Abstract
How does an economies regime type affect corruption rates observed within a nation? Past empirical studies have looked at both regime type and corruption rates using several different techniques; however past empirical studies have failed to come up with a conclusive relationship. Some of the studies have found no relation, while some have found that the age of the regime has a significant affect on corruption rates within an economy, while others have found a significant positive effect of democracies on corruption rates. In this paper, we utilize the latest data available from the University of Gothenburg's Quality of Government data set, in order to analyze the relationship between corruption and regime type. We develop a simple one way fixed effects model, and employ 11 control variables when analyzing the relationship. The control variables we employ are both economic and political in nature. Furthermore, we use a series of sensitivity analysis in order to help verify our results. We find that regime type does in fact have an effect on corruption rates within a nation, both when we employ an ordinal variable, and a binary variable for regime type. However, we find opposite effect on corruption rates when employing the two different regime type variables. In our study, we provide explanations for the differences in the effects.
