Democracy and Ethics, Governance, and Corruption Perception in Africa: A Cross-Country Analysis”

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between democracy and corruption. Using data on African countries, I find the relationships between democracy and corruption measures to be statistically significant and nonlinear in nature. The coefficients of the nonlinear regressions suggest that corruption is slightly lower in dictatorships than in partial democracies; and that once past a threshold, corruption is substantially lower in democracies. Apart from democracy variables, I also find the effects of legal systems, religious traditions, and ethnic fractionalization to be key determinants of cross-country variations in corruptions rates.