Tag Archives: Transparency International

Commentaries on Corruption and the Coronavirus Pandemic: Update

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A couple weeks back, I said I was thinking about trying to collect and collate the ever-increasing number of commentaries on the relationship between corruption and the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic. Several readers wrote to encourage me to continue, so I’m doing another update. I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to keep this up, since commentaries in on the corruption-coronavirus connection, like the virus itself, seem to be growing at an exponential rate. I certainly don’t make any claims to comprehensiveness (and thus I beg the forgiveness of anyone whose contributions I’ve neglected to include in the list below). But here are some new pieces I came across, followed by a chronological list of corruption-coronavirus commentaries to date: Continue reading →

Guest Post: A Defense of Anticorruption Orthodoxy

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Robert Barrington, Professor of Anti-Corruption Practice at the University of Sussex’s Centre for the Study of Corruption, contributes today’s guest post.

The international anticorruption movement, which has been so successful over the last 25 years in putting this once-taboo issue squarely at the forefront of the international agenda, is suffering a crisis of confidence. The aspiration to eliminate corruption now seems to many like a fantasy from the dreamy era of the fall of the Berlin Wall. And what had appeared to be an emerging consensus about how to diagnose corruption, and how to respond, is fracturing. There has long been a lively debate within the anticorruption community about the best ways to understand and respond to corruption; and likewise, a growing challenge from several different quarters (including governments, businesses, journalists, and academics) on areas such as measurement, what has been successful, and whether the evidence matches the theory for fundamental approaches such as transparency. The debate and challenge have been broadly healthy, and have led to sharper thinking and improved approaches. But some criticism has veered towards attacking simplistic caricatures of the perceived orthodoxy, or launching broad-brush critiques that, intentionally or not, serve to undermine the anticorruption movement and provide nourishment for those that would prefer to see the anticorruption movement diminished or fail.

Take, for example, two common lines of attack against the “orthodox” approach to tackling corruption, one concerning the diagnosis of the problem and the other concerning appropriate responses: Continue reading →

Do Stronger Campaign Finance Disclosure Rules Reduce Corruption? A Critical Assessment of Transparency International’s CPI Report

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Transparency International (TI) released its latest Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) last month. A couple weeks back, in what has unfortunately become a necessary annual tradition, I posted a warning that one should not attach significance to short-term changes in any individual country’s CPI score. Today, I want to turn to another matter. In recent years, whenever TI releases a new edition of the CPI, the organization plays up certain themes or claims that, according to TI, the CPI reveals about corruption’s causes or impact. This year, one of the main themes in the report is the connection between corruption and campaign finance regulation. As this year’s lead TI press release on the CPI declares, “Analysis [of the data] shows that countries that perform well on the CPI also have stronger enforcement of campaign finance regulations.… Countries where campaign finance regulations are comprehensive and systematically enforced have an average score of 70 on the [100-point] CPI, whereas countries where such regulations either don’t exist or are so poorly enforced score an average of just 34 or 35 respectively.” (On the CPI, higher scores indicate lower perceived corruption.)

How did TI arrive at this conclusion? The report accompanying the CPI, and the longer research brief on this topic, give a bit more explanation. TI used another index, from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project, on “Disclosure of Campaign Donations.” The V-Dem index rates countries’ disclosure requirements for campaign donations on a 0-4 ordinal scale. TI took this scale, collapsed the 0 and 1 categories into one (allegedly for “data visualization purposes,” though I’m not sure what this means), and then calculated the CPI score for the countries in each of the four categories. The results:

  • For those countries with a V-Dem disclosure score of 0/1 (no disclosure requirements or requirements that are partial and rarely enforced), the average CPI score was 34.
  • For countries with a V-Dem score of 2 (uncertain enforcement of disclosure rules) the average CPI was 35.
  • For countries with a V-Dem score of 3 (disclosure requirements exist and are enforced, but may not be fully comprehensive), the average CPI score was 55.
  • Countries with a V-Dem score of 4 (comprehensive and fully enforced disclosure requirements) had an average CPI score of 70

That looks like pretty strong evidence that strong campaign finance disclosure rules are associated with lower corruption, and that’s certainly the story TI wants to tell. As the report puts it, “Unregulated flows of big money in politics … make public policy vulnerable to undue influence.” The research brief similarly explains, “Shedding light on who donates and how much, can expose the influence of money in politics and deter corruption and other pay-to-play situations.”

The claim may ultimately be correct, but on closer inspection, the evidence TI adduces in support of that claim is deeply problematic. Continue reading →

New Podcast, Featuring Gary Kalman

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this episode, I interview Gary Kalman, formerly (and at the time of the interview) the Executive Director of the FACT Coalition, and now the Director of the U.S. Office of Transparency International. The first part of our conversation focuses on the work Mr. Kalman did at the FACT Coalition on the push for new U.S. legislation to crack down on anonymous companies. We also discuss his vision, and top priorities, for Transparency International’s new U.S. office.

You can find this episode, along with links to previous podcast 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.

Small Year-to-Year Changes in CPI Scores Are Meaningless. Small Year-to-Year Changes in CPI Scores Are Meaningless. Small Year-to-Year Changes in CPI Scores Are Meaningless

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Last month, Transparency International (TI) released the latest version of its Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI)–an index that I continue to believe is useful and important, and that I regularly defend against the blunderbuss critiques sometimes leveled by a few of my colleagues in the academy. Yet every year when the CPI comes out, we see a spate of articles and press releases that focus on individual countries’ score changes from one year to the next. (For some examples from this year, see here, here, here, here, and here.) TI contributes to this: Despite the qualifications and cautions one can find if you search TI’s web site diligently enough, TI’s lead press release and main CPI report inevitably play up these changes, connecting them to whatever larger narrative that TI hopes to convey. This year was no exception. This time around, the press release emphasizes that “(f)our G7 countries score[d] lower than last year: Canada (-4), France (-3), the UK (-3) and the US (-2). Germany and Japan have seen no improvement, while Italy gained one point”–and TI treats this as evidence for the assertion, in the title of the press release, that the “2019 Corruption Perceptions Index shows anti-corruption efforts stagnating in G7 countries.”

Sigh. I feel like I have to do this every year, but I’ll keep doing it until the message sinks in. Repeat after me:

  • Small year-to-year changes in an individual country’s CPI score are meaningless.
  • Small year-to-year changes in an individual country’s CPI score are meaningless.
  • Small year-to-year changes in an individual country’s CPI score are meaningless.
  • Small year-to-year changes in an individual country’s CPI score are meaningless.
  • Small year-to-year changes in an individual country’s CPI score are meaningless.
  • Even big changes in an individual country’s CPI score may well be meaningless, given the fact that, in a collection of 180 countries, random noise will sometimes produce unusually large changes an a handful of countries (for the same reason that if you flip a set of five coins 180 times, odds are a few of those times you’ll get five heads or five tails).
  • Because year-to-year changes in an individual country’s CPI score usually meaningless, they are not newsworthy, nor can they be invoked to make substantive claims about corruption’s causes or consequences, or the success or failure of different countries’ anticorruption policies.

I don’t want to repeat everything I’ve written before explaining why this is so; I explained this at length in my post last year, after the 2018 CPI came out. (That post, in turn, relied on my prior writing on this topic: See here, here, here, here, here, and here.) I’ve kind of given up hope that TI will actually modify the way it talks about within-country year-to-year CPI score changes in its press releases. I know enough people at TI (great people, I should add) who are aware of what I (and plenty of others) have had to say on this topic that I can only assume that the failure to change is a deliberate decision on the part of TI’s leadership and communications team. I strongly suspect that the serious researchers at TI who work on the CPI are slightly embarrassed by how the index is framed by the organization for public and media consumption, but there’s nothing they can do about it. Despite the apparent futility of my prior efforts, I’ll keep harping on this, in the vain hope that the message will gradually trickle out.

New Podcast, Featuring Andres Hernandez

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. This episode features an interview with Andrés Hernández, the executive director of Transparencia por Colombia (the Colombian chapter of Transparency International). During the interview, Mr. Hernandez covers a range of topics including corruption in the Colombian judicial system, problems in the system for appointing senior public officials, the background and consequences of Colombia’s recent popular referendum of a slate of anticorruption measures, and how corruption may be a factor in recent popular street protests throughout the country. In the later part of the interview, Mr. Hernandez and I also discuss the proposal for the creation of an International Anti-Corruption Court, which the Colombian government has endorsed. The interview concludes with some broader reflections on how the corruption challenges have changed over the past two decades, and why there might be some reasons for cautious optimism about the potential for significant progress going forward.

You can find this episode, along with links to previous podcast 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.

New Podcast Episode, Featuring Kieu Vien

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this episode, I interview Nguyen Thi Kieu Vien, the founder and executive director of Towards Transparency, an anticorruption civil society organization based in Vietnam and affiliated with the Transparency International movement. In the conversation, Vien discusses the history of her organization, the corruption challenges facing Vietnam, some of Towards Transparency’s major initiatives, and the promises and limitations of the Vietnamese government’s recent anticorruption reforms. Vien and I also discuss some of the special challenges of operating an anticorruption NGO in an environment like Vietnam, and how Towards Transparency has tried to overcome these challenges in order to achieve meaningful results within the constraints imposed by the political and legal environment.

You can find this episode, along with links to previous podcast 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.

Fighting Police Corruption in Nigeria: An Agenda for Comprehensive Reform

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Nigeria has a serious problem with police corruption, at all levels. At the top, senior police officials embezzle staggering sums of public funds. To take just one example, in 2012, the former Inspector General of Police, Sunday Ehindero, faced trial for embezzling 16 million Naira (approximately US$44,422). Meanwhile, at the lower levels, rank-and-file police officers regularly extort money from the public, and crime victims must pay bribes before the police will handle their cases. As a 102-page report by Human Rights Watch documented, police extortion is so institutionalized that Nigerians are more likely to encounter police demanding bribes than enforcing the law. No wonder Nigeria’s police force was ranked as the worst of those included in the 2016 World Internal Security and Police Index, and that Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer survey found that a staggering 69% of Nigerian citizens think that most or all police officers are corrupt.

To combat such a deep-rooted and systemic problem, bold and comprehensive reforms are needed. What would an effective reform agenda look like? Here is an outline of the most important reforms that are needed, drawing on international best practices but also tailored to Nigeria’s particular circumstances: Continue reading →

Fighting Healthcare Corruption with Smiles and Stickers

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Compared to other EU countries, petty bribery in Lithuanian healthcare is quite common (see here and here). Though extortion seems rare, Lithuanians frequently make informal (and illegal) payments to doctors either to get better/faster treatment or as an expression of gratitude. When describing this practice, Lithuanians use the language of “giving a gift” or “giving a little envelope,” euphemisms that imply that these payments have come to be perceived as acceptable expressions of gratitude rather than bribes, despite the fact that the Criminal Code prohibits bribery and the Civil Code prohibits giving doctors any sort of gifts outside their private lives. Though formally bribery, giving money to a doctor in Lithuania seems to have developed a different social meaning—rather than implying that you are a dishonest or corrupt person, giving extra money to your doctor has come to be understood as something that reasonable people do in recognition that doctors work hard, are underpaid, and deserve gratitude. Offering gifts or money to a doctor has also become a way to express how much you care about the health of your loved ones who are unwell. So, in Lithuania, the practice of making illegal payments to doctors seems to have become a “social norm” – a shared understanding that such behavior is permitted or even obligatory. It has become a norm both in the descriptive sense (people make these payments because they think that everyone else does so) and in the injunctive sense (making an extra payment to your doctor is an appropriate expression of gratitude). That doesn’t mean it’s good, or something we should ignore or tolerate. But it’s something we need to take into account when thinking about how to combat this form of corruption.

Once we recognize that petty bribery has become a social norm, we should ask what tools could be used to disrupt that norm. Because the problem is so extensive and multifaceted, many of the solutions will require significant institutional reforms, changes in management style, budget reallocations, and the like. Without minimizing the importance of those more fundamental changes, it’s also possible that seemingly small, inexpensive, and non-coercive interventions might help disrupt this dysfunctional social norm. Back in 2011, when I was working for Transparency International Lithuania (TI Lithuania), we piloted one such initiative in collaboration with the Lithuanian Medical Students Association. Our objective was to disrupt social norms surrounding informal healthcare payments—not through loud or aggressive actions, but with stickers and smiles. Continue reading →

A Cultural Defense to Bribery? The Solomon Islands’ Approach

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Gift-giving usually has positive connotations as an expression of love, respect, friendship, gratitude, or celebration. However, when the recipient is a public official, there is always the concern that the “gift” is nothing but a thinly-veiled bribe. For this reason, countries around the world have placed restrictions on the character and value of gifts that public officials are allowed to accept. But in societies where giving gifts – including, perhaps especially, to powerful or influential figures – is an important part of the culture, treating all (sufficiently large) gifts as unlawful bribes is more than usually challenging. Indeed, a recurring question for anticorruption reformers is whether or how anti-bribery law should make allowances for local cultural norms and practices, especially those related to gift-giving. This question – often framed as one of “cultural relativism” – frequently comes up in the context of developing countries (such as Indonesia or various Pacific islands), though it is not exclusive to such countries (see, for example, discussion of this same issue in South Korea).

One country that has recently faced the challenge of regulating cultural gift-giving to and by public officials is the Solomon Islands – a small state in the Pacific Ocean consisting of over nine hundred islands, a population of about 600,000, and a rich and fascinating history. For years, the Solomon Islands has been dealing with pervasive corruption at all levels of government, most notably in natural resources management, which has had disastrous ramifications for the country’s economic development (see here, here, and here). Like other Pacific islands, the Solomon Islands is home to a practice of traditional gift-giving to and by public officials, which in many other jurisdictions could be viewed as legally problematic. According to a local custom (as explained in an official government document), public officials, as members of their community, are “expected to contribute to community events such as weddings, funerals, feasts or church gatherings” and are “obligated to reciprocate with gifts if and when they visit communities and are presented with gifts.”

In July 2018, as part of a comprehensive national anticorruption scheme, the Solomon Islands’ Parliament enacted the much anticipated Anti-Corruption Act (ACA). The ACA is especially notable, and unusual, in its approach towards customary gifts and bribery. Instead of capping the monetary value or limiting the type of gifts which public officials are allowed to accept, the ACA introduced a new cultural defense to the offence of bribery of public officials. According to this defense, a public official who accepts or solicits something of value, as well as the individual who offers or gives it, is not guilty of bribery if the defendants can prove that their respective acts were conducted: (1) “in accordance with custom,” (2) “openly, in the course of a traditional exchange of gifts,” and (3) “for the benefit of a community or group of people and not for an individual.” According to Prime Minister Rick Houenipwela, the ACA’s cultural defense is required as part of the government’s obligation “to respect our customs and traditional cultures” as “a multi-ethnic post conflict country.” However, the cultural defense has been criticized by many, including the Parliament’s Bills and Legislation Committee (see here and here) and Transparency Solomon Islands, which referred to this defense as “a good example of bad law.”

In this post, I do not attempt to answer the question whether the Solomon Islands’ customary gift giving should be criminalized. I do wish to argue, however, that even if we assume that local gift-giving customs are worth protecting, the ACA’s cultural defense to bribery in its current form is highly susceptible to misuse and may undermine the government’s anticorruption efforts. Both the Solomon Islands and other jurisdictions that might be considering a similar cultural defense should take heed of four significant problems with the defense as currently written: Continue reading →