Abstract
Many international survey projects contain items on corruption that facilitate comparative analyses of individual-level determinants of perceived and experienced corruption, yet such data remain under-used. To encourage more and better use of the wealth of available survey projects, this article presents a comprehensive review of the largest collection of extant cross-national data suitable for research on corruption in Europe. I examine a total of 1129 items on corruption stemming from 21 international survey projects and their 89 survey waves that cover 45 European countries during the period 1989–2017. Within three decades, the number of corruption items has grown remarkably, rising from just one in 1989 to nearly a hundred in 2017. This article shows the trends: a considerable increase in experiential items; greater differentiation between forms of corruption; a move from items on ‘what government has done’ to items on ‘what ordinary people can do’; and inclusion of items on corruption in private sector. Researchers interested in understanding perceptions and experiences of corruption, as they are shaped by social contexts, are offered an opportunity of exploring the availability of corruption items in international survey projects in a systematic manner in order to analyzed patterns of corruption, its causes and consequences. Concluding part of the paper contains some remarks on the challenges of using survey data on corruption in a comparative framework.
Highlights
Corruption, broadly defined as the misuse of entrusted power for private gain, ranges from bribery and embezzlement in economic transactions to favoritism, cronyism, and nepotism, i.e. ‘social corruption,’ in professional relations (Holmes 2015)
Harms society: it creates barriers for economic development (Mauro 1995; Aidt 2009), decreases effectiveness and efficiency of public services (Rose-Ackerman 1999; Rose and Peiffer 2015), increases transaction costs (Lambsdorff 2002), undermines legal rules (Karklins 2005), damages government legitimacy (Rothstein 2011), and weakens the social fabric of democratic society (Melgar et al 2010; Anderson and Tverdova 2003). When studying this world-wide, persistent and prevalent social problem, scholars interested in understanding corruption as influenced both by the personal characteristics and by the socio-economic and political contexts can turn toward cross-national public opinion surveys
I trace the number of corruption items included in public opinion surveys from 1989 to 2017 and I examine what types of surveys included corruption items
Summary
Corruption, broadly defined as the misuse of entrusted power for private gain, ranges from bribery and embezzlement in economic transactions to favoritism, cronyism, and nepotism, i.e. ‘social corruption,’ in professional relations (Holmes 2015). The extended abstract of this article has been published in the Newsletter on Survey Data Harmonization in the Social Sciences, Tomescu-Dubrow and Dubrow (eds.), see Wysmulek (2017) When studying this world-wide, persistent and prevalent social problem, scholars interested in understanding corruption as influenced both by the personal characteristics and by the socio-economic and political contexts can turn toward cross-national public opinion surveys. Cross-national surveys on representative samples of the adult population facilitate generalization They allow to assess, among others, citizen’s personal experience with ‘petty’ or bureaucratic corruption and perceptions of the elite level acts of ‘grand’ corruption committed by governments and multi-national corporations (Holmes 2015; Heath et al 2016). Despite this great potential, public opinion survey data on corruption remain under-used (Richards 2017, p. 4; Chabova 2017)
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