Kleptocracy

Rule by theft. A government whose working purpose is the transfer of public wealth to the people operating it, as distinct from a government that merely has corrupt officials inside it. The distinction is one of design rather than degree: in a kleptocracy the extraction is not a failure of the system, it is what the system is arranged to do.

The Philippine case is the reason the word appears in this course at all, and it marks the inversion the whole level has been building toward. Every earlier lesson described private actors extracting from a weak state. This is the point at which the state itself becomes the extracting party.

Source: Standard comparative-politics vocabulary rather than a Philippine coinage. The Philippine anchor is Jovito R. Salonga, Presidential Plunder: The Quest for the Marcos Ill-Gotten Wealth, 2000, and the Guinness World Records entry for “largest-ever theft from a government,” recorded in 1989 and still listed, which Guinness has confirmed it does not dispute as a historical fact (VERA Files, https://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-guinness-did-not-remove-marcos-greates ).

First used in: 1.7 · When the state itself became the looter