The parameters of the study are kind of hard to understand -
It seems like an odd assumption to think “this state spends a lot on construction and police, therefore it is corrupt”. I guess it matters how much they weight numbers of convictions over amount the state spends on prisons.
I did a little Googling about South Dakota, and a lot of the complaints about it are not so much about how much corruption they have, but that they don’t have an ethics commission. I can see that as a reason they don’t have a lot of scandals known publicly, but I am reluctant to assume that it is any kind of proof that they do and are therefore #9 in corruption in the US.
OTOH I can easily believe it about Mississippi and, especially, Louisiana. Wasn’t LA the place where they caught some representative with $90K in bribe money in his freezer, and everyone responded with a a deafening ho-hum?
Same for New Jersey. The whole damn state is run by the Mob. Including, apparently, the people who are supposed to be looking out for corruption.
ETA: On further review, this is looking more like a list of The 10 Most Corrupt States Which Don’t Have Enough Political Clout to Keep Their Names Off This List.
I mean, seriously, how else can you explain the fact that New York & New Jersey, two of the most famously and openly corrupt states in the country, are not included?
Yeah, Michigan should probably be on the list, just due to the rampant corruption in Detroit. Fortunately, it looks like we’re trying to weed that out now.
This must be the reason that PA is only 5th. The ‘bonusgate’ scandal, which took out most of the leadership was after this. Currently, there’s the undercover investigation that had a handful of Philly politicians recorded taking money that the AG tried to squash.
In the NE, if you ain’t corrupt, you’re not in office!
Four or five state congress critters went to jail a few years ago, and Ted Stevens lost his Senator For Life status over some gifts. Oil company lobbyists were handing notes over the railing during sessions telling our elected officials how to vote on a variety of issues. When called on it by one of the more honest Senators, he was rounding shouted down by the very people who later went to prison. People leave office there and go directly to work for the oil industry as lobbyists.
One thing Palin was not, was corrupt. Willfully ignorant, and little work ethic, yes. But crooked? No.
That’s not in the methodology section of the report, that’s in the “Empirical Findings” section of the report (see pg.353 - might be behind a paywall.)
In other words, they used corruption conviction data to test the hypothesis that states that have more corruption will tend to spend more money on construction (see pg. 349,) they did not generate a list of corrupt states using construction spending.
…from “Bridge-Gate” to “Poll-Gate”, the corruption is blatant, but everything will get silenced, shelved, or plain-old rug-swept until the nominee is determined to be or not be Christie.
So, they used corruption conviction data? Doesn’t that mean that the states at the top of the list are the states that most actively fight corruption, and the states at the bottom are the ones that more-or-less shrug off corruption as “normal” (ie, the northeast)?
It could be, but the authors don’t think the data bears that interpretation:
While I’m not 100% convinced by their explanation, I’ll note their data source can’t reflect corruption that doesn’t make it to the court system, but I’m not sure how one could realistically obtain data on corruption where no public accusation, much less conviction, has been made. So it could be you’re right, but a first approximation with subjective corruption indexes doesn’t reveal anything suspicious.
Some interesting tidbits from the study in case anyone is interested:
New Jersey is listed as #31 out of 50 by index with population, #30 out of 50 by index with employment, so still in the highly-corrupt set of states even if not in the most-corrupt set of states.
New York is listed as #41 out of 50 by index with population, #39 out of 50 by index with employment, so by at least one measure, New York is in the top 10 most corrupt states.
The primary author on the paper is from the City University of Hong Kong, so it’s not clear that a lot of bias towards or against specific states is in play. The secondary author is from Indiana University, and Indiana doesn’t come out smelling of roses, but isn’t listed among the worst either.
The study doesn’t say why the conviction data only runs up to 2008 - which is a shame, I’d like to know why. On the other hand, they do have 11 years’ worth of data, which doesn’t seem like a bad start.
Hmm. That would correlate with another of their conclusions, which was that higher state spending overall correlated with greater corruption, either as a cause or as an effect. Or possibly both.
Considering how much more the federal government spends than any state…
NJ had Rabbis dragged away in handcuffs. The ASPCA (yes the animal police) is a paramilitary organization. There isn’t a level of government office that hasn’t been investigated for bribery…I guess they just ranked the other 49 states because NJ was just a given.
