The Corruption Taboo: economic, political and moral narratives in UNGA speeches

On October 31st, 2003, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) adopted the Convention Against Corruption. Prior to the 1990s the term corruption was taboo, throughout the 1970s it was uttered only 56 times in UNGA speeches by world leaders, in the 2000s it was mentioned 424 times. The anti-corruption convention helped bring the topic into the international agenda; in Kofi Annan’s words from the forward of the convention: "the word corruption was hardly ever uttered in official circles." Despite the growing recognition of the importance of this issue, the factors that lead countries to raise the matter and the nuances behind how they discuss it in in the world stage remain underexplored. The word corruption is politically sensitive, powerful, and closely related to the language of morality. In that same forward, Annan defined it as "an insidious plague" and "an evil phenomenon". Simultaneously, it is often identified as a key cause for economic underdevelopment and "a major obstacle to poverty alleviation". Though this tension between the moral and economic connotations of the term are widely recognized, their correlates have not been systematically explored. This paper attempts to fill this gap by measuring the usage of the term corruption in a corpus of 10,568 UNGA speeches between 1946 and 2022 and tests which country-level variables predict its salience and embedding using various quantitative text analysis methods. To this effect, it considers the following hypotheses: a1) world leaders are more likely to mention corruption following an election where there was a change in political party, a2) world leaders are more likely to mention corruption when referring to a geopolitical opponent, b) there is a difference between the themes associated with the term corruption in speeches by high-income and low/middle-income countries, and c) there are latent narratives of corruption that can be uncovered through unsupervised machine learning algorithms (e.g. topic modelling) which can be scaled into theoretically meaningful categories; namely corruption as an economic development issue and a moral failure. A better understanding of which factors are associated with world leaders highlighting the economic aspects of corruption or using it as a political weapon to denigrate opponents can help pave the way for more effective international anti-corruption measures.