This Anti-Corruption Helpdesk brief was produced in response to a query from a Transparency International chapter. The Anti-Corruption Helpdesk is operated by Transparency International. The project is supported by The Swedish Postcode Lottery Foundation.
Query
Could you please provide an overview of the corruption risks associated with the concentration of power in the executive branch?
Summary
In recent decades, many countries have experienced a growing concentration of power in the executive branch. While constitutions typically grant executives significant powers, democratic systems rely on horizontal and vertical accountability mechanisms to prevent abuses. Executive aggrandisement occurs when democratically elected leaders gradually expand their authority beyond constitutional limits while weakening checks and balances. This process is usually associated with democratic backsliding.
This Helpdesk Answer provides an overview of how executive aggrandisement also increases corruption risks. It identifies key pathways through which concentrated executive authority weakens horizontal and vertical accountability, promotes political patronage and favouritism, facilitates clientelistic strategies, and increases opportunities for conflicts of interest and personal enrichment. Drawing on examples around different political systems, the paper also outlines mitigation strategies aimed at reinforcing institutional resilience. These include safeguarding judicial and oversight independence, ensuring meaningful electoral competition and alternation of power, strengthening meritocratic bureaucracies capable of resisting political capture, and protecting civil society and media freedoms as essential mechanisms of accountability.
Main points
- In recent decades, different political systems have experienced an increasing concentration of authority in the executive branch, accompanied by the erosion of institutional checks and balances and the weakening of accountability mechanisms.
- While this phenomenon, also known as executive aggrandisement, is mostly associated with democratic backsliding and institutional decay, it also creates acute corruption risks.
- Weakening horizontal and vertical accountability mechanisms, constrained media reporting on corruption, political patronage and favouritism, and personal enrichment are the main corruption risk factors associated with executive aggrandisement.
- Guaranteeing the stability of democratic and oversight institutions, ensuring electoral competition, promoting bureaucratic resistance and protecting the civil space are mitigating measures against these risks.
- As shown by examples from Benin, Colombia, Ecuador and South Korea, efforts by horizontal and vertical accountability actors to hold the executive to account can be complementary and mutually beneficial. Informal alliances between state and non-state accountability actors can provide opponents of executive aggrandisement with institutional access to formal accountability mechanisms to demand explanations or impose penalties on the executive, while also lending oversight institutions popular legitimacy and support.
Contents
- Introduction
- Concentration of power in the executive branch: how does it work?
- Executive aggrandisement and corruption
- Risk factors of executive aggrandisement
- Corruption risks arising from executive aggrandisement
- Mitigation strategies
- References
Authors
Maria Dominguez
Reviewers
Caitlin Maslen, Jamie Bergin, Gabriela Camacho, Buren Mandakhbileg and Matthew Jenkins
Date
19/05/2026
