Corruption in Underdeveloped Societies

Abstract

We saw at the beginning of the previous chapter that under the influence of modernisation theory a number of writers assumed that the governmental structures of the industrialised nations conformed closely to the rational-legal model. We saw, furthermore, that this model became the goal towards which developing countries were supposed to be moving. Along with western-style democracy, ‘clean’ public administration was the destination that lay at the end of the road to modernity. As Huntington has pointed out, these modernisation theories were characterised by the kind of evolutionary optimism that informed the works of their precursors, sociologists such as Comte and Spencer (Huntington, 1971).