Why Civil Society Cannot Battle it All Alone: The Roles of Civil Society Environment, Transparent Laws and Quality of Public Administration in Political Corruption Mitigation

ABSTRACT

Utilizing a large-N data that covers about 20000 observations from about 200 countries from 1789 to 2018 from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project, and anchored on institutionalism as an overarching theory, and the nascent literature on civil-society corruption nexus, the paper looks at the predictive capacity of civil society environment, transparency of laws and predictability of enforcement, and rigorousness and impartiality of public administration in political corruption. Using a four-step hierarchical multiple regression, results show that while civil society and its structure is a significant determinant of the level of political corruption, the introduction of transparency of laws and predictability of enforcement, rigorousness, and impartiality of public administration, and civil society environment in the regression model accounted for additional variance in political corruption. Practical and theoretical implications, particularly on civil society-corruption nexus and the broader corruption-democracy linkage, are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Civil society
• corruption
• public administration
• transparency
• institutionalism

Acknowledgments

I want to thank the peer reviewers for the constructive feedback. I also would like to thank the editor of this journal, Ali Farazmand, for the helpful comments. Errors are mine alone, of course.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. It is a new approach to conceptualization and measurement of democracy. It is co-hosted by the University of Gothenburg and University of Notre Dame (Coppedge et al., 2018).

2. See Coppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staffan I. Lindberg, Svend-Erik Skaaning, Jan Teorell, Joshua Krusell, Kyle L. Marquardt, Juraj Medzihorsky, Daniel Pemstein, Josefine Pernes, Natalia Stepanova, Eitan Tzelgov, Yi-ting Wang, and Steven Wilson. 2018. “V-Dem Methodology v8”. Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project for discussion on the methodology of the V-Dem.

Additional information

Funding

The present publication is the outcome of the project “From Talent to Young Researcher project aimed at activities supporting the research career model in higher education”, identifier EFOP-3.6.3-VEKOP-16-2017-00007, co-supported by the European Union, Hungary and the European Social Fund.