Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Transparency

Transparency in government and even business decision making that affects national or global economics is generally thought to be a good thing. Transparency International has helped publicize the idea and make it desirable. The latest ranking of 180 countries has been released.

How would your students evaluate the importance of transparency? Would they see any disadvantages to transparency (can there be too much)? What differences are implied if a country is ranked 19th or 135th? Do your students understand how this ranking is done? Do they think the process creates legitimate results?

There are many good teaching ideas and online materials at TI's Policy Research web page.

Corruption Perceptions Index 2009

The rank shows how one country compares to others included in the index. The CPI score indicates the perceived level of public-sector corruption in a country/territory.

The CPI is based on 13 independent surveys. However, not all surveys include all countries. The surveys used column indicates how many surveys were relied upon to determine the score for that country.

The confidence range indicates the reliability of the CPI scores and tells us that allowing for a margin of error, we can be 90% confident that the true score for this country lies within this range.

1. New Zealand
2 Denmark...

17. UK (tied with Japan)
19. USA...

79. China...

89. Mexico...

106. Nigeria...

146. Russia...

168. Iran...

178. Myanmar
179. Afghanistan
180. Somalia