ABSTRACT

Several of the most widely used measures of corruption are, at least in part, based upon perceptions of corruption. For example, Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, probably the most widely used measure of corruption, is explicitly a measure of the perceived level of corruption (Andersson and Heywood 2009). Intrinsically, there is nothing wrong with a perception-based evaluation of corruption. Citizens of a country have direct lived experiences of the level of corruption in their own country; country experts have an arguably broader familiarity, although when they are not resident in the country in question this familiarity is perhaps less ‘deep’. Moreover, since many cases of corruption will go unreported to the authorities, corruption perceptions can almost inevitably consider more cases than an ‘objective’ analysis of, say, official corruption reports. However, despite such virtues, there remains a legitimate fear that perceptual measures of corruption are not simply imperfect, as all measures are, but are instead an inadequate record of the level of corruption within a country (for a discussion, see Treisman 2007: 241).