%0 Journal Article
%T Corruption: Democracy, Autocracy, and Political Stability
%A Kanybek Nur-tegin
%A Hans J. Czap
%J Economic Analysis and Policy
%D 2012
%I 
%X The recent empirical literature on corruption has identified a long list of variables that correlate significantly with corruption but only five were distinguished by Leamer¡¯s Extreme Bounds Analysis as robust to various samples, measures of corruption, and regression specifications. Among these five factors that were found to reduce corruption are decades-long tradition of democracy and political stability. In today¡¯s world, however, there are many countries that combine one of these two robust determinants of corruption with the opposite of the other: politically stable autocracies or newly formed and unstable democracies. The central question raised in this paper is: Is it worth, in terms of corruption, for a country to trade stability with autocratic rule for political freedoms but with transitional instability? We find that the answer to this question is in the affirmative - the level of corruption is indeed lower in unstable democracies than in stable dictatorships. Our results are robust to various measures of corruption, alternative regressor indices, and regression specifications.
%K corruption
%K democracy
%K autocracy
%K dictatorship
%K political stability
%U http://eap-journal.com/archive/v42_i1_04-nurteg-czap.pdf