![]() The failure to combat corruption has several dire consequences. ![]() 83) writes in reference to the many anti-corruption initiatives as of recent, “but the problem remains stubbornly resistant to resolution” (p. There is little to suggest that many of today’s anti-corruption initiatives are significantly more effective than they were in Plunkitt’s days: “The answers seem to keep coming” Heywood (, p. This form of honest graft was according to Plunkitt never completely rooted out during his tenure, mainly since the authorities spent their days looking for corruption in all the wrong places: “That is why” Plunkitt said, “when a reform administration comes in and spends a half million dollars in tryin’ to find the public robberies they talked about in the campaign, they don’t find them” (, p. To maintain power and control, Plunkitt and members of Tammany Hall bent the political system and took advantage of their insider positions to enrich themselves, or “I seen my Opportunities and I took ‘em” as Plunkitt (, p. ![]() Dishonest graft, Plunkitt believed, was the workings of thugs: blackmailing gamblers, saloonkeepers and the disorderly. Instead, he became infamous for how he handled the “practice of politics”, for what he called “honest” and “dishonest” political graft. Plunkitt, however, did not go down in history as the political entrepreneur he believed himself to be. One of the premier figures in the Tammany inner ring was George Washington Plunkitt, who once held four political positions simultaneously. Originally it was formed to counter the city’s political hegemony, but once in power swiftly became a political machine catering to the interest of their political cronies and, primarily, those of an exclusive inner ring (, p. Tammany Hall was the Democratic Party-political machine dominating New York City’s politics in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The article ends by arguing for an anti-corruption discourse acknowledging that a multifaceted problem such as corruption requires multiple frameworks rather than attempts for silver-bullet explanations. Having outlined how institutional corruption can be seen as one type of systemic corruption, this article shows how a policy-centered approach such as strengthening the appearance standard through an independent public commission can address theoretical mechanisms emphasized in each anti-corruption framework–thus arguing that the frameworks complement rather than rival each other. Through an analysis of current principal-agent and collective action anti-corruption literature, this article adds two additional arguments to the debate: (a) the need to specify what one talks about when talking about systemic corruption and (b) the necessity to move beyond the principal-agent versus collective action frameworks dichotomy towards a policy-centered approach for how to combat institutional corruption. The lack of success stories has sparked an academic debate about the theoretical foundations of anti-corruption frameworks: primarily between proponents of the principal-agent framework and those seeing systemic corruption as the result of collective-action problems. How can institutional corruption be combatted? While recent years have seen a growth in anti-corruption literature, examples of countries rooting out systemic corruption remain few.
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