Corruption is a kind of decay that afflicts institutions. Explicit rules, transparency, checks and balances, and consequences for violating the rules are the only thing that can prevent, or diagnose, or treat corruption. Where you find corruption is where one or more of these things is lacking. It has absolutely nothing to do the -acry or -ism attached to a society, institution, or group.
> Corruption is a kind of decay that afflicts institutions.
It can be, but often its often the project of a substantial subset of the people creating institutions, so its misleading and romanticizing the past to view it as “decay”.
I am no way suggesting that corruption is a new thing. It is an erosive force that has always operated throughout history. The amount of corruption in an institution tends to increase unless specifically rooted out. It goes up and down over time as institutions rise and fall or fade in obsolescence.
Seems like it’s under-studied (due to anglophone bias in the English language political science world probably) - but comparative political science is a discipline, and this paper suggests it’s a matter of single-member districts rather than the nature of the constitutional arrangement: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0010414090022004004
(I would just emphasize, before anyone complains, that the Federal Republic of Germany is very much a federal republic.)
That is painfully naive, a history of pork projects speaks otherwise.