The Politics of Corruption — Answer Key
Answer with the question number followed by your answer. Do not copy the questions.
Part A — Name the act
Name the act each case describes. Choose from: bribery, extortion, embezzlement, fraud, influence trafficking, clientelism, patronage, state capture. Each is used exactly once. No reason required.
Example answer: X1 – bribery.
A1. A clerk at the water utility transfers money from the connection-fees account into her own account.
Embezzlement. The money was already in her care. She did not have to deceive anyone to get hold of it, she simply moved it. That is the difference from A5, where the firm has to lie before it is paid.
A2. An importer offers a customs officer a payment to move her container ahead of the queue. The officer has demanded nothing.
Bribery. The queue is real and the officer controls it, so she is paying to get around a delay that was already there. That the officer asked for nothing rules out coercion, but it is not what settles the label. Compare A6, where the inspector invents the problem he is charging to fix.
A3. A party has handed out food parcels to the same households before every election for ten years, and its local organiser keeps a list of who voted.
Clientelism. Benefits go out in exchange for political support, the same households receive them at every election, and the organiser keeps track of who delivered. The repetition and the monitoring are what separate this from vote buying, which is a single exchange around a single election.
A4. A minister appoints three hundred of his campaign volunteers to posts in the housing agency.
Patronage. What the supporters receive is a public job, and they receive it for work already done for the party. In A3 the party hands goods to voters. Here it hands posts to its own workers.
A5. A construction firm invoices the state for two kilometres of road it never built.
Fraud. There is no road, so the state is paying for nothing. The payment is obtained by deception, which is exactly what A1 lacks.
A6. A health inspector tells a shopkeeper that she has broken a rule the shopkeeper has never heard of, and demands a payment to drop the matter.
Extortion. The rule does not exist. The inspector manufactures the problem and then sells the shopkeeper her way out of it. She is not buying an advantage; she is buying back something she should never have lost.
A7. A mining company pays a former minister to arrange meetings for it with the officials who will decide its permit.
Influence trafficking. The former minister cannot issue the permit. What the company is buying is his access to the people who can. Selling that access is a crime in Mexico (tráfico de influencias) and an offence under UNCAC art. 18.
A8. The three largest banks in the country draft the bill that will regulate them, and the legislature passes it unchanged.
State capture. The banks are not buying a decision here. They are writing the rule that governs every decision afterwards.
Part B — Name the concept
Name the concept each case illustrates. Choose from: corruption with theft, corruption without theft, systematic corruption, venal corruption. These are two pairs from two different distinctions: one pair turns on what the treasury ends up with, the other on which way the influence runs. Each is used exactly once. No reason required.
Example answer: X1 – venal corruption.
B1. A tax inspector records the full amount a business owes, collects it, and charges an extra payment to process the file this month.
Corruption without theft. The treasury is paid in full. The bribe is charged on top of the tax, so the business ends up paying more than the law requires. It gets its file processed, but it is out of pocket, and it has a reason to complain.
B2. A tax inspector records nothing, collects less than the business owes, and keeps what he is paid.
Corruption with theft. The treasury receives nothing and the business settles for less than it owes. Inspector and taxpayer both do well out of it, and neither has any reason to report the other. That silence is why this kind is the harder one to find.
B3. A legislature grants the right to build bridges and charge tolls on them only to allies of the majority, and the majority holds together because it controls who receives those rights.
Systematic corruption. The influence runs from politics to money. The majority decides who gets a profitable bridge concession and gives it to the people who keep it in power. The privileges are what holds the coalition together.
B4. A construction company pays a mayor to win a contract it would otherwise have lost.
Venal corruption. The influence runs the other way, from money to politics: a private firm pays for a public decision. Calling this bribery is not wrong, but Part B is asking which direction Wallis’s arrow points, and B3 is the case that runs the other way.
Part C — What would you change first?
For each office, write reduce monopoly, reduce discretion, raise accountability, or none of these — it is a collective-action problem, and one sentence saying why. Each is used exactly once.
Example answer: X1 – raise accountability. The only people who see the file are the ones who benefit from losing it. For the last option you may shorten the label to “none of these” — you still need the sentence.
C1. Any of the utility’s twelve district offices can add a household to the water-connection waiting list. The inspectors who set the order of that list follow no written rule, and a connection takes between three weeks and fourteen months. A supervisor reviews every decision, but has no rule to review it against.
Reduce discretion. The inspectors order the list however they like, which is why one household waits three weeks and another fourteen months. There is no monopoly to break: twelve offices can put a household on the list. Accountability is not the gap either, because the supervisor already sees every decision. What he lacks is a standard to hold the inspectors to. Write the order down, first come first served, and there is nothing left for them to sell.
C2. A single office issues every export permit in the country. There is nowhere else to apply.
Reduce monopoly. One office, and nowhere else to apply. An exporter who cannot go elsewhere cannot walk away, and that is where the office’s leverage comes from. A second place to apply removes it.
C3. Complaints about the inspectors are filed at the office where the inspectors work, that office decides which complaints to investigate, and there is no appeal to any body outside it.
Raise accountability. The inspectors’ own office decides which complaints against the inspectors are investigated, and nobody outside can overturn that. Someone can find out what happened, but nobody who can punish it is watching. An appeal to an outside body is what closes that gap.
C4. Every officer in the customs house takes payments, every importer pays, and both sides say so openly. The government’s response is to raise the penalty for taking a payment.
None of these — a collective-action problem. Nobody in this customs house is breaking a rule that the others follow. They are all following the same one, and an officer who stopped taking payments would lose the money and change nothing else. A higher penalty only bites if officials expect it to be enforced, and the officials who would do the enforcing are in the same arrangement. There is no honest party left to appeal to, which is why working on one official’s incentives at a time gets nowhere.
How it was marked: “everyone takes part openly” earned full marks, because the menu no longer carried the gloss that would have prompted the enforcement or expectations argument.
Part D — Explain the pattern
For each finding write the first thing causes the second, reverse causation, a confounder (something else that causes both), or coincidence (the match does not reflect any real connection), and say why in a few words. If you write confounder, name it. Each is used exactly once.
Example answer: X1 – something else causes both: the weather. Heat drives up ice-cream sales and sunburn alike.
D1. “Villages picked by lottery to have their road project audited were missing less of the money than the villages not assigned to the audit. So the audit reduced how much money went missing.”
The first thing causes the second. A lottery decided which villages were audited, so nothing about a village, rich or poor, well run or not, had any bearing on which group it landed in. The two groups were alike to begin with and the audit is the only thing that differs between them. The conclusion holds.
How it was marked: the label plus any coherent mechanism earned full marks. The question asks why, and a mechanism answers that.
D2. “Researchers compared perceived corruption with sixty different country characteristics. The one that matched best was the number of letters in the country’s name. So the length of a country’s name affects how corrupt it is.”
Coincidence. Sixty characteristics were tested. Test that many and one of them will match by chance; here it was the number of letters. The finding comes from the number of comparisons, not from anything happening in the world.
How it was marked: the paper’s own gloss, “the match does not reflect any real connection”, invited the answer this key rules out, so the label plus any reason earned full marks.
D3. “The mayors who spend most on an anticorruption office govern the cities with the most corruption. Each of those offices was opened the year after a corruption scandal broke in that city. So anticorruption offices cause corruption.”
Reverse causation. The dates give the order away. Every one of these offices opened the year after the scandal, so the corruption came first and is the reason the office was funded. Cities with a corruption problem are the cities that build an anticorruption office.
D4. “Neighbourhoods where more households pay bribes for a water connection also have worse school results. So paying bribes lowers school results.”
A confounder: poverty, or a weak local government. The paper prints this label two ways, “a confounder” in the menu and “something else causes both” in the example, and either wording was accepted. A town hall too weak to run a clean water office is also too weak to run good schools, and poor neighbourhoods are where both failures land. The bribes and the school results are two symptoms of the same thing. Neither is producing the other.
How it was marked: a common factor named, however imperfectly, earned full marks. Naming none still earns 1 of 3.
Part E — Read the study
Two or three sentences for each answer.
Example answer, for a different study: “A study app reports that students who downloaded it scored 11% higher.” E(a) – The students chose to download it, so the 11% may be the kind of student who goes looking for a study app rather than anything the app did. E(b) – They are compared with other students at the same moment, never with their own marks from before they downloaded it.
A study published in 2000 asks why some countries are perceived as more corrupt than others. The author takes Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index — built from surveys of businesspeople and ratings by country experts, giving each country a single score, and comparing countries with one another rather than following any country over time — and relates it to a set of national characteristics: religion, colonial past, income per person, and democratic history.
The same patterns appear no matter which other characteristics the author takes into account. Countries with a British colonial past are perceived as less corrupt, as are countries with a larger Protestant share of the population, and countries with a higher income per person. Countries that have been democratic without interruption for forty years or more are also perceived as less corrupt — but how democratic a country is today makes no difference.
The study is titled The Causes of Corruption, and presents a Protestant tradition and a history of British rule as among the deeper causes of low corruption today.
E(a). What was actually measured, and who did the measuring? Name one problem and say why it matters.
What the index measures is opinion, not conduct. It is built from surveys of businesspeople and from ratings by country analysts, and it gives each country a single score.
The problem is that a country’s reputation can follow things other than its conduct. A rich country with a free press may be scored clean because it is rich, and the people doing the rating are not the people who pay bribes. This matters because the study goes on to explain the score as though it were the corruption itself, so anything that shapes reputations turns up looking like a cause of corruption.
How it was marked: naming the unit of analysis was not required, because the question does not ask for it.
E(b). Compared with what? Say what each country is being compared against, and name one rival explanation that comparison cannot rule out.
Each country is compared with other countries, all measured at the same moment. No country is compared with its own past.
That leaves reverse causation open. A country may be rich and lastingly democratic because it is clean, rather than clean because it is rich and democratic. Comparing countries at a single moment cannot settle which came first, because no country is ever seen before and after.
How it was marked: a rival named in general terms counted as named.
Part F — Match the reading
Match each reading to what it is mainly about. Write one letter per reading. Each letter is used at most once, and one option is left over.
Example answer: X1 – c.
F1. Klitgaard, Controlling Corruption
(c) a practical method for working out which offices are most at risk before anything goes wrong. The formula, corruption = monopoly + discretion − accountability, is a way of finding the vulnerable office rather than an account of why officials take money.
F2. Shleifer and Vishny, “Corruption”
(d) why the person who pays sometimes has no reason to report it. This is B2. When the bribe also lowers the payer’s bill, nobody involved wants to speak.
F3. Persson, Rothstein and Teorell, “Why Anticorruption Reforms Fail”
(a) why appointing honest officials does not help when nobody has an interest in acting. This is C4. If the problem is collective action, replacing one official changes nothing.
F4. Wallis, “The Concept of Systematic Corruption in American History”
(f) how one country’s politics once ran on handing out economic privilege, and how that ended. B3 in historical form: the United States before the reforms that stopped legislatures handing out privileges one by one.
F5. Mauro, “Corruption and Growth”
(e) whether a slower, more obstructive bureaucracy shows up as less investment across dozens of countries. The cross-country evidence on what corruption costs an economy.
why appointing honest officials does not help when nobody has an interest in acting
how a colonial administration’s rules shaped a country’s politics long after independence
a practical method for working out which offices are most at risk before anything goes wrong
why the person who pays sometimes has no reason to report it
whether a slower, more obstructive bureaucracy shows up as less investment across dozens of countries
how one country’s politics once ran on handing out economic privilege, and how that ended
Left over: (b). None of the five readings is about colonial rule.
End of examination.