The Role of Incentive Design in Parliamentarian Anti-Corruption Programmes

The “first wave” of donor sponsored anti-corruption programmes usefully focused on elaborating recommendations for parliamentarians or tried to train them (develop human capital) in anti-corruption. Now it time for these programmes to take into account parliamentarian incentives to adopt these recommendations and/or use this “knowledge.” This paper will discuss these incentives and the ways these programmes should and can help build political capital by managing voter demands, political competition, patronage, and enforcement. The paper also reviews some basic theories from formal political economy which may be of interest to practitioners interested in bridging the theory-practice gap.