Transparency International
Aslund more than 30 times mentioned corruption in one way or another in his rather short article, which certainly makes me believe it’s his single strongest point. The main source behind his assumptions in that regard is Transparency International (TI) report:
Third, it has stayed equally corrupt according to the measurements by… Transparency International (2007)…
According to Transparency International (2007), the only country that is both richer and more corrupt than Russia is Equatorial Guinea. That is hardly a standard worthy of a great, historic European nation.
Indeed, to impede Russia's corruption requires democratization, which has reduced corruption in Ukraine (Transparency International 2007) [the Ukraine is self-sufficient meme though is not persistent here, still worth a word or two, see below – mai].
What we’re trying to actually measure here? The thing is openly admitted by TI (hence the name “corruption perception index”, CPI), though never mentioned nor by Aslund, nor by most other publications, which is already deluding by itself.
Basically the work is a set of numbers on the scale from 1 (most corrupt) to 10 (least corrupt), assigned to each country. The numbers do not represent any facts or complex calculations from factual data, nor anything like that, what Aslund thinks the report is measuring or what the creators seem to indirectly imply. The numbers are derived from a number of polls, in which people are being asked their personal subjective opinion on how they think their country is corrupt, and that’s the only and definitive “measure” of corruption as per Aslund and most other publications on the matter. Whoever uses TI report as a basis of his or her argumentation constantly omits the word “perception”, yet as much consistently writes about corruption itself, not about its perception. Needless to say how far could be social perception from facts (read more on that in Kara-Murza’s “Mind Manipulation”, the definitive work on infowar known under the name glasnost and sociopsychology in general).
But could it has been used as scientific sociological work at the very least? What differs good scientific work from poorly made one is consistent methodology. The problem here is TI do not have any sort of methodology, since they don’t even do the polls by themselves. TI uses different sources such as Freedom House (lol), Global Insight, Institute for Management Development (IMD), World Economic Forum (WEF) etc., not for every each of them I was even able to find any sort of methodology or respondent group review, and what’s been found is rather diverse.
Moreover TI’s logic behind the use of said sources from country to country and one report to another is incomprehensible (say, IMD and WEF used twice in the same report for no apparent reason). They often use different set of sources for different countries and reports, cherry-pick piece of data, while ignoring the rest, and not a word of argumentation why is this, why is that. So much for consistency, lol.
Previously TI used to publish not an average number as of today but a range, where Russia ranged from 0.3 to 5. Obviously TI never thought of using median, so they stick with an average between these two. Why? God knows.
Among mentioned sources, there’s the one, which worth few words as well, it’s Freedom House (FH). It’s been used by Aslund as well:
Second, the country has moved from being partially democratic to authoritarian rule by Freedom House (2007) standards.
Only eight countries in the world are richer than Russia and still not democratic, namely Singapore and seven small oil states (World Bank 2007; Freedom House 2007).
FH is known by funny rating “Freedom in the World” (try to think of methodology for THAT, lol), which referred in Aslund’s work btw. I’m not going to waste time stating the obvious, FH has been criticized by numerous people besides me for having ties to the government despite being an NGO, for being retarded and unscientific etc.
The other interesting point here is what exactly FH knows about corruption around the globe? The “methodology” behind this is as follows. They’ve got an “expert” who judge the situation by the information from “international competent organizations”, among which you may find… TI. So yeah, a circular reference. Watch the hands! TI thinks the corruption is high or low, because FH thinks so, and FH thinks so because TI thinks so. Actually from my experience circular references happen all the time, these kind of NGOs constantly use each other in the manner “I think so because they think so”, – which could be ok if “they” wouldn’t have the same argumentation for their reports of the same year on the same matter, lol.
Funnily enough, but these polls as a measure for reality method is broken from the beginning, since it’s a circular reference by itself. TI or whoever asks people how corrupt you think your country is, people like businessmen etc. answer basing their knowledge on tabloids like Aslund, tabloids publish TI reports. The circle closed up.
