Executive corruption index

Quick info
Data type	Numeric
Scale	Metric
Value labels	Not applicable
Technical name	polnat_politics_corruption_exec_vdem
Category	Political factors
Label	Executive corruption index
Related indicators	Political corruption index Public sector corruption index Political actors corruption index Corrupt activities in judicial decisions Corrupt activities of members of legislature Election vote buying

The "Executive corruption index" is a V-Dem mid-level index focusing on several types of corruption across the executive. It ranges from low (0) to high (1) with lower values indicating less corruption.

Conceptually, the index captures the extent to which members of the executive or their agents routinely "grant favors in exchange for bribes, kickbacks, or other material inducements" and how often "they steal, embezzle, or misappropriate public funds or other state resources for personal or family use" (Coppedge et al. 2020, 279).

Coding rules

The index is composed of several components and lower-level indices applying V-Dem's measurement model (Pemstein et al. 2020) which in turn are indices built from a number of indicators. The index itself is the average of two indicators, namely "executive bribery (v2exbribe) and executive embezzlement (v2exembez)" (Coppedge et al. 2020, 279) [emphasis in original; note that variable names in italics refer to V-Dem's nomenclature in their dataset, not in WeSIS].

Bibliographic info

Citation: McMann, Kelly, Daniel Pemstein, Brigitte Seim, Jan Teorell, and Staffan I. Lindberg. 2016. "Strategies of Validation: Assessing the Varieties of Democracy Corruption Data". V-Dem Working Paper No. 23. University of Gothenburg: Varieties of Democracy Institute.

Related publications:

• Coppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staffan I. Lindberg, Jan Teorell, David Altman, Michael Bernhard, M. Steven Fish, Adam Glynn, Allen Hicken, Anna Lührmann, Kyle L. Marquardt, Kelly McMann, Pamela Paxton, Daniel Pemstein, Brigitte Seim, Rachel Sigman, Svend-Erik Skaaning, Jeffrey Staton, Agnes Cornell, Lisa Gastaldi, Haakon Gjerløw, Valeriya Mechkova, Johannes von Römer, Aksel Sundtröm, Eitan Tzelgov, Luca Uberti, Yi-ting Wang, Tore Wig, and Daniel Ziblatt. 2020. "V-Dem Codebook v10" Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project.
• Pemstein, Daniel, Kyle L. Marquardt, Eitan Tzelgov, Yi-ting Wang, Juraj Medzihorsky, Joshua Krusell, Farhad Miri, and Johannes von Römer. 2020. “The V-Dem Measurement Model: Latent Variable Analysis for Cross-National and Cross-Temporal Expert-Coded Data”. V-Dem Working Paper No. 21. 5th edition. University of Gothenburg: Varieties of Democracy Institute.

Misc

Project manager(s): Nils Düpont (A01)

Data release:

• Not yet applicable

Revisions:

• Not yet applicable

Sources

• Coppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staffan I. Lindberg, Jan Teorell, David Altman, Michael Bernhard, M. Steven Fish, Adam Glynn, Allen Hicken, Anna Luhrmann, Kyle L. Marquardt, Kelly McMann, Pamela Paxton, Daniel Pemstein, Brigitte Seim, Rachel Sigman, Svend-Erik Skaaning, Jeffrey Staton, Steven Wilson, Agnes Cornell, Nazifa Alizada, Lisa Gastaldi, Haakon Gjerløw, Garry Hindle, Nina Ilchenko, Laura Maxwell, Valeriya Mechkova, Juraj Medzihorsky, Johannes von Römer, Aksel Sundström, Eitan Tzelgov, Yi-ting Wang, Tore Wig, and Daniel Ziblatt. 2020. ”V-Dem Country–Year Dataset v10”. Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project. https://doi.org/10.23696/vdemds20