Lest you worry that the corrupting influence of money in American politics would fall by the wayside with the new administration, Brian Ross’ investigative team at ABC News reminds us that Barack Obama did, in fact, raise lots of money from the usual suspects. Justin Rood’s story is a sobering reminder that despite the campaign’s…
DetailsA post on merinews.com, an Indian citizen journalism site, serves as a textbook example of how the Global Integrity Report can provide deep context to the news of the day. Satish Singh, reporting for Merinews, is able to draw a quick, evidence based snapshot of governance in India from our scorecard: India’s anti-corruption laws get…
DetailsTwo articles from the December 23 New York Times merit a bit of unpacking. The articles — one on Ghana’s upcoming elections, the other on the rise of Islamic movements in Jordan — tout two widely-held but rarely proven theories of corruption: that corruption inhibits growth, and that corruption is a motivator for radical, Islamic…
DetailsFor election monitoring in Europe, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) provides the fairest assessment, at least in the eyes of the West, as they chronicle the many flaws in Eastern European elections. But the former-Soviet bloc does its own election monitoring, and their results… well, they can’t seem to find any…
DetailsWhistle-blowing website Wikileaks has made it their trade to host content censored online. While this brings to mind China or Myanmar, their most challenging threats have come from the West — in this case, they’ve posted a series of stories quietly scrubbed from the archives of British papers by a hyperactive British libel law. The…
DetailsThe European engineering giant settles a massive bribery case, pays US$1.6 billion in fines, and somehow manages to stay off US government blacklists, which (in theory) prohibit giving contracts to companies who pay bribes. Daniel Kaufmann has an analysis of the echoing hollowness of Seimens’s previous CSR commitments. Kaufmann writes: “The case of Siemens illustrates…
Details