Pretty much every article that isn’t The Independent is blaming this 71 score on Trump, but apparently last year in 2017 it actually went up at 75 to the second highest it’s ever been compared to the 74 year of 2016. It seemed to be pretty low during Obama’s term oddly enough.
Does anyone know why it hit a beneficial jump in Trump’s first year? None of the articles I’m looking up explain it.
74 to 75 isn’t really a “jump”. Given that they’re clearly rounding to whole integers, that could be “74.4 to 74.6” for all we know.
Given Trump, I agree that it’s interesting that the number didn’t go down last year, but they have a lot of criteria, some(/all?) of which are based on subjective evaluations by experts, and some of which may not have very much to do with the Federal executive.
By the way, why on earth don’t the Independent just say “Transparency International” rather than this mysterious “the organisation said…”? Not to mention link their sources!
Lists of countries by some arbitrary ranking system are bullshit. Just total bullshit. People take them as gospel to support their own opinions, but there’s no real rhyme or reason to them. Ignore them.
This ranking lost it immediately in my eyes when I saw the UAE just behind the US.
Right.
OTOH, corruption in the form of campaign [del]bribes[/del] donations is an incredible problem in the US. I’'m surprised the US has ranked so highly in recent years.
I suspect most of the purpose of these kinds of surveys and rankings and suchlike is to slice and dice and spin the data to find some way to rank Scandinavian countries above the United States.
I poked around their website, and I can’t find much description of their methodology beyond this -
which isn’t very informative. Maybe it is made clear elsewhere.
No, that’s pretty informative. perceived level of public corruption means they asked people how corrupt do you think country X is. They specifically asked business people and ‘experts’ however they define that. So essentially it’s a poll. That of course means that it has about as much validity as tea leaf reading, but it does explain what the poll does. It’s the same as asking ‘dog breeders’ and ‘pet owners’ what is the friendliest dog breed. It doesn’t actually mean anything, but I’m sure that Labs will get a good bounce. Or to be more local in our analogy, it’s like asking ‘Men, what percent of women are beautiful?’
All I can really say about ‘corruption’ is that I’ve lived in the United States for 40 years and never paid a bribe, nor felt a bribe or any other thing was necessary to fast track any government involved business. I am usually friendly at the DMV, but I’m not sure if that has helped me or not. I work for the state government at a University and I do occasionally see things that ‘skirt’ the rules, but never for personal gain. Usually it’s to get around a bureaucratic dictate.
I don’t disagree with any of this - what I was wondering was who are the experts/businesspeople, and what did they ask? But, as you mention, it’s a poll, and subject to all the limitations of polling.
Touché. OTOH I tried to be clear that I didn’t think my poll had any validity. And the organization that did this poll seems to be implying that their’s does.
I’m not even sure if bribes are what they are saying are the problem -
Was the threat to checks and balances and erosion of ethical standards the same issue back in 2011? I dunno.
Which is not to say the poll has no significance at all - I just can’t tell how much.
Corruption isn’t always about bribing a cop. Without choosing sides (in this thread), it seems to me that both sides in the US have been complaining about political corruption of various sorts for many years, most often in campaign finance but also in the way elections are run–who gets to vote, how districts are drawn, election fraud, etc. I can well imagine that perceptions of this kind of corruption would be pretty high given the amount of media attention focused on it; again, leaving out the question of which side is worse.
Also, just because it’s a poll doesn’t mean it’s necessarily wrong. Wisdom of crowds, etc. I do think that the bouncing around of the last few years seems like normal sampling error more than a trend of some kind.
And one final thought: If you’re really skeptical of polls, consider the possibility of a massive error in favor of the US. Perhaps in reality we’re down there with Uzbekistan.