{draw:rect} A consensus is emerging among anti-corruption professionals that techniques based on policing and oversight are insufficient to control corruption. It is essential, they argue, for citizens to participate in anti-corruption efforts, largely through civil society groups. In devices the classical institutions of constitutional democracies, including the separation of powers, independent judiciaries, free and fair elections, and an independent media. 1 Nor are these moves toward democratic institutions surprising: the goals most often mentioned in association with anti-corruption techniques—accountability, openness, and transparency— map roughly onto the democratic ideal that the central forces in political decision-making should be accountable representation and public justification. Moreover, there is a striking correlation between more democracy and less corruption: of the 20 least corrupt countries in Transparency International’s most recent Corruption_ Perception Index_, 18 are developed democracies, the exceptions being Singapore and Hong Kong. 2 Yet the role of democratic participation in controlling corruption is ambiguous at best. A cross-national study by Daniel Treisman suggests that the current degree of electoral democracy is not correlated with low corruption at all. “Long exposure to democracy” predicts lower corruption, although the corruption-lowering impact was less than a number of other factors, including histories of Protestantism and British rule with its common law tradition, levels of economic development, levels of imports, and non-federal governmental structures.” 3 Theoretical reasons for such findings are not hard to see: as corruption control devices, the key mechanisms of democratic participation are ambiguous at best. At worst, they often seem to be causes rather than solution. Transparency International’s TI Sourcebook notes that “vertical accountability”—that is, citizens using the powers of the...