I think right here you’ve made a strong an erroneous assumption. As well as a highly ideological one.
I would suggest that in general smaller urban area corruption incidents are less likely to hit major media, due to generally being less note-worthy (budgets smaller, less likely to pull wider reader/viewership interest). It is also the case that with smaller budgets, such municipalities are subject to far less outside oversight, and less likely to have corruption uncovered to begin with. Never mind villages and the like, which are highly unlikely to attract any reporting attention (or even law enforcement or audit attention) unless there is some particularly salacious and odd angle to the behaviour.
However, to look in the opposite direction, it may very well be that in large urban agglomerations there is less social cohesion (insofar as I recall a general sociological rule that human bands / relationship networks tend to make out at approximately 100), which may lead to less social pressure against corruption. Of course on the third hand, in large urban areas, there are more third party controls and oversight, so… I would go with your impression being media driven, having nothing at all to do with some peculiar “welfare state” connection (as others noted, the history of urban corruption predates any suspicion of welfare states).
I’m going to agree with SageRat’s point that a lot of people simply don’t care about local politics. As much as I hate to say it, I’m guilty of that sort of apathy myself. I’m pretty well tuned into national politics, to the point of being a geek when it come to knowing the names of all the cabinet secretaries, congressional committee chairs, federal bench nominees, etc. But when it comes to local politics, I’d hard pressed to name anyone, aside from the mayor and maybe one or two especially flamboyant city council members, who holds elected office in my city or county. It partially has to do with the fact that I haven’t lived here very long, but I’m not proud of it. Still it is hard to get interested in the sort of minutia that municipal government deals with, even if it does have a more direct impact on your daily life.
There’s also the fact that a lot of news organizations are cutting back on their staffs, and can no longer engage in the sort of investigative work they did in the past. And when a reporter does uncover something, they probably won’t be able to write as many follow-up stories. Thus the offenders aren’t as worried about having their feet held to the fire.
This is completely wrong. Podunk county will always out-corrupt Bigcityville. But no one gives a crap about the $10k corrupt pig subsidy appropriation (at least no one outside of Podunk county), but the million dollar city budget hole that ended up in Major Corruptypants account, that is news.
In my personal experience the small out of the way local government, where everyone knows everyone else is by far the most corrupt form of government. What ever the evils of “big government”, you can be assurred each of them will happen ten times more often in Podunk county than Washington DC.
That must be it. I thought it was the cities that paid more in taxes than they got back in services and that the poorest counties in the country are mostly rural, but it must be the fact that democrats run welfare states. Of course small towns are never corrupt, because they are run by REAL Americans with red, white, and blue blood who are self sufficient.
Joe Biden or Ross Perot vs Us? I’d disenfranchise several Dopers before the contest but, overall, politicians are no smarter than middling-smart citizens. (Bush's IQ 129 – Links provided says Dubya’s IQ is 129, and many of us could beat it.)
My answer is very simple: because they can. There is money flowing and where money flows there will be corruption. It’s not a city/rural distinction, or a Republican/Democrat distinction. It’s simply that there is money to be made.
Do you consider something like snow removal to be part of a welfare-state-generous-handout?
The reason I ask is that where I’ve grown up and lived snow removal was a huge part of a city budget, involving huge contracts. A snow removal company stands to make a lot of money, so to get that money they might bribe a local politician. But note that it’s a two sided issue: the local politician is corrupt for taking money, and the local businessman is corrupt for bribing an official.
You get the same problems in the corporate world, since there is someone that has to decide who will get a snow removal contract. It’s just a lot less likely to hear about the corruption of an office manager at your local office building, who was taking kickbacks from someone at Office Depot. But why is that? Is it a matter of accountability?
You can have an identical scenario: person in charge of awarding a snow removal contract gets a kickback from Mr Plow. It can either be a local politician, or a low level office manager. What is worse?
Our city elections don’t even have parties. I think the reason city government is so gross is that it’s incredibly incestuous - it’s like the neighborhood association where the same three people always hold all the offices, because they’re the ones who bother to go do it and they know everybody and nobody really puts up the effort to get them out of there. Mayor Bob here has been the mayor for 20 fucking years. There are kings who aren’t king that long! But we have a Weak Mayor System, so he doesn’t do all that much damage except to your immortal soul, and nobody votes for mayor. The mayorial elections are in, like, April. He does have more competition every time, but so what? So we get whatshisname Fisher? Good lord, nobody likes that guy! Bob has been there that long because he’s the least offensive to the most people, and you’re never going to get good government that way.
Our last city manager LOST millions of city dollars. He “decided to seek new opportunities” and got a cushy job BOTH as a city consultant AND as a dean at one of the local colleges. It’s just disgusting, but nobody really puts the work in to fix anything. My boyfriend wants to get into it and make things better, but I keep telling him he’ll end up like all the rest of them anyway. And I doubt you can get elected to city council if you produce, direct, and star in a show about drinking in the morning, dear.
I think RickJay’s second point is a good one (as I understood it) - more politicians with actual access to the cash flow.
I would propose a variation on his first point, though. It’s not that local politicians are stupid (& I don’t believe there’s any correlation between intelligence and integrity) but that they have more limited ambition. If you are a US senator or governor, you have an enormous amount of prestige and power (as well as the opportunity to parlay these into big bucks on retirement, if you don’t mess up too much), so you are less inclined to risk these over some small-time graft. If you are some city councilman, you’re basically scrounging around anyway, and not too well paid either. The risk/reward of some quick cash is a lot different.
But I also believe the racial/ethnic issue can’t be swept away either. Fact is that racial/ethnic minorities who are or who believe they are discriminated against tend to be supportive of “their” people when they are accused of corruption, and are receptive to claims that this is just the WASP establishment clamping down on minorities. That’s why you get people like Alcee Hastings getting elected to congress, and why Charles Rangel is still head of the Ways & Means when a non-minority would probably have been ousted long ago.
And of course, once a system is perceived as corrupt it becomes self-perpetuating. Corrupt people try to get into the system, for any person the idea of corruption becomes more justifiable (“everyone does it”) and citizens are less motivated to push for sanctions on corrupt politicians (since the replacements will probably be the same).
I have a small quibble with this. I think that low intelligence probably has some effect of increasing corruption. An outright stupid person I think is more likely to not foresee consequences ( like getting caught, or harming others ), or to just go along with an already corrupt system without thinking about it.
I thought the OP was going to ask why local politics is so corrupt, not slam big cities. My hometown has 40,000 people. Of course we get corruption. There’s a pretty small pool of active candidates, yet unlike a rural area, we aren’t in the main a bunch of farmers who all know each other. A lot of the electorate isn’t paying attention.
Social democracy & the New Deal didn’t cause corruption, they appeared in response to it. Nations that are still highly corrupt tend not to have welfare states.
No doubt there’s some truth to that, but there’s also some truth to the notion that a dummy might have less confidence that he could pull it off while a smart guy might be more arrogantly overconfident in his own abilities. (If Bernie Madoff was dumber he probably wouldn’t have tried it.)
I don’t think his point necessarily supports yours. Distrust between ethnic groups is not necessarily a greater inducement to corruption than blithe trust in a government of “good ol’ boys like us.”
Further, some of the worst corruption is about maintaining the power differential between haves & have-nots, or creating such. So even in a country with low immigration, the upper class can find a way to create internal ethnic differentiation.
Even Duncan Hunter? No, really, define “average candidate.” There have been some very smart nominees (G.H.W.Bush at least had foreign policy chops, W.J.Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar), & then there have been nominees of some political ability but only middling administrative ability. And those are the nominees. The candidates running for the nomination–even the ones that get press–may be good at getting support, but they aren’t really all good at governing.
Same here. I quite agree local poltics is far more corrupt than national politics. But the idea that big city politics is more corrupt than small town politics is laughable.
I think Sayre’s postulate that, “Business and public administration are alike only in all unimportant respects,” also comes into play. A lot of council members are local business owners. They know accounting, drudgery, & administration. They may know how to get things done while cutting corners. They aren’t necessarily good at balancing diverse interests, including the interests of persons in the future who may be their children’s rivals.
My experience has been with tiny cities in remote places.
These governments have been oligarchies. The people who run them got there because some mysterious desire to run the government. They do it badly because they don’t know how to run anything. They keep their positions of power because there is no mechanism to inform people as to what they are doing. No local newspaper. No local TV at all. No local radio coverage. The few who tweet don’t even know the local government exists.
Foe example, there’s more corruption at the Township Committee level in small towns than there is at the nominally comparable City Council level in big cities. But these positions are only nominally comparable. Because the Big City job is more influential, simply by virtue of having more people subject to it. And as a result it’s also higher paying and there’s more money spent on the elections and so forth.
So if you want to compare positions by title and official job level, there’s more corruption in small towns. But if you want to equalize them by actual power and influence I would say there’s probably more in big cities.
Though in one sense I do think there’s more in the small towns. Because there’s a lot more chumminess in the towns, simply because they’re small. If you’re a building/constructor inspector in a small town, you personally know and interact with every landlord/builder in town (or their agents). So there’s more opportunity for mutual backscratching/handwashing relationships to develop, versus in a big city where a given builder/landlord might have a harder time paying off the entire inspection department.
Another area where the scale of things comes into it is the fact that a big corporation comes a lot closer or even exceeds the power and wealth of a small community than it does compared to a big city, much less a national government. A single corporation can become the basis of a town’s economy, to the point where simply moving would destroy the town economically. That can’t help but give the local politicians lots of reasons to comply with whatever is asked of them.
IMO thats fairly meaningless. I mean yeah there are more people and bigger budgets in the big towns. But saying that makes them more corrupt is a bit like saying the US is more corrupt than Haiti as you don’t get too many multi-billion dollar defense appropriation scandals in Port-au-Prince.
Things happen in small towns that would make the worse Chicago politician blush.