Measuring Political Corruption - How to Hit a Moving Target?

Abstract

Corruption researchers face an unavoidable challenge of how to operationalize and measure corruption that is secretive in nature. Corruption has become an increasingly politicized issue and its measurements are often vulnerable to manipulations, which makes the demand for objective measures of political corruption even more pressing. Over the past twenty years, the efforts to measure corruption have helped to put corruption on the global policy agenda. The most widely used indicators, for example the Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index, the World Bank’s Control of Corruption indicator and measures from the Quality of Government and Varieties of Democracy Datasets, are based on perceptions and experts’ opinions. Research community has a growing awareness of the biases that corruption measures based on citizen- and expert-surveys entail; yet to ensure better quality of the measurements, more research is needed on sources of those biases. At the same time, a great increase in the available data on corruption together with improving computational techniques create new analytical possibilities for corruption researchers, but also require critical reflection on limitations and benefits of the available data sources. This panel will address limitations of available measurements of political corruption and discuss new approaches to measuring political corruption. It welcomes both qualitative and quantitative reflections on biases and possible improvements of political corruption measures.

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