Which State Is the Most Corrupt?
| Wed Dec. 17, 2008 8:00 AM PST
In the wake of the Blagojevich scandal, we've heard a lot about how corrupt "Chicago politics" are. But what's the real story? A pretty graph tells the tale:
Turns out that while Illinois is more corrupt than most states, it's not Blagojevich but another allegedly-criminal Democrat, now-former Rep. William Jefferson, who comes from the most corrupt state in the union. That's Louisiana, home to sometime GOP presidential aspirant Bobby Jindal. All four of the most corrupt states in the union are red states, and three are in the deep south. And the third-most corrupt state just reelected the Republicans' leader in the senate, Mitch McConnell. Can we stop the ridiculous guilt-by-association game now? Just because a politician's home state has a reputation (deserved or undeserved) for corruption doesn't mean he or she is therefore also corrupt. Even if a sitting governor from the politician's own party has just been arrested.
(Via Matt Yglesias)
Advertisement
Advertisement
Comments
Corruption convictions per 100,000 Residents? What kind of crazy statistic is that? At least make it convictions per representative or per civil servant or something relevant. You might as well have made it corruptions per acre or per alphabetic length of capital city.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
Corruption convictions per 100,000 Residents? What kind of crazy statistic is that?
Agreed. Does somebody want to make a list of State populations in the same order as the States are currently represented in the graph? Off the top of my head, I would say PA, FL, and NY are each more populous than LA, MI, KY, and AL combined.
I think that the reason that the chart is measured in terms of convictions per 100,000 residents is because that's about as good a way of comparing states as any. It allows you to control a bit for the fact that, yeah, of course California and New York are going to have more corruption convictions than, say, Alaska, in absolute terms.
Acreage and alphabetic length of capital city have nothing to do with incidents of corruption. And keying the numbers to "number of representatives" would be misleading, as very few of the convictions are going to be for members of Congress to begin with. Finally, keying it to the number of civil servants would be a massive undertaking, because you'd have to not just figure out how many government employees there are in every state, but also make determinations as to what sort of civil service jobs should count (does the dogcatcher count? Volunteer aldermen? Postal workers?), which would end up likely having a significant skewing effect on the final numbers.
Convictions per 100,000 isn't perfect, but it's workable.
I think that the bigger failing is that the chart is missing 15 states. Plus DC. Maybe they had no convictions during the relevant time period?
The fallacy in this is evident by numbers of politicians in each state which can vary depending on how many districts are represented by how many representatives. Lets say a state has 100 politicians and the state has a million residents. Lets say there are 10 convictions. Lets say another state with 100 politicians and 10 convictions but has two million residents. Do the math. Is one state more corrupt than the other?
Post new comment
MoJo Comments: Send Us Your Feedback
We changed our spam software to better filter comments. Should you encounter any issues, please let us know.
