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using multiple sources of quantitative data, qualitative narrative analysis and real-life case studies to arrive at a picture of corruption within a county (UNDP 2008: 8). This is the approach typically used by diplomats and aid workers engaged with problems of governance within a single country. However, it is unsuitable for use by policymaking superiors concerned with allocating funds among countries within and across continents. Nor is it acceptable to social scientists who want to test statistically theories that offer competing explanations about why national governments differ in the extent of their corruption. It is academic in the pejorative sense to conclude from deficiencies of measures that nothing can be said about whether corruption is widespread in a country. Nor should critics ignore the demand from policymakers for measures of corruption that offer an alternative to the self-interested dismissal of corruption by leaders of badly governed countries. In the words of John Tukey (1962: 13), a mathematician who pioneered exploratory data analysis, ‘Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise’.
3 Explaining National Differences in Corruption Since the CPI shows great variations between countries (see Fig. 1), it is logical to test explanations that attribute these variations to the national context. Many theories of the causes of corruption concentrate exclusively on the influence of national institutions, and proposals to reduce corruption often conclude with prescriptions for the reform of national institutions. Because national institutions are normally uniform within a country, comparison across national boundaries is necessary to test hypotheses about the causes of variations in national corruption. Every state needs some form of public administration to exercise its authority but a big majority of United Nations member states lack a long history of governance by public officials trained to conform to the Weberian ideal of a bureaucracy impartially administering public services. European states are distinctive in beginning bureaucratization in the nineteenth century. States such as Prussia and Napoleonic France institutionalized bureaucratic procedures for national security and economic development long before the upheavals of the First World War (Anderson and Anderson 1967; Finer 1997). Thus, public officials were expected to meet bureaucratic standards long before they began
