(Assignment 3) WHAT DOES CROSS NATIONAL EMPIRICAL RESEARCH REVEAL ABOUT THE CAUSES OF CORRUTION - Daniel Treisman - Jyotika Minz

1. The two indexes of perceived corruption most often used in empirical work are the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) of Transparency International (TI) and a rating of control of corruption constructed by Daniel Kaufmann and colleagues at the World Bank (WB).

2. While the highly developed democracies have low estimates of corruption by either measure, among less developed countries, the reported frequency of bribe demands and the perceived level of corruption often diverge widely.

3. Studies have found that lower perceived corruption, using these measures, correlates with higher economic development, more democratic government, more press freedom, parliamentary rather than presidential constitutions, plurality electoral systems rather than proportional representation, political centralization rather than federalism, a history of British colonial rule, less intrusive state regulation, low inflation and greater represent at ion of women in the legislature and government.

4. A respondent’s perception of the extent of bribery was not significantly associated with either the number of contacts he had had with officials or the number of bribes he had paid. However, such perceptions were related to the respondent’s exposure to media stories about corrupt ion.

5. Serious questions have been raised about whether the perceived corruption measures capture cross-national differences in corruption levels or just differences in countries’ reputations, based in part on prevailing stereotypes and media cover age.

6. One possible explanation is that the two indicators measure different dimensions of corruption.

Another possibility is that the experts, country residents and journalists whose writing about governance informs global opinion are them selves influenced by folk theories about what causes corruption.

7. One cannot experiment on the historically formed cross- national variation in corruption. What experiments can be designed are necessarily local and concern only policies or features of the environment that are easy to manipulate. Meanwhile, one should treat analyses of the correlates of experience-based corruption measures as suggestive but certainly not conclusive evidence of causal relationships.

In this chapter, the author has stressed on how the country averages of ‘experience- based’ indicators of corruption turn out to correlate quite imperfectly with the perceived corruption measures.

Treisman, Daniel, “ What does cross national empirical research reveal about the cause of corruption”, Routledge Handbook of Political Corruption, ed. Paul M. Heywood (New York : Routledge, 2015), 95- 109.