Corruption and Democratic Governability

Corruption regularly appears among the top five problems cited in opinion polls in most Latin American countries. Along with violence, crime, inequality, and institutional weaknesses, it figures prominently in contemporary scholarly work on quality of democracy as well. Researchers have made considerable progress in measuring aspects of corruption and in linking these to reduced support for regimes and policies as described in the introduction. But to this point, much of the work employs rather blunt categories and focuses on specific pieces of the broader problem complex, usually with little attention to how the pieces might fit together. We need to