Measuring public integrity

Journal of Democracy

Volumn 17, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 152-165

  Camerer, Marianne ^a,b  

^a Global Integrity   (South Africa)

^b STELLENBOSCH UNIVERSITY   (South Africa)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 32944480912     PISSN: 10455736     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jod.2006.0004     Document Type: Review

References (15)

1. World Bank Institute, www.worldbank.org/wbi/governance.
2. United Nations Millennium Project, "What About Corruption and Governance?" available at www.unmillenniumproject.org/facts/qa12_e.htm.
3. The Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), put out annually by the nongovernmental organization Transparency International and accessible at www.transparency.org, is the best-known attempt to promote integrity in governance by ranking countries according to how corrupt people think their governments are. While the CPI may once have been useful in spurring shady governments to increase transparency, its inability to capture trends toward concrete reform and in this way reward genuine improvers is a major flaw that has begun to generate nontrivial amounts of justifiable irritation. Fredrik Galtung, Transparency International's own former research chief, agrees that the CPI's all-stick-no-carrot approach needs changing. As he puts it: "It is all but impossible to improve scores in the CPI through government reforms and sustained anti-corruption efforts. . . . The challenge ahead is evident: After ten years it is time to find new measurements!" Fredrik Galtung, "Measuring the Immeasurable: Boundaries and Functions of (Macro) Corruption Indices," in Fredrik Galtung and C. Sampford, eds., Measuring Corruption (London: Ashgate, 2005).
4. The 25 countries are Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Germany, Ghana, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Namibia, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Panama, the Philippines, Portugal, Russia, South Africa, Turkey, Ukraine, the United States, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe.
5. Transparency International, "National Integrity Systems: Country Studies," www.transparency.org/activities/nat_integ_systems/ country _studies.html.
6. Sources used include the U.S. Agency for International Development's Handbook on Democracy and Governance Program Indicators (1998);
7. Transparency International's report, "The National Integrity System: Concept and Practice" (2001);
8. the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs's Public Service Ethics in Africa, vols. 1 and 2 (2001);
9. the UN's Convention Against Corruption (2003), available at www.unodc.org/unodc/crime-convention-corruption.html;
10. the UNDP's Discussion Paper 3 on "Corruption and Good Governance," 1997;
11. the Commonwealth Secretariat Expert Group's Fighting Corruption, Promoting Good Governance (London: Commonwealth Secretariat, 2001);
12. and the OECD's book, Public Sector Corruption: An International Survey of Prevention Measures (London: OECD Publishing, 1999).
13. Larry Diamond, "Building a System of Comprehensive Accountability to Control Corruption," in Adigun A.B. Agbaje, Larry Diamond, and Ebere Onwudiwe, eds., Nigeria's Struggle for Democracy and Good Governance: A Festschrift for Oyeleye Oyediran (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 2004), 221-40.
14. Center for Public Integrity, The Corruption Notebooks: 25 Investigative Journalists Report on Abuses of Power in Their Home Country (Washington, D.C.: Public Integrity Books, 2005).
15. Center for Public Integrity, "South Africa Integrity Assessment" in Global Integrity Report 2004 (Washington, D.C.: Public Integrity Books, 2004).