Daniel Drezner does some useful research and analysis on the general contention that there was systematic corruption relating to contract awards in Iraq and campaign contributions to G.W. Bush. He also takes on the specific contention of corruption by Halliburton and Bechtel here.
This topic is close to my heart, because I did my dissertation on the effect of campaign contributions on the 1996 Congressional elections. There are really two questions that are important. The first is whether campaign contributions make any impact on legislation, and the second is whether they impact elections. My research was concerned with the second, and the findings were that money has about the same effect as ideology and incumbency
But regarding the other issue, Kevin Grier and Mike Munger's research shows pretty convincingly that there is not. Overall, the case for "corruption" of legislators through the agency of campaign contributions is, to say the least, very weak. Stephen Ansolabehere did a very clever paper a few years ago demonstrating that whether or not there was ever significant corruption, one can show that at least the level of corruption (seen as the influence of campaign contributions on legislation) hasn't changed very much in the last 150 years. So it at least hasn't been getting worse.
It doesn't surprise me, therefore, that the evidence regarding Halliburton contracts specifically, and Iraq reconstruction contracts in general, doesn't show much evidence of corruption. Corruption, if it occurs at all, is usually not on a big scale, simply because the costs of being caught are so high. And perhaps more importantly, legislators have virtually all the leverage, so the money they obtain tends to resemble extortion income more than bribery. And no one seems very worried about the extortion of large corporations by a few legislators, as long as they don't provide very much for the money they've been given.
I think this is a case where the reformers have to assume corruption, because there's such a paucity of evidence for it. And this is, almost inevitably, what Dan found.
Posted by Demosophist at November 4, 2003 06:33 PM | TrackBack