Tag Archives: Dieter Zinnbauer

Guest Post: ChatGPT in Anticorruption Research–You Cannot Make This Up!

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Today’s guest post is from Dieter Zinnbauer of the Copenhagen Business School’s Sustainability Center:

Jim Anderson over at the World Bank blog and Matthew Stephenson on this blog kicked of an interesting discussion about how the new era of artificial intelligence—particularly the natural language chat-bots like OpenAI’s revolutionary ChatGPT—will affect the anticorruption field. As Matthew suggested, the ability of ChatGPT to generate plausible-sounding (if a bit bland) summaries and speeches on corruption-related topics should inspire all of us real humans to aim to do more creative and original—and less bot-like—writing and speaking on anticorruption topics. And both Jim and Matthew suggested that in this field, as in many others, ChatGPT can also be a valuable aid for researchers and advocates, performing in seconds research and drafting work that might take a human being several hours.

Yet while ChatGPT may be able to assist in some tasks, we shouldn’t get too excited about it just yet, especially when it comes to research. Some of its limits as a research tool are already well known and widely discussed. But I wanted to call attention to another problem, based on a couple of recent experiences I had trying to use ChatGPT as a research aid. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Refining Corruption Surveys To Identify New Opportunities for Social Change

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GAB is delighted to welcome back Dieter Zinnbauer, Programme Manager at Transparency International, who contributes the following guest post:

Household corruption surveys, such as Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer (GCB) are primarily, and very importantly, focused on tracking the scale and scope of citizens’ personal bribery experience and their general perceptions about corruption levels in different institutions. More recently, the GCB has branched out into questions about what kind of action against corruption people do or do not take, and why. The hope is that better understanding what motivates people to take action against corruption will help groups like TI develop more effective advocacy and mobilization strategies.

In addition to these direct questions about why people say they do or don’t take action against corruption, household surveys have the potential to help advocacy groups in their efforts to mobilize citizens in another way as well: by identifying inconsistencies or discrepancies between what people’s experience of corruption and their perceptions of corruption. The existence of these gaps is not in itself surprising, but learning more about them might help advocates craft strategies for changing both behavior and beliefs. Consider the following examples: Continue reading →

Guest Post: A New Additional Indicator for Measuring Progress Toward SDG 16

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GAB is delighted to welcome back Dieter Zinnbauer, Programme Manager at Transparency International, who contributes the following guest post:

A very interesting discussion has evolved on this blog (see here, here, here, and here), and in the wider world (for example, see here), on about the indicators that should be used to measure progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) goals for improving governance and reducing corruption (Goal 16). There are already some very good suggestions on the table, including the use of Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer (GCB) to measure progress toward Target 16.5, on reducing corruption and bribery in all their forms. (TI has used the GCB since 2005 to compile one of the largest data troves on the detailed experience with corruption of households and individuals around the world. Using a GCB-type indicator for the bribery dimension of SDG 16.5 is supported by a wide variety of stakeholders, including the World Bank, UNDP, and Save the Children.)

Yet most of the indicators proposed so far, including the GCB, speak to very specific aspects of corruption (such as bribery) and don’t quite do justice to Goal 16’s broad ambitions and its emphasis on public accountability. So to spice up this stew a bit, let me suggest another possible indicator, one that complement to some of the ideas that are already on the table. My proposed indicator of progress toward SDG 16 is as follows:

What percentage of national-level parliamentarians (and perhaps top level members of the executive) have made assets, income, and interest disclosures (AIIDs) in a format that is publicly accessible online at sufficient level of detail, in timely manner, and in a machine-readable data format.

Using AIID as an additional SDG 16 indicator might at first seem to be a step backwards, since such an indicator measures “outputs” rather than “outcomes.” But let me try to convince you that in fact AIID would be an extremely useful complementary indicator for progress toward SDG 16: Continue reading →

Guest Post: Promoting Ambient Accountability with Architecture and Design

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GAB is delighted to welcome back Dieter Zinnbauer, Programme Manager at Transparency International, who contributes the following guest post:

Corrupt transactions do not merely “take place” – they take place in a place, a specific place at a specific time: at customs authorities and land registrars, at hospital wards, police road-stops, school headmaster offices, or the offices of social benefits agencies. The fact that most form of corruption occur in physical locations may seem both obvious and unimportant, but in fact there may be some promising ways to modify the physical settings for government-citizen interactions that would make various kinds of corruption less likely to occur (or easier to detect and remedy). This possibility builds on the observation that many corrupt transactions are fragile forms of social exchange, often involving power asymmetries, established social roles, norms, and expectations. These social dynamics are critical to enabling the parties to engage in an illegal transaction that could get both of them into a lot of trouble. These complex social dynamics and expectations are affected by the physical environment; modifications to that environment can therefore disrupt or alter the social dynamics of a specific situation—creating feelings of empowerment for potential targets of extortion and feelings of uncertainty and anxiety for those who would propose corrupt exchanges.

We should therefore think about ways to use architecture and design to empower citizens to become more aware of their rights and entitlements, to better understand and assess the services they receive, and to register complaints and seek remedies more effectively. I call this concept “ambient accountability.” I have developed this idea more fully in two recent papers (here and here), but here are some concrete examples of how this sort of intervention might work in other contexts: Continue reading →

Guest Post: Typologies of (Anti-) Corruption — How Much More Boring Can It Get? Or Maybe Not…

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Dieter Zinnbauer, Senior Program Manager for Emerging Policy Issues at Transparency International, contributes the following guest post:

Remember that childhood game, you say a word over and over and it seems to lose its meaning and just dissolves into a melodic sound? I feel similarly about trying to slice up the umbrella concept of corruption and sort it into practical, reasonably comprehensive, and distinctive subcategories – an endeavor that usually gets out of hand, consumes disproportionate amounts of scarce thinking-time and energy, and eventually leaves the participants more confused and in disagreement than at the outset. Yet quite recently I have begun to change my mind a bit about the unproductiveness of typologizing (anti)corruption. In fact, I have begun to derive some surprising enjoyment and inspiration from playing around with different ways to look at and classify different types of (anti)corruption. Here three examples: Continue reading →

Crowdsourced Anticorruption Reporting, 2.0

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Crowd-based reporting tools have garnered tremendous attention for their role in anticorruption efforts all around the world. Deservedly so: these platforms harness rapidly increasing internet and mobile access in the developed world to tackle the age-old problem of corruption. Perhaps the best known of this new wave of crowdsourced reporting tools, iPaidABribe (which started in India and has been successfully recreated in other parts of the world), allows any citizen with a smartphone or other access to the internet to report bribery incidents nearly-instantaneously. Citizens can report the amount of a bribe, the recipient of the bribe, the institution that took or demanded the bribe, and so on — all anonymously. Visitors can read the reports as well as view a sort of “heat map” that aggregates the reports to demonstrate where bribery is most prevalent. The very act of broadcasting one’s own experiences with corrupt officials, and the commensurate naming-and-shaming effect this has when many such reports are aggregated, is proving to be extremely powerful.

To be sure, not all attempts to use modern internet and mobile technology to crowdsource anticorruption reporting have been as successful. Some (perhaps most) platforms never really get off the ground. Observers on this blog and elsewhere have pointed out that this may be due to a mismatch between local social conditions and the platform itself. These challenges are real, but I want to focus for now on platforms that have managed to gather and report significant data on corruption. Even in these cases, some commentators have pointed out, the full potential of crowd-based corruption reporting platforms has yet to be realized. The data they are gathering is still relatively “raw” and unprocessed by entities that could really use it — such as government anticorruption agencies. Thus it is important to highlight how these platforms can improve, and how they can avoid having their efforts thwarted by unwanted side-effects. As platform developers move past their early obstacles and start achieving real success in their primary goal — getting people to use their reporting system — the need now is to direct the platforms and their potential partners in such a way as to enhance their effectiveness and to avoid the possibility that their data will be misused. Continue reading →

Corruption and the Revolving Door: Recent Discussions and Further Reflections

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So-called “revolving doors” between government and the private sector raise the specter of potential corruption (if not in the strict legal sense, then in the broader sense), and some anticorruption advocates have called for much more aggressive restrictions on former government officials’ ability to work for the sectors they used to regulate. (See, for example, here, here, and here.) Though the concerns are legitimate, I argued in a post a little while back that the issue is much more complex: many of the concerns about the harms of the revolving door may be overblown, and revolving doors might in some cases have beneficial effects.

I thought I’d revisit the issue in light of two very interesting recent contributions on this topic: a blog post last week by Transparency International Programme Manager Dieter Zinnbauer on the pros and cons of the revolving door (along with a companion post on measurement issues), and an article by Wharton School Professor David Zaring. Mr. Zinnbauer concludes that the weight of the evidence suggests that the revolving door is indeed a serious problem, and that for the most part the costs outweigh the benefits; Professor Zaring reaches more or less the opposite conclusion.

Although I think the first half of Mr. Zinnbauer’s post is an excellent, succinct, evenhanded summary of the main issues, I respectfully disagree with the inferences that he draws from the existing evidence. That’s not to say that his conclusions are wrong, or that revolving doors are nothing to worry about. But when Mr. Zinnbauer says that “a much larger body of new evidence comes down quite distinctively on the negative impact of the revolving door,” I think he’s overstating his case. Here’s why: Continue reading →