A Good Turn Deserves Another: Political Stability, Corruption and Corruption-Control

Abstract

We build on existing literature and contemporary challenges to African development to assess the role of political stability in fighting corruption and boosting corruption-control in 53 African countries for the period 1996-2010. We postulate that on the one hand, an atmosphere of political instability should increase the confidence of impunity owing to less corruption-control. On the other hand, in the absence such impunity from corruption, political instability further fuels corruption. Our findings validate both hypotheses. Hence, contrary to a stream of the literature, we establish causal evidence of a positive (negative) nexus between political stability/no violence and corruption-control (corruption). The empirical evidence is based on Generalized Methods of Moments. The findings are robust to contemporary and non-contemporary quantile regressions. The political stability estimates are consistently significant with decreasing (increasing) magnitudes throughout the conditional distributions of corruption (corruption-control). In other words, the positive responsiveness of corruption-control to political stability is an increasing function of corruption-control while the negative responsiveness of corruption to political stability is a decreasing function of corruption. Simply put: a good turn deserves another.