Welcome back to bribes, swindle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Ragi, and today's guest is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Colgate University.

He's the distinguished professor at the International Anti-Corruption Academy

in Austria and co-editor of Transitions to Good Governance, Creating Virtuous Circles of Anti-Corruption.

His teaching experience spans more than 40 years, during which time he has taught courses on

corruption, comparative politics, and democratization. Michael Johnston, thank you for joining me today.

Thanks for the invitation. You've studied corruption for much of your career. Perhaps you could

just start with some high-level observations about what contributes to the virtuous circles you

describe in your book. Well, what's interesting is that the virtuous circles are a way of summing up changes to the entire society, the entire political system.

It's not a matter of this remedy or that remedy, this toolkit or something like that.

It's really, in some respects, a different story in each of the countries that we highlight, but it involves opening up

government to greater accountability. It involves greater involvement on the part of society.

Frequently, the story involves some kind of a crisis period, which is, of course, also an

opportunity and a chance to really change things around. Those are

not always predictable and don't always happen in every country. So if you take our seven key,

virtuous circles, countries, you have seven different stories. What we think we have done is through

the process tracing methodology, which means sort of deep description,

looking at the causes of causes. We think we have at least told a useful story about those

countries that may offer some hints for other places. One of the countries you look at closely

as Botswana, which I think is always fascinating to compliance professionals because it's in a really tough neighborhood and it's a resource-rich country, but it seems to have avoided the worst of the resource curse.

That's really the case. I mean, part of the resource curse issue is that at least people who know the diamond mining business better than I do point out that it's a different extraction process in Botswana from, say, in Western Africa.

The diamonds are closer to the surface in Western Africa.

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