens in 172 regions in Europe shows Spain, Portugal, and Italy are countries where the interregional variation is perceived to be high, so certain regions in these countries are considered to face more cases of corruption than others (Charron, Lapuente, & Rothstein, 2013). Moreover, corruption may be present in certain policy sectors within a country and absent in others. Indeed, while Spain and other European countries present low degree of corruption in the education system, urban planning has been particularly susceptible to malfeasance (Villoria & Jiménez, 2012). Taking account of these elements, our article seeks to explain the variations in the incidence of corruption in urban planning policies at the local level in Spain. While the decade from 1997 to 2007 witnessed the spread of corruption in local urban planning in Spain, the cases here present important variation in the presence of illegal practices: Marbella, a municipality in the Costa del Sol with a very high level of corruption; Lanzarote, in the Canary islands, with a high incidence of corruption despite its pioneering role in establishing innovative policies to limit urban (touristic) growth; and Menorca, in the Balearic islands, where corruption, according to objective data (judicial statistics and media attention) and citizens’ perceptions, has been very low. We ask why corruption has been different in these locations even though they all are important touristic resorts facing similar strong demands for building new hotels and apartments. The article examines the role of formal institutional features and social attitudes to contain corruption in a sector that, despite its importance, has received reduced scholarly attention. It shows that the explanations focusing on the different institutional features of the local integrity systems (LISs) face difficulties to account for the variations in the incidence of corruption across these three locations: despite some interesting differences, the LIS of the cases considered
is basically quite similar. In this context, the case of Menorca is particularly puzzling, because no significant evidence of corruption has surfaced despite its weak integrity system. As for the citizens’ values and expectations on the behavior of local decision makers, the article presents the results of a public opinion survey on values and expectations administered in the three cases. Against our expectations and the literature on the topic, the cases show no significant difference in shared social values and expectations. Thus, neither set of explanations seems to have sufficient power to explain the variations in corruption at the local level in Spain. The inconclusiveness in the results suggests the need for further research on the causes explaining variations in local urban corruption. For this, we argue that research designs comparing most similar cases that nonetheless accrue different results seem to be especially pointed to improve the existing explanations, which, in our cases, have been insufficient. The article proceeds in various steps. We first present an examination of the theories that have explained corruption and, subsequently, the characteristics of our research and an overview of the extent of political corruption in Spain during the decade of the building boom. Next the three case studies are discussed, focusing on the cross-local variations in the degree of malfeasance. Subsequently, the limitations of the two sets of explanations are examined, plus an advance of tentative future lines of enquiry is presented. The conclusion takes stock of the findings and argues that examining variations in corruption at the local level might provide challenging and grounded cases where to test and improve our theoretical knowledge on the causes of corruption.
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK Attempts at answering “why” corruption occurs have developed into an extended literature pointing at numerous and diverse sets of independent variables. Some studies have built relevant systematizations of factors (De Graaf, 2007; Jain, 2001; Lambsdorff, 1999; Pellegrini & Gerlagh, 2007; Tanzi & Davoodi, 2001; Treisman, 2007), some have adopted cultural and anthropological approaches to the subject (see, inter alia, Banfield, 1958; Del Monte & Pagagni, 2006; Mocan, 2004), as well as psychological and criminological explanations (i.e., De Graaf & Huberts, 2008). Others have focused on elements of social and economic structure, such as inequality (Rothstein & Uslaner, 2005), or explored the influence of combinations of economic and cultural factors such as Protestantism and capitalism (Sandholtz & Koetzle, 2000). Nonetheless, most of the studies focusing on explaining corruption stem from rational choice institutionalism and the principal–agent model of corruption (Klitgaard, 1988; RoseAckerman, 1978, 2000), and from collective action theory (Rothstein, 2011). For scholars following a rational choice institutional approach, corruption is the result of deficient
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institutions unable to disincentive corruption, be it by reducing the benefits of engaging in corrupted practices, and/or by increasing the chances of being caught and the disciplinary sanctions issued against corrupted agents. Considering actors as rational, corruption acts are understood to be the result of information and interest asymmetries between an agent acting in his/her self-interest and a principal (Rothstein, 2011; Teorell & Rothstein, 2012). Thus, an analysis of the institutional framework to combat corruption, as well as its actual functioning in practice, can aid to explain the presence and the degree of corruption in different settings. The policy recommendations to reduce corruption according to this approach have been the introduction of formal mechanisms to monitor more closely the agents’ behavior, to increase information and transparency, and to improve accountability, with however very modest success (Persson, Rothstein, & Teorell, 2010, p. 3). Collective action approaches are based on the idea that rationality is highly dependent on shared expectations about how other individuals will act (Ostrom, 1998). When a large enough number of actors are expected to play foul, everyone has something to gain personally from acting corruptly (Persson et al., 2010, p. 6). Thus, these approaches have gathered and examined information on collective preferences as expressed in surveys on opinions and attitudes, and paid attention to possible contradictions and conflicts between individual behavior and collective expectations (Jiménez, 2011; Jiménez & Carbona, 2012; Persson et al., 2010; Villoria, Van Ryzin, & Lavena, 2013). Developing from these approaches, the article examines two sets of explanations. First, those concerned with the workings of the existing LIS in the three municipalities. Following closely the insights from rational institutionalist approaches, LIS explanations maintain that corruption stems from deficient institutional mechanisms inbuilt in the relationship between political representatives and citizens, which limit the opportunities to control the illegal activities of representatives seeking to maximize their own preferences (see Huberts, Anechiarico, & Six, 2008; Six & Huberts, 2008). The article examines whether variations in the LIS of Marbella, Lanzarote, and Menorca might be at the basis of their differential degree of local corruption. Second, the article analyses the presence of different public values and expectations on the functioning of local politics and policy-making, which takes stock of the theories of collective action. The article compares the values and expectations of citizens from the three cases to examine whether the higher presence of corruption in Marbella and Lanzarote than in Menorca might be related to lower expectations from the citizens on the functioning of their local institutions and the behavior of their local representatives, a circumstance that may have generated a vicious circle of corruption in Marbella and Lanzarote, where higher perceived corruption might be linked to an increased acceptance of how unavoidable is its occurrence (Rothstein, 2011).
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EXAMINING LOCAL URBAN CORRUPTION The present analysis integrates a wider three-year research project examining the factors that explain local urban corruption in Spain, financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. Some of the research findings have already been published in articles where we have discussed different elements explaining the occurrence of local urban corruption in Spain: the design and functioning of the Spanish model of town planning (Jiménez, 2008, 2009), the relevance of informal institutions (Jiménez et al., 2012), the role of local monitoring and disciplinary action (Garcia-Quesada, Jiménez, & Villoria, 2013), and the economic and political context of the corruption practices (Romero, Jiménez, & Villoria, 2012). Whilst undertaking this study we have identified, however, that although local urban corruption has been a generalized phenomenon across Spain, it has not affected all areas equally. For this reason, we consider necessary to carry out an examination of three areas of the Spanish coast—Marbella, Lanzarote, and Menorca—where the pressures to expand building zones has been high (Romero et al., 2012), but where the incidence of corruption practices has been different. The cases of Lanzarote and Marbella are two salient cases of local urban corruption in the Spanish geography, whereas Menorca is one of the rare cases of the Spanish Mediterranean coast where no significant corruption practices have been identified. It is worth noting that, given the illegal and secret nature of corruption, it is impossible to be absolutely certain that malfeasance has not taken place in any given place. Indeed, the absence of objective evidence of corruption can never be considered equal to the absence of corruption. Our analysis, however, has brought us to contact and interview a wide range of people, citizens, and representatives from all three places, who have all agreed that Menorca has not faced major problems of corruption and that, when illegal activities have been identified, they have been rapidly investigated and aborted. Whilst acknowledging the underground nature of malfeasance, Menorca is considered, to the greatest degree possible, a corruption-free territory. Hence, methodologically, the research selects the cases on the dependent variable, that is, the occurrence of corruption at the local level, with two cases (Marbella and Lanzarote) and one case (Menorca) for each of the possible values. As George and Bennett (2005, p. 23) have argued, selecting via the dependent variable is a suitable strategy to identify “the potential causal paths and variables leading to the dependent variable of interest.” The analysis is grounded in qualitative methodology. Data from the three cases has been gathered and triangulated, including primary sources such as national and local legislation, newspapers articles, judicial and police reports, other documentary sources, and over 50 semi-structured interviews adding to over 100 hours of oral evidence.
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BUILDING BOOM AND POLITICAL CORRUPTION IN SPAIN 1996–2007 Between December 1995 and December 2007, during the economy’s long expansion cycle, over 6.5 million new housing units were approved in Spain. Approvals were more than 600,000 per year in 2003, 2005, and 2007 and over an extraordinary 865,000 in 2006. All this construction fever was accompanied by a high degree of corruption particularly at the local level of government. These corruption scandals have been very prominent in news headlines and have even led to consternation in a European Parliament that since 2005 has discussed three highly critical reports about the worrying situation of town and country planning in Spain (European Parliament, 2007, 2008). According to a November 2009 public hearing of the Spanish Attorney General before the Parliament, the Public Prosecutor’s Office was investigating almost 750 cases of political corruption, involving more than 800 politicians (mostly for crimes related to urban planning). And according to an urban planning corruption dataset compiled from 2000 to 2010, 8.3% of all municipalities in Spain have been affected by corruption cases (Jerez-Darías, Martín-Martín, & Pérez-González, 2012). Several scholars have provided in-depth accounts on the relationship between the construction boom and the spread of corruption particularly at the local level in Spain (Estefanía, 2007, 2010; García-Quesada et al, 2013; Greenpeace, 2007, 2008; Iglesias, 2007; Jiménez, 2009; Jiménez & Villoria, 2008; Jiménez, Villoria, & GarcíaQuesada, 2012; Romero et al., 2012; TI España, 2008). In a nutshell, according to these studies, local corruption has been facilitated by a combination of factors, including the existence of a Strong Mayor form of local government in, predominantly, quite small municipalities (with a balance of power extremely biased toward politicians vis-à-vis bureaucrats and a weakly professionalized administrative organization) and a complex but ill-defined LIS (García-Quesada et al., 2013) which has rendered accountability mechanisms very ineffective, as well as the prevalence of patronage networks and the perverse incentives provided by the existing local and political party funding system (Jiménez & Villoria, 2012; Jiménez, Villoria, & García-Quesada, 2012). One important piece in the set of factors that have stimulated land speculation and corruption is the very peculiar Spanish model for town-planning policies, which has created strong incentives for urbanization and given large and fairly unaccountable powers to local authorities. The model arose in the context of the first planned enlargements of Barcelona and Madrid at the end of 19th century. By its virtue, town councils have a central role in urban planning, as they have a decisive say in establishing which land in their territory was fit or unfit for building and urban development through the elaboration of the municipal plans. Under this model, landowners of urban lands became urban developers. As the
Spanish state was suffering from a deep fiscal crisis, this model permitted that very important town enlargement operations were financed by the owners of these land areas, which were thus incorporated into the cities. As a way to compensate for this huge investment by landowners and to facilitate that they got the necessary loans from banks, policy-makers placed strong legal guarantees that landowners would keep most—almost everything—of the capital gains (Fernández, 2008). This model was finally set in law in the first Spanish law on land (the Francoist law of 1956) and has been ever-present in all Spanish land regulations until the very important reform of 2007. During the transition years of the late 1970s this scheme of privatized town planning was reformed so that urban developers had to pay a percentage of around 10–15% of the capital gains obtained in each development plan to the town councils. Thus, town councils became an interested partner in the urban development of land. Furthermore, under the Spanish legal framework, urban planning discipline rests mainly in the hands of town councils, particularly of the mayor, who issues building permits (in accordance with the current plans and after receiving technical and legal advice from local officers, such as the secretary general and the technical office for urban planning) which a developer must obtain before starting building or urbanization work. It is also the mayor who issues sanctions against all illegal buildings and constructions. Although the regional governments hold powers on land planning, they have maintained a secondary role and shown resistance to enact supramunicipal land policy.1 Most commonly they have exclusively provided a legalistic overview of the content of municipal plans. Even in the field of urban planning discipline, where national legislation allows the regions to substitute the town councils in front of serious and very serious offences whenever the municipalities do not act to pursue these rules breaches, regional governments have avoided to act. In matters of urban development, local authorities have effectively acted as self-regulatory entities. The confluence of these factors and an extraordinary demand for new buildings during this “prodigious decade of Spanish town-planning” (Burriel, 2008) set the background to explain why corruption has been very high in those areas where the demand for new housing units was very relevant such as coastal areas and the outskirts of densely populated urban areas. The Spanish model for town planning thus created large incentives and opportunities for land speculation and corruption, as local authorities operated with great powers and reduced accountability. In this sense, Spain has faced a paradoxical situation (Romero et al., 2012, p. 477), by which a regulatory 1 One very important exception being the region of the Canary Islands were a regional law dating back from 1987 allowed the Cabildos insulares (a directly elected council government in each one of the seven islands composing the archipelago) to develop territorial plans for the whole island.
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framework of improved political rights, economic development, and environmental protection has coexisted with a generalized social support for the speculative and predatory urban development policies of the “prodigious decade”: Until a few years ago it was thought that the pre-democratic era of the 1960s and early 1970s encapsulated all the most noteworthy elements of what was called ‘desarrollismo’. It was logical, it was said, if we consider that it was a period when there were no democratic governments, there were no appropriate regulations and Spain was not part of the group of European democratic countries. However, and herein lies the paradox, now that we are part of a European Union that has made environmental conservation and land and landscape protection one of its most notable goals, we have a consolidated democratic system and matchless regulations in place, the greatest ever urban development in Spain’s history has taken place, in most cases, on a completely untenable basis far removed from the provisions of European directives and the very regulations and plans of democratic regional and local governments. Indeed, the ‘desarrollismo’ of the pre-democratic period, which has been easily surpassed by the advancing development of the last decade, now pales in comparison with the scale of the current disaster.
OUR THREE CASE STUDIES The cases of Marbella, Lanzarote, and Menorca are evidence of the cross-local variations in corruption in Spain. The case of Marbella, in the Spanish Costa del Sol, regards a complex network of local politicians, civil servants, and private urban promoters guilty of bribery, embezzlement of funds, fraud, etc., concerning urban planning and construction on municipal land, which resulted in the signing of around 900 “convenios” (town-planning agreements between the town council and private developers) and the issuing of over 10,000 building licenses. Up to 95 people have been accused in court, amongst them are 3 former mayors, 14 former local councilors, and 38 businessmen (Jiménez, 2007). Unprecedentedly in Spain, on April 7, 2006, the Council of Ministers of the Spanish government dissolved the local authority and put it under the tutelage of the national government until the next local elections of May 2007. Corruption in Marbella came to light on March 29, 2006, as a result of a large police operation known as “Operacion Malaya.” The police and judicial investigations showed the workings of the town council during 15 years under the direction of three mayors, consisting essentially in the creation of a parallel structure in charge of the most important decisions for local urban development with limited administrative and judicial control. This structure served the preferences of local politicians in power and urban developers alike, as a confluence of interests existed, by which local representatives traded planning permits in exchange of monetary favors from the benefited businessmen.
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The events started in 1991 when a businessman, Jesus Gil, created a new local political party of a strong personalistic character, the GIL (Grupo Independiente Liberal or Liberal Independent Party). His candidacy participated in the 1991 municipal elections in Marbella, where he gained his first absolute majority out of four in a row (1991, 1995, 1999, and 2003). From the first moment, Gil aspired at managing all local affairs with limited administrative and judicial controls. With this purpose, he established two autonomous local bodies and 32 companies that became responsible for managing and deciding on local policies in parallel to the traditional bureaucratic structures. Thus, during the 1990s, the Council of Marbella became, with 3,532 employees, the third local authority in number of staff of Andalucia, shortly behind Seville and Malaga, despite its relatively small population. Of these employees, 1,587 worked in the standard municipal administration, whereas 1,945 worked for the local public companies and foundations created after Gil accessed to power. Civil servants that showed opposition to the activities of the local representatives were sidelined and their responsibilities assumed by new personnel engaged for the purposes of undertaking these functions. Thus, for instance, only one month after rising to power, the mayor signed a decree that obliged the local council secretary to take vacations when he refused to work away from the Council headquarters, as the mayor wanted. This parallel structure decided on the agreements defining urban areas, gave building and usage licenses, resolved about local land swaps and service contracts. Decisions were discussed bilaterally between the mayor and the urban developers, and approved by the Council. Thus they kept an air of legality, but in fact they were made in a legal vacuum, as neither the existing local plan for urban development nor the draft of the future local plan contemplated many of the plans adopted. The decisions looked advantageous for the citizens of Marbella as the agreed costs for building new public facilities or monetary payments were commonly shown to be below market prices, although they did not present the full payment in bribes made to the local technical assessor, the mayor, and the councilors. Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands, presents an extraordinary and early development of protectionist regulations, which nevertheless has not avoided widespread political corruption. Corruption in Lanzarote did not achieve the technical complexities of the Marbella case, but it shares with it its disregard for administrative procedures and controls and its long duration before disciplinary action was taken. The corruption cases we have focused on date from 1998 to 2006 and have given rise to over 30 police and judicial investigations, some of which have not been resolved yet (Jiménez, GarcíaQuesada, & Villoria, 2012). The most relevant cases have to do with urban planning in the towns of Yaiza and Teguise, where the mayors issued permits for the construction of big touristic complexes (hotels and apartments) for more than 13,000 tourist vacancies (20% of the total that existed in
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Lanzarote in 2006) in a clearly unlawful way, as later on the courts attested. As a result of the investigations, over 100 people, including 11 former mayors, 2 Secretaries, civil servants, and private businessmen, have been accused of participating in corruption exchanges and bribery linked to the issuing of 37 licenses for the construction of large hotels and residential complexes, which the Courts later declared against planning and environmental law (Gómez, 2011). The investigations have shown the number and kind of administrative irregularities incurred in the issuing of the building permits, which, however, brought about only limited disciplinary measures. Local mayors, for instance, extended the validity of expired building permits that did not meet legal obligations; they ignored the requirement to include legal and technical reports by the secretary of the municipality and the technical staff when issuing a license to build (Teguise), or its content was absolutely irregular (Yaiza); they granted building permit certificates despite the fact that the only authorized person to do so was the secretary, and even though they had been informed negatively by the technical office (Yaiza). Police and judicial investigations have shown how these administrative irregularities have been accompanied of criminal acts of bribery and influence peddling. Local politicians employed their position of power to authorize illegal practices by urban developers and to enrich themselves. By contrast, in the case of Menorca, of a similar size of Lanzarote, there have only been very minor instances of corruption and all of them have been followed by quick institutional reaction. In most cases, inquiry committees were constituted in the town councils to investigate allegations and its conclusions were sent out to the prosecution office in case there was any suspicion on criminal behavior. Menorca therefore presents a puzzle: why did corruption fail to be present in this island that shared many similar features of Lanzarote and Marbella?
EXPLAINING THE DIFFERENCES AMONG OUR CASES To explain the cross-local variations in corruption in our three cases, two sets of explanations have been explored in turns. Here, we refer to them as the LISs explanation, which relates to the rational institutionalist approaches, and the local public values and expectations explanation, which relates to the collective action approach. LISs Explanations Our initial hypothesis has been that the key factor to account for the spread of corruption in Spain can be traced to the LISs. The LIS consists of the institutions, policies, practices, and instruments meant to contribute to the integrity of the municipality (Huberts et al., 2008). It concerns the structural
and institutional characteristics and the performance of the actors of the local political system, which define its degree of integrity. A defective or ineffective LIS would explain the spread of local corruption across Spain. Our initial findings support this idea. As we have analyzed somewhere else (García-Quesada et al., 2013; Jiménez, Villoria, & García-Quesada, 2012), the LIS for the Spanish town-planning policies is very defective. The Lanzarote and Marbella cases show that, when confronted to the large economic incentives of building on municipal soil, the LIS have been unable to ensure integrity of the local authorities. The internal and external administrative mechanisms to discipline local policy-makers were barely employed, whereas judicial oversight was slow and limited both in the administrative and the criminal jurisdictions. Failures in the adoption of adequate controls and the absence of expedient, regular, and proportionate sanctions against local representatives acting unlawfully limited the deterrent effect of the existing checks and balances during the decade from 1997 to 2007. This is the case even in Lanzarote, which developed as early as 1991 a more restrictive normative framework on land planning and usage than any other Spanish local area and, as a consequence, was even awarded with the status of a UNESCO Reserve of the Biosphere for the whole island (Jiménez, García-Quesada, & Villoria, 2012). The analysis of the Spanish LIS shows the limits of the principal and agency approach when it assumes that the principal (be it the electorate voting public representatives, or public representatives delegating functions to civil servants) seeks to reduce the occurrence of corruption practices by the agents. Instead the Spanish electorate has frequently failed to impose sanctions against corrupted representatives—and at times, even reward them by supporting them electorally (Costas-Pérez, Solé-Ollé & SorribasNavarro, 2011; Gómez, Cabeza, & Palacios, 2011; Jiménez, 2008; Rivero & Fernández-Vázquez, 2011), and that public representatives have not always sought to ensure impartiality of civil servants, but have demanded political allegiance (Charron & Lapuente, 2011). However, the LIS explanations, while applicable to Spain as a whole, are not sufficiently accurate to explain why certain local authorities in Spain rate better than others in containing corruption. In particular, the absence of serious cases of corruption in Menorca does not appear to be related to a more solid integrity system. Indeed, the formal and informal institutions, policies, and instruments designed to contribute to integrity in urban policy-making in Menorca, where corruption has been restricted to isolated incidents, are not significantly different to those of Lanzarote or Marbella, where corruption has been rampant. Public Values and Expectations Given the limitations of the LIS approach to explain crosslocal variation in corruption, we have turned to the analysis
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TABLE 1 Levels of Generalized Trust in European Countries (1999–2007)
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Turkey Cyprus Portugal Bosnia and Herzegovina Slovakia Latvia Moldova France Serbia Slovenia
10,2 21,2 21,9 32,4 33,4 35,9 36,7 37,9 38,2 38,6
Croatia Andorra Poland Spain Malta Romania Hungary Estonia Czech Republic Bulgaria
38,7 40,8 40,9 40,9 42,2 43,6 44,8 48,4 48,8 50,9
Lithuania Luxemburg Greece Russia Ukraine Italy Great Britain Belgium Montenegro Austria
52,8 53,9 54,6 55,4 60,0 60,8 61,7 63,0 68,2 70,2
Ireland Germany Iceland Belarus Netherlands Switzerland Finland Denmark Sweden Norway
72,1 75,8 83,0 85,2 90,6 107,4 117,5 131,9 134,5 148,0
Source: http://www.jdsurvey.net/jds/jdsurveyMaps.jsp?Idioma=I&SeccionTexto=0404&NOID=104
of the local ethical environment. For this we have followed the insight of studies about corruption in Nordic countries (see Rothstein & Uslaner, 2005), which argue that these countries have developed a kind of virtuous circle by which generalized trust, the widespread sentiment of being members of the same social group, universal social insurances and social services, and a favorable attitude to the fulfilment of social norms have contributed to the lower presence of corruption. Contrarily, expecting others to act corruptly may act as incentive to engage in malfeasance (Persson et al., 2010). Following this literature, we should expect significant differences in public values and expectations on the working of public institutions among our three cases, with Menorca having a greater degree of institutional trust and a higher commitment to the functioning of local institutions. Our initial fieldwork in Menorca supported this idea as many interviewees there and in Majorca called our attention to this kind of cultural factors. Some of them explained the absence or low level of corruption in this island compared to the rest of Spain and particularly the rest of the Balearic Islands referring to the existence of a more civic political culture. According to them, people from Menorca are more demanding toward their political representatives, more respectful for public spaces and more prone to public values and interests. To test these insights more systematically, we ran a survey in our three locations with indicators on trust, perceptions on the partiality or impartiality of political institutions, and some other attitudinal variables, which for illustrative purposes, we have compared with the Spanish data as a whole.2 A significant difference in these factors among our three Spanish cases, and in particular a differential result in the Menorca case, would validate the insights of the public values and expectations approaches. However, as the findings below show, such has not been the case.3
2 As gathered by the Centro de Investigaciones Sociologicas (CIS) and Analistas Socio Politicos (ASP) Research Centre. These data are not comparable with ours as survey methodologies have been diverse. 3 We have tested the statistical significance of all differences calculating the squared chi in our crosstabs and have paid attention to the corrected residual to observe the source of the differences. All these results are in the appendix.
The first element concerns the degree of generalized trust, or trust in strangers. Nordic countries present a high level of generalized trust (Table 1): more people in these countries believe that most people outside their closest circle can be trusted than in most other places. Table 2 presents the results of this variable in the three cases of our study. It shows that in all three areas the level of generalized trust is low, but no distinction exists amongst them; the variable registers very similar values in the three cases. Generalized trust is no higher in Menorca than in Lanzarote and Marbella, as it was initially expected. If we focus on the trust in institutions—and so not only on the generalized trust in strangers—again the differences among our three cases are very minor, with only a marginal stronger degree of trust on town councils in Menorca but the difference is not statistically significant (see Appendix). Table 3 shows these results. What about the perceptions on the partiality or impartiality of political institutions? Again, if Menorca were a representative case of a society where a virtuous circle had evolved like in Scandinavian countries, the political institutions in this case should be perceived to work more impartially than in Lanzarote or Marbella. However, as shown in Table 4 we again do not find clear differences between Menorca and the other two cases. Building from this idea, we asked citizens from the three cases about their values and expectations on how civil servants should solve a conflict of interest concerning situations they may face when undertaking their daily responsibilities. Again, we do not find particular differences among our three cases pointing to suppose that citizens from Menorca share a differentiated political culture. The results appear in Table 5. We went further to examine whether citizens from the three cases have different expectations toward the behavior of their political representatives. We presented them with statements that confronted legality and efficacy, and asked them to choose between these two principles. Again, the preferences of citizens of Menorca are not significantly different to the other Spanish cases, as Table 6 shows. Next, we enquired about citizens’ perceptions on the workings of clientelistic networks in their communities.
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JIMÉNEZ, GARCÍA-QUESADA, AND VILLORIA TABLE 2 Levels of Generalized Trust
lives. However, when examining this element in the three Spanish cases, we find no clear differences in the proneness to patronage in the areas that have suffered a greater degree of corruption, as Table 7 shows. In this sense, taken together, these survey results invite to discard also our second set of explanations on shared values and expectations. These elements do not seem to be at the basis or be a cause of the differential presence of corruption incidents in Lanzarote, Marbella, and Menorca, as in all these cases citizens’ values and expectations seem to be strikingly similar, and however the presence of corruption in these places has been different. More generally, the findings show the methodological limitations of employing values and perceptions as proxies of the occurrence of corruption, as it does not account for the source of citizens’ perceptions, whether it is a personal first-hand experience of corruption (which makes citizens wary of the functioning of the institutions) or developed as a consequence of learning vicariously from distant cases via news coverage and from reports from third persons, but with no bearing on their daily experience. In the analysis of local corruption, which involves local actors and policy-making, this limitation is particularly pointed. While it could be expected that the citizens from Lanzarote and Marbella rated highly in mistrust
Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted, or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?
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Most people can be trusted You can’t be too careful in dealing with people DK/NA
Menorca
Lanzarote
Marbella
Spain
28.3 69.1
27.9 68.7
28.2 69.6
37.2 61.1
2.6
3.4
2.1
1.7
Source: Our own telephone survey on corruption perceptions. Fieldwork made from January 26 to 31, 2012, by Instituto Perfiles. Local samples: 250 interviews each one. Spain’s survey: ASP 09.047, October 2009, 807 interviews.
Countries that have developed vicious instead of virtuous attitudinal circles are expected to have a widespread level of corruption and a high presence of clientelistic networks (Rothstein & Uslaner, 2005). In these societies, people look to improve their living standards by investing their time and resources to get a connection as a way to guarantee a social protection for them and their families (Chandra, 2007). Thus, people give more prominence to get the right connections than to personal efforts when they try to improve their
TABLE 3 Trust in Institutions Level of trust in different institutions from 0 (no trust) to 10 (maximum trust) Menorca
Central government Regional government Island/province government Town councils Justice administration Police
Lanzarote
Marbella
Spain
Average
St. Dev.
Average
St. Dev.
Average
St. Dev.
Average
4.77 4.50 4.43 4.95 4.68 6.61
2.33 2.38 2.15 2.44 2.14 1.98
4.80 4.67 4.66 4.41 4.54 6.43
2.51 2.47 2.46 2.56 2.64 2.14
4.68 4.00 4.13 4.36 3.72 6.65
2.53 2.60 2.23 2.58 2.39 2.07
3.47 3.87 4.06 3.95
Source: Our own telephone survey on corruption perceptions. Fieldwork made from 26 to January 31, 2012, by Instituto Perfiles. Local samples: 250 interviews each one. Spain’s survey: CIS, 2826, December 2009, 2,478 interviews. TABLE 4 Perceptions on the Partial or Impartial Working of Political Institutions How do you agree with the following sentences? Menorca
Courts prosecute and sanction guilty people irrespectively of who they are The internal revenue system treats clearly better well-off people Some people in this island receive a preferential treatment by town councils and the island’s government Corruption is not sanctioned in this island/municipality
Lanzarote
Marbella
Spain
Agree
Disagree
Agree
Disagree
Agree
Disagree
Agree
Disagree
33.5
65.7
36.5
59.9
29.4
67.9
27.4
66.8
75.9
17.4
83.6
12.1
77.1
19.2
74.1
23.4
72.4
16.6
79.7
12.2
54.7
34.2
60.8
32.5
67.0
30.7
Source: Our own telephone survey on corruption perceptions. Fieldwork made from January 26 to 31, 2012, by Instituto Perfiles. Local samples: 250 interviews each one. Spain’s survey: CIS, 2826, December 2009, 2,478 interviews.
INTEGRITY SYSTEMS, VALUES, AND EXPECTATIONS
75
TABLE 5 Values and Expectations on Conflict of Interests How should a civil servant behave when he/she deals with a close relative or friend and what do you expect he/she will actually do?
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Menorca
To help this person beyond any other regard To help this person trying not to harm the general interest To undertake this case but behaving impartially To abstain from this case DK/NA
Lanzarote
Marbella
Spain
Should do
Expected to do
Should do
Expected to do
Should do
Expected to do
Should do
1.1 13.4 43.0 35.8 6.8
22.8 29.0 15.6 6.0 26.5
4.6 12.2 43.3 31.5 8.4
38.9 21.5 12.7 7.1 19.9
4.5 17.0 32.1 40.2 6.3
35.2 29.2 11.5 5.1 19.0
24.4 40.4 29.4 5.9
Source: Our own telephone survey on corruption perceptions. Fieldwork made from January 26 to 31, 2012, by Instituto Perfiles. Local samples: 250 interviews each one. Spain’s survey: CIS, 2826, December 2009, 2,478 interviews.
TABLE 6 Legality vs. Efficacy in Government
THE PUZZLE OF MENORCA
Legality vs. efficacy
Politicians should always respect the law, even if they become less efficacious to solve citizens’ problems Politicians should solve citizens’ problems, even if to be more efficacious they have to break the law NS/NC
Menorca
Lanzarote
Marbella Spain
77.3
74.9
78.6
56.5
15.5
19.1
13.4
27.9
7.2
6.1
8.0
10.5
Source: Our own telephone survey on corruption perceptions. Fieldwork made from January 26 to 31, 2012, by Instituto Perfiles. Local samples: 250 interviews each one. Spain’s survey: CIS, 2826, December 2009, 2,478 interviews.
TABLE 7 Proneness to Clientelism The most important thing to become rich in our society
To have good connections and nurture them To be lucky To have good ideas and to try hard to implement them DK/NA
Menorca
Lanzarote
Marbella Spain
38.1
39.1
46.8
56
20.0 37.3
22.3 34.6
20.3 30.0
18 16
4.6
4.0
3.0
0.9
Source: Our own telephone survey on corruption perceptions. Fieldwork made from January 26 to 31, 2012, by Instituto Perfiles. Local samples: 250 interviews each one. Spain’s survey: ASP, 10.048, September 2010, 811 interviews.
in the functioning of institutions given the numerous cases of corruption in their municipalities, the high perception of corruption in Menorca cannot be explained by reference to the local cases.
The cases of corruption in Marbella and Lanzarote (as many other local governments in the coastal area of Spain) can successfully be explained by either of the explanations that we have presented. The LIS explanations, with its emphasis on the monitoring and enforcement mechanisms to control the actions of policy-makers, and also those focusing on the values and expectations of citizens regarding political representatives, can tell why malfeasance has been rampant in these two places. The case of Menorca, however, can be neither explained by a powerful LIS nor by its high quality values and expectations, since the island does not have these features and however its levels of corruption have been remarkably low. Hence, Menorca presents the researcher with a puzzle, as the conventional explanatory variables fail to explain the case. So, the search for appropriated explanations of the cross-local variations in corruption continues. At this point, we would like to suggest two alternative explanations that we are starting to explore. The first is of an economic nature and has to do with the relatively less powerful economic interests at play in Menorca compared to Marbella or Lanzarote. The geographer Onofre Rullán (2009, pp. 180–185) has shown how the number of tourist accommodations built up in Menorca during the years of the building boom in Spain (Figure 1) have been quite below the legal quotas established by the island’s territorial planning of 2003 (2003 Island’s Territorial Planning (PTI)). The legal upper building limit established for the island has been higher than the actual demand from developers. Rullán (2010) argues that the construction and tourist industry is not as profitable in the Baleares as in the peninsula or the Canaries. This circumstance has meant that the pressures to grant building permits in Menorca has not been as strong as in other areas of Spain, which would explain why the degree of corruption in Menorca has been lower than in Lanzarote or Marbella. Indeed, in comparison to
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JIMÉNEZ, GARCÍA-QUESADA, AND VILLORIA
FIGURE 1 Tourist accommodations granted in Menorca since the approval of the PTI. Source: Figure taken from Rullán (2009, p. 183, fig. 3).
allowed a more successful implementation and enforcement of the restrictive land planning policies approved than in Lanzarote. Indeed, as shown in Table 8, the control of the island’s institutional political power until 2011 has mainly been in the hands of the Leftist parties (shadowed cells), particularly so during the years of the Spanish building boom (1995–2007).4 With a program backing the contention of urban (tourist) growth, the dominance of these political parties would have allowed fewer opportunities to those interested in breaking the rules in this field. These explanations might provide complementary accounts to the existing cross-local variations in corruption in Spain and so might contribute to enrich the body of literature of the reasons for corruption. Future research will examine their explanatory power.
CONCLUSIONS the peninsula, the costs of transporting building materials to the Baleares are much higher, which makes the Baleares less competitive as a tourist destination, whereas, unlike the Canaries, the Baleares have a short tourist season—currently of only three months. In addition, within the archipelago, transport costs in Menorca are the highest. Menorca’s airport is considerably badly communicated by direct flights with the main tourists supply markets of Germany and Britain— unlike Majorca, which has the second largest airport in Spain in number of travelers. Also, due to its geographical distance from the peninsula, Menorca has not developed, as Ibiza has done, a system of transport of passengers via ferry, which makes the island less accessible and more expensive for mass tourism. Thus, the higher costs for setting and developing the touristic sector in Menorca has limited the incentives to build projects of infrastructures and so also the attempts and opportunities to distort illegally the planning processes. This explanation supports the institutional economics theories, since it is based on the assumption that agents will perform a cost-benefit analysis before their engagement on a corrupt transaction (Lambsdorff, 2002). In this case the briber’s utility function will suit the following elementary equation: U a = b − c; where U a = corrupt private agents’ utility function, b = potential benefits from engagement, c = potential costs from engagement. Since the costs of engagement outweigh the potential benefits, there will not be corruption. The second element subject to analysis is a political factor that has to do with political stability of Menorca, particularly noticeable when compared to Lanzarote. While Lanzarote has lived in a constant and destabilizing political turmoil, political life in Menorca has been much more steady and unfluctuating. The Socialist Party, sometimes in coalition with smaller Green, Nationalist, and Leftist parties, has been in control of most political institutions in the island: the island council government (Consell Insular) and most of its eight town councils. This stability would have allegedly
From 1997 to 2006, Spain has suffered from a major problem of local political corruption associated with urban development (Jiménez, 2009), which has questioned to some extent the capacity of the country to ensure the prevalence of legal norms and the rule of law. Despite this high degree of malfeasance, corruption levels have not run equally high across the country. This article has attempted to uncover the reasons for the differences in corruption in three Spanish local settings, all of them important touristic resorts: Marbella, Lanzarote, and Menorca. The two formers have faced salient corruption cases, whereas the later has been unusually low in such incidents. Two sets of reasons have been explored to explain this cross-local variation: first, those associated to the institutions and policies destined to ensure the integrity in the actions of local policy-makers (in line with Charron & Lapuente, 2011; Huberts et al., 2008), and those of concerning the values and expectations of local citizens (see Rothstein & Uslaner, 2005). The findings suggest that the LIS functions deficiently as it is unable to disincentive corruption practices, and that citizens’ values and expectations with regards to corruption are typical of those situations where a vicious circle of corruption has evolved. However, against our expectations and the literature on the topic, no significant difference has been found to explain the variation in corruption between the cases of Marbella, Lanzarote, and Menorca. The three cases are singularly similar in this regard, which has prompted us to open up analysis to other further potential explanations, particularly to explain the puzzling case of Menorca: one is the use of institutional economics to understand the strategies of the possible bribers, and the other is the role of political stability. 4 From 9 institutions (the Consell and the 8 town councils) and 4 different mandates, which mean 36 total power positions, the Leftist parties have been in control of 28, that is 78%.
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INTEGRITY SYSTEMS, VALUES, AND EXPECTATIONS
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TABLE 8 Main Government Party in the Consell or the Eight Municipalities
Consell Mahon Ciutadella Alaior Es Castell S. Luis Ferreries Mercadal Migjorn
1987
1991
1995
1999
2003
2007
2011
PSOE∗ PSOE∗ PSOE∗ AP PSOE CISL CDS∗ AP –
PP∗ PSOE PP PP PSOE∗ -PP∗ PP∗ CDS∗ PP PSOE∗
PP PSOE PP PSOE PSOE∗ PSOE∗ INME∗ PP PP
PSOE∗ PSOE PSOE∗ PSOE PSOE∗ PSOE∗ INME∗ PSM AEMG
PSOE∗ PSOE∗ PP∗ PSOE∗ PSOE∗ PSOE∗ ENTESA∗ PSM PSOE∗
PSOE∗ PSOE∗ PP∗ -PSOE∗ PSOE∗ PP∗ PSOE∗ ENTESA∗ ENTESA∗ PP∗
PP PP PP∗ PP PP∗ PP PP∗ PSOE∗ PSOE
∗ Plurality
or coalition. Source: Own elaboration. Data from the election results: database from the Ministry of the Interior and media accounts on post-elections agreements.
Overall, the present article gives two key lessons on how to approach the analysis of corruption. First, it has presented an examination of the phenomenon of corruption that focuses on the role of both formal and informal rules for guiding and constraining the behavior of local actors. A fully fledged account of corruption—by nature a subterranean phenomenon—requires examining the existing set of formal rules that channel and limit the preferences and behavior of local actors, but also the informal institutions and expectations that guide their action. The development of indicators to assess local actors’ values and expectations on conflict of interests, legality versus efficacy, and proneness to clientelism, as presented in Tables 5–7, served to identify the role of informal rules and expectations in our three particular cases. Second, it has shown that the existence of cross-local variations in corruption provides a fertile ground for analyzing the causes of corruption, as it allows controlling for a wide variety of elements that could potentially explain the occurrence of these practices, such as cultural peculiarities and institutional features. Thus, carrying out analysis of corruption at the local level can contribute to the development of the theoretical approaches to the topic, applicable also to other different tiers of government. Well-designed descriptive studies are important blocks in building theory (Nørgaard, 2008). In so doing, although the jury is still out regarding the development of an empirically tested explanation of the cross-local variations in the degree of urban corruption in Spain, the present article provides indications of the strategy to follow in future research.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This research has been made possible thanks to a grant from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation awarded to the research project CSO2008-03663/CPOL. An earlier version of this text was presented at a meeting of the Ethics and Integrity in Governance Study Group in the 34th EGPA Annual Conference (Bergen, September 5–8, 2012). We are
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APPENDIX Significance tests (squared chi of crosstabs) TABLE A1 Levels of Generalized Trust Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted, or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people? Squared Chi Value
df
p
1.370
4
.849
TABLE A2 Trust in Institutions Level of trust in different institutions from 0 (no trust) to 10 (maximum trust)
Central Government Regional Government Island/province government Town councils Justice administration Police
Squared Chi Value
df
p
32.746 32.002 35.511 31.120 49.458 15.593
22 22 22 22 22 22
.066 .077 .034∗ .094 .001∗ .836
The only two institutions where the differences are statistically significant are the island/province government and the administration of justice. In the first case, none of the statistically significant differences affect Menorca as shown in Table A3. Regarding the administration of justice, differences are due to both the underrepresentation of those who say “0” (no trust at all) in Menorca and those who say “8” in Marbella, on the one hand, and the overrepresentation of those who say “0” in Marbella and those who say “9” in Lanzarote, on the other, as shown in Table A4.
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JIMÉNEZ, GARCÍA-QUESADA, AND VILLORIA TABLE A3 Trust in the Island/Province Government
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Degree of trust in the island/province government
Lanzarote No. % within loc Corr. Res. Menorca No. % within loc Corr. Res. Marbella No. % within loc Corr. Res. Total No. % within loc
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
99
Total
22 8.8 −0.5
6 2.4 −0.2
12 4.8 −0.7
22 8.8 −0.9
28 11.2 −1.7
54 21.6 −1.0
42 16.8 1.2
25 10.0 0.7
18 7.2 1.9
7 2.8 2.5
4 1.6 1.0
10 4.0 1.0
250 100.0
18 7.2 −1.6
8 3.2 0.8
17 6.8 1.0
22 8.8 −0.9
41 16.4 1.2
59 23.6 −0.1
39 1.6 0.6
20 8.0 −0.6
17 6.8 1.5
1 0.4 −1.6
2 0.8 −0.5
6 2.4 −0.7
250 100.0
32 12.8 2.1
5 2.0 −0.7
13 5.2 −0.3
32 12.8 1.7
38 15.2 0.5
66 26.4 1.2
28 11.2 −1.8
22 8.8 −0.1
3 1.2 −3.4
2 0.8 −0.9
2 0.8 −0.5
7 2.8 −0.3
250 100.0
72 9.6
19 2.5
42 5.6
76 10.1
107 14.3
179 23.9
109 14.5
67 8.9
38 5.1
10 1.3
8 1.1
23 3.1
750 100.0
8
9
10
99
Total
TABLE A4 Trust in the Administration of Justice Degree of trust in the administration of justice 0 Lanzarote No. % within loc Corr. Res. Menorca No. % within loc Corr. Res. Marbella No. % within loc Corr. Res. Total No. % within loc
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
33 13.2 −0.1
9 3.6 0.3
12 4.8 −1.1
20 8.0 −1.1
34 13.6 −0.9
50 20.0 −0.4
30 12.0 −0.2
28 11.2 0.9
18 7.2 1.6
9 3.6 2.2
5 2.0 1.8
2 0.8 −0.3
250 100.0
18 7.2 −3.5
7 2.8 −0.6
10 4.0 −1.7
26 10.4 0.5
43 17.2 1.1
58 23.2 1.1
36 14.4 1.3
28 11.2 0.9
18 7.2 1.6
3 1.2 −1.1
2 0.8 −0.5
1 0.4 −1.1
250 100.0
49 19.6 3.6
9 3.6 0.3
24 9.6 2.8
26 10.4 0.5
37 14.8 −0.2
49 19.6 −0.6
26 10.4 −1.1
18 7.2% −1.7
4 1.6 −3.2
3 1.2 −1.1
1 0.4% −1.3
4 1.6 1.3
250 100.0
100 13.3
25 3.3
46 6.1
72 9.6%
114 15.2
157 20.9
92 12.3
74 9.9
40 5.3
15 2.0
8 1.1
7 0.9
750 100.0
TABLE A5 Perceptions on the Partial or Impartial Working of Political Institutions How do you agree with the following sentences?
Courts prosecute and sanction guilty people irrespectively of who they are The internal revenue system treats clearly better well-off people Some people in this island receive a preferential treatment by town councils and the island’s government Corruption is not sanctioned in this island
Squared Chi Value
df
p
9.511 9.071 5.537
8 8 4
.301 .336 .236
22.402
8
.004∗
The differences on the fourth option “Corruption is not sanctioned in this island/municipality” are statistically significant. As shown in Table A6, this is due to the underrepresentation of those who strongly agree with the statement in Menorca and the overrepresentation of this same position in Marbella. But the underrepresentation of the “strongly agree” position in Menorca, although significant, is not very high.
INTEGRITY SYSTEMS, VALUES, AND EXPECTATIONS
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TABLE A6 Degree of Agreement with “Corruption is Not Sanctioned in This Island/Municipality”
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Degree of agreement: “Corruption is not sanctioned in this island/municipality” Strongly agree (1)
Somewhat agree (2)
Somewhat disagree (3)
Strongly disagree (4)
63 25.2 −1.0
87 34.8 0.8
48 19.2 −0.8
35 14.0 1.0
17 6.8 0.1
250 100.0
57 22.8 −2.0
79 31.6 −0.5
57 22.8 1.0
30 12.0 −0.2
27 10.8 3.2
250 100.0
86 34.4 3.0
80 32.0 −0.3
51 20.4 −0.2
27 10.8 −0.9
6 2.4 −3.3
250 100.0
206 27.5
246 32.8
156 20.8
92 12.3
50 6.7
750 100.0
Lanzarote Number % within loc Corr. Res. Menorca Number % within loc Corr. Res. Marbella Number % within loc Corr. Res. Total Number % within loc
DK/NA
Total
TABLE A7 Values and Expectations on Conflict of Interests How should a civil servant behave when he/she deals with a close relative or friend and what do you expect he/she will actually do?
Should do Expected to do
Squared Chi Value
df
p
14.033 21.543
8 8
.081 .006∗
The differences in the expectations on the civil servant’s actual behavior are close to be statistically significant. This is due to the underrepresentation of those who choose the first option “To help this person beyond any other regard” in Menorca as shown in Table A8. But this is a too meagre result to sustain the people in Menorca share a different political culture. TABLE A8 How the Civil Servant is Expected to Behave What do you expect he/she will actually do?
Lanzarote Number % within location Corr. Res. Menorca Number % within location Corr. Res. Marbella Number % within location Corr. Res. Total Number % within location
To help this person beyond any other regard
To help this person trying not to harm the general interest
To undertake this case but behaving impartially
95 38.0 2.8
56 22.4 −1.8
34 13.6 −0.4
53 21.2 −4.2
73 29.2 1.2
87 34.8 1.4 235 31.3
To abstain from this case
DK/NA
Total
17 6.8 0.8
48 19.2 −1.4
250 100.0
42 16.8 1.4
16 6.4 0.4
66 26.4 2.0
250 100.0
69 27.6 0.5
31 12.4 −1.0
11 4.4 −1.2
52 20.8 −0.6
250 100.0
198 26.4
107 14.3
44 5.9
166 22.1
750 100.0
82
JIMÉNEZ, GARCÍA-QUESADA, AND VILLORIA TABLE A9 Legality vs. Efficacy in Government Legality vs. efficacy Squared Chi Value
df
p
6.095
4
.192
TABLE A10 Proneness to Clientelism
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The most important thing to become rich in our society Squared Chi Value
df
p
5.102
6
.531