CORRUPTION Syndromes of Corruption

50 Syndromes of Corruption
than we would wish. Moreover, not all sorts of indicators have been
gathered in comparable ways over the same periods of time. Thus, the
analysis that follows involves unavoidable compromises. For trends in
political participation I turned to the Polity IV dataset, 2 which features a
composite Polity indicator ranging from plus ten (‘‘strongly democratic’’)
to minus ten (‘‘strongly autocratic’’). Using 1992 as a baseline allows the
inclusion of many post-communist states, and 2001 will be the end date
because that is consistent with the most recent data available on several
other indicators to be considered. On the economic side I used 1990 and
2001 scores from the Economic Freedom in the World (EFW) index
compiled by the Fraser Institute, 3 which ranges from zero to ten and
assigns higher scores to economies rated as more free. There are no EFW
scores available for the years between 1990 and 1995, nor do other
indicators of liberalization fill that gap; using 1990 as a beginning point
still includes some post-communist states in the analysis.
Institutional quality is also a complex issue, and has only been estimated
quantitatively more recently. Institutions include not just the official state
apparatus and political bodies but also a wider range of institutions that
affect an economy. Fortunately, on the political side, an excellent composite
measure of ‘‘institutional and social capacity,’’ touching upon both
state and civil society, is included in the World Economic Forum’s 2002
Environmental Sustainability Index. 4 This index, drawing upon data from
as late as 2001 but not yet available as a time series, rates countries from
zero to one hundred in terms of institutional and civil-society capacity to
debate and address public policy issues. As a proxy for the quality of
economic institutions I used the index of the security of property rights
compiled by the Heritage Foundation for the year 2002; 5 it ranges from
one to five, giving lower scores where property rights are more secure.
Secure property rights depend upon a range of institutions and policies;
thus, while this index scarcely measures all aspects of the economic system
it should reflect the soundness of the overall framework.
Results of a cluster analysis that employed these variables to search for
four groups of countries appear in Table 3.2.
2 Data and codebook available at http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/inscr/polity/polreg.htm; the
data employed were from the revised 2002 version of the dataset.
3 Data available at http://www.freetheworld.com/.
4 World Economic Forum, Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, and CIESIN
(Columbia University), 2002 Environmental Sustainability Index (http://www.ciesin.
columbia.edu/), February, 2002.
5 The 2002 data were taken as indicative of conditions for our end-date year of 2001, as
the Heritage Foundation gathers data and publishes its index for the coming year: for
example, the 2003 index was published in the Fall of 2002. See http://www.heritage.org/.