Report says 7% of US households paid a bribe within the last year. Valid?

Great Debates
1

This is a continuation of this GQ thread. Transparency International (TI) reported that 7% of US households claim they paid a bribe within the past year. This is less corrupt than most countries and more corrupt than most OECD countries.

I found this number to be high, so I contacted TI for the underlying data. I am no longer dubious: I find their conclusions plausible, though I don’t have sufficient information to vouch for them.

The data is all univariate: there are no cross-tabulations. If it were conclusive, I would just present it. People can read it differently. Few things are settled in GD, but we at least have some success listing the main arguments. With that in mind, I’m going to withhold the detailed US information to give posters a chance to state their beliefs and what they would expect the survey results to show. Think of it as a chance to propose hypotheses, just like Popperian scientists.

Links: Map: Which country pays the most bribes? - BBC News
http://www.transparency.org/gcb2013

The results of the global Corruption Barometer were consistent with other surveys of world corruption such as TI’s Corruption Perception Index, at least in terms of the US ranking.

It’s from an internet survey, but we found during the 2012 Presidential elections that they can be pretty accurate: Nate Silver ranked Google’s effort fairly high for example. Leger USA, who conducted the survey for the US, is a small branch of a respected Canadian outfit.

Here’s the question wording, FWIW:
Q7. a. in the past 12 months, have you
or anyone living in your household had a
contact or contacts with one of the following

1– Education system
2– Judicial system
3– Medical and health services
4– Police
5– Registry and permit services
6– Utilities
7– Tax
8– Land services

Q7. b. if yes to Q7a, in your contact or
contacts have you or anyone living in your
household paid a bribe in any form in the
past 12 months?
yes/no

Q8. What was the most common reason for
paying the bribe/bribes? please give only
one answer.
1– As a gift, or to express gratitude
2– To get a cheaper service
3– To speed things up
4– It was the only way to obtain a service

Those are the survey questions. What is and is not a bribe is defined by the respondent. While the questions may have been misunderstood, it’s not clear why Americans would misunderstand such questions more than say the Danes and anyway I’d like to know what that implies for the breakdowns across sectors.

There are other survey questions. You can dig here if you want: http://www.transparency.org/gcb2013/in_detail

Enjoy.

2

Longish thread in GQ about this last week.

3

The US was an Online survey, a methodology I consider notoriously unreliable, and not comparable to Face to Face or Phone surveys.

We can also note the countries using Online methodology:
Canada - 3%
Cyprus - 19%
Denmark - 1%
France - n/a
Germany - n/a
Israel - 12%
Japan - 1%
Luxembourg - n/a
Switzerland - 7%
UK - 5%
US - 7%

Comparatively, I’m finding these numbers somewhat high, and am curious why France and Germany have no data.

From the US Detail page it states that 15% of respondents paid a bribe to the Judiciary.

Really? You buy that crap? I don’t.

9% reported a bribe to the Tax Service… right-o.
7% reported a bribe to the police, which I could believe if you’re counting Coffee and Donuts as a bribe.

If that high a percentage bribe the Judiciary and Tax Service, we should have anecdotes coming out of our ears of people who have bribed, or know people who have bribed. Anecdotes dont equal data, but I’d say a complete lack of anecdotes makes this data pretty suspect.

4

It’s the “12 months” and “living in your household” part that I doubt. Massachusetts has a fairly well documented system of bribery in place, but I don’t think they happen with that sort of frequency.

If you want a job on the MBTA or a liquor license, you can get one by paying a bribe of a few thousand. But those aren’t things that happen every year. It’s more of a once in a lifetime deal. Same deal with becoming a judge. You need to donate the maximum political contribution to the right candidates for a few years to get that job.

I can see the number being as high as 7% if people are angry enough to count a few years ago as “last 12 months” and their uncle or nephew as in their “household”.

I don’t think we have a system where to get anything done you’ve got to slip a $20. The bribes are more medium sized than that.

5

I am afraid I got no further than “online survey”.

Regards,
Shodan

6

Yeah, ‘online survey’ is fail from the start. But also I’m skeptical of not having a good definition of bribe or having it include “a gift or to express gratitude.” A few weeks ago my church held a neighborhood fish fry and sold plates to police, firefighters and soldiers in uniform at half price. Under this survey, that could reasonably be construed as a bribe, but it would be silly to think of it that way.

7

In a similar vein, they recently voted in NH on whether the State Reps should get discounted tickets to Cannon Mountain.

8

Is it? Can you imagine that the community your church serves (be it geographic, ethnic, whatever), might be reinforcing the idea that you guys are generally good folks, and that might translate into slightly more positive attention in the future? It’s not always about a tit-for-tat exchange. Often it’s about making a general good impression, with the hopes it pays off in some ways. I might, for example, send cookies to my kid’s teacher. I’m obviously not expecting that to translate into straight A’s, but I might hope that the teacher shows her a little extra attention and maybe some more benefit of the doubt.

9

Yes, it is.

Otherwise, Mother’s Day is Bribe Central.

The definition of bribery includes gifts of money or objects of value given in exchange for actual or promised illicit benefit.

There may be some fuzzy areas at the margins. A church holding an event with a discount to public service workers has no expectation for any illicit benefit from the discount. It may come anyway, but that doesn’t make it bribery.

Likewise, I may hand out little lapel pins with my company’s logo to everybody at a trade convention, including government officials who may have the power to influence legislation or regulations over my company.

That lapel pin is not a bribe. There’s no expectation it is given in exchange for any benefits, even if it may subtly influence a government official through the regular channel of advertising. That may not seem fuzzy, but what if we were giving out iPads to everybody instead?

Likewise, recently the US Congress passed some new ethics guidelines limiting the value of meals accepted by Congressman and paid by lobbyists. In other words, what legally constitutes a bribe is not something set in stone but determined by circumstances. Giving a Congressman a $10 McDonald’s meal is almost certainly not a bribe (though it may be - the Congressman might have demanded it in return for support on legislation, for example). Giving that Congressman a $500 meal at the top restaurant in DC? It might be construed as a bribe and is at least considered an ethical violation.

This broader notion of bribery makes virtually everything a bribe, which is not a useful definition in practice.

10

I took the training on this recently. Isn’t the buzzword we’re looking for “customary” and “unusual”? Giving a bottle of wine to someone at Christmas is customary and not unusual. Thus, not a bribe. Giving someone a week long trip to wine country is not customary and is unusual, thus probably would be a bribe.

11

Well then I bribe everyone from my pizza delivery guy to my kid’s teachers to the cops in my neighborhood.

Along with valentine’s day and your anniversary, its more extortion than a bribe. There isn’t a quid pro quo, it to avoid bad consequences.:wink:

12

I agree with posters who have problems with having the respondents define “bribe in any form”, especially in an on-line survey. I suspect more than a few respondents characterize just about any interaction with an authority that involves money or goods as a “bribe”, but that’s just rhetorical bluster. If Q7a had asked “in your contact or contacts have you or anyone living in your household been the victim of ‘highway robbery’ in the past 12 months,” I suspect there would be a similar non-trivial number.

If you go to court for a traffic ticket, you usually have the option of paying the fine and getting “points” on your driver’s license, or paying a higher fine, attending a bullsh!t traffic school, and getting no points (for dopers outside the US, if your license accumulates enough points, it is suspended). Does option (2) count as a bribe? I’m sure the answer depends a lot on whether or not you faced this situation in the past 12 months.

13

I could get you the data for a, ahem, handler’s fee.

14

These are 2 excellent points… QFT!

This one is not excellent, though I made the same assertion in the GQ thread:

Online surveys are no longer uniformly awful. Nate Silver compared the accuracy of various pollsters during the 2012 election: Google’s internet-based poll earned 2nd place. Furthermore there are roughly as many internet polls above median accuracy as below median accuracy.

Now Leger USA may indeed suck. They have a fine rep in Canada, but I know nothing about their US office.

Skammer: “A few weeks ago my church held a neighborhood fish fry and sold plates to police, firefighters and soldiers in uniform at half price. Under this survey, that could reasonably be construed as a bribe, but it would be silly to think of it that way.”

Skammer: I have a question for you. In your contact or contacts with the police have you or anyone living in your household paid a bribe in any form in the past 12 months?

Given what you just said, I have difficulty imagining that you would think back to your church fish fry and answer, “Yes”. So that problem wouldn’t show up in the data and if it did, I see no reason to believe that it would inflate the US’s results vs. that of Sweden et al.

Returning to CJJ: given your take (“I suspect more than a few respondents characterize just about any interaction with an authority that involves money or goods as a “bribe”, but that’s just rhetorical bluster.”), would you expect any pattern in the sectoral breakdowns? This is the question I want to pose to the group, before I dive into the presentation. I’ll also address the contention that the results fail “Smell test” at first glance.

15

I’m skeptical. I haven’t ever even been in a position to consider offereing a bribe, unless you count being pulled over by a cop – and the last thing that ever entered my mind was to offer a bribe. That’s for about 35 years, so I’m pulling the average down.

But, I live in a different world than many Americans, never having lived in an inner city slum. Things may be different in other places.

Does a Christmas bonus to the mailman count? (We don’t do that, my wife says it’s a crime to offer any money to a fed employee … I don’t think it’s an issue but I respect her reservations.)

Mailman doesn’t match the list above, otherwise that might account for the high percentage. (I’d be surprised to learn that as many as 7% tip the mailman!)

I agree with skammer and Antibob that a gift to express gratitude shouldn’t be considered a bribe.

16

FYI, you can give your local postal worker a gift with value of no more than $20 per gift occasion (say Christmas or other major holidays). No cash or cash equivalents (like gift cards) though. They’re not allowed to accept those. And they are not allowed to accept more than $50 in gifts from a single postal customer over the course of a year.

USPS link

17

Not only have I never paid anyone a bribe, I can’t think of any situation in the past 52 years where I thought a bribe offer would do me a dang bit of good.

That is, even though I’m honest by nature, I can’t take any real pride in never offering a bribe, because I’m pretty sure I’ve never been in a situation where a person in a position to help me out wanted or expected illegal payments in exchange.

18

Thanks!

19

Nice contributions gang. As I see it the argument to this point follows:

a) 7%? You must be joking.
b) So there’s reason to question the survey’s methodology.

Well, there certainly is reason to question it, but that’s something that could be evaluated if we had access to more information. TI has conducted this survey for several years now: it’s possible that past years used more conventional survey methodology.

Let me present some of the underlying data, and explain why I’ve upgraded my stance on the 7% figure from “Dubious” to “Plausible”.

Is the sample strongly biased towards, say, inner city slums? I don’t think so. In terms of education 68% had “High Level (eg University)”, while 28% had “Secondary”. 2% had “Only basic”. Admittedly those categories aren’t familiar ones in a US context, but let’s move on. Also, the sectors weren’t biased towards “Police” or “Judicial System”, which is what I’d expect if bribery were exclusively a poverty-driven social phenomenon.

In fact bribing was a lot more evenly spread than I would have anticipated. Here’s the data. Respondents are asked whether someone in their household has had contact with various institutions over the past 1 year. Only if they say yes are they asked if they paid a bribe.



Q7 (Figure 4)	                had    	Paid  
			      contact   bribe    product
Education system	        29%	11%	 0.033 
Judicial System	                13%	15%	 0.020 
Medical and health services	56%	6%	 0.032 
Police	                        20%	7%	 0.014 
Registry and permit service	21%	14%	 0.029 
Utilities	                52%	6%	 0.030 
Tax	                        28%	9%	 0.025 
Land Services	                16%	17%	 0.027 
			
		                           sum	 0.210

“Product” is my addition. By multiplying the two, you can see the share of the total population that paid a bribe to any given sector. By adding that you get a sum three times that of 7%: it seems we have a small number of people paying bribes to multiple sectors in a given year. Huh. Possible overlap between “Police” and “Judicial System” doesn’t come close to covering that. Note also, that while 15% of those having contact with the judicial system say they are paying a bribe, that isn’t wildly out of line with the other sectors.

If people were just posturing, I would think “Tax” might be over-weighted. But it’s not.

Ok, why did people pay bribes? 45% pay “To speed things up”. 14% pay, “To get cheaper service”. This doesn’t sound like a fish fry discount to me. Admittedly 30% say, “As a gift, gratitude”. That has an ambiguous interpretation, but has some scope for a more innocent payment. But 30% isn’t a majority. To be complete, 11% said they paid a bribe because it was the only way to obtain service.

Now let’s turn to question 12: “Have you ever been asked to pay a bribe?” Note that’s not “Within the past year”. It’s “Ever”. 90% said no; 10% said yes. So it seems like we have a small number of people who are volunteering to pay bribes in a wide variety of contexts. Since some of their targets are “Land Services” and the like, I’m guessing that this small number hails from all walks of life. Most of us are unaware of these transactions because nobody has asked us for a bribe ourselves.

Furthermore, 80% of us said that we would report an incident of corruption. 20% said they wouldn’t (and a quarter of those said they wouldn’t because they were afraid of the consequences! .2*.22= 4.4%, which isn’t too far from 7%.)

More
Of those who were asked to pay a bribe and said yes, 83% say they refused. So…

(10% asked to pay a bribe)*(.17 did not refuse)= 1.7% of respondents at some point in their lives have paid a bribe after having been asked. Relative to 7% over the past year, this figure is “Small”. If we believe this survey, those who pay bribes do so at their own initiative. That’s the sort of phenomenon that might exist without there being widespread knowledge of it.

I’m not sure I would call 7% an extraordinary claim. Given rampant and legal corruption in Washington -congressmen routinely spend 4 hours per day on the phone raising funds- and defenses of the same by 1/2 of the country, it’s not surprising that low level corruption would exist. The odd part is that it’s so low and that so little is known about it.

OBTW: I said “Plausible”, not “Probable”. Don’t offer a bribe to anybody and if you do I hope you are punished. And remember that there are many who will report you.

20

Measure for Measure, I can’t fault your raw math but I can for for missing a couple of glaring errors in the base data. In your table, is says that only 13% have had contact with the judicial system in the past year but 15% paid a bride to them. That is impossible unless I am reading it incorrectly. It is similar for land services.

The other problem is based more on assumptions about the way things work. Your table says that 6% of those surveyed said that they paid brides to medical service professionals. I believe that is a practical impossibility because there is both no reason and no way to do that. If they are talking about doctors and nurses, they are already getting paid plenty and your total bill would be exorbitant if you paid it yourself. Insurance companies pay those bills and handle the claims. Those with no insurance tend to be so poor they have to use the emergency room even for routine care. There is no mechanism to bribe anyone in an emergency room and no reason to bribe a doctor for discounted payment. That is just called a sliding scale payment and it is not a bribe if they give you one. The bill is the bill and you just don’t pay it if you can’t afford it. Your $20 or $100 bribe would just get you laughed at. Everything else is just a regular payment.

I looked up the margin of error on this study and it is 3% in the statistical sense meaning that almost all the countries listed in the single digits are statistically tied. That doesn’t tell you much useful information. Combine that with the fact that some small percentage of people enjoy joking around on anonymous surveys (I have done it too) and you end up with no useful information at the low end of the scale.