On May 28, Professor Lars Vinther Johannsen from Aarhus University delivered the PhD seminar “Corruption: Nemesis of Democracy”, within the PhD Programme in Legal Sciences and as part of the ProStEUVa teaching activities. Chaired by Professor Angioletta Sperti, the seminar offered PhD students an opportunity to reflect on one of the most enduring challenges faced by democratic systems: the ways in which corruption affects institutional trust, democratic competition, and the resilience of constitutional government.
Professor Johannsen began by situating corruption within a long tradition of political thought. From Kautilya/Chanakya to Plato and Aristotle, corruption has been understood as a recurring threat to public life, connected to greed, moral decay, weak oversight, and the pursuit of private advantage at the expense of the common good. Building on this historical perspective, the lecture moved to contemporary theories of corruption. The principal-agent approach was presented as a way to understand corruption through information asymmetries, weak monitoring, and failures of accountability. The collective-action perspective, in turn, shifted the focus to shared expectations: when corruption is perceived as widespread, integrity becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. Through these analytical lenses, Professor Johannsen showed how corruption may become systemic. In contexts marked by weak institutions, patronage, clientelism, and low levels of trust, corrupt practices tend to reinforce one another, gradually shaping both institutional behaviour and public expectations.
The seminar then explored the democratic consequences of corruption. Professor Johannsen discussed how corruption can distort democratic competition even before elections take place, while also weakening institutions once political power has been allocated. Corruption therefore affects democracy at multiple levels: it influences the formation of political choices and undermines the functioning of democratic institutions over time. This also opened the way to a broader discussion of the relationship between corruption, populism, and trust. Anti-corruption claims may strengthen demands for accountability, yet they can also fuel generalized distrust when institutions are portrayed as irredeemably captured.
In the final part of the lecture, Professor Johannsen turned to anti-corruption strategies and to the challenge often described as “getting to Denmark”: the building of a stable, democratic, low-corruption, high-trust society supported by impartial public administration. The discussion addressed the importance of merit-based bureaucracy, rule-bound administration, transparency, sanctions, whistleblowing, leadership, and anti-corruption agencies. At the same time, the seminar stressed that information alone is rarely enough where corruption has become systemic, and that effective anti-corruption policies require institutions capable of changing incentives, expectations, and practices over time.
