Good Governance Indicators as an Indicators of Corruption – Why Not?

Corruption, as is well known, is difficult to measure. Existing tools—whether based on surveys of perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors; on official data (in particular, criminal justice data); or on various proxy measures – remain far from ideal (Fazekas 2023). That said, it should be noted that since the 1990s, when attempts to estimate the scale of corruption relied primarily on perception-based indicators, some progress has been made. Nevertheless, current indicators still capture only fragments of the phenomenon and, while complementary, do not provide a comprehensive picture of it. At the same time, the growing availability of diverse forms of secondary data continues to open up new possibilities for measuring corruption. It also enables a return to indirect approaches to measurement – especially through assessing the extent to which existing legal and institutional arrangements create barriers that prevent corruption risks from expanding. In this context, the concept of good governance is experiencing something of a renaissance. In the past, it functioned as an indirect indicator of corruption, used in particular by the World Bank (Mungiu-Pippidi 2019; Kaufmann, Kraay, Mastruzzi 2010). The presentation is based on a draft version of a methodological article presenting the concept of the Good Governance Index (IDR), created by a team of researchers in 2024 and later applied to a pilot assessment of good governance standards in Poland for the years 2014, 2019, and 2022. In contrast to existing international indices, which to a greater or lesser extent measure corruption and the quality of governance based on perception, the IDR is based solely on the analysis of existing factual data. This experimental effort was intended not only to test whether existing data sources can yield an analytically useful and suitable for comparison picture of corruption and good governance, but also to develop a tool that could be replicated and used in other countries, also opening new possibilities of international. References: Fazekas, M., Ferrali, R. (2023) Advances in measuring corruption and agenda for the future, Government Transparency Institute, Budapest, https://www.govtransparency.eu/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Fazekas-Ferrali_Corr-measurement_article_WPformatted_final.pdf. Herbst, J., Makowski, G., Sobiech, R., Zaremba, M. (2025). The Polish Good Governance Index: A Methodological Proposal Shaped by Democratic Challenges (manuscript under review) Kaufmann, D., Kraay, A., Mastruzzi, M. (2010). The Worldwide Governance Indicators: Methodology and Analytical Issues. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 5430. Mungiu-Pippidi, A. (2019) Europe’s Burden: Promoting Good Governance across Borders. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.