Measuring Public Corruption in the American States: A Survey of State House Reporters

Abstract

Abstract We use a survey of State House reporters to measure corruption in state government and assess the priority federal prosecutors place on corruption investigations. The reliability and validity of the corruption measures are assessed, as are the relationships among corruption level, federal prosecutorial effort, and the number of federal prosecutions. Federal corruption prosecutions are positively correlated with both corruption and prosecutorial effort. Hence, we argue that federal prosecution data provide a potentially biased and unreliable measure of state public corruption.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 169 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.