BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter One
impossible to establish any fact of the matter. Hence, I am not saying that A actually
paid B to do C—meaning both A and B considered the transaction context a ‘payment’,
as opposed to a ‘gift’ or ‘entitlement’—nor am I saying that C actually constituted some
norm violation. Instead, I am indicating that, according to one perspective, ‘A bribed B
to do C’ is a valid way to construe the events in question, meaning it is a valid way to
understand C and the causal link, if any, between C and the transaction between A and
B. 24
Adopting the social frame of bribery necessarily assumes that A paid B to do C,
and it accordingly assigns these events a particular normative value; but, again, note how
A and B, or anybody else for that matter, might adopt a different frame for understanding
the situation and thus might evaluate it differently. This is an inevitable agnosticism in
assessing any individual’s real motivations, I think, and for this reason intention-based
models of bribery have a critical problem in that they can rarely, if ever, be accurately
measured. As a corrective, therefore, the relational view I am espousing focuses on the
outcome, not the intent, of the ‘bribe’. Shifting our focus in this way from bribery qua a
set of actions to bribery as a political claim—and, specifically, allowing that different
frames might prevail among participants and observers—can have major implications for
how we think about anti-corruption agendas. Although these implications will be
addressed formally at the end of the dissertation, it is hoped that insights on this question
will emerge periodically throughout the chapters that follow.
A second disclaimer that should be mentioned is that following a relational model
of bribery necessarily moves us away from rational actor explanations for bribery as a
24 On this point, I have benefited greatly from extended conversations with Arudra Burra, whose own work
on coercion takes a similar approach.
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