Evaluating corruption

by Christine Heckman

On Nov. 11, Columbia University’s Harriman Institute of Russian, Eurasian and Eastern European Studies hosted a panel discussion entitled “The Politics of International Corruption Ratings” as part of its series Human Rights in the Post-Communist World, co-convened by Professors Jack Snyder and Alexander Cooley.

The panel consisted of Mlada Bukovansky, Associate Professor of Political Science at Smith College; Nathaniel Heller, Managing Director of Global Integrity, an NGO that examines governance and corruption trends around the world; and Timothy Frye, the Marshall D. Schulman Professor of Post-Soviet Foreign Policy at Columbia University and Director of the Harriman Institute.

Cooley introduced the discussion by noting that while corruption ratings are often cited in academia, the media and policy circles, there is a lack of questioning about the authority, methodology or potentially conflicting interests of the agencies generating the ratings.

Bukovansky provided a historical overview of the development of the anti-corruption norm. For decades, corruption was implicitly accepted as a “rational, market-clearing mechanism”: inconvenient, yet necessary to maneuver around certain policies. However, during the second half of the 1980s, as quantitative corruption indices and international conventions began to solidify the anti-corruption norm, the general perception of corruption shifted from something generally overlooked to a cause of embarrassment.

Bukovansky argued that the current anti-corruption framework, with its intense focus on bribery, misses other crucial corruption indicators. She noted how the emergence of corruption ratings coincided with the deregulation of global financial flows of the late-1980s and 1990s, making anti-corruption just one example of the larger shift away from the state and toward the market.

Since bribery impedes business deals by making them more expensive — while other corruption issues, such as tax havens, tax evasion and capital flight, may work to the advantage of private actors — the wider pro-privatization environment of the time likely influenced how the anti-corruption movement determined its priorities.

Heller provided a practitioner’s point of view and discussed the political and logistical challenges of producing corruption data. He specifically highlighted the problem of labels: words like “democracy,” “corruption” and “rule of law” may not carry the same meaning for everyone involved in the data collection process.

Other problems include delays in processing the data, a lack of access to relevant documents and sources of information, the preference for quantitative data over deeper, qualitative analysis and the expense of incorporating local experts in the process. Heller also mentioned an emerging, and in his opinion positive, trend toward sub-national corruption assessments that focus on the regional, city or sector level.

Frye called cross-national corruption indices “powerful, but blunt tools” that should be used with caution. He spoke about the politics of anti-corruption, particularly the interests of major institutions in the international system and the recent shift to understand corruption as a product of particular incentives rather than as a moral failing of specific cultures. He discussed the tendency for the corruption label to be thrown around haphazardly both by politicians against their adversaries and by constituencies against unpopular policy decisions.

Upcoming events in the Human Rights in the Post-Communist World series include: “New Research on Transitional Justice” (February 10), “The Politics of International Media Rankings” (February 16) and “Illicit Indicators and the Contested Politics of Numbers” (February 23).

Published in RightsNews Volume 29, no. 2, February, 2011.
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