Probably because they aren't as corrupt. Do you have a specific example in mind?
Saudi Arabia for all that it is authoritarian isn't corrupt (within it's own country) they are pretty effective at rounding those people up on a regular basis. North Korea is stuck in the 1960's and led by an insane idiot but they execute people for using their top offices for personal gain.
>> North Korea is stuck in the 1960's and led by an insane idiot but they execute people for using their top offices for personal gain.
That is an incredibly naive point of view on the issue. USSR used to regularly jail/execute people for corruption, so to the outside it might have looked like it was really hard on people using their positions for personal gain.
But the truth couldn't be any further from this - basically everyone was corrupt, because that's how the whole system worked - and the people who were prosecuted were the ones who have fallen out with someone even higher up. It was basically the case of everyone is guilty, but the ruling party would selectively pick people to blame for things going wrong. The surveilance apparatus was very effective and it was trivial to find something on someone, it was just a matter of how hard you looked - and I can guarantee that pretty much everyone had to either take or give a bribe at some point in their lives, because the simplest things in life(like getting coupons to buy food for example) depended on you giving a "gift" to the right person.
I'm not glorifying them or anything. But bribes are part of an authoritarian system, those people have an almost feudal right to the power, and hence to extract value from it. However at the higher echelons where the government was ran from, failing to do the job you were given for bribes was a problem. I suspect that effective members of government took bribes in such a way to incentivize the behavior they needed.
> basically everyone was corrupt, because that's how the whole system worked - and the people who were prosecuted were the ones who have fallen out with someone even higher up
This is a textbook means of social control. You may also refer to our war on (some) drugs (when consumed by certain people).
Sorry, you've lost me here, in what seems like an extreme case of No True Scotsman. Just a few weeks ago, Saudi Arabia was the major news story for allegedly sending a hit squad to secretly murder its own citizen -- a man not charged with a crime but happened to be a vocal critic of the regime -- in its own embassy. Nevermind the convoluted attempt at a coverup, nevermind the regime that operates completely on nepotism.
I'm not saying they aren't nepotistic nor prone to poor attempts at covert ops. Just that they expect a modicum of results, even from their appointed family members. No one wants to die on an airplane because their cousin wanted a few extra bucks to look the other way on airplane safety. Where as bribes for access in the first place are very common in authoritarian regimes, I wouldn't even call that corruption per se, because they have the feudal power to extract the value from the post as long as they perform.
Saudi Arabia for all that it is authoritarian isn't corrupt (within it's own country) they are pretty effective at rounding those people up on a regular basis. North Korea is stuck in the 1960's and led by an insane idiot but they execute people for using their top offices for personal gain.