Thirty-seven out of Eighty-five
Transparency International announced its international corruption
perception index (CPI) on Tuesday, and the Czech Republic found itself
in 37th place among the 85 countries surveyed. It is not easy to say
exactly what this figure represents, because it is not a measurement of
corruption per se but rather an indication of the population's
perception of corruption in the country.
The Czech Republic is behind most of the EU countries in terms of the
CPI, but interestingly, Italy falls behind the Czech Republic just
slightly. Estonia seems to be leading the Central and East European pack
of countries in transition, and Chile beat all these countries. Hungary
fared better than the Czech Republic, and Poland and Slovakia were
behind. But it is with margin of error taken into account, even these
very rudimentary statements become questionable.
At the same time, the polling agency Sofres-Factum released a survey
showing that people see government offices and the police as the main
sources of corruption. The same survey, however, showed that one in five
people said that corruption was "everywhere" in Czech society.
Unfortunately, Sofres-Factum does not reveal margin of error
with its results as was done with the CPI results from TI themselves
(as is normal practice in the USA and), so some of the data are
difficult to interpret. Stanislav Hampl of Sofres-Factum remarked to
Britske listy that people in the Czech Republic are not used to seeing
such figures with their data, but he agreed that in the future, his
agency would consider including margins of error with their results.
This may seem like a minor point when you condsider that for a survey of
over 1000 people, margin of error is usually about 3%, but in smaller
sub-groups of the data set, for example women over fifty living in
smaller towns, the margin of error could reach 10% or more, which is
rather significant.
A further complication with the Sofres-Factum data is that results
according to age, gender and size of hometown are already worked up and
presented only partially. It would be better to offer journalists the raw
data and have them draw their own conclusions.
Still, some points of the survey were intriguing. 90% of Czechs, for
example, denied ever having been offered a bribe. 21% say they were made
to pay bribes, and about half of those (10.9%) said they have been made
to pay bribes more than once.
Unfortunately, such numbers cannot really capture the problem in its
entirety. Personal stories of bribery and corruption are always more
compelling. I fear that with all the numbers and charts, the real story
may have been lost.
