To explain corruption, political scientists have looked at an array of «remote factors» related to the political market and the institutional settings. So far, however, the literature has produced contradictory evidence. We start from the observation that corruption mainly occurs in the administrative dimension of the rule-making and of delivery, and depends on the complaisance of public managers. We then explore and probe empirically an explanation of corruption grounded on the accountability of public administration. We argue that this is a proximate factor capable of hindering the delivery of favors. To prove the explanatory power of our claim and the underlying theoretical arguments, we present an original dataset of administrative governance and analyse mechanisms empirically the association of configurations of accountability obligations with the Perception of Corruption Index 17 EU countries by using Qualitative Comparative Analysis.
