The corruption perception index and the political economy of governing at a distance

Abstract

The corruption perception index (CPI) compiled by Transparency International (TI) ranks countries by perceived levels of corruption. It is a reformist rather than a radical form of ‘statactivism’. First, I use Rose and Miller’s analytical framework to explain how corporate concerns come to dominate the CPI: How a neoliberal rationality is translated into a programme to govern corruption and then a technology – the CPI. A comprehensive survey of sources used to compile the CPI 2001–2016 shows that the vast majority were either produced for sale to corporate clients or were based on surveys of business elites. Second, I embed the index’s production into a wider political economy: TI workers are Gramscian intellectuals who put forward an interpretation of corruption that is non-threatening to corporate capital. This Gramscian framework holds wider relevance for analyses of the politics of global benchmarking.