Eric Uslaner's ambitious book argues that—across a wide range of countries and contexts—the fundamental underlying engine and explanation for corruption is inequality. Mustering an array of sources, including survey data, comparative literatures, and personal anecdotes, Uslaner makes a compelling case that the faith often placed in relatively simplistic institutional changes as a means for combating corruption is misguided. Such approaches ignore the deeply embedded economic and social underpinnings of corruption, which, he argues, are tied less to political institutions (narrowly conceived) and more to systematic inequality and the economic and cultural processes that support it.

Uslaner's analysis of the relationship between inequality and corruption depends on a crucial, indirect mechanism that links inequality and corruption: namely, trust. He shows that low levels of “generalized” or “out-group” trust and high levels of “particularized” or “in-group” trust characterize societies with great inequality, both of which facilitate corruption. The basic argument is that in settings of significant inequality, people have little reason to trust out-group others (including—indeed perhaps especially—individuals who control the government), leading to a situation where the state is seen as something that can be (even should be) “grabbed” for one's in-group.

Using data from multiple national surveys, Uslaner makes the point repeatedly and convincingly that ordinary citizens perceive a connection between inequality and corruption, and that these perceptions matter. The data further suggest that it is large-scale or grand corruption that people find aggrieving, not small-scale corruption. Ordinary folk become habituated to the daily workings of petty corruption, and are relatively unbothered by it. But they do not become inured to grand corruption and perceive it as directly tied to inequality, a finding that appears robust across a range of data sets and country settings.

Uslaner contends that there is an “inequality trap”—a vicious cycle that exists in contexts of high levels of inequality, low levels of generalized trust, and grand corruption. Inequality breeds corruption (and low levels of trust), which gives rise to more inequality. The book portrays both inequality and corruption as “sticky” problems, not easily amenable to quick fixes and simple policy changes. Combating corruption, he suggests, requires taking on the much larger problem of social inequality.

As a scholar who works on Africa (and in Nigeria in particular), I was pleased to read an account of corruption that looks beyond some of the narrow cultural explanations for it in the developing world (especially in Africa) and would have one believe that corruption is a “cultural” problem, peculiar to the Global South. Uslaner begins with an anecdote from his hometown of Paterson, New Jersey, and makes it clear that the connections among inequality, trust, and corruption transcend cultural (as well as national) boundaries. Despite the vast differences between my own discipline's more ethnographic and particularistic orientation and Uslaner's more quantitative and sweepingly comparative approach (to an anthropologist like me, the idea that one might expect a single framework to explain cases as dissimilar as Nigeria, Romania, and Singapore appears exceedingly ambitious), I found many resonances between my ethnographic understanding of corruption in Nigeria and Uslaner's comparative account of corruption everywhere.

A number of themes in the book provoked critical reflections on my experiences with corruption in Nigeria, and I am elaborating on them as a way to interrogate further the analytical contributions of this fine book. These themes include the relationship between corruption and morality, the connections between petty and grand corruption, the distinction between generalized and particularized trust, and issues related to the origin of corruption and the direction of the causal arrows between corruption and inequality.

I found myself a bit skeptical about Uslaner's position with regard to the significance of morality for understanding and explaining corruption. According to survey data, average folk do not find petty corruption morally problematic, but they do find high-level corruption morally unacceptable—primarily, the author argues, because it is perceived as causing or exacerbating inequality. Petty corruption is an adaptive response to inequality and thus is experienced as morally acceptable; grand corruption is a cause of inequality and, thus, is deemed morally unacceptable, he suggests. While this resonates broadly with my experience in Nigeria and elsewhere, I believe that the connections between corruption and morality are frequently more nuanced and complex. For example, many forms of petty corruption are not simply tolerated, as Uslaner suggests, but can run the gamut from ethically imperative (for example, a person who uses his social connections to pull strings in order to get a family member an otherwise inaccessible job) to ethically despicable (a police officer who demands a bribe to investigate a crime). The moral dimensions of petty corruption, rather than being largely absent, are often highly salient. Further, context and position frequently shape popular perceptions of grand corruption, at least in Nigeria. For example, a corrupt federal minister can be seen as a hero in his state of origin and a villain in another region (all of which supports Uslaner's argument about in-group versus out-group trust, but complicates any notion that one can easily paint petty corruption as morally neutral and grand corruption as morally wrong).

Related to the issue of morality is the question of the connections between petty and grand corruption. While I largely agree with Uslaner's argument (supported by the data he provides) that it is grand corruption that creates the context for petty corruption rather than vice versa, I am not convinced that the prevalence of petty corruption is unrelated to the social reproduction of grand corruption. He gives great weight (in my view, appropriately) to the significance of people's perceptions about the links between inequality and corruption. In the same vein, I take seriously the perception in Nigeria among ordinary people that they are in some ways complicit in the perpetuation of grand corruption. While I believe that Uslaner is correct in seeing petty corruption as a means for surviving in the context of the inequality trap, it seems to me that the possibilities for political change that would address corruption by redressing inequality are inhibited by the pervasive practices of petty corruption, which lead people to conclude that there is no other way to respond to grand corruption and tremendous inequality. The context for the most socially injurious forms of corruption is social inequality, and challenges to inequality must ultimately be political. To me, this means that for change to occur, ordinary citizens must create political pressure to combat inequality; such collective action is arguably inhibited by pervasive petty corruption.

On another matter, Uslaner argues that social inequality undermines generalized trust and makes particularized trust more powerful, thus facilitating corruption. I wonder if there is not a bigger story to tell. Might not a larger set of sociological forces be at play, related to the transition from more face-to-face forms of governance and sociality to more anonymous arrangements? In other words, the very notion of generalized trust could be argued to be a fairly new (and, frankly, quite peculiar) phenomenon in human societies that needs to be interrogated and understood, rather than taken for granted.

Perhaps the weakest aspect of this excellent book, from my point of view, is the lack of an historical perspective. Uslaner admits that we know much more about why corruption persists than why it starts, but I think more attention to historical contexts (which, of course, would run against the comparative grain of an explanation designed to account for almost all cases everywhere) would go a long way to addressing this question. While I think Uslaner is correct that the nexus among inequality, trust, and corruption has become a vicious circle in which causality is not simply linear, the lack of attention to history preempts any possibility for an account that could tell us more about origins (and therefore, perhaps, about pathways forward).

In some ways, this is a curious book for a political scientist to write about corruption because it argues against the explanation that I might imagine (perhaps naively, as a non–political scientist) would be most conventional in the discipline: namely, the centrality of politics and institutions. Ultimately, I found Uslaner's argument about the significance of inequality to be compelling. He rejects the “broken window” model, in which grand corruption is tackled by taking on petty crime. His evidence that it is more (and better) government, not less, that is the best policy prescription for combating corruption is an important finding in an era of neoliberal policies. Given his persuasive argument that inequality is at the root of corruption and at the center of ordinary people's discontents, I could not help wondering what he thinks of societies (like the United States) that have maintained tremendous inequality but reconfigured the mechanisms for reproducing these disparities such that they are no longer branded as corrupt.