19 - Constitutionalism and Public Corruption

Summary

The theme of this volume – constitutionalism and the right to effective governance – has important connections with the fight against public corruption.¹ This short contribution to the volume will briefly introduce three aspects of this topic: (1) How might corruption pose a threat to effective constitutional governance? (2) How might anticorruption efforts also put strain on the constitutional system? (3) In what ways might constitutional design choices affect the scope, prevalence, or type of corruption? The hope is that, by sketching out these relationships, this discussion can help to stimulate more dialogue and engagement between constitutional theorists and anticorruption specialists, who sometimes occupy separate intellectual and professional universes despite the close connections between their subject areas.