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The politics of survival or business as usual? Exploring the effects of armed conflict on corruption

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Abstract

Countries emerging from violent conflict must overcome several challenges to achieve long-lasting peace. The literature paints a bleak picture indicating that only few post-conflict countries improve in terms of good governance and the rule of law. Instead, they might experience even more corruption, because state structures are not fully developed while informal networks have flourished during the civil war. Yet, we know surprisingly little about what happens to corruption during conflict. In this study, we examine whether levels of corruption in post-conflict countries are systematically different from pre-war levels. Using data from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project, we find that corruption is relatively stable over time. However, longer and more intense conflicts are associated with higher levels of corruption.

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Fig. 1
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Note: Coefficients and confidence intervals for conflict types from different model specifications. Control variables are omitted in the presentation

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Notes

  1. However, some authors point to reverse causality (Thies 2010).

  2. Le Billon uses both the CPI by Transparency International and the ICRG by the PRS Group. Both have limitations in the context of time-series analysis (Le Billon 2008: 347–50).

  3. Patterns for individual time series can be found in the online appendix.

  4. TI reworked the CPI in 2012 to facilitate future comparisons over time (Malito 2014: 14–15).

  5. To investigate the robustness of these findings, we also ran panel regressions that provide us with information on a country-year basis and thus allow us to capture dynamics in the post-conflict period instead of comparing the pre- and post-conflict situations. The results generally support a positive relation of conflict duration with corruption levels. Conflict duration carries a positive coefficient but is statistically not significant in the fixed-effects regressions (as advised by the Hausman test).

  6. We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for this suggestion.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers and Kristen A. Harkness for their helpful comments. Margit Bussmann acknowledges financial support from the German Research Foundation (BU 2289/3-1/2). The online appendix and replication files are available at https://ipk.uni-greifswald.de/politikwissenschaft/ib-replikationsdaten/.

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  1. Otto Suhr Institute of Political Science, Free University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Mathis Lohaus

  2. Department of Political Science and Communication Studies, University of Greifswald, Greifswald, Germany

    Margit Bussmann

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Lohaus, M., Bussmann, M. The politics of survival or business as usual? Exploring the effects of armed conflict on corruption. J Int Relat Dev 24, 149–170 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-020-00186-9

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