Configurations of corruption: A cross-national qualitative comparative analysis of levels of perceived corruption

This article advances our understanding of the potential causes of national levels of corruption. It develops a new institutionalist criminological theoretical framework. It then applies fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to a sample of 77 countries. The outcome is perceived corruption. Potentially causal conditions are levels of democracy, human development, income inequality and two value orientations: traditional/rational-secular and survival/self-expression. The analysis supports the new institutionalist expectation that the effects of each of these conditions are configurational and dependent upon the presence or absence of other conditions, including value orientations. This can help to explain why previous findings on the independent effect of democracy on corruption have been mixed. It may also help to explain why corruption is such an intractable phenomenon in many countries

The Supply-Side of International Corruption: A New Measure and a Critique

I consider the supply-side of corruption in the context of international bribery, which I define as firms bribing public officials abroad. I present the Bribe Payers Corruption Index (BPCI), a non-perception-based measure of cross-border corruption coherent with a simple analytical framework based on an important distinction: that between the propensities to corrupt and observed levels of corruption. The BPCI is compared with a widely known indicator of the supply-side of corruption, Transparency International’s Bribe Payers Index (TI-BPI), which I demonstrate to be flawed. Whereas according to the TI-BPI firms from corrupt countries are more likely to bribe abroad, the opposite emerges when the BPCI is considered. I explain and discuss such results, the implications of which are framed within the global discourse on the supply-side of international corruption

What Do the Decisions of the European Court of Human Rights Tell About Property Rights Across Europe?

Despite the important role that institutions play in explaining economic growth, there exist few objective quantitative measures of institutional quality. We propose a new quantitative index that allows comparing the strength of property rights across the member states of the Council of Europe. To construct the index, we analyzed all judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) related to property rights for all member states and identified whether the ECtHR had found a violation of property rights in the domestic courts’ decisions. The resulting data were used to calculate the likelihood of finding violation in the judgments of national courts. Assuming that the ECtHR is impartial and unbiased, higher probability of overruling the judgments of local courts from a given country implies that the level of property rights protection is low. Our constructed measure is highly correlated with a number of indices of property rights protection used in the literature and serves as a strong objective foundation for these indices. Furthermore, we found that the ECtHR had received more applications from countries with higher likelihood of national court judgments violating property rights