Subnational Measure of Corruption Using News Reports

• In Event: Poster Session: Formal Political Theory; Political Methodology & Canadian Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Political Methodology

Abstract

Using news reports from the People's Daily newspaper, this paper develops a subnational measure of corruption in China from 2010 to 2015. After identifying the names of corrupt officials, their positions, the amount of corrupt money involved, and the province where corruption happened using Natural Language Processing approach, this paper builds a latent score of corruption for each province using Continuous Response Model. This new measure of corruption contributes to multiple corruption-related research domains, such as the relationship between corruption and economic development, corruption and social movements, and also the diffusion of corruption within a country.

Authors

• Min Rosemary Pang, Penn State University

• Steven Morgan, Pennsylvania State University

• Sara Francisco, Pennsylvania State University