I suspect someone bribed transparency.org to fudge the results. Or maybe it’s that the U.S.* failed to pay* the appropriate bribe that would have ensured a fair and accurate result! :dubious:
But seriously, the most likely explanation is that someone transposed a “7” for a “1”. :p. But whatever the cause for the error, their methodology is obviously shit. I say we bribe someone at the DOD to make them have an “accident”. 
Someone I know…yeah…someone… had a water pipe break outside his house on Memorial Day. Before he realized where it was, he called the city utility for help. When they showed up, they found it was between the meter and the house. So it was the homeowner’s responsibility. Some money may have exchanged hands, and the pipe may have mysteriously been fixed anyway.
This might count as a “bribe,” for the purpose of the survey.
I’ve given gifts of at least that much to govt officials to whom I wanted to show my appreciation with no problems whatsoever. But it was clearly done with no expectation of a quid pro quo. I also didn’t do it in the form of cash.
Things can also get “fuzzy” when you do some of your accounting in cash - say a criminal defense attorney taking a retainer. What the client pays and what goes down in the books may not always match, hypothetically speaking. :eek:
Perhaps the 7% in the US is influenced by international travel and/or immigrants?
I notice that Mexico is at 33%. I was recently told by a friend that if you go to Mexico as an American, you pretty much expect to pay a few bribes while you’re there. I’m not sure I believe that person, but I’ve heard similar stories about Africa and China from missionaries who have been to those countries. In this sense, then Americans do a lot of bribing because we’re well-traveled, not so much because of domestic corruption.
Then we have the fact that about 10% of those in the US were born overseas. I suspect that many paid more than a few bribes before they got here. Wikipedia’s list of the top five countries are all high on the bribery index: Mexico (33% bribe rate), China (no rate listed, but probably high), India (54% bribe rate), Philippines (12%), Dominican Republic (no rate listed).
If we assume a domestic rate of 1-2%, then I think travel and immigration nicely explain the rest.
Nobody is disputing that it happens in places, only the extent of it. I happened to hit the corruption jackpot. I grew up in Louisiana and live very close in the Rhode Island border in Massachusetts. If I ever moved to Illinois, I would qualify for the rare corruption Trifecta yet I truly don’t believe even those states that 7% of people have given true bribes to public officials especially in the last year. There is no social protocol for that even in the most corrupt states. It is an extreme risk even in the best of cases. In most locales, you would go straight to jail just for offering.
That is the realm of multi-millionaires and politicians in back room deals or among people that know each other personally. While those exist you are still talking about very small numbers and the risk for engaging in them is very high (see the outcome for Governor Edwin Edwards of Louisiana, Mayor Buddy Cianci of Providence, RI and multiple Illinois governors and politicians to see what can happen for that behavior; you go to prison for a long time). Lower level government officials in the U.S. have no incentive to loose their usually cushy jobs for relatively small amounts of money except in unusual circumstances.
I also find it doesn’t sound right that 7% of the whole population across the USA engaged in public bribery. Unless they’re saying that such foci of local corruption as NOLA, Chicago, Jersey, my hometown the SJU, and the likes really skew the curve that far, or are counting things that are not really governmental – or are not really talking about what people think of as bribes, for instance:
A voluntary gratuity is not the same thing as a bribe. A public official may still be required under ethics rules to refuse it or only accept it up to a limited value, but the public service was rendered without there being a QPQ offer. So a Xmas tip for your garbageman is not legally a bribe. Similarly, campaign/PAC contributions, FOP donations, etc. are not really bribes.
I had never heard of the outfit Tranaparency International which conducted the survey.
The 7% bribery rate is implausible and must be the result of either unscientific methodology,
or lying by the reporting organization (I do not think anywhere near 15-20 million Americans
would make a false claim of having paid bribes). There are enough people in the world who
hate the USA to explain why someone might want to make up lies about its system, and having
a highfalutin name like “Transparency International” doesn’t get you a free pass on that score.
I notice there are no Americans on its Board of Directors, although the Chair is a Canadian
former university president (not that they can’t be crooked too). The other Directors are one each
from the following countries (% in parenthesis is % of bribe payers in Board member’s home country.
No number, no survey reported for that country) :
Argentina (13%)
Bangladesh (39%)
UK/Germany (UK 5%/Germany no report)
Canada (3%)
Colombia (22%)
France
Lithuania (26%)
Peru (20%)
Russia
Sri Lanka (19%)
Zambia
If they want to be so transparent about it then the board members’ home countires should all
be included in the survey. I will concede, though, that the several high scores for Board member
countries might indicate lack of favoritism toward them.
My boss (the owner) would not hesitate to ask local health department officials: “Is that your $20 bill wrapper?” that he would conveniently drop on the floor. (He wouldn’t say “$20 bill wrapper,” he just pointed to it with a “Is that yours?”)
This was up to and including the grand opening of his restaurant. After it was open, from what I saw, he was less overt.
When I saw that 3% of Malaysians report paying bribes, I immediately dismissed the validity of the study. My husband, who is Malaysian, laughed.
Bribing a police officer in Malaysia is so routine that smart people carry two wallets – one concealed with real spending money, the other with the amount of cash you’re willing to sacrifice when pulled over.
Exactly. But at the same time, there are certain unwritten rules that everyone expects will be followed more or less. For example, when I used to have PBA, FOP, state police and other indicia of my support of law enforcement festooning my car like tassels on a psychedelic taxi, it was understood that I wasn’t going to be pulled over for some stupid bullshit like not having a front license plate - until some stupid rookie did just that. I paid the ticket of course but made sure that I “explained” the situation to her sergeant/duty officer.
Interesting. All those stickers generally do nothing around here in Chicago (with the exception maybe of having a numbered plastic medallion. I’m not sure exactly what they’re called, but you can’t get them just for donating to an organization.) Name dropping a cop, though, can often help, though, especially if you’re a close relation and the officer is well-known and liked.
That’s interesting because once I was pulled over in Illinois around Batavia I think. This was back in the 80’s though things have probably changed. And even though all of my paraphernalia was from NJ with NJ plates, he was almost . . . I’d have to say ‘deferential.’
Can’t speak with confidence to any of the others, but that number for Colombia seems low… like a lot low!
It’s possible it’s changed, or you got a cop that was willing to give you a break. Those FOP and similar stickers are just a dime a dozen. If you look at the police forums (like say here), you’ll get an idea of what the general police community thinks of them. I especially like the comment: “One of the first things taught in most interdiction classes is that there are more thugs with FOP/PBA stickers on their cars than cops.”
Like I said, there was a particular type of plastic medallion that the cops I knew said they actually would pay attention to, but they would ask you how you got it/who you know. But they were different than the ubiquitous FOP stickers.
This report has got to be screwy. I just looked up the numbers for Hungary, and here, under #6, it says “0% reported paying a bribe to the police.” There is no possible way that is true. No possible way. I’m wondering if some data is missing, or if I’m just reading that wrong.
It almost feels like there’s a question in there someplace. 
This is why 7% for the US is bogus. Just read the responses in this thread. All of the Americans are literally reaching for examples that ‘might’ have been a bribe decades ago to try and explain the number. But Tracijo says it’s so routine in ‘3%’ Malaysia that people carry two wallets?!?!
There is something seriously wrong here. I’m starting to think this survey is either complete BS or someone divided by 10 instead of 100 in an excel sheet. 0.7% I could maybe believe, but even that seems high…
The survey was answered by about 1,000 US residents. That is about 1/300,000 of the population. Without any information about how the participants were chosen and who they were it’s easy to believe that 70 out of 1,000 random people reported paying a bribe to a public official. Another random sample that small might yield 0 people, and another might yield 150.
With a small sample size and the participants being taken at their words there is really no reason to think the researchers made a false claim or miscounted their results. But there is also no reason to believe the results are representative of reality for all US residents.
In fairness, the US has a long, rich history of corrupt public officials that continues on to the present day, and there is really nothing completely incredible about the estimate of 7%. Maybe it’s 3%, maybe 1% in reality, but it is still a whole lot of corruption.
The FBI’s news page about public corruption casesdemonstrates that it does go on, and in some cases in some regions it goes on at a large scale. They aren’t all public officials receiving bribes but many of them are. Those are just the cases that were discovered, prosecuted, and reported to the public by the FBI. It stands to reason they represent only a tiny fraction of the total.
As far as I can tell the survey in the OP doesn’t say exactly which 1,000 people were selected. Maybe it was 1,000 big real estate developers and government contractors.
I am not surprised by that 7% figure and assume it is probably higher. It isn’t like we’re immune to corruption. It’s more that we’re careful, because the penalties are measurably worse than the initial crime, and enforceable. In many countries, a police officer is paid poorly and the job is not considered a noble profession. Taking bribes is a way of supplementing a low income. Here in the US, it may not pay a fortune, but it is certainly a livable wage. I would not dare try to bribe a police officer; he or she likely wouldn’t risk a career with decent pay and benefits for a few extra bucks. I do expect that politicians probably take ‘gifts’ in exchange for vague promises to firm committments (based on the size of the ‘campaign contribution’) quite frequently.
1000 isn’t really a small sample size if the sample is constructed properly. For a truly random sample on a population of 300,000,000, one thousand samples should give you a confidence interval of ± 4% with a confidence level of 99%. At 95% (usually the standard level used), your interval is ± 3.1%.
And the size of the population doesn’t really matter that much–it’s more a function of the sample size. The numbers are nearly identical whether the population is 30,000 or 300,000,000.