Corruption, Gender Equality and Meritocracy

  • Bo Rothstein
Chapter
First Online:
Part of the Political Corruption and Governance book series (PCG)

Abstract

This chapter makes five claims: (1) Corruption has a detrimental effect on overall human well-being. (2) Most existing programs for combatting corruption have not delivered. (3) Increased gender equality seems to be one important factor behind getting corruption under control. (4) Impartiality in the exercise of public power, not least when it “translates” into meritocracy in the public administration, has a powerful effect both on increasing gender equality and for lowering corruption. (5) As an ideal, impartiality in the exercise of public power turns out to be difficult to reach. It is therefore reasonable to take a “Churchillian” (non-ideal) approach to this. As with democracy, impartiality is not a perfect system, but all other systems for delivering quality of government have turned out to be worse.

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Copyright information

© The Author(s) 2018

Authors and Affiliations

  • Bo Rothstein
    • 1
  1. 1.Department of Political ScienceUniversity of GothenburgGothenburgSweden

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