CORRUPTION Syndromes of Corruption

52 Syndromes of Corruption
rights, variables. Group 2 (N ¼ 21), including Argentina, Belgium, Chile,
Italy, South Korea, Poland, Spain, and Zambia among others, is broadly
democratic (and becoming somewhat more so), if not quite as highly
rated as Group 1; similarly, the economies in this group are relatively
liberalized but also becoming more so. New political and economic
opportunities are likely emerging in these societies, but institution scores
are lower than those for Group 1. Group 3 (N ¼ 30), exemplified inter alia
by Albania, Colombia, Ecuador, Malaysia, Mexico, the Philippines,
Russia, and Venezuela, is still democratizing as a whole. Economies in
this group continue to liberalize too, and these changes have taken place in
a setting of weak social/institutional capacity and somewhat uncertain
property rights. Finally, Group 4 (N ¼ 29), which includes, for example,
Algeria, Chad, China, Indonesia, Jordan, Nigeria, Syria, Tanzania, and
Zimbabwe, is marked by rather rapid liberalization in both the political and
economic arenas, but remains largely undemocratic and suffers from weak
institutions. As the analysis of variance shows, the differences in variable
scores defining these four clusters are statistically strongly significant.
The cluster results correspond reasonably closely to the patterns
proposed earlier, although statistical clustering does not mean we have
‘‘discovered’’ these groups out in the world. Data limitations mean that
many countries of interest could not be classified; further, mean polity
scores for Group 3 show less change, and for Group 4, more change than
we might have expected. Group 3, however, includes several transitional
post-communist cases where rapid political liberalization came just
before 1992, and Group 4, while less authoritarian in the aggregate by
2000 than in 1992, remains on the undemocratic side of the scale.
Do these groupings correspond to contrasts in corruption? The scatter
plots in figures 3.1–3.4 suggest that they may. There is one plot for each
group of countries, and axes are the same as in figure 2.1: HDI scores from
the 2003 report, covering 2001, are plotted against ‘‘inverted’’ TI scores for
2003. Earlier caveats about the TI index remain very much in force; the
question at this point is only whether grouping countries by participation
and institution measures begins to sort out some of the complexities we
found when we looked behind the basic corruption–development connections
that figure so strongly in the consensus view. Means for the four
groups on those indices are presented following the plots.
The plots and data are generally consistent with the idea of differing
corruption–development connections among the four groups. Group 1
countries (fig. 3.1) – most of them established market democracies –
enjoy high levels of development and are perceived as having moderate
to low amounts of corruption (though that notion will come in for critical
examination in later chapters). Most Group 2 countries (fig. 3.2) are