The Ideological Malleability of Corruption. A Comparative Analysis of Official Corruption Discourses in Albania and Colombia, 2010-2017

Abstract

Corruption literature has paid little attention to the way corruption discourses reflect specific ideological agendas. This paper aims to address such shortcoming by comparing official corruption discourses in Albania and Colombia during the last seven years. The paper shows that despite similar levels of corruption, the leaders of the two countries articulate corruption in slightly different ways. While the prime minster of Albania Edi Rama articulates corruption narrowly as bribery, a phenomenon that pertains almost exclusively to the public sector, president Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia articulates it more broadly as a phenomenon that has moral, ethical and cultural dimensions, which can also originate in the private sector although more pervasive in the public one. Based on the findings of this paper, these divergent articulations reflect ideological variations between the two leaders more than different corruption 'realities' on the ground.