Experts and Questions: Exploring Perceptions of Corruption

Abstract This article is a contribution to the ‘know your data’ approach to the issue of measuring corruption, in two specific areas: the impact of the way questions are formulated on the results of surveys on corruption perception; and the potential pitfalls of using businesspeople as expert respondents in surveys measuring corruption. The article first presents and analyses the sources of two most frequently used indicators to measure corruption perceptions – the Corruption Perception Index and the Control of Corruption, one of the Worldwide Governance Indicators. Based on this analysis, hypotheses are posed on how the formulation of the questions will influence the out-comes of surveys, and what differences there will be between studies conducted on the general public and businesspeople. These are tested using data obtained from two original survey experiments conducted concurrently, one on a representative sample of the public and another on businesspeople.