Tag Archives: United States

Multiple Errors in Quantitative Data Analysis, from Site Specializing in Quantitative Data Analysis

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Like many people out there, I’m both a huge fan of Nate Silver–and the rigorous quantitative approach to election forecasting that he popularized–and at the same time quite disappointed in his FiveThirtyEight website, where the posts (especially those not by Silver himself) often seem to be slapdash efforts by people who have a smattering of statistical knowledge but don’t really know much about the topics they’re writing about. A depressing recent example, germane to this blog, is a post from last week entitled “It Only Seems Like Politics Is More Corrupt.” I normally wouldn’t bother to comment on something so slight here (especially because the post appears to have been written by an intern, and I generally try to avoid beating up on people who are just starting out), but many of the errors in analysis are both sufficiently elementary, and sufficiently common in discussions of corruption trends in other contexts (and by people with much more experience and therefore less of an excuse), that it’s worth taking a moment to explain what’s wrong.

A quick summary: The author cites recent U.S. Gallup poll data showing that the percentage of Americans who believe that “corruption is widespread” throughout the government in the United States has increased from about 60% in 2006 to a little over 75% in 2013. However, the author argues, the data doesn’t support the idea that corruption in the U.S. has actually worsened. To support that claim, she points to two other data sources:

  1. U.S. Department of Justice statistics from 1992-2012 show that the number of cases prosecuted by the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section (as well as the number of convictions and number of cases awaiting trial) appears to have declined, or at least hasn’t increased.
  2. The U.S. score on the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index (CPI) hasn’t changed very much between 1995 and 2013 (although there’s concededly a slight downward trend).

Do these two data sources disprove the idea that corruption in the U.S. has worsened over the last eight years, or more generally that the U.S. public’s perception of corruption is inaccurate?  In a word, no. There are so many elementary conceptual and statistical errors in this analysis, it’s difficult to know where to begin, but let me take a shot at cataloguing the most egregious problems: Continue reading →

America’s Pursuit of Absolute Integrity

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Attempts to control corruption have a long history in the United States.  Since the late 19th century numerous laws have been enacted at the federal, state, and local level to end patronage and nepotism in government employment, control conflicts of interest by public servants, and reduce opportunities for bribery and kick-backs.  Although the current corruption landscape differs from that of 20th century America, policymakers considering anticorruption legislation today can profit from a look at the U.S. experience.

A useful, if sobering, place to start is with Professors Frank Anechiarico and James B. Jacobs’ 1997 analysis based on New York City’s century long effort to combat corruption supplemented by the federal government’s more recent experience with ethics laws.  Useful because the authors analyze many of the same interventions now commonly advocated to combat corruption around the globe: conflict of interest legislation, financial disclosure requirements for public servants, whistleblower protection, the creation of inspectors general, the reduction of officials’ discretion.  Sobering, not only because they conclude these reforms have done little to combat corruption, but also because the authors contend that together these laws have contributed to the current dysfunctional state of American government.  In short, they say, America’s effort to suppress corruption has produced little benefit at great cost.

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Bharara and the Moreland Commission: Federal Overstep or Legitimate Intervention?

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As a reaction to widespread corruption in New York state government, Governor Andrew Cuomo and Attorney General Eric Scheiderman appointed the Moreland Commission to Investigate Public Corruption in July of last year. The members of the Commission were deputy attorneys general with broad powers to investigate violations of bribery, campaign finance, lobbying and election laws. Governor Cuomo disbanded the Moreland Commission last March, purportedly as part of a bargain to pass stricter anticorruption laws made in a larger budget deal. Two weeks later, the federal government stepped in, in a very public way. Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, opened an investigation into Cuomo’s decision to prematurely shut down the Commission and openly questioned Cuomo’s justification for the decision. Last week, the New York Times reported that subpoenas may have been served on the Commission’s former counsel, possibly to root out evidence of interference by the governor’s office in the workings of the Commission.

The federal investigation raises an important question: how involved should federal prosecutors be in corruption at the state and local level? Cuomo’s defensive response to Bharara’s announcement suggests that Cuomo believes involvement in this case is undesirable. However, any umbrage-taking on the part of the governor would be misplaced. For two reasons, Bharara’s intervention stands out as a uniquely well-founded and legitimate example of the increasingly commonplace practice of federal prosecution of state and local corruption.

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Do Americans Care About Corruption?

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We usually imagine that democratic accountability serves an important anticorruption function: since voters presumably do not approve of corruption, a benefit of democracy is the ability to give untrustworthy pols the boot. Yet in a recent op-ed in the Washington Post, Hilary Krieger provocatively claims that American voters don’t really care if a politician engages in corrupt acts, so long as “a political leader has otherwise furthered the public good.” In addition to this descriptive claim, she also makes the normative argument that Americans voters are right not to reflexively vote out politicians tainted by corruption.

Although both her descriptive and normative claims have some truth to them–elections are multi-faceted, and corruption is not the end-all-be-all issue–both the descriptive and normative arguments have serious flaws.

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Political Bias in U.S. Anticorruption Enforcement

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In my post last week, which reacted to Dani Rodrick’s discussion of the political situation in Turkey (and also to some of the commentary on recent anticorruption enforcement patterns in China), I noted the ambivalence that many people (myself included) feel about anticorruption enforcement that is simultaneously (1) legitimate (in the sense that there is evidence that the targets have indeed violated the law) and (2) politically-motivated (in the sense that the targets may have been selected not only, or not primarily, because of the alleged corruption, but also because of partisan or factional political conflict).

One thing that I should have made clearer in the post, but didn’t, is that concerns about politically-motivated anticorruption enforcement are not limited to developing countries. Indeed, there’s some fairly strong evidence of partisan political bias in anticorruption enforcement in other countries, like the United States. The strongest evidence that I know of is a terrific paper by the political scientist Sandy Gordon, which finds very strong evidence that the U.S. Department of Justice is more likely to prosecute state and local officials for various corruption offenses if those officials belong to a different political party than the one that controls the White House. (This effect was particularly strong during George W. Bush’s presidency.) Continue reading →