Corruption

As I mentioned in a post a couple of years ago, I have looked for data on perceived corruption in the different states of the US, but have found very little.  One of the few is an ABC News/Washington Post Poll from 2006, which asked "if you think it occurs at all, do you think corruption in *** is limited to a few corrupt individuals or is widespread?"  There were two questions, one in which *** was "the local government in your area" and the other in which it was "your state government."  I added them together to get an index of perceived corruption.*  The rankings, from most to least perceived corruption:

Louisiana

Kentucky

Iowa

Oklahoma

Kansas

Nevada

Florida

New Jersey

California

Tennessee

......

Wisconsin

Oregon

Wyoming

Arkansas

Maine

Missouri

Idaho

New Hampshire

N. Dakota

S. Dakota

The samples for many of the individual states are small, so there's a lot of random error, but the differences are statistically significant (p=.005) and the general pattern seems reasonable.  My earlier post looked at rankings on a question of how large a part politics played in the handling of relief in your community from the late 1930s, raising the question of whether the two rankings are correlated.

*There was a category for "neither/none (volunteered)", but it was very small.  I treated it as missing, because I wasn't sure if "neither" should be interpreted as "none are corrupt" or "don't know."

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]