ABSTRACT
Until fairly recently, political scientists generally viewed corruption in developing societies as, if not beneficial, largely benign. Indeed, eminent scholar Samuel Huntington wrote that ‘the only thing worse than a society with a rigid, over-centralized, dishonest bureaucracy is one with a rigid, over-centralized honest bureaucracy’ (1968: 386). The idea of corruption being a necessary evil and a mechanism that served to ‘grease the wheels’ of dysfunctional and unresponsive bureaucracies in developing societies survived well into the late twentieth century. Nevertheless, since the crest of the third wave of democratisation and the accompanying implementation of neo-liberal and open-market economic reforms throughout the Global South, social scientists have begun to view the presence and persistence of corruption in society through a more critical lens, and an interest in accurately and validly measuring this phenomenon has become of utmost importance to quantitative scholars.
