Hostname: page-component-6766d58669-l4t7p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-19T18:53:21.389Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Political Corruption and Democratic Representatives - Emanuela Ceva and Maria Paola Ferretti: Political Corruption: The Internal Enemy of Public Institutions. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 232.)

Review products

Emanuela Ceva and Maria Paola Ferretti: Political Corruption: The Internal Enemy of Public Institutions. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 232.)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2023

Chiara Destri Open the ORCID record for Chiara Destri [Opens in a new window]
Chiara Destri*
Affiliation:
Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Ceva and Ferretti's book offers an innovative account of political corruption as “a form of unaccountable use of entrusted power” (14). Accordingly, an officeholder's conduct counts as corrupt when in her institutional capacity she pursues an agenda whose rationale cannot be vindicated as coherent with the power mandate specified by her institutional role. Among the numerous advantages of this persuasive view, one is that it offers a nonmoralized definition of corruption with explanatory and discriminatory potential (21). Another point of strength is that the authors outline an original path to anticorruption centred on developing a public ethics of office accountability. To ensure public institutions’ good functioning, officeholders must exercise their power mandate in accordance with institutions’ raison d’être and engage in practices of mutual answerability, as they are all accountable to each other in virtue of the interrelatedness of their institutional roles (25).

Information

Type
A Symposium on Emanuela Ceva and Maria Paola Ferretti's Political Corruption: The Internal Enemy of Public Institutions
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 85 , Issue 2 , Spring 2023 , pp. 243 - 246
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of University of Notre Dame

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

1 Erman, Eva and Möller, Niklas, “Political Legitimacy for Our World: Where Is Political Realism Going?,” Journal of Politics 80, no. 2 (2018): 525CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Dahl, Robert, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956)Google Scholar.

3 Burke, Edmund, “Speech to the Electors of Bristol,” in Miscellaneous Writings, ed. Canavan, Francis (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1999), 3–13Google Scholar.

4 White, Jonathan and Ypi, Lea, The Meaning of Partisanship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Rehfeld, Andrew, “On Representing,” Journal of Political Philosophy 26, no. 2 (2018): 216CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 See, for instance, Christiano, Tom, The Rule of the Many: Fundamental Issues in Democratic Theory (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996)Google Scholar and Thompson, Dennis F., Just Elections: Creating a Fair Electoral Process in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

7 See Rehfeld, Andrew, The Concept of Constituency: Political Representation, Democratic Legitimacy, and Institutional Design (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.