Tag Archives: Global Integrity

Special Podcast Episode: ICRN Forum Panel on Communication Between Academics and Policymakers

Posted on by
Reply
A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. This episode differs a bit from our usual format. Rather than featuring an interview of a single expert, this week’s episode features a recording of a roundtable discussion held at the fifth annual Interdisciplinary Corruption Research Network (ICRN) Forum, which was held virtually last month with the sponsorship and support of Global Integrity. One of the highlights of the Forum was a special panel entitled “How Can Academia and Policy Communicate in Anti-Corruption?”, which, as the name implies, focuses on improving the channels of communication between the research community (especially academics based at universities) and the policy and advocacy communities. The roundtable, which was moderated by Johannes Tonn of Global Integrity, featured three distinguished experts with substantial experience working to bridge the gap between research and practice: Professor Heather Marquette of the University of Birmingham (currently seconded part-time to UK Government’s Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office); Professor Leslie Holmes of the University of Melbourne; and Jonathan Cushing, who leads Transparency International’s Global Health Program.The panelists had a lively discussion about the importance of improving channels of communication between researchers and practitioners, the challenges that researchers face in engaging with the policy community, and some of the approaches that might help overcome those challenges. While I hope the episode may be of interest to all of our readers, I would particularly commend it to up-and-coming scholars. One more quick note: After this week’s episode, KickBack will be going on hiatus for the (Northern hemisphere’s) summer break. We will be back in September with new episodes! You can also find our most recent episode, as well as an archive of prior episodes, at the following locations: KickBack is a collaborative effort between GAB and the ICRN. If you like it, please subscribe/follow, and tell all your friends! And if you have suggestions for voices you’d like to hear on the podcast, just send me a message and let me know.

Announcement: The Anticorruption Corpus Launch Event

Posted on by
1

As I mentioned in a previous post, the anticorruption NGO Global Integrity (GI), in collaboration with the UK’s Anti-Corruption Evidence Research Programme, have created a new resource for anticorruption researchers–an Anticorruption Evidence Library–which is based on the bibliography of anticorruption sources that I started compiling several years back (and for which I announce monthly updates on this blog). Tomorrow (Wednesday, June 23), at 9 am US East Coast Time, Global Integrity will be hosting an online event to mark the launch of the library, and to provide scholars, activists, and other researchers more information about how to use the library to identify and access sources that can contribute to developing a solid, evidence-based approach to assessing and addressing corruption problems. You can find out more information about the event, along with a link to preregister, here. I hope to see many of you there!

Anticorruption Bibliography–May 2021 Update, Plus the Introduction of Global Integrity’s (Anti-)Corruption Corpus

Posted on by
Reply

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.

In addition to this month’s update, I am delighted to announce that Global Integrity has created an online searchable version of the bibliography, complete with user-friendly search functions, links to open-source versions of the pieces (when available), and other helpful features. This resource (which GI is calling “The (Anti-)Corruption Corpus”) is a huge improvement over my extremely low-tech long PDF document, and I hope that this will make the database more useful. My collaborators at Global Integrity and I will be ironing out the kinks over the next little while, and I will continue to post PDFs of the full bibliography and each month’s new additions on my webpage, but I am optimistic that in the very near future the Global Integrity database will supplant my original version, and serve as the go-to resource for researchers and others looking to get a sense of what’s available in the English-language corruption literature.

As always, I welcome suggestions for other sources that are not yet included, including any papers GAB readers have written.

The Opportunity to Address Kenya’s Corruption Problem

Posted on by
8

With the Kenyan Presidential elections on the horizon in 2017, incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta, who hopes to continue his regime, has spoken out against corruption, emphasizing that combating this widespread problem requires effort on the part of every Kenyan. In his first term, President Kenyatta had shown promising signs of staying true to his philosophy of holding everyone accountable by actually getting rid of members of the Cabinet. Yet Kenya’s recent history makes many skeptical. For over a decade, Kenyan presidents have been pledging to get corruption under control. In 2003, newly-elected President Kibaki promised to stamp out corruption in Kenya. He proceeded to enact two important pieces of legislation in his first year: the Anti-Corruption and Economic Crimes Act, which established the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission (KACC) to investigate corruption and educate the public, and the Public Officer Act, which required all public officers to declare their wealth. Yet at the end of President Kibaki’s decade-long regime, the situation remained bleak, with corruption running rampant. Kenya’s education sector offers a particularly troublesome glimpse into the continued prevalence of the problem. A 2010 forensic audit of Kenya’s Education Sector Support Programme found that misappropriation of funds and leakages in transfer of cash and materials from the Ministry of Education to schools, as well as other types of private embezzling and mis-accounting of funds, had led to the loss of 4.2 Billion Kenya Shillings (US$55 million) that was originally intended for education. Furthermore, most of the suspected actors went unpunished; even when caught, the culprits were either transferred to new departments or at most suspended from their role.

As for President Kenyatta’s more recent efforts, the President claims that he has done his part in the anticorruption fight and is frustrated by the lack of complementary efforts by others. Yet many critics claim that President Kenyatta has not demonstrated the political will necessary to fight corruption. And some have gone further, accusing the president of suspect and excessive awarding of government contracts to companies like Safaricom without an open bidding process. Safaricom have been involved in multiple corruption scandals already, leading to suspicions of bribery. Critics have also been highlighting the fact that those close to Kenyatta seem immune from serious scrutiny for corrupt acts.

Even if we put those concerns to one side, and assume that both President Kenyatta and President Kibaki before him were acting in good faith, the numerous anticorruption initiatives undertaken by both administrations do not seem to have had much of an impact. There are a few things that Kenya’s next president—whether it is Kenyatta or someone else—could do that would go further in making progress against the corruption problem than the measures that have been adopted so far: Continue reading →

Guest Post: When and How Will We Learn How To Curb Corruption?

Posted on by
3

GAB is pleased to welcome Finn Heinrich, Research Director at Transparency International, who contributes the following guest post:

Listening to conversations about corruption among global policy-makers, corruption researchers, and anticorruption activists alike, I can’t help but notice that the focus of anticorruption research and policy is changing. The 1990s focused mainly on demonstrating that corruption exists and finding ways to measure it (largely through perception-based indicators), and the early 2000s were about assessing corruption risks in specific countries, sectors, or communities, and assessing the performance of anticorruption institutions. More recently, researchers (and their funders and clients) are shifting from the “Where is corruption?” question toward the “How can we fight corruption?” question. They ask: Do we know what works, when, where, and under which circumstances in curbing a specific type of corrupt behavior?

Answering such questions is extremely challenging. Corruption’s clandestine nature makes it difficult to measure, data is often of low quality or simply not available for time-series or cross-sectional analysis beyond aggregate country-level indicators. Furthermore, anticorruption interventions often lack an underlying theory of change which would be needed to design robust research evaluations to find out whether they worked and if so, how (and if not, why not). And we lack realistic but parsimonious causal models which can take account of contextual factors, which are so important to understand and tackle corruption, as corruption is an integral part of broader social and political power structures and relationships which differ across contexts. Similarly, there is a lack of exchange between micro-level approaches focusing on specific, usually local anticorruption interventions, on the one hand, and the macro-level literature on anti-corruption strategies and theories, on the other.

While we at Transparency International certainly do not have any ready-made solutions for these extremely tricky methodological and conceptual issues, we are committed to joining others in making headway on them and have therefore put the “what works” question at the heart of our organizational learning agenda by engaging in reviews of the existing evidence as well as ramping up impact reviews of some of our own key interventions. For example, we have just released a first rapid evidence review on how to curb political corruption, written by David Jackson and Daniel Salgado Moreno, which showcases some fascinating evidence from the vibrant field of political anticorruption research. We are also working with colleagues from Global Integrity on a more thorough evidence review on corruption grievance as a motivator for anti-corruption engagement and are planning further evidence reviews and impact evaluations.

As we start to get our feet wet and figure out how to best go about generating and making sense of the existing evidence on what works in anti-corruption, we are keen to engage with the broader anticorruption research community. Maybe there are others out there who have some ideas about how to go about learning about what works in fighting corruption? If so, please use the comment box on this blog or get in touch directly at acevidence@transparency.org.

Political Finance Regulation and Perceived Corruption: Some Preliminary Exploration

Posted on by
6

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 →