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Have you been served, your honor? Yes, thank you, your excellency: the judiciary and political corruption

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Abstract

Using a sample of 56 countries (28 rich and 28 poor), observed over the period 2004–2013, our paper develops an analysis of the contagion of corruption at the inter-institutional level. More precisely, it examines whether corruption in the justice system is an important factor to explain the expansion of corruption in politics. We find a clear unidirectional causal effect of corruption in the justice system on corruption in parliament. Low corrupt justice induces low corrupt politics. The results are robust to various checks. It appears that reducing corruption in justice alone causes a direct reduction of corruption in politics. Since fighting corruption is very costly, the result highlights the additional benefit of devoting greater resources to curbing judicial corruption.

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Notes

  1. Looking at the recent release of the three most commonly-used indicators of the prevalence of corruption, namely Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index and the indicators provided by the International Country Risk Guide and the Worldwide Governance Indicators, no country, developed or developing, attains the best possible score.

  2. The published results of the 2017 edition are not comparable to those of the previous editions. The 2017 results give the percentage of interviewees which have no opinion (coded 1), think that the given institution is not corrupt at all (coded 2), partially corrupt (3), corrupt (4) and, extremely corrupt (5). The sum of the five percentages is 100. In contrast, the results for 2003 to 2013 give the percentage of interviewees who think that the given institution is not corrupt at all (1), little corrupt (2), moderately corrupt (3), corrupt (4) and very highly corrupt (5). The sum of the five percentages is 100. No information is given about interviewees who have no opinion in the results of 2003 to 2013. Hence, it is not possible to combine the two sets of results.

    https://www.transparency.org/en/gcb/global/global-corruption-barometer-2013/press-and-downloads

    https://www.transparency.org/en/gcb/global/global-corruption-barometer-2017/press-and-downloads.

  3. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/fce8/8e5b4a51ed84f635437b547a98b59e528974.pdf.

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  1. Centre Emile Bernheim, University of Brussels, 50 Avenue F.D. Roosevelt, CP 114/03, 1050, Brussels, Belgium

    Khalid Sekkat

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Appendices

Appendix A

Table

Table 7 List of countries by income level
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7

Appendix B

Tables

Table 8 Descriptive Statistics
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8,

Table 9 Correlation matrix
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9

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Sekkat, K. Have you been served, your honor? Yes, thank you, your excellency: the judiciary and political corruption. Const Polit Econ 33, 326–353 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-021-09348-4

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