Interdisciplinary perspectives on producing, using and debating corruption indicators

Abstract

While, in the last decades, the proliferation of corruption indicators has stimulated an increasing sophistication of both data collection and management, academics and policy-makers have been confronted with significant challenges and criticisms over their efforts to elaborate anti-corruption strategies. Both theoretical and methodological issues related to the use of corruption indicators highlight the need to better consider the narrative emerging from the use of numbers; in particular by evaluating both policy context and implications involved in the construction of corruption through governance indicators. The present working paper promotes the idea of approaching corruption indicators from a broader multidisciplinary and multifocal perspective. It addressed three core dimensions of the analysis of key governance indicators: the construction of corruption indicators and their use as well as the discourse about them.