Author Archives: Matthew Stephenson

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About Matthew Stephenson

Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

Guest Post: Spend Anticorruption Resources on Professional Training, Not Postgraduate Education

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Alan Doig, Professor at Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University, contributes the following guest post:

Resources for anticorruption are scare; how should they be spent? In particular, how should the international community (national aid agencies, international institutions, and private donors and foundations) allocate resources for education and training programs for anticorruption professionals?

Although “education” and “training” are often lumped together as one category, in fact they are quite different. Education is about the acquisition of knowledge, with the accompanying change in awareness and understanding, through the provision and assimilation of information. Training involves the acquisition of the applied knowledge and technical skills required to improve individual and organizational performance in the workplace, invariably in relation to specific roles or functions. In terms of impact, education would look for longer-term benefits and impact while training can be judged more immediately by what the person does once trained.

The question of how to spend the even more limited funds that are not tied to the big spenders (the multilateral and bilateral donors) brings this issue into sharp focus, and raises the question of whether too much too much is allocated to postgraduate anticorruption education, at the expense of practical anticorruption training. Continue reading →

Political Finance Regulation and Perceived Corruption: Some Preliminary Exploration

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Corruption is closely linked to problems associated with money in politics. Indeed, some have argued that an excessive/inappropriate influence of money on elections is corruption (even if it’s not necessarily illegal or currently viewed as unethical). Even for those who (like me) prefer a more restrictive definition of “corruption,” it is widely believed that these issues are related. Many hypothesize that countries with weak or ineffective systems of political finance regulation may experience higher levels of corruption—though at the same time excessively onerous, unrealistic regulations on political spending may also induce corruption in order to circumvent the official rules. Perhaps surprisingly, though, we do not have (or at least I have not yet seen) very much quantitative, comparative research on the relationship between the quality of countries’ laws on the regulation of political finance, on the one hand, and the extent of their corruption problems, on the other.

This may be starting to change, thanks in part to initiatives like the Money, Politics and Transparency (MPT) forum (a collaborative venture of the Sunlight Foundation, Global Integrity, and the Electoral Integrity Project). A few weeks back Rick posted a highly critical assessment of MPT’s volume Checkbook Elections, a collection of qualitative case studies. I haven’t yet read that report, but here I wanted to focus on another aspect of MPT’s work: a quantitative index that purports to measure how well 54 different democratic countries regulate political finance, based on responses to 50 survey questions in five different categories (public funding of elections, contribution and expenditure restrictions, reporting and disclosure, regulation of third-party actors, and monitoring/enforcement). The surveys include questions about both law and practice in all five categories; moreover, in addition to a composite index score, MPT also provides separate scores for the quality of electoral regulation both “in law” and “in practice.” (A detailed description of the methodology is available here.) All the usual caveats and concerns regarding these sorts of composite indexes of course apply here, but at first pass this seems like a useful resource, and potentially helpful in teasing out the relationships between political finance regulation and corruption more generally.

Real progress on this will front require careful research design, more extensive data, and the application of rigorous empirical methods—an enterprise for which I lack both the time and the talent. But just for fun, I played around a bit to see how the MPT index (and each sub-index) correlates with the 2014 Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). Are countries with better regulation of political finance (in law, in practice, or overall) perceived as more corrupt? Less corrupt? I’ll tell you what I found after the break, but just for fun take a guess now, before you know the answer!

OK, here’s what I found: Continue reading →

Anticorruption Bibliography–November 2015 Update

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An updated version of my anticorruption bibliography is available from my faculty webpage. A direct link to the pdf of the full bibliography is here, and a list of the new sources added in this update is here. As always, I welcome suggestions for other sources that are not yet included, including any papers GAB readers have written.

A Quick (Partial) Fix for the CPI

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A regular readers of this blog know, I’ve been quite critical of the idea that one can measure changes in corruption (or even the perception of corruption) using within-country year-to-year variation in the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). To be clear, I’m not one of those people who like to trash the CPI across the board – I actually think it can be quite useful. But given the way the index is calculated, there are big problems with looking at an individual country’s CPI score this year, comparing it to previous years, and drawing conclusions as to whether (perceived) corruption is getting worse or better. Among the many problems with making these sort of year-to-year comparisons is the fact the sources used to calculate any individual country’s CPI score may change from year to year, and the fact that a big, idiosyncratic movement in an individual source can have an outsized influence on the change in the composite score. (For more discussion of these points, see here, here, and here.) Also, while TI does provide 90% confidence intervals for its yearly estimates, the fact that confidence intervals overlap does not necessarily mean that there’s no statistically significant difference between the scores (an important point I’ll confess to sometimes neglecting in my own prior discussions of these issues).

Although there are lots of other problems with the CPI, and in particular with making over-time CPI comparisons, I think there’s a fairly simple procedure that TI (or anybody working with the TI data) could implement to address the problems just discussed. Since TI will be releasing the 2015 CPI within the next month, I thought this might be a good time to lay out what I think one ought to do to evaluate whether there have been statistically significant within-country changes in the CPI from one year to another. (I should say up front that I’m not an expert in statistical analysis, so it’s entirely possible I’ve screwed this up in some way. But I think I’ve got the important parts basically right.) Here goes: Continue reading →

Job Opening for Anticorruption Advisors at the U4 Centre

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A job opening possibly of interest to some of our readers:

The U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre, part of the Christian Michelsen Institute in Bergen, Norway, is looking for two full-time anticorruption advisers. The official announcement, which contains more information about the positions, is here. Applications are due November 27 (three weeks from today).

Some Worrisome Russian Rhetoric at the UNCAC Conference of States Parties

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My post a couple days ago expressed some discomfort with the decision to hold the Conference of States Parties to the UN Convention Against Corruption in Russia, given Russia’s track record on this issue, and my concern that the Russian government hopes to use this event more as a PR exercise than anything else. Apropos of these concerns, I finally had a chance to watch some of the video from the event, and one particular passage in the opening remarks of Sergei Ivanov (Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office and a Putin crony) caught my attention. Sandwiched in between claims that recent surveys show corruption in Russia is decreasing and descriptions of all the measures Russia is supposedly taking to combat corruption, Mr. Ivanov said (and here I’m transcribing the English simultaneous translation, since I can’t speak Russian):

We firmly believe that anticorruption activities at the international level require clear rules and agreed efforts between countries. Imposing standards, however, which certain countries are not willing to accept, is not acceptable—all the more so, given that we have seen on more than one occasion that when one country establishes standards of behavior, it tends to be that this is unacceptable to other countries, and it can indeed be harmful. In this connection, we believe that when implementing international anticorruption standards, we need at all times to take on board the specificities of each individual state. I would note also that in the Russian Federation the system of anticorruption measures is based on our national legal culture, which takes on board our historical and economic and social development trends, and the general interests of our society.

Maybe I’m just being paranoid, but to me this sounds an awful lot like a veiled warning that the international community, both within and outside the UNCAC review process, should refrain from criticizing Russia (or other countries) for failure to live up to international standards, on the grounds that each state – and Russia in particular – has its own unique circumstances. Of course, at a high level of generality, Mr. Ivanov’s remark is unexceptionable, and UNCAC already makes plenty of allowances for differences in national legal traditions and political systems. But the spirit of UNCAC is very much to hold every signatory country to a higher standard. Insofar as Mr. Ivanov’s statement is meant to suggest that other countries should not be subject to criticism for failure to live up to international anticorruption standards—particularly in the context of the second cycle country reviews, beginning this year—this seems to me contrary to the point of UNCAC and the associated review process.

(For those who are interested, the video of the full opening ceremony, including Mr. Ivanov’s address, is here, and the portion of the speech I quoted above can be found at 2:37:18-2:38:26.)

The UNCAC States Parties Meeting, and the Political Symbolism of Venue Choice

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The Sixth Conference of States Parties (CoSP) to the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) is being held this week, in St. Petersburg, Russia. From a quick glance at the provisional agenda, it looks like some of the topics that delegates will focus on include prevention, asset recovery, and international cooperation, as well as broader issues related to UNCAC implementation. (For more information, see here.) I don’t really have much to say about the substance of the meetings, not least because they’re still in progress, and much of the actual discussion is taking place behind closed doors. Rather, I wanted to take this opportunity to say in public what I know a lot of people have been mumbling and/or grumbling about in private: There’s something a bit ironic, maybe even perverse, about holding the UNCAC CoSP meeting in Russia, of all places. It seems about as appropriate is it might be to hold a CoSP for the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women in Saudi Arabia. Continue reading →

Announcement: New Edited Volume on “Greed, Corruption and the Modern State”

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Please forgive the self-promotion, but some of our readers out there might be interested in the new volume, Greed, Corruption and the Modern State, co-edited by Susan Rose-Ackerman and Paul Lagunes. (I said it’s self-promotion because I have a chapter in the book on the relationship between democratic electoral institutions and corruption.) The publisher’s information page is here, and the online e-book can be found here. Just to save interested readers a bit of time, I’ll list here the contents, with direct links to PDFs of the chapters:

How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love SDG 16

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A few weeks back, I posted a skeptical commentary about the integration of anticorruption into the new Sustainable Development Goals and associated targets, in particular Target 16.5 (“substantially reduce corruption and bribery in all their forms”). Rick was even harsher. The premise of most of my criticism (and Rick’s) was that progress on Target 16.5 was likely to be measured using changes in countries’ scores on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). It turns that this premise was (probably) incorrect.

I had based my assumption on the lengthy report released last June by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN)—a report which had been commissioned by the UN’s Inter-Agency Expert Group on SDG Indicators (IAEG-SDG). But as Transparency International Senior Policy Coordinator Craig Fagan helpfully pointed out in his comment on Rick’s post, the more recent official information released by IAEG-SDG in September 2015 does not indicate that the CPI will be used as the principal measure for Target 16.5. Rather, the IAEG-SDG document lists as the proposed indicator the “percentage of persons who had at least one contact with a public official, who paid a bribe to a public official, or were asked for a bribe by these public officials, during the last 12 months.” (The relevant material is on page 225.) This still isn’t finalized, but it certainly appears that the IAEG is poised to endorse an experience/survey-based measure for Target 16.5, rather than the CPI-style perception index.

Is this perfect? No, certainly not. But it’s a lot better than what I’d feared. A few further thoughts on this: Continue reading →

Anticorruption Bibliography–October 2015 Update

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An updated version of my anticorruption bibliography is available from my faculty webpage. A direct link to the pdf of the full bibliography is here, and a list of the new sources added in this update is here. As always, I welcome suggestions for other sources that are not yet included, including any papers GAB readers have written.