Configurations of corruption: a cross-national qualitative comparative analysis of levels of perceived corruption

This article advances our understanding of the potential causes of national levels of corruption. It develops a new institutionalist criminological theoretical framework. It then applies fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to a sample of 77 countries. The outcome is perceived corruption. Potentially causal conditions are levels of democracy, human development, income inequality, and two value orientations: traditional/rational-secular and survival/self-expression. The analysis supports the new institutionalist expectation that the effects of each of these conditions are configurational and dependent upon the presence or absence of other conditions, including value orientations. This can help to explain why previous findings on the independent effect of democracy on corruption have been mixed. It may also help to explain why corruption is such an intractable phenomenon in many countries.