write an article for a local newspaper on the growing corruption in government offices

Reporting Corruption in Local Government: A Guide to Promoting Transparency and Accountability

Local government is essential to helping our communities run smoothly. Sometimes, though, corruption can infect local government operations and bring harm to communities. This guide will cover four common types of corruption, steps for identifying red flags and reporting corruption, and examples of corruption at the local level.

Understanding Corruption in Local Government

Corruption can take place at any level of government, as well as within corporations and private institutions. Mayoral offices, city managers, police departments, and other offices have all sometimes been found guilty of corruption. Often, these instances of corruption develop when elected officials or public servants misuse their power for personal gain.

How severe of a problem is corruption in the United States? The 2022 Corruption Perceptions Index ranked the United States as the world’s 24th least corrupt nation. This means that while the United States is less corrupt than many countries, it is still more corrupt than many other developed nations, including the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada, and Australia. Combating corruption in local government is one way to reduce the overall level of corruption in the United States.

Common Types of Corruption in Local Government

Understanding specific forms of corruption can help to make the concept of corruption more tangible. Below are four common types of corruption, with examples. In many of the cases described, officials participated in multiple forms of corruption at once.

Conflict of Interest

When an elected official makes decisions based on their own personal gain rather than on the well-being of their community, they are becoming involved in a conflict of interest.

One notable example of a conflict of interest concerns the case of the former mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin . In 2014, Ray Nagin was convicted of 20 charges, including bribery, money laundering, and conspiracy. Nagin used his official capacity to give favorable treatment to individuals who provided him with money and services. He also misused his power to benefit his granite company, Stone Age LLC. By making decisions based on their benefit to his personal supporters and company, rather than on their benefit to New Orleans, Nagin failed to fulfill his responsibilities as mayor.

Embezzlement

Embezzlement is the intentional misuse or misappropriation of funds or property entrusted to an official’s care. In many cases, embezzlement occurs when an official transfers government funds to their personal accounts.

One example of embezzlement concerns Rita Crundwell, the former comptroller of Dixon, Illinois . In 2013, Crundwell was sentenced to over 19 years in prison for stealing $53.7 million from the city of Dixon. As comptroller , Crundwell’s job had been to oversee the city government’s financial activity. Starting in 1990, Crundwell transferred money from city accounts to a secret account which only she could access. She then used the money to finance her quarter horse business and make expensive purchases, including trucks and luxury vehicles. This case of embezzlement diverted millions of dollars that should have been serving the needs of the people of Dixon.

Fraud is a broad term which describes intentional deception or the deliberate misrepresentation of facts and information for personal gain. One specific type of fraud is wire fraud, which refers to the use of electronic communication to deceive or misrepresent information. This can include communication over phone calls, via email, or through other electronic means.

The San Francisco City Hall corruption scandal is one recent example of fraud in local government. In 2020, the scandal began when the FBI arrested Mohammed Nuru, the head of San Francisco’s public works department, on charges of attempted bribery. Authorities arrested numerous other city officials after Nuru. The officials’ crimes included using municipal funds to reward supporters and exorbitantly overcharging residents for garbage collection services. By deceiving citizens for personal gain, Nuru and other officials were committing fraud.

Nepotism means giving an unfair advantage to family members or friends in employment or other opportunities.

An example of nepotism is the case of the “clout farms” in Cook County, Illinois . In 2009, a civic watchdog group and the media exposed multiple townships within the county as “a cash crop” for local politicians, many of whom received multiple salaries and pensions. Many of the local politicians were also relatives of one another. In Leyden township, just eight families made up 18 elected positions. Critics observed that an unfair advantage had been given to the relatives of those already in power.

Identifying Red Flags and Signs of Corruption

The examples of corruption described above can occur in many different scenarios. In each of the examples mentioned, the citizens of the affected communities suffered because of the corrupt practices of their public officials. Most often, resources that were meant to serve the needs of the community were instead used to benefit only the corrupt individuals.

Identifying red flags is the first step to recognizing and then combating corruption in local government. Note that these red flags may not always mean corruption is taking place. A red flag is not a guarantee of corruption. Instead, a red flag is a sign that more investigation may be required.

Here are several red flags to look out for:

Sudden or Unexplained Wealth

If elected officials or public servants suddenly or inexplicably gain a considerable amount of wealth, their communities may want to investigate further. Officials who amass wealth through embezzlement or fraud may begin to lead lavish lifestyles. They may make expensive purchases, such as buying luxury vehicles or large homes.

Irregular Financial Activity

Another sign of embezzlement or fraud is irregular financial activity. There may be unauthorized expenditures, unexplained budget overruns, or discrepancies between financial records. Government funds may also be diverted in unexplained ways. If citizens can assess their local government’s financial activity, they can more easily identify signs of corruption. Transparency and accountability are essential here.

Ready to get involved?

Which companies or contractors do local government officials hire to perform work? Which people are appointed or hired for positions? If the same companies or contractors are hired over and over again — and especially if they produce subpar work, or if they are connected to one of the government officials — favoritism may be occurring. 

The same principle applies to the people appointed or hired by the local government. Citizens can watch out for new appointees or hires who lack the proper qualifications, or who are closely connected to people in power. These kinds of favoritism could be a sign of nepotism, cronyism , or a conflict of interest.

Inflated Costs

Citizens can also watch out for public services whose costs keep increasing. In this case, it can be helpful to compare the costs of services — such as waste management — to those of neighboring communities.

Lack of Transparency

Transparency is one of the best ways for local governments to avoid corruption. By providing citizens with accurate public information and financial records, officials can remain accountable to their communities. If officials refuse to disclose information that should be public, corruption may be occurring.

Failure to Address Concerns

Have any members of your community already raised concerns about potential corruption? If yes, how have officials responded to those concerns? If accusations or complaints have been brushed aside without investigation, it may be worth taking a closer look. It is essential that we hold our elected officials accountable for their actions.

Remember that a red flag does not always mean corruption is occurring. However, red flags can be valuable signs that more investigation is necessary.

How to Report Corruption in Local Government

If you have identified a red flag, looked into the concern, and are worried that corruption could be taking place, reporting and becoming a whistleblower could be the next step. Here are five steps to keep in mind as you report corruption:

#1: Identify Reporting Procedures and Channels

Procedures for reporting your concerns vary from place to place. Do your research and identify what channel seems most secure, appropriate, and effective. You can look for public corruption or whistleblower hotlines. You can also contact an ombudsman , whose job it is to investigate complaints, or other internal agencies.

#2: Ensure Anonymity and Protection

Ensuring anonymity can be important for keeping yourself safe and out of the spotlight. Look into your state’s whistleblower protection policies and be sure of your rights before reporting suspected corruption.

#3: Gather Evidence

Find out what information is publicly available concerning your complaint. If you are a member of a government organization, you may have access to additional information that can support your claims.

#4: Collaborate with Advocacy Organizations and Media

Advocacy organizations and the media can play an important role in publicizing corruption concerns and pushing for further investigation. Reaching out to watchdog groups or investigative journalists can give your case valuable resources.

#5: Make Your Report

Using the evidence and resources you have gathered, file your report of suspected corruption.

#6: Monitor Progress and Follow Up

After filing your report, follow up with the agency or organization you contacted and make sure your complaint has been processed. If any investigations develop, or if you receive requests for additional information, follow up and cooperate to the best of your ability. 

Case Study: The Bell, California Scandal

The Bell, California scandal serves as a helpful case study of how citizens can help to uncover corruption in local government.

In July of 2010, the Los Angeles Times revealed that Bell’s city manager, Robert Rizzo, was being paid a salary of $787,000 — almost twice that of Barack Obama, who was president at the time. This exorbitant salary was a clear red flag of potential corruption. Following this revelation, concerned residents formed a citizens activist group, the Bell Association to Stop the Abuse (BASTA). By September, BASTA had gathered the 4,000 signatures required to initiate a recall election, where citizens could vote to remove four city council members from office. By forming a citizens activist group and making their voices heard, these community members helped to expose the widespread corruption in their city.

In 2013, five former elected officials were convicted on felony counts of misappropriation of public funds. The officials had stolen about $5.5 million from Bell taxpayers. Through the efforts of investigative journalists and concerned citizens, these corrupt officials were able to be brought to justice.

Local government is meant to serve, protect, and support local communities, but sometimes corruption can disrupt the essential services it provides. Whether it be a conflict of interest, embezzlement, fraud, nepotism, or another form of corruption, corruption at the local level is always important to identify and report. 

Eliminating corruption in local government is a key step toward larger anti-corruption efforts. To find independent candidates who support anti-corruption efforts, learn more about how GoodParty.org is building a movement to fight political dysfunction.

Help us win this flash challenge

We've been challenged to raise $10K for Spotlight PA this Independence Day to unlock a $10K matching gift. Give now & get it DOUBLED »

Journalism that Gets Results ℠

5 takeaways from Spotlight PA’s event on the DuBois corruption case and local government oversight

By min xian of spotlight pa state college | feb. 2, 2024.

A version of this story first appeared in Talk of the Town, a weekly newsletter by Spotlight PA’s State College regional bureau featuring the most important news and happenings in north-central Pennsylvania. Sign up for free at spotlight.org/newsletters/talkofthetown.

A November Spotlight PA investigation reported how the former city manager of a small Pennsylvania city landed at the center of one the state’s most sweeping political corruption cases in recent years.

Spotlight PA reporters Angela Couloumbis and Min Xian detailed how former DuBois City Manager Herm Suplizio wielded vast powers as the city’s chief administrator during his tenure, held outside jobs that presented conflicts of interest, and allegedly stole hundreds of thousands of public and nonprofits dollars because city government oversight was lacking.

The reporters discussed these findings and what they revealed about ethical conduct and fiscal accountability in Pennsylvania local government at a virtual event on Jan. 25.

Here are five key takeaways from the panel discussion, which can be viewed in full at spotlightpa.org/events :

State law sets minimum standards to prevent conflicts of interest in government.

The Pennsylvania Ethics Act spells out basic financial interest disclosure requirements for all public officials and employees, as well as candidates for public office.

Leanne Davis, executive director for Pittsburgh’s Ethics Hearing Board, said the mandatory annual filing sets a floor for making sure elected officials and government workers are not using their public office for private or political gain.

State law broadly defines private gain as “anything that could have a financial impact that can be calculated, which is pretty much everything,” Davis said. The gain could even include benefits for family or entities that public figures are associated with.

State law requires disclosure of secondary employment, certain travel expenses, and seats or offices held at a business or nonprofit. Officials also must report details of debts that exceed $6,500, any gift valued at $250 or more, and outside income of $1,300 or more.

“You are going to see in smaller units, smaller boroughs, smaller townships, more of an overlap between those who are involved with the business community and those who are going to be serving in government,” Davis said. Those contracts are permissible as long as proper disclosures are made public accordingly.

Municipalities can hire law firms instead of individual attorneys as solicitors, and Davis said the Ethics Act should be updated to cover those appointed positions in terms of disclosure. A set of bills in the General Assembly would allow firms to be hired as municipal managers and include reporting requirements.

Fiscal accountability starts with accessible information.

The amount of public and nonprofit money that federal prosecutors alleged Suplizio stole — more than $550,000 over nearly a decade — raised questions about how those funds were handled.

Local governments can adopt best practices — such as adhering to the Governmental Accounting Standards Board guidelines and releasing annual comprehensive financial reports — as the first line of action in fiscal accountability, Rachael Heisler, Pittsburgh city controller, said. These steps would expose potential wrongdoing and generally help the public understand how taxpayer money is managed.

The Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development makes municipal annual financial reports available online .

Heisler’s office produces an annual report that she said is a “very digestible” version of the in-depth audited statements and gets distributed widely. This helps inform local business owners and civic leaders of Pittsburgh’s financial position, she said.

The state auditor general is an elected statewide position with the ability to investigate misconduct, and Heisler said empowering that office to do its job could also protect against fraud, waste, and abuse of public money.

Segregation of duties helps eliminate fraud and misuse.

DuBois was “like the perfect storm” where checks and balances were not in place, Jennifer Jackson, a DuBois City Council member, said. The rare form of local government the city operates under grants vast powers to the city manager, and in the past elected officials trusted Suplizio to do his job without much oversight, she said.

“Even now, we don’t have job [descriptions]. We don’t have employee handbooks,” Jackson said.

Clearly defined job responsibilities limit the authority of each public office, and having workplace policies documented is critical to municipal governance, according to the panel members.

Heisler said her office tries to eliminate the opportunity for misconduct by keeping “even smaller duties within the city” separate.

“I think it's prudent,” she said. “Taxpayers expect that. Residents expect that.”

Heisler suggested that the state legislature strengthen the checks and balances in municipal finances by requiring more than two people act as signers for their bank accounts.

Jackson said the new City Council is reaching out for input, including to the Pennsylvania Municipal League, to help establish new practices, policies, and procedures.

Publicizing government information increases accountability.

Panelists spoke about the importance of making government information available to the public by posting it online where possible and following the state’s open records law.

“Sunshine is the best disinfectant, right?” Davis said. “We need to have transparency.”

Heisler acknowledged that the process can sometimes be cumbersome for smaller governments and hiring more staff to ensure independence in public office often comes with costs, but she said municipalities can make incremental changes to maximize accessibility, like starting with posting monthly treasurers’ reports online.

Davis added that being transparent might “take a culture shift” and could be initiated and passed down by predecessors in public office as institutional knowledge.

Panelists offered potential improvements to oversight.

Elected officials can decide if their municipal policy goes further than what the state ethics law requires of public employees and themselves, Davis said. Allegheny County, for example, established a five-person Accountability, Conduct and Ethics Commission by ordinance and tasked it with receiving and investigating complaints regarding unethical behavior by county officials and employees.

The panelists agreed that proper oversight of governments requires a participating public.

“I would go to council meetings as [a] business owner and would walk out and be like, ‘I don't understand how our city is being run because nothing was public. Everything was behind the scenes,’” Jackson said. “I think [the] public needs to truly educate themselves as to how your municipality should be working and ask questions.”

“Once we kind of have some of that fundamental understanding of basic accountability and what we should be expecting, we can hold [elected leaders] accountable,” Davis added.

Jackson successfully ran on a write-in campaign last year to join DuBois City Council, after the allegations of theft against Suplizio were made public and the city faced questions about its governance. Heisler said that running for office is an important way to restore faith in government.

SUPPORT THIS JOURNALISM and help us reinvigorate local news in north-central Pennsylvania at spotlightpa.org/donate/statecollege . Spotlight PA is funded by foundations and readers like you who are committed to accountability and public-service journalism that gets results.

Most Popular Stories

Editor’s pick.

Pa. Supreme Court sets the stage to consider whether the state constitution protects abortion

By stephen caruso of spotlight pa and katie meyer of spotlight pa.

How Spotlight PA will cover Pennsylvania’s 2024 election

By elizabeth estrada of spotlight pa, state college bureau.

Group of Penn State trustees push to name football field after Joe Paterno in private meetings

By wyatt massey of spotlight pa state college, get all the top news and notes from state college & north-central pa..

Sign up for Spotlight PA’s free weekly newsletter and get our exclusive reporting, plus the most important news and events from our region.

Email address

I’m already a subscriber No thanks

Advertisement

Public Sector Strategies in Curbing Corruption: A Review of the Literature

• Open access
• Published: 30 June 2022
• Volume 22 , pages 571–591, ( 2022 )

Cite this article

You have full access to this open access article

• Federico Ceschel   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6639-4490 1 ,
• Alessandro Hinna 2 &
• Fabian Homberg 3  

12k Accesses

9 Citations

2 Altmetric

Explore all metrics

Corruption is widespread and preventive strategies to reduce corruption need to be adapted within the local context. Considering the United Nations (UN) Convention against corruption as our starting point, the paper presents a literature review based on 118 articles on corruption prevention initiatives in the public sector. The analysis indicates a substantial alignment between the guidelines deriving from the UN Convention, except for a lack of work on the risk-based approach to corruption prevention. Further, the review indicates problems with research designs. Based on the insights generated from the analysis, we develop an agenda for future research.

Similar content being viewed by others

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR): The Role of Government in promoting CSR

Governance and Good Governance: A New Framework for Political Analysis

Pre-enlargement reform failures in the western balkans: social and economic preconditions of the rule of law.

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

Introduction

Corruption is widely recognized as a social plague that affects most countries worldwide. The so-called ‘syndromes of corruption’, such as elite cartels, clans and oligarchs described by Johnston ( 2005 ), locate corruption scenarios in different contexts. Certainly, both the public sector (Anechiarico and Jacobs, 1996 ; Auriol & Blanc, 2009 ) and the private sector (Argandoña, 2003 ; Castro et al., 2020 ; Lange, 2008 ) suffer from corruption. A significant portion of the specialized literature, focusing on the public sector during the end of the 1990s, highlights the harmful effects of corruption. There is evidence that corruption reduces investment (Mauro, 1995 ) and foreign direct investment (Wei & Wu, 2001 ), damages productivity and economic growth as a whole (Hall & Jones, 1999 ), diminishes the quality of procurement services (Rose-Ackerman, 1997 ), exacerbates income inequality and poverty (Gupta et al., 2002 ) and hampers efficient and effective allocation of resources of public expenditure (Tanzi & Davoodi, 1997 ).

Against this background, a growing interest emerged at the beginning of the 2000s in combating corruption not only through counter policies aimed at punishing corruption but also with prevention policies aimed at limiting the occurrence of potential effects. A significant milestone that marked a significant change in the anti-corruption strategy was sparked by the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC) that was opened for signature in Merida in 2003, adopted by the UN General Assembly on 31 October 2003 (resolution 58/4), and entered into force on 14 December 2005 (in accordance with article 68(1)). According to the UN, this was “the only legally binding universal anti-corruption instrument” that affirmed the preventive approach to the corruption phenomenon. The Convention has become a milestone for the public sector in promoting and strengthening measures “to prevent the most prevalent form of corruption” (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2003 , p. iii). Starting from the premise that “a comprehensive and multidisciplinary approach is necessary to effectively prevent and combat corruption”, chapter no. 2 is devoted to corruption prevention measures. It thus inextricably links the concept of prevention with policies and practices of intervention both at the national level, calling for “appropriate legislative and administrative measures”, and at the level of the individual organization calling for (among other things) maintaining and strengthening “systems for the recruitment, hiring, retention, promotion, and retirement of public employees”, as well as implementing “codes or standards of conduct”. This is particularly relevant for public procurement and public financial management, with their emphasis on implementing reporting systems, adopting accounting and auditing standards, implementing system of risk management and internal control.

With this integrated and multidisciplinary approach to corruption prevention, inspired by the work within the OECD ( 2000 ), public and private organizations might develop and implement more accurate, realistic, and effective preventive actions as these measures are linked to the assessment of the corruption causes to which organizations are potentially exposed.

Furthermore, within the framework of the general principles defined by the UNCAC, each State must adopt the mentioned basic rules in its context according to the fundamental principles of its legal, organizational, and cultural system. Certain scholars (Hopkin, 2002 ; Meagher, 2004 ) and governmental organizations (McCusker, 2006 ; Disch et al., 2009 ; OECD, 2008 ) emphasize design and implementation at the national level and thereby contribute to this framework of renewed interest in prevention policies.

However, little is known about governments' implementation of corruption prevention strategies inspired by these renewed international guidelines. While corruption is increasingly seen as a risk to public organizations, the prevention activities undertaken by such organizations or the results of these activities for the public institutions themselves are poorly understood (Miller et al., 2008 ; Power, 2007 ).

Considering the above, this paper presents a literature review based on 118 articles on corruption prevention initiatives in the public sector published between 2001 and 2020. Given the aforementioned need to adopt anti-corruption measures in their reference context, we defined clear selection criteria for the articles included in the review: We focus on upper-middle-income (with a GNI per capita between $4,046 and $12,535) and high-income countries (with a GNI per capita of $12,536 or more) as defined by the World Bank, that are often considered less vulnerable to corruption. As Graycar and Monaghan ( 2015 , p. 587) assert, “corruption is different between countries with established democracies and those in a state of political-economic development or transition”. Consequently, anti-corruption measures should vary with the state of development in a given country. Hence, focusing our review on richer countries provides a purposeful grouping and can potentially deliver additional insights concerning anti-corruption measures.

Therefore, we aim to make three main contributions to the research field. First, by focusing on the anti-corruption measures, we shed light on the extent to which evidence has been generated on their use and effectiveness. Second, by giving a central role to the organizational and individual level in corruption studies, we shift attention to the practices and processes of implementation that can affect their effectiveness within public institutions. Third, arising from the integrated nature of the review, we propose an agenda for future research on corruption prevention.

The paper proceeds as follows. The following section introduces a conceptualization of corruption; the third section presents the major streams in corruption prevention research, and the fourth section outlines the agenda for future research.

The Nature and the Causes of Corruption

If, as already mentioned, the analysis and therefore the awareness of the effects of corruption have certainly motivated a renewed interest on the part of institutions in activating policies of prevention and not only of contrast, on the other hand, it is precisely the desire to "prevent" that makes in-depth study of the nature and causes of corruptive phenomena increasingly relevant. Dimant and Tosato ( 2018 ) summarise findings relating to 22 single causes of corruption (see Table 1 in Dimant & Tosato 2018 for a summary), also identifying new developments. For example, there is evidence that corruption is contagious and spills over to neighboring countries and it works both ways, i.e., for corruption prevention policies. This is a field of investigation that is characterized by a long tradition of studies, demonstrating unequivocally the complex and multidimensional nature of corruption (Capasso & Santoro, 2018 ) and, therefore, the multifaceted nature of the motivation to engage in corrupt behavior (Bicchieri & Ganegonda, 2017 ; Dimant & Schulte, 2016 ), which requires a multilevel analysis approach where micro-meso and macro-level are necessarily interdependent. In particular, as Aguirre ( 2008 , p. 13) argues, "addressing one level of the triad, without ignoring another, renders the entire system ineffective."

Approaches to understanding corruption at the micro-level have invoked the “bad apples” analogy (Anand et al., 2004 ), i.e., such approaches emphasize the combination of contextual and individual psychological factors that bring about corrupt behavior as a result of questionable moral standards. For example, according to Cressey’s ( 1953 ) fraud triangle model, opportunity, motivation, and rationalization efforts combine to enable corrupt behavior. While such individual-level explanations remain popular in applied empirical research on fraud and corruption (Homer, 2020 ; Le et al., 2021 ), researchers also criticized the fraud triangle for its heavy emphasis on individual-level factors, which are unable to explain more socio-systemic triggers of fraud (Suh et al., 2020 ) and its incapacity to capture different notions of financial crimes (Huber, 2017 ). Notwithstanding these criticisms, a detailed analysis of the origins and use of the fraud triangle by Morales et al. ( 2014 ) identifies the fraud triangle as a trigger stimulating the development of organizational controls as a countermeasure to the emergence of corrupt behavior. Consequently, Morales et al., ( 2014 , p.185) conclude that the “(…) fraud triangle has been harnessed as a tool, in the service of practitioners and theorists, to promote a branch of knowledge that views fraud at the juncture of an individual and organizational problem”. In fact, part of the specialized literature has devoted itself to this over time (Hinna et al., 2018 ), studying the basis of the corruption phenomenon at the firm level, thus integrating itself into a more traditional and established macroeconomic literature, by offering a socio-psychological view on why individuals engage in corrupt acts.

Specifically, focusing on the organizational level of corruption, the literature has analyzed the causes of corruption from the point of view not only of what determines the “opportunity” of a corrupt action but also of what could “incentivize” it, combining a macro level of analysis with a meso level of analysis. In terms of opportunity, Klitgaard et al., ( 2000 , p. 35) state that an individual “will have the opportunity to garner corrupt benefits as a function of their degree of monopoly over a service or activity, their discretion in deciding who should get how much, and the degree to which their activities are accountable”. It follows that, on the opportunity side, the prevention of corruption can be effectively achieved through an improvement of control systems on operators, a limitation of their monopoly conditions, and an increase in the level of transparency of the actions implemented by them.

Other types of arguments focus on the study of the “incentives” to carry out corrupt acts. As these are inevitably correlated to the characteristics of the environmental and organizational context, one needs to consider how they, therefore, “interact” with the characteristics of organizational actors and that can be at the base of their corrupt behavior. In particular, two arguments can be distinguished.

First, with reference to the external context of the individual firm, beyond the aforementioned spaces of “opportunity” that may be created by environmental features such as turbulence and munificence, as well as low rivalry intensity or complex and ambiguous characteristics or newly enacted legislation, other two main factors of “environmental” origin are identified as underlying corruption risk (Baucus, 1994 ): (a) the “pressure” to which the company is subjected, due not only to elements of fore competitiveness of the markets but also to the possible scarcity of available resources or to a regulatory framework in constant evolution; (b) a “predisposition,” deriving from a context with a significant and consolidated level of illegality.

Second, with reference to the internal context of the individual company, some pioneering contributions (i.e., Albrecht et al., 1984 ) have gradually developed the original model of Cressey, precisely focusing on the formal and informal dimensions of work organization, investigating not only organizational structures and processes but also operating systems and the social and cultural dimensions of the organization, as possible determinants of individual behavior (Palmer, 2012 ). This allows the study of whether they could alternatively push individuals toward wrongdoing (i.e., the need to guarantee a certain level of performance) or “justify” corrupt behavior, whether in response to corporate interests or interests of an individual nature (Hinna et al., 2016 ; Palmer, 2012 ).

Therefore, through the combination of economic, social and psychological theories and perspectives, the set of contributions provided to date in the literature allows for an integrated view for understanding corruption, which is not limited to the analysis of only individual factors but expands to both the relationship between the individual and organizations, and between the organization and the context in which the company operates (Fig.  1 ).

Source: Hinna et al., ( 2016 , p.155)

Environment (macro), organization (meso), and individual (micro) relationship: the integrated model of organization corruption determinants.

Major Streams in Corruption Prevention research

The analysis of the results that emerged in the literature review allows us to make several considerations on how the research overcomes the traditional repressive approach to corruption to adopt a more preventive one. We begin with describing a few general patterns found in the articles reviewed and proceed then to a more detailed discussion of three main themes which are related to (i) the attempts to generate more transparency at the macro-level, (ii) identification of initiatives at the organizational level that complement transparency enhancing measures and (iii) micro-level individual processes with relevance for preventing corrupt behavior.

Major Patterns Observed in the Literature

Reviewing the articles included, first we find that studies analyzing corruption have significantly increased during the period under analysis (2001–2020). More specifically, out of the 118 works examined, 82 percent of the publications were published in the last ten years (2010–2020) (Fig.  2 ).

Focus of the publications

The second consideration is that the research interest has progressively turned to the theme of corruption prevention. This is already evident by observing the number of papers dedicated explicitly to preventive measures. But it is further confirmed by the papers dedicated to the causes of corruption, as a typical object of investigation for the choice and evaluation of prevention strategies. However, although the combination of studies dealing with the causes and preventive measures of corruption increasingly outweighs studies focusing on its consequences over time, it is worth noting that the relationship between causes and related anti-corruption measures is still rarely discussed. This is particularly evident in studies focusing predominantly on one or the other aspect. In fact, only 20 works in our sample investigate both the causes and the related preventive measures, realizing an effective contextualization of the proposed measures against the identified causes.

A third element that stands out concerns the methodological perspective. Our research shows that most works adopt empirical approaches of which 58 percent (69 studies) qualifies as quantitative work, whereas 24 percent (28 studies) qualifies as qualitative work. Only 16 percent of articles (19 studies) are conceptual in nature or qualify as some form of review (2 percent, 2 studies). As corruption is notoriously difficult to observe, it is not surprising that quantitative studies rely primarily on country rankings based on international corruption indices such as the Transparency International Corruption Index or World Governance Indicators. At the same time, it is worth noting the unexpected predominance of quantitative studies in a field of research that does not yet present consolidated theoretical and explanatory models.

A fourth consideration is related to the alignment of the emerging literature adopting the preventive approach with the fundamental principles of the Merida Convention, which also highlights the adoption of measures aimed at avoiding the occurrence of corrupt behaviors in the organizational context. Indeed, the primary level of analysis adopted by the studies: 53 percent of the studies analyzed (63 studies) indicate that academic interest is moving towards a meso level of analysis, thus responding to the demand for studies that go beyond the macro-level (52 studies, 44 percent) to investigate organizational and behavioral aspects related to corruption (Jain, 2001 ). The meso-level analysis is mainly adopted by studies addressing the causes of corruption and the related measures (see Table 1 below).

More specifically, according to the key principles of the Merida Convention and consistent with distinct levels of analysis, some dominant themes emerge in the specialized literature: transparency and accountability strategies, human resource management (HRM) system, individual attitudes, and behaviors.

Finally, it is noteworthy that only one paper investigates a prevention system based on a “risk-based” approach (Van der Wal et al., 2016 ). Using data from 36 Victorian (Australia) public sector bodies the authors examined public officials' perceptions and the ability to identify and analyze corruption risks, the strategies to mitigate these risks, and the integrity mechanisms in place (Van der Wal et al., 2016 ).

Addressing Corruption through Transparency

At a macro level of analysis, one of the dominant themes is undoubtedly centered on the concepts of transparency and openness and how they in turn contribute to tackling corruption in the public sector with its promise to increase the chances of accountability. Transparency and anti-corruption policies have experienced a rapid spread worldwide – from the dramatic increase of freedom of information laws to the recent Open Government Partnership.

One example addressing the transparency argument is the work by Escaleras et al. ( 2010 ) asking if freedom of information acts have been an effective measure against corruption. Their findings do not support the effectiveness of freedom of information laws as a deterrent to corruption and remain neutral. But they support a moderating effect of institutional quality. They even find an increase in corruption for developing countries in the presence of freedom of information legislation. Hence, they conclude that freedom of information acts might be a small complementary measure in anti-corruption campaigns.

In contrast, in a study with a sophisticated empirical design de Simone et al. ( 2017 ) show that increasing fiscal transparency is an effective measure in the fight against corruption. Similarly, using data from the World Values Survey, Capasso et al. ( 2021 ) support the view that transparency creates incentives for individuals to be rule compliant and thus is an effective anti-corruption measure. Global pressure has played a significant role in policy dissemination and in some cases has also created an external pressure for legitimacy that has empowered domestic policymakers and facilitated the related adoption processes (Schnell, 2015 ).

However, the beneficial effect of government transparency may be contingent on the nature of the demand for accountability, as well as on a series of "heroic assumptions" (Fukuyama, 2015 , p. 16) about the nature of stakeholders' willingness and ability to act upon the information received (Bauhr & Nasiritousi, 2012 ; Kolstad & Wiig, 2009 ). With their empirical research in public procurement, Bauhr et al. ( 2020 ) contribute to this debate with two significant elements. The first is the need to develop a theoretical distinction between ex-ante and ex-post transparency, the second is to consider the fact that the mere publication of relevant information is not enough for holding governments to account, as the legal and technical complexity of data presents substantial barriers to data use. Ayhan and Üstüner ( 2015 ) study reforms on public procurement in Turkey. While the initial aim of creating a more transparent public procurement system triggered the process, their analysis reveals an overall quality decline in the Turkish procurement system. One reason they identify is the dilution due to an increase in regulations (i.e., they report that about 20 amendments have been made to the original regulation) thereby creating untransparent rules, procedures, and regulations undermining anti-corruption efforts.

Often the need to build a transparent procurement environment inevitably passes through the adoption of technologically innovative solutions, such as e-procurement platforms (Liao et al., 2003 ). Understandably, the adoption of an innovative e-government approach should not be seen as a panacea for corruption problems in public organizations. A recent work by Wu et al. ( 2020 ) examines the potential and limitations of using e-government as an innovative anticorruption measure from the perspective of public officials in China and India, verifying that the effectiveness of this measure varies based on the political, economic, and cultural conditions of a country.

However, the implementation of an e-governance system is not only associated with the issue of transparency but—more generally—with the second important research stream identified at a macro level: good governance as a corruption prevention tool. In this sense, using cross-national secondary data from 191 countries, Chen and Aklikokou ( 2021 ) demonstrate a positive association between e-governments’ development and government effectiveness, as well as between e-governments’ development and their control of corruption.

In the same research field, the focus is often aimed at evaluating the degree to which public administration reforms contribute to corruption reduction (Andrei et al., 2009 ; Matei & Matei, 2009 ; Neshkova & Kostadinova, 2012 ; Segal & Lehrer, 2012 ). Other works take into consideration more specific reform processes, such as the adoption of quality public sector accounting (Lewis & Hendrawan, 2020 ) or auditing practices (Gustavson and Sundström, 2018 ) that can assist in reducing corruption. Similarly, Christensen and Fan ( 2018 ) report on the introduction of an anti-corruption campaign in China characterized by strict reporting rules between local and central governments. Such reporting rules discourage supervisors from covering up lower-level employees' misbehavior, hence increasing transparency. But Christensen and Fan ( 2018 ) also acknowledge the limitations of such institutional measures by highlighting that also deeply ingrained cultural attitudes need to be changed. They see the anti-corruption campaigns as a vehicle to do so.

Addressing Corruption through the HRM System

An HRM system integrates practices of pay and reward, recruitment, selection, training and development, career progression and related HRM practices. Berman ( 2015 ) offers a detailed discussion on how HRM can support efforts to fight corruption. Regarding the HRM system, several empirical studies have investigated the anti-corruption effect of the different HR practices. HRM efforts may also instill career commitment, loyalty and pride in serving the public. Therefore, highly selective recruiting procedures, appropriate onboarding and continuous training (Beeri et al., 2013 ) and socialization efforts may contribute to building a public sector workforce that is less inclined to engage in corrupt practices. In this sense, robust HRM systems act as an antidote to corrupt behavior (Berman, 2015 ). For example, looking at the recruitment of public officials in Denmark, Barfort et al. ( 2019 ) investigated whether a systematic self-selection of honest types into public service may be one channel that helps sustain a low level of corruption and found that dishonest individuals are more pecuniarily motivated and self-select out of public service and into higher-paying private-sector jobs.

A traditional argument in the corruption literature focuses on public officials’ compensation ( inter alia , seminal work of Becker & Stigler, 1974 ). Higher salaries (compared to private sector salaries) that allow individuals to sustain their living costs are commonly seen as a deterrent to corruption. Individuals working under such conditions are simply less inclined to accept bribery payments or other gifts. While van Veldhuizen ( 2013 ) confirms this argument empirically in a laboratory experiment, showing that higher wages make individuals less corruptible, the broader review of the literature reveals a more nuanced picture. For example, setting up a theoretical model Macchiavello ( 2008 ) challenges the idea that the relationship between wages and corruption is monotonic. However, this study does not provide systematic empirical evidence to support the claim. In contrast, work by Chen and Liu ( 2018 ) and Dhillon et al. ( 2017 ) present empirical evidence on the wage argument. Chen and Liu ( 2018 ) study bribes received by Chinese officials based on court proceedings data and find a U-shaped relationship. Thus, according to their results, higher wages are effective when base salaries are low but increasing salaries as an anti-corruption measures loses its effectiveness when wages are at elevated levels already and when bribes can be negotiated. Results presented by Navot et al. ( 2016 ) who study a dataset consisting of 58 countries, highlight that higher wages may increase public corruption and demonstrate that people with a stronger sense of belonging tend to be less affected by pecuniary incentives. This finding is consistent with theories about intrinsic motivation.

Researchers have tested whether the relationship between performance rewards and corruption is conditioned by patronage-based recruitment (Campbell, 2020 ). They discover, through a comparison of over 100 countries, that the effect of pay on corruption is negative when clientelism is low but not significant or positive in countries where clientelism pervades the hiring process. On the same theme, Egeberg et al. ( 2019 ) oriented their studies to answer whether a system of recruitment based on merit enhances good and non-corrupt governance. In their case, the field of investigation was the European Union regulatory (decentralized) agencies and it emerged that these agencies seem to overwhelmingly apply meritocratic instruments when hiring people, regardless of their location.

Specific personnel management measures are also considered potential corruption prevention tools. For example, under the job rotation, public officials are less likely to accept bribes and this leads to less manipulated decision-making by public officials (Fišar et al., 2021 ). Also well-curated content for employee training may mitigate the corruption problem. For example, Luk ( 2012 ) recommends a three-pronged approach advocating the integration of ethical leadership, ethical training, and ethics legislation for maintaining the integrity of the civil service in Hong Kong.

Addressing Corruption by Influencing Individual Attitudes and Behaviors

Considering the results of the review, several authors have recently addressed the determinants of corruption at the individual level. Among others, Mangafić and Veselinović ( 2020 ) analyzed the effects of individual determinants on the likelihood of engaging in bribery, confirming that specific personal characteristics predicted corrupt behavior. Rabl ( 2011 ) explores the effect of contextual variables on the willingness of the individual to accept a bribe using laboratory experiments. Furthermore, Nichols and Robertson ( 2017 ) underscore the need to explore the role of moral emotions for bribery research. Another study demonstrated how dishonesty is strongly negatively correlated with public service motivation (Olsen et al., 2019 ).

The analysis of individual psychological determinants conducted by Kakavand et al. ( 2020 ) provided elements for HRM to understand workplace corruption better. The main results highlight that sense of mastery, distributive justice and procedural justice have a negative impact on workplace corruption, whereas powerlessness has a positive effect on workplace corruption. A further implication is that by staying in tune with motivational processes a HRM system is suited to prevent corrupt mechanisms fueled by frustrated or endangered motivational resources (Kakavand et al., 2020 ). Also Dhillon et al. ( 2017 ) offer a perspective based on psychological economics by applying a crowding-out logic (Frey et al. 2013 ) to explain the effects on bribe acceptance. In their theoretical model, they acknowledge the variety of individual motivational dispositions. Furthermore, they argue that concern for the collective reputation of the profession may be at play. They conclude that “optimal policies to reduce corruption should take account of the competing motivations for public sector work and the importance of maintaining a high status in the public sector as opposed to private sector work” (Dhillon et al., 2017 , p.3).

The consideration of motivation also prompts thoughts on incentive systems in general. In a corrupt transaction both parties, e.g., a bribe-giver and a bribe-taker, are subject to different incentives to engage in the corrupt activity. Addressing this situation, some authors have argued that the nature of corruption is a decisive factor in determining such incentives. Capasso and Santoro ( 2018 ) distinguish between active (i.e., bargaining power to set bribe lies with the official) and passive (i.e., bargaining power lies with the private actor) corruption. Based on their empirical analyses, they recommend monitoring and strict supervision as more effective deterrents to active corruption whereas controls are more effective when fighting passive corruption.

Research further emphasized the impact on individual behaviors deriving from the adoption of codes of conduct or ethical leadership (Thaler and Helmig, 2016 ). In this empirical research carried out in Germany, it emerges that only ethical leadership has a positive effect on employees' organization-related attitudes. Consistently with this evidence, Janenova and Knox ( 2020 ) demonstrate how the introduction of specific ethics commissioners improves the benefits deriving from the adoption of the code of conduct in the context of Kazakhstan.

The encouragement of whistleblowing and protection of whistleblowers is the last dominant theme that emerged. A literature review published ten years ago on the wave of growing interest in the subject, despite the lack of empirical knowledge, discussed new theoretical and methodological areas of research in the domain of whistleblowing (Vadera et al., 2009 ).

As the decision to blow the whistle is rooted in the individual, the works analyzed in this review illustrates the interplay between the individual (micro), the organizational (meso) and the macro level. In order to encourage whistleblowing, both the organization and the legal system need to implement protection measures for the individuals involved. Hence, the literature reviewed highlights the complementary role organizations need to assume in anti-corruption initiatives as institutional measures may not be sufficient.

Following this path, recent studies have worked on: the content and effectiveness of whistleblowing policies (West and Bowman, 2020 ); the whistleblowing process, especially from a practitioner perspective (Vandekerckhove & Lewis, 2012 ); the organizational conditions necessary to encourage the whistleblowing (Previtali & Cerchiello, 2018 ), the determinants of a whistleblowing intention (Vadera et al., 2009 ; Cassematis & Wortley, 2013 ; Chang et al., 2017 ), and the influence of the ethical position on whistleblowing behavior in private and public contexts (Nayır et al., 2018 ). Noteworthy in this context is the work by Chang et al. ( 2017 ) on whistleblowing as it zooms in on the determinants of whistleblowing beyond mere institutional and regulatory protections. In their large-scale analysis of Korean public officials, they identify perceived colleague support and organizational support as significant antecedents to the willingness of individuals to blow the whistle in the presence of observed wrongdoing by others.

Instead of looking only into whistleblowing policies, organizations may also consider enforcement policies. For example, Burlando and Motta ( 2016 ) developed an anti-corruption enforcement model demonstrating that, within an optimal compensation scheme, legalization can play a critical anti-corruption role. In fact, they found that fiscal and legalization policies have an impact on reducing enforcement costs because they affect individual incentives to crime and corruption rents. Despite the model and the debate on the enforcement issue present at the global level, the two authors point out some significant limitations to this type of policies, in particular the negative implications on people’s trust, that could interpret the legalization as a repugnant policy.

Taking a similar perspective on enforcement, Capasso et al. ( 2019 ) analyzed a dataset on 80 countries to assess the relative effectiveness of various types of law enforcement, judicial efficiency and broader measures of related institutional quality, demonstrating that strengthening country-level institutions is the most powerful deterrent to corruption. The main and most interesting implication from this study is that “comprehensive improvements in enforcement involving better institutions related to law and order are more effective in combating corruption than focus on individual dimensions of enforcement” (Capasso et al., 2019 , p. 357), hence stressing once again the need for a holistic approach to fight against corruption.

Future Research Agenda

This work reviewed the literature on public sector anti-corruption for upper-middle- and high-income countries. We assessed 118 studies identified by our search methodology according to a wide range of criteria, such as country of origin, methodological approach and its quality, level of analysis, scope, and anti-corruption approach, among others.

The problem of preventing corruption has long been an international political priority, and the need to activate policies of prevention, and not merely repression, of corruption is unequivocally present in both the UNCAC and the various control mechanisms, such as the Group of States against Corruption (GRECO) or the OECD’s Working Group on Bribery in International Business (WGB). As demonstrated by our review, the academic literature has responded to these demands and progressively focused its efforts on the prevention of corruption, which also highlights the adoption of measures aimed at avoiding the occurrence of corrupt behaviors in the organizational context.

Our research demonstrates an increasing adoption of the organizational level of analysis to investigate the determinants and the possible measures for corruption prevention and it outlines a new additional item which is the recognition of the individual as an essential element to explore both the causes and the specific measures which impact individual behaviors.

Concerning preventive measures, the study highlights a substantial alignment between the guidelines deriving from the Merida Convention and the dominant themes of interest in the academic debate, except for a lack of work on the risk-based approach to corruption prevention. From this vantage point, while corruption is increasingly considered a risk to public organizations’ performance (Power, 2007 ), the findings of the review suggest that little is known about the activities of various public organizations in promoting the logic of risk management or about the impact of these activities for administrations. This evidence is surprising as an exception to the importance that the management of risk has assumed a central role in public policy and management (i.e., Brown & Calnan, 2013 ; Hood et al., 2004 ; Miller et al., 2008 ) and raises some questions about the processes of analysis, evaluation and choice of prevention measures that, if not linked to an effective risk assessment, could be adopted in a standardized form.

From this point of view, there is a need to study risk management systems and processes for anti-corruption, also to better understand the link between causes and measures of corruption. Academic literature (Jain, 2001 ; Jancsics, 2019 ) and the international conventions stress the importance of linking the causes of corruption to the possible measures for formulating better policies and more effective identification of the appropriate recipe for the specific context. However, our review found that in academia, the alignment between causes and potential measures for combating corruption is still poorly investigated both at organizational and individual levels. This is particularly problematic as this missing link often hinders the effectiveness of anti-corruption policies with consequences on the interests and objectives of academic research as well as for theoretical or practical relevance.

Moreover, because of the nature of the research object and to build a plausible explanation for the causal relationship that links antecedents and countermeasures of corruption in specific organizational contexts, exploratory analyses are required (Benbasat et al., 1987 ). In this regard, the low number (and depth) of qualitative studies is surprising since the qualitative research methodology is beneficial in fields of study where it is still necessary to understand the studied reality, where consolidated theoretical and explanatory models cannot yet be found.

While the methodological challenges are severe, it is possible to overcome them. One issue lies in the hidden, invisible nature of corrupt activities which creates difficulties for empirical study. However, researchers can work on making it visible and it could be successful with regard to smaller payments, i. e. in the form of petty corruption. A case in point is the use of publicly available data that potentially makes corrupt activity visible and can be studied. For instance, Schoeneborn and Homberg ( 2018 ) exploited reports on a website to make small bribes visible. Another example is displayed in Bauhr et al. ( 2020 ) which presents an analysis based on publicly available information about public procurement tenders involving more than 100,000 observations. Corruption is made visible here by analyzing the number of participants in bids. Additional opportunities arise from the use of algorithms and computer science techniques that can identify hidden patterns through a combination of different databases, such as described in Velasco et al. ( 2021 ), who used data mining techniques to identify corruption risk patterns. As far as field studies are concerned, researchers can choose settings that allow them to make relevant observations such as Olken and Barron ( 2009 ) who studied more than 6000 illegal payments made by truck drivers to officials in Indonesia. Additionally, ethnographies or other forms of qualitative inquiry could help understand where institutional setups break down or which anti-corruption measures have design flaws. Therefore, overall, creative research designs can overcome some of the challenges that plague corruption research.

This literature review has provided a snapshot of the current state of the literature on corruption in upper-middle-income and high-income countries, highlighting future research needs to address. First, more attention to risk management processes is required; second, a stronger focus on the interrelationship between causes and solutions for corruption is needed; and third, more creative effort needs to be put into study design in order to generate solid evidence on corruption at the organizational and individual level. As the corruption literature grows further, we are confident that researchers will be able to address these challenges.

Aguirre, D. (2008). The human right to development in a globalized world . Routledge.

Albrecht, W. S., Howe, K. R., & Romney, M. B. (1984). Deterring fraud: the internal auditor’s perspective . Inst of Internal Auditors.

Google Scholar  

Anand, V., Ashforth, B. E., & Joshi, M. (2004). Business as usual: The acceptance and perpetuation of corruption in organizations. Academy of Management Perspectives, 18 (2), 39–53.

Article   Google Scholar  

Andrei, T., Matei, A. I., Tusa, E., & Nedelcu, M. (2009). Characteristics of the reforming process in the Romanian public administration system. Transylvanian Review of Administrative Sciences, 25E , 13–31.

Anechiarico, F., & Jacobs, J. B. (1996). The pursuit of absolute integrity: How corruption control makes government ineffective . University of Chicago Press.

Argandoña, A. (2003). Private-to-Private Corruption. Journal of Business Ethics., 47 , 253–267.

Auriol, E., & Blanc, A. (2009). Capture and corruption in public utilities: The cases of water and electricity in Sub-Saharan Africa. Utilities Policy, 17 (2), 203–216.

Ayhan, B., & Üstüner, Y. (2015). Governance in public procurement: The reform of Turkey’s public procurement system. International Review of Administrative Sciences, 81 (3), 640–662.

Barfort, S., Harmon, N. A., Hjorth, F., & Olsen, A. L. (2019). Sustaining honesty in public service: The role of selection. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 11 (4), 96–123.

Baucus, M. S. (1994). Pressure, opportunity and predisposition: A multivariate model of corporate illegality. Journal of Management, 20 (4), 699–721.

Bauhr, M., & Nasiritousi, N. (2012). Resisting transparency: Corruption, legitimacy, and the quality of global environmental policies. Global Environmental Politics, 12 (4), 9–29.

Bauhr, M., Czibik, Á., de Fine Licht, J., & Fazekas, M. (2020). Lights on the shadows of public procurement: Transparency as an antidote to corruption. Governance, 33 (3), 495–523.

Becker, G. S., & Stigler, G. J. (1974). Law enforcement, malfeasance, and compensation of enforcers. The Journal of Legal Studies, 3 (1), 1–18.

Beeri, I., Dayan, R., Vigoda-Gadot, E., & Werner, S. B. (2013). Advancing ethics in public organizations: The impact of an ethics program on employees’ perceptions and behaviors in a regional council. Journal of Business Ethics, 112 (1), 59–78.

Benbasat, I., Goldstein, D. K., & Mead, M. (1987). The case research strategy in studies of information systems.  MIS quarterly , 11 (3), 369–386. https://doi.org/10.2307/248684

Berman, E. M. (2015). HRM in development: Lessons and frontiers. Public Administration and Development, 35 (2), 113–127.

Bicchieri, C., & Ganegoda, D. (2017). Determinants of corruption: A sociopsychological analysis. In Thinking about Bribery: neuroscience, moral cognition and the psychology of bribery . Cambridge University Press.

Bierstaker, J. L. (2009). Differences in attitudes about fraud and corruption across cultures: Theory, examples and recommendations. Cross Cultural Management: An International Journal .

Brown, P., & Calnan, M. (2013). Trust as a means of bridging the management of risk and the meeting of need: A case study in mental health service provision. Social Policy & Administration, 47 (3), 242–261.

Burlando, A., & Motta, A. (2016). Legalize, tax, and deter: Optimal enforcement policies for corruptible officials. Journal of Development Economics, 118 , 207–215.

Campbell, J. W. (2020). Buying the honor of thieves? Performance pay, political patronage, and corruption. International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice, 63 , 100439.

Capasso, S., Goel, R. K., & Saunoris, J. W. (2019). Is it the gums, teeth or the bite? Effectiveness of dimensions of enforcement in curbing corruption. Economics of Governance, 20 (4), 329–369.

Capasso, S., & Santoro, L. (2018). Active and passive corruption: Theory and evidence. European Journal of Political Economy, 52 , 103–119.

Capasso, S., Cicatiello, L., De Simone, E., Gaeta, G. L., & Mourão, P. R. (2021). Fiscal transparency and tax ethics: Does better information lead to greater compliance? Journal of Policy Modeling, 45 , 1031–1050.

Cassematis, P. G., & Wortley, R. (2013). Prediction of whistleblowing or non-reporting observation: The role of personal and situational factors. Journal of Business Ethics, 117 (3), 615–634.

Castro, A., Phillips, N., & Ansari, S. (2020). Corporate corruption: A review and an agenda for future research. Academy of Management Annals, 14 (2), 935–968.

Chang, Y., Wilding, M., & Shin, M. C. (2017). Determinants of Whistleblowing Intention: Evidence from the South Korean Government. Public Performance and Management Review, 40 (4), 676–700. https://doi.org/10.1080/15309576.2017.1318761

Chen, L., & Aklikokou, A. K. (2021). Relating e-government development to government effectiveness and control of corruption: a cluster analysis.  Journal of Chinese Governance ,   6 (1), 1–19.

Chen, Y., & Liu, Q. (2018). Public-sector wages and corruption: An empirical study. European Journal of Political Economy, 54 , 189–197.

Christensen, T., & Fan, Y. (2018). Post-New Public Management: A new administrative paradigm for China? International Review of Administrative Sciences, 84 (2), 389–404.

Cressey, D. R. (1953). Other people's money: A study of the social psychology of embezzlement. New York: Free Press.

De Simone, E., Gaeta, G. L., & Mourão, P. R. (2017). The Impact of Fiscal Transparency on Corruption: An Empirical Analysis Based on Longitudinal Data.  The BE Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy ,  17 (4), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1515/bejeap-2017-0021

Dhillon, A., Nicolò, A., & Xu, F. (2017). Corruption, intrinsic motivation, and the love of praise. Journal of Public Economic Theory, 19 (6), 1077–1098.

Dimant, E., & Schulte, T. (2016). The nature of corruption: An interdisciplinary perspective. German Law Journal , 17(1), 53–72.

Dimant, E., & Tosato, G. (2018). Causes and effects of corruption: what has past decade's empirical research taught us? A survey. Journal of Economic Surveys, 32 (2), 335–356.

Disch, A., Vigeland, E., Sundet, G., & Gibson, S. (2009). Anti-corruption approaches: A literature review. Oslo: Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation . Retrieved August, 12, 2018.

Egeberg, M., Gornitzka, Å., & Trondal, J. (2019). Merit-based recruitment boosts good governance: How do European Union agencies recruit their personnel? International Review of Administrative Sciences, 85 (2), 247–263.

Escaleras, M., Lin, S., & Register, C. (2010). Freedom of information acts and public sector corruption. Public Choice, 145 (3–4), 435–460.

Farrington, D. P., Gottfredson, D. C., Sherman, L. W., & Welsh, B. C. (2003). The Maryland Scientific Methods Scale. In Evidence-based crime prevention (pp. 27–35). Routledge.

Fišar, M., Krčál, O., Staněk, R., & Špalek, J. (2021). Committed to Reciprocate on a Bribe or Blow the Whistle: The Effects of Periodical Staff-Rotation in Public Administration.  Public Performance & Management Review , 44(2), 404–424.

Frey, B., Homberg, F., & Osterloh, M. (2013). Organizational control systems and pay-for-performance in the public service. Organization Studies, 34 , 949–972.

Fukuyama, F. (2015). Why is democracy performing so poorly? Journal of Democracy, 26 (1), 11–20.

Graycar, A., & Monaghan, O. (2015). Rich country corruption. International Journal of Public Administration, 38 (8), 586–595.

Gupta, S., Davoodi, H., & Alonso-Terme, R. (2002). Does corruption affect income inequality and poverty? Economics of Governance, 3 (1), 23–45.

Gustavson, M., & Sundström, A. (2018). Organizing the audit society: Does good auditing generate less public sector corruption? Administration & Society, 50 (10), 1508–1532.

Hall, R. E., & Jones, C. I. (1999). Why do some countries produce so much more output per worker than others? The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 114 (1), 83–116.

Hinna, A., Monteduro, F., & Moi, S. (2016). Organizational Corruption in the Education System. Dark Sides of Business and Higher Education Management, II , 2.

Hinna, A., Homberg, F., Ceschel, F. (2018). Anticorruption Reforms and Governance . In: Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance Living Edition, Month 1, p. 1-8.

Homer, E. M. (2020). Testing the fraud triangle: A systematic review.  Journal of Financial Crime, 27 (1), 172–187.  https://doi.org/10.1108/JFC-12-2018-0136

Hood, C. C., James, O., Peters, G., & Scott, C. (2004). Controlling Modern Government: Oversight, competition, mutuality and randomness in three public policy domains . Edgar Elgar.

Book   Google Scholar  

Hopkin, J. (2002). States, markets and corruption: A review of some recent literature. Review of International Political Economy, 9 (3), 574–590.

Huber, W. D. (2017). Forensic accounting, fraud theory, and the end of the fraud triangle.  Journal of Theoretical Accounting Research ,  12 (2), 28–49.

Jain, A. K. (2001). Corruption: A review. Journal of Economic Surveys, 15 (1), 71–121.

Jancsics, D. (2019). Corruption as resource transfer: An interdisciplinary synthesis. Public Administration Review, 79 (4), 523–537.

Janenova, S., & Knox, C. (2020). Combatting corruption in Kazakhstan: A role for ethics commissioners? Public Administration and Development, 40 (3), 186–195.

Johnston, M. (2005). Syndromes of corruption: Wealth, power, and democracy . Cambridge University Press.

Kakavand, B., Neveu, J. P., & Teimourzadeh, A. (2020). Workplace corruption: a resource conservation perspective.  Personnel Review,   49 (1), 250–264. https://doi.org/10.1108/PR-08-2018-0303

Klitgaard, R. E., Abaroa, R. M., & Parris, H. L. (2000). Corrupt cities: a practical guide to cure and prevention . World Bank Publications.

Kolstad, I., & Wiig, A. (2009). Is transparency the key to reducing corruption in resource-rich countries? World Development, 37 (3), 521–532.

Lange, D. (2008). A multidimensional conceptualization of organizational corruption control. Academy of Management Review, 33 (3), 710–729.

Le, N. T., Vu, L. T. P., & Nguyen, T. V. (2021). The use of internal control systems and codes of conduct as anti-corruption practices: evidence from Vietnamese firms.  Baltic Journal of Management, 16 (2), 173–189. https://doi.org/10.1108/BJM-09-2020-0338

Lewis, B. D., & Hendrawan, A. (2020). The impact of public sector accounting reform on corruption: Causal evidence from subnational Indonesia.  Public Administration and Development, 40 (5), 245-254.

Liao, S. H., Cheng, C. H., Liao, W. B., & Chen, I. L. (2003). A web-based architecture for implementing electronic procurement in military organisations. Technovation, 23 (6), 521–532.

Luk, S. C. Y. (2012). Questions of ethics in public sector management: The case study of Hong Kong. Public Personnel Management, 41 (2), 361–378.

Macchiavello, R. (2008). Public sector motivation and development failures. Journal of Development Economics, 86 (1), 201–213.

Mangafić, J., & Veselinović, L. (2020). The determinants of corruption at the individual level: evidence from Bosnia-Herzegovina.  Economic Research-Ekonomska Istraživanja ,  33 (1), 2670–2691.

Matei, L., & Matei, A. I. (2009). Corruption in the Public Organizations-Towards a Model of Cost-Benefit Analysis for the Anticorruption Strategies.  First Global Dialogue'Governing Good and Governing Well': The First Global Dialogue on Ethical and Effective Governance , 28–30.

Mauro, P. (1995). Corruption and Growth. Quarterly Journal of Economics., 110 (3), 681–712.

McCusker, R. (2006). Review of anti-corruption strategies. Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology (p. 75)

Meagher, P. (2004). Anti-corruption agencies: A review of experience . IRIS Center.

Miller, P., Kurunmäki, L., & O’Leary, T. (2008). Accounting, hybrids and the management of risk. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 33 (7–8), 942–967.

Morales, J., Gendron, Y., & Guénin-Paracini, H. (2014). The construction of the risky individual and vigilant organization: A genealogy of the fraud triangle. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 39 (3), 170–194.

Navot, D., Reingewertz, Y., & Cohen, N. (2016). Speed or greed? High wages and corruption among public servants. Administration & Society, 48 (5), 580–601.

Nayır, D. Z., Rehg, M. T., & Asa, Y. (2018). Influence of Ethical Position on Whistleblowing Behaviour: Do Preferred Channels in Private and Public Sectors Differ? Journal of Business Ethics, 149 (1), 147–167. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-016-3035-8

Neshkova, M. I., & Kostadinova, T. (2012). The effectiveness of administrative reform in new democracies. Public Administration Review, 72 (3), 324–333.

Nichols, P. M., & Robertson, D. C. (Eds.). (2017). Thinking about bribery: Neuroscience, moral cognition and the psychology of bribery . Cambridge University Press.

OECD. (2000). Trust in Government Ethics Measures in OECD Countries . Paris: OECD

OECD. (2008).  Specialised Anti-Corruption Institutions: Review of Models . Paris: OECD

Olken, B. A., & Barron, P. (2009). The simple economics of extortion: Evidence from trucking in Aceh. Journal of Political Economy, 117 (3), 417–452.

Olsen, A. L., Hjorth, F., Harmon, N., & Barfort, S. (2019). Behavioral dishonesty in the public sector. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 29 (4), 572–590.

Palmer, D. (2012). Normal organizational wrongdoing: A critical analysis of theories of misconduct in and by organizations . Oxford University Press on Demand.

Patton, M. Q. (1999). Enhancing the quality and credibility of qualitative analysis. Health Services Research, 34 (5 Pt 2), 1189.

Power, M. (2007). Organized uncertainty: Designing a world of risk management . Oxford University Press on Demand.

Previtali, P., & Cerchiello, P. (2018). The determinants of whistleblowing in public administrations: An analysis conducted in Italian health organizations, universities, and municipalities. Public Management Review, 20 (11), 1683–1701. https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2017.1417468

Rabl, T. (2011). The impact of situational influences on corruption in organizations. Journal of Business Ethics, 100 (1), 85–101.

Rose-Ackerman, S. (1997). The pursuit of absolute integrity: How corruption control makes government ineffective. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management: The Journal of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, 16 (4), 661–664.

Schnell, S. (2015). Mimicry, persuasion, or learning? The case of two transparency and anti-corruption policies in Romania. Public Administration and Development, 35 (4), 277–287.

Schoeneborn, D., & Homberg, F. (2018). Goffman’s return to Las Vegas: Studying corruption as social interaction. Journal of Business Ethics, 151 (1), 37–54.

Segal, L., & Lehrer, M. (2012). The institutionalization of stewardship: Theory, propositions, and insights from change in the Edmonton public schools. Organization Studies, 33 (2), 169–201.

Suh, I., Sweeney, J. T., Linke, K., & Wall, J. M. (2020). Boiling the frog slowly: The immersion of C-suite financial executives into fraud. Journal of Business Ethics, 162 (3), 645–673.

Tanzi, V. & Davoodi, H. (1997). Corruption, Public Investment, and Growth. International Monetary Fund Working Paper, 97/139.

Thaler, J., & Helmig, B. (2016). Do codes of conduct and ethical leadership influence public employees’ attitudes and behaviours? An Experimental Analysis. Public Management Review, 18 (9), 1365–1399.

Treisman, D. (2000). The causes of corruption: A cross-national study. Journal of Public Economics, 76 (3), 399–457.

Triangulation, D. S. (2014). The use of triangulation in qualitative research. Oncology Nursing Forum, 41 (5), 545.

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2003). United nations convention against corruption. Retrieved March 1, 2022, from https://www.unodc.org/documents/treaties/UNCAC/Publications/Convention/08-50026_E.pdf

Vadera, A. K., Aguilera, R. V., & Caza, B. B. (2009). Making sense of whistle-blowing’s antecedents: Learning from research on identity and ethics programs. Business Ethics Quarterly, 19 (4), 553–586. https://doi.org/10.5840/beq200919432

Van Der Wal, Z., Graycar, A., & Kelly, K. (2016). See no evil, hear no evil? Assessing corruption risk perceptions and strategies of Victorian public bodies. Australian Journal of Public Administration, 75 (1), 3–17.

Van Veldhuizen, R. (2013). The influence of wages on public officials’ corruptibility: A laboratory investigation. Journal of Economic Psychology, 39 , 341–356.

Vandekerckhove, W., & Lewis, D. (2012). The Content of Whistleblowing Procedures: A Critical Review of Recent Official Guidelines. Journal of Business Ethics, 108 (2), 253–264. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-011-1089-1

Velasco, R. B., Carpanese, I., Interian, R., Paulo Neto, O. C., & Ribeiro, C. C. (2021). A decision support system for fraud detection in public procurement.  International Transactions in Operational Research, 28 (1), 27–47.

Wei, S.-J., & Wu, Y. (2001). Negative Alchemy? Corruption, Composition of Capital Flows, and Currency Crises. Working Paper no. 8187, National Bureau for Economic Research . http://www.nber.org/papers/w8187

Wells, K., & Littell, J. H. (2009). Study quality assessment in systematic reviews of research on intervention effects. Research on social work practice, 19 (1), 52–62.

West, J. P., & Bowman, J. S. (2020). Whistleblowing Policies in American States: A Nationwide Analysis. The American Review of Public Administration, 50 (2), 119–132.

Wu, A. M., Yan, Y., & Vyas, L. (2020). Public sector innovation, e-government, and anticorruption in China and India: Insights from civil servants. Australian Journal of Public Administration, 79 (3), 370–385.

Download references

Open access funding provided by Università degli Studi Roma Tre within the CRUI-CARE Agreement.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Department of Business Economics, Roma Tre University, Rome, Italy

Federico Ceschel

Department of Management and Law, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Rome, Italy

Alessandro Hinna

Department of Business and Management, LUISS Guido Carli University, Rome, Italy

Fabian Homberg

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Federico Ceschel .

Ethics declarations

Ethical approval.

Not required.

Informed Consent

Not applicable.

Conflict of Interest

Additional information, publisher's note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Appendix 1.

Search procedure.

Appendix 2.

Summary of search procedures.

The list of studies included in the review can be obtained from the authors upon request.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Ceschel, F., Hinna, A. & Homberg, F. Public Sector Strategies in Curbing Corruption: A Review of the Literature. Public Organiz Rev 22 , 571–591 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11115-022-00639-4

Download citation

Accepted : 01 June 2022

Published : 30 June 2022

Issue Date : September 2022

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11115-022-00639-4

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Prevention of corruption
• Public Sector
• Risk management
• Merida Convention
• Find a journal
• Publish with us
• Track your research

How to report corruption in local government

In this article, you will learn:

• Early signs of potential corruption within local government organizations
• Best practices for approaching any type of corruption smoothly and effectively
• Why accountability and transparency are integral, and how technology can facilitate both

If you've ever had the opportunity to visit Chicago, Illinois, you're sure to have heard someone refer to this major city as the 'Windy City.' What you may be interested to know is that Chicago didn't get its nickname from the gusty winds that blow across the city from Lake Michigan. In fact, Chicago is only the 12th-windiest city in the nation among major cities. According to the Chicago Tribune , the most likely source of the nickname dates back to the 1800s and originates from long-winded politicians.

The University of Illinois found that the northern district of Illinois had 1,642 corruption convictions between 1976 and 2013. The tradition of corruption continues, as four of the last seven Illinois governors have served time in federal prison for corruption.

Election time is prime time for long-winded speeches at every level of government. Citizens want to believe that their candidates' motives are genuine and that their tax dollars will be used ethically to support and improve their community. How can you tell if corruption exists, and if it does, do you know how to report corruption in local government?

How to Spot Potential Signs of Corruption

Spotting corruption can be difficult, especially if no one is looking for it. However, history has shown us that there are telltale signs of corruption in local government.

Corruption is more likely to occur when there are few or no watchdogs. If you live in an area where one political party dominates the government, there is less likely to be any objective oversight. Investigations may be light or nonexistent. It's the old adage, 'What you don't know won't hurt you,' until it does.

Don't count on the fact that corruption doesn't occur in your area. Because Illinois is known for its corruption, the University of Illinois did a study of local government corruption. Surprisingly, Miami and Newark surpassed Chicago, with each city having over 400 corruption convictions within a nine-year timespan.

It also pays to be aware of court systems that are light on convictions. The acquittals of the police officers in the Rodney King case, and another Los Angeles case in which a store owner killed a young African American girl and served no jail time at all, demonstrate that the justice system isn't always as just as citizens would like it to be.

Other signs of possible corruption are when family members get insider jobs, public officials suddenly become wealthier, the local government budget is always dry, the town's infrastructure is crumbling and the FBI has a viable presence in your area.

How to Report Corruption in Local Government

Now that you know what to look for, would you know how to report corruption in local government if you suspected it? Smaller cities and towns are actually more susceptible to corruption than large cities. With smaller budgets, smaller locales often lack the budget to employ an official oversight body. Regardless of the size of a community or the size of its budget, every community can take action to prevent corruption within their local government. Preventing corruption on any level depends on two words ' accountability and transparency.

Insisting on Accountability

Every town or city should have a known authority to which ' or to whom ' citizens can report suspicions of fraud or corruption. Each area is at liberty to make their own decisions about who or what body has the authority to investigate and address allegations of fraud and corruption. If your town doesn't have such an authority, it's a good idea to have some discussions with elected officials about establishing a watchdog authority. Alternatively, it's something citizens can bring up for discussion at a public meeting. You might just find that other citizens are equally concerned.

If your local government doesn't know where to start, it's helpful to share ideas with them on how other small towns and cities have approached the issue. Here's a starter list of ideas that various municipalities have implemented to improve accountability and transparency in their communities:

• Implement an Ethics Commission
• Hire a part-time or full-time Ethics Officer
• Combine with other cities and towns and share the cost of a Regional Ethics Officer
• Hire a part-time or full-time Local Inspector General
• Expand the duties of a City Auditor to include local government investigations

Ethics officials should be independent of city positions in order to avoid a conflict of interest. Their job descriptions should include overseeing city officials, management and staff. They should also be responsible for conducting investigations over allegations of ethics violations and make all ethics decisions public via public postings. Ethics officers usually also coordinate ethics training classes and ensure that all public officials are compliant with ethics education.

The use of a city auditor isn't always the best solution, as city auditors usually limit their investigations to allegations regarding financial issues.

For very small communities with extremely limited finances, it may not be possible to hire an Ethics Officer or an equivalent. In that case, at a minimum, citizens should verify that their local government has a system of internal controls, such as having more than one person open the mail and having more than one person check over the accounting records.

New York citizens provide a positive example of how citizens can hold their public officials accountable with their project called 'Reclaim New York.' The citizen-led project formed the New York Transparency Project where citizens can grade the performance of all local government officials based on 29 clear transparency practices. It's a program that all communities can use as a model for better government.

How a Transparency Portal Supports Accountability and Transparency in Local Government

There's another way that citizens can encourage their local officials to step up and demonstrate their commitment to ethical leadership, and that's by implementing a Transparency Portal by iCompass, a Diligent brand . A Transparency Portal is a seamless extension of a local government website that's designed with the accountability and transparency of local government in mind.

Citizens can use the portal to view council meeting agendas and minutes. They can even view a council meeting in progress in real time, which makes access to local government convenient for shut-ins and disabled people, as well as all citizens. Using a simple search box, citizens can retrieve all public documents within seconds. There's no better investment of tax dollars or a sure way to ensure accountability and transparency of local government than by implementing a Transparency Portal by iCompass, a Diligent brand.

Solutions Solutions

• Board Management
• Enterprise Risk Management
• Audit Management
• Market Intelligence

Resources Resources

• Research & Reports

Company Company

Your data matters.

• Contributors

When the Local Newspaper Leaves Town: The Effects of Local Newspaper Closures on Corporate Misconduct

Jonas Heese is Marvin Bower Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School; Gerardo Pérez-Cavazos is Assistant Professor of Accounting at UC San Diego Rady School of Management; and Caspar David Peter is Associate Professor of Accounting at Erasmus University Rotterdam School of Management. This post is based on their recent paper , forthcoming in Journal of Financial Economics .

Is the local press an effective monitor of corporate misconduct? Examining this question is important as over the last two decades the circulation of local newspapers in the United States has decreased by nearly 50% according to the Pew Research Center. A concern is that less local news results in less local accountability and investigative reporting, and therefore increased local corruption and crime. Yet, little is known about whether the decline in local newspapers affects corporate misconduct. We study this question by examining the effects of local newspaper closures on facility-level violations of publicly listed firms using a dataset that encompasses a wide range of violations, such as workplace safety violations, environmental violations, and securities fraud.

Effects of Local Newspaper Closures

From a theoretical standpoint, the effect of local newspaper closures on firms’ legal violations is ambiguous. On the one hand, the local press could be an effective monitor of firms and hence affect corporate misconduct via investigations or dissemination. For example, similar to the national press, the local press could undertake original investigations to detect corporate fraud. Local newspapers may be especially effective in discovering the misconduct of local firms because of their proximity to local sources such as employees and local suppliers. The local press could also affect corporate misconduct by widely disseminating information about misbehavior.

Alternatively, local newspapers may be an ineffective monitor of firms’ behavior for at least three reasons. First, local newspapers have incentives to avoid or slant reporting on local firms as they rely on local firms for advertising income. In addition, the press caters to its readers. Thus, local newspapers may refrain from reporting critically about local companies, which are frequently large employers, to avoid the risk of upsetting their readers and possibly losing subscription income. Second, local newspapers often have constrained resources in terms of the number of reporters investigating local misbehavior. Third, local newspapers are typically limited in their reach, potentially reducing the impact of their reporting and hence rendering its monitoring ineffective.

Empirical Analysis and Results

To examine the effects of newspaper closures on corporate misconduct, we exploit the closure of local newspapers over time. These closures serve as a proxy for shocks to the strength of monitoring by the local press because they cause large discrete reductions in local coverage of firms’ activities. To measure corporate misconduct, we use a data set from Violation Tracker covering a wide range of federal violations and the resulting penalties issued by 44 agencies. The data specify the geographical location of the facility in which the misconduct occurred, which enables us to identify the violations that occur in the coverage area of local newspapers. Our sample includes 26,450 violations perpetrated by 10,647 unique facilities of 1,383 Compustat firms, including approximately 80% of Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 firms, for the period 2000 to 2017.

We find that local newspaper closures lead to increased facilities’ violations and penalties in the ensuing three years. Specifically, the number of violations increases by 1.1% and penalties increase by 15.2%. These magnitudes are economically significant. For the average facility, they represent approximately 0.95% of facility-level sales. These findings indicate that local newspapers are an important monitor of corporate misconduct.

Conclusions

Our study provides the first systematic evidence showing that the local press is an effective monitor of corporate misconduct. This is an important finding, as prior studies suggest that local newspapers are ineffective monitors of local firms’ behavior. We show that local newspaper closures increase facility-level misconduct, highlighting the importance of local newspapers as monitors to curtail corporate misconduct. Our study also extends prior research by documenting the monitoring role of local newspapers on a wide range of corporate violations that resulted in penalties, including securities law violations, environmental violations, consumer-protection violations, and workplace safety violations, among many others. Thus, our study provides a comprehensive analysis of the effect of local newspapers on firms’ misconduct.

Finally, our findings improve our understanding of the consequences of reduced local newspaper coverage—an important topic in light of the decline in local newspapers in the United States. A major concern is that less local news leads to more local corruption and crime. Our study provides evidence consistent with this concern as we document that reduced local newspaper coverage affects firm behavior through increased misconduct.

The full paper is available for download here .

Supported By:

Subscribe or Follow

Program on corporate governance advisory board.

• William Ackman
• Peter Atkins
• Kerry E. Berchem
• Richard Brand
• Daniel Burch
• Arthur B. Crozier
• Renata J. Ferrari
• John Finley
• Carolyn Frantz
• Andrew Freedman
• Byron Georgiou
• Joseph Hall
• Jason M. Halper
• David Millstone
• Theodore Mirvis
• Maria Moats
• Erika Moore
• Morton Pierce
• Philip Richter
• Elina Tetelbaum
• Marc Trevino
• Steven J. Williams
• Daniel Wolf

HLS Faculty & Senior Fellows

• Lucian Bebchuk
• Robert Clark
• John Coates
• Stephen M. Davis
• Allen Ferrell
• Jesse Fried
• Oliver Hart
• Howell Jackson
• Kobi Kastiel
• Reinier Kraakman
• Mark Ramseyer
• Robert Sitkoff
• Holger Spamann
• Leo E. Strine, Jr.
• Guhan Subramanian
• Roberto Tallarita

Corruption is a Global Problem for Development. To Fight It, We All Have a Role to Play

Oped published in French in La Tribune Afrique, June 13, 2023.

Oped by Ousmane Diagana, World Bank Vice President for Western and Central Africa and Mouhamadou Diagne, World Bank Vice President for Integrity.

Every day, we hear about the onslaught of crises facing the world—from climate change to conflict, inflation and debt, and the ongoing recovery from a years-long pandemic. Add to them the prospect of slow economic growth , and our efforts to overcome these challenges seem rife with obstacles. For developing countries, many with limited and already stretched resources, the confluence of crises will be especially difficult to navigate.

But if we are to achieve success over the challenges of our time, there is one scourge we cannot fail to confront: corruption.

The unfortunate truth is that corruption persists in all countries. It manifests in many ways—from petty bribes and kickbacks to grand theft of public resources. With advances in technology, corruption has increasingly become a transnational challenge without respect for borders, as money can now move more easily in and out of countries to hide illicit gains.

Corruption is also a fundamental problem for development.

Corruption harms the poor and vulnerable the most, increasing costs and reducing access to basic services, such as health, education, social programs, and even justice. It exacerbates inequality and reduces private sector investment to the detriment of markets, job opportunities, and economies. Corruption can also undermine a country’s response to emergencies, leading to unnecessary suffering and, at worst, death. Over time, corruption can undermine the trust and confidence that citizens have for their leaders and institutions, creating social friction and in some contexts increasing the risk of fragility, conflict, and violence.

To prevent these negative impacts, we must confront corruption with determined and deliberate action. For the World Bank Group, fighting corruption in development has been a long-standing commitment in our operational work. This commitment is reflected in our support for countries in building transparent, inclusive, and accountable institutions , but also through initiatives that go beyond developing countries to also include financial centers, take on the politics of corruption more openly than before, and harness new technologies to understand, address, and prevent corruption.  

Indeed, across western and central Africa in particular, it is one of the World Bank Group’s strategic priorities to emphasize issues of good governance, accountability, and transparency among our partner countries, with the aim of reducing corruption. We recognize that transparency in public affairs and the accountability of high-level officials are fundamental to the trust of citizens in their government and the effective delivery of public services. Working to rebuild and bolster trust between citizens and the state is critical today, especially in countries affected by fragility, conflict and violence that make up half of the countries in this region alone.

Across Africa, World Bank Group support is helping countries face these challenges. Recent investments in the Republic of Congo , Ghana , and Morocco , for example, will support institutional governance reforms to improve the performance and transparency of service delivery. In Kenya, our support will further fiscal management reforms for greater transparency in public procurement , thereby reducing opportunities for corruption. Strengthening citizen-state engagement is key: In Burkina Faso, for example, a World Bank-funded project helped the national government improve citizen engagement and public sector accountability through the development of a digital tool to monitor the performance of municipal service delivery. 

The World Bank Group’s commitment to fighting corruption is also reflected in robust mechanisms across the institution that enhance the integrity of our operations. Our independent Integrity Vice Presidency (INT) works to detect, deter, and prevent fraud and corruption involving World Bank Group funds. Over two decades of INT’s work, the World Bank has sanctioned more than 1,100 firms and individuals, often imposing debarments that make them ineligible to participate in the projects and operations we finance. In addition, we have enforced more than 640 cross-debarments from other multilateral development banks, standing with our MDB partners to help keep corruption out of development projects everywhere. Nevertheless, we must remain vigilant to the risks of fraud and corruption that remain.

The World Bank Group also leverages its position as global convener to support anticorruption actors at all levels and from around the world. That is why we are pleased to have organized the next edition of the World Bank Group’s International Corruption Hunters Alliance (ICHA) to take place in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, on June 14-16, 2023.

The ICHA forum is an opportunity for front-line practitioners committed to fighting corruption as well as policy makers and representatives from the private sector and civil society, to come together to share knowledge, experience, and insights for confronting corruption. For the first time since its inception in 2010, we are hosting the ICHA forum in an African country. This reflects the reality that the negative impacts of corruption can be more devastating for developing countries, who face unique challenges and have fewer resources to overcome them. Yet, it also acknowledges that there is a wealth of anticorruption strengths, skills, and expertise from these countries that we must draw upon.

Together, we can affirm that through our collective action, we can advance the fight against corruption even in an era of crises.  

This site uses cookies to optimize functionality and give you the best possible experience. If you continue to navigate this website beyond this page, cookies will be placed on your browser. To learn more about cookies, click here .

• Follow us on Facebook
• Follow us on Twitter
• Criminal Justice
• Environment
• Politics & Government
• Race & Gender

Expert Commentary

Public corruption prosecutions rise where nonprofit news outlets flourish, research finds

Study finds prosecutions for corruption rise after a nonprofit news outlet is established within a judicial district. Prosecutions are also more likely in districts where those outlets enjoy greater philanthropic funding.

Republish this article

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

by Clark Merrefield, The Journalist's Resource October 10, 2023

This <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org/media/watchdog-public-corruption/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org">The Journalist's Resource</a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.<img src="https://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/cropped-jr-favicon-150x150.png" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

U.S. news organizations and the public often clash over the role the media should play in society, but many reporters, editors and news consumers view journalists as watchdogs — especially when it comes to holding elected officials accountable.

A recent paper published in The International Journal of Press/Politics is among the first to explore associations between local news coverage and criminal corruption charges brought against public officials.

The authors find prosecutions for public corruption are more likely in U.S. communities served by a nonprofit news outlet, a relatively new business model that often aims to fill the void left by shuttered traditional local newspapers.

Defining watchdog journalism

News outlets don’t have to do deep investigative reporting to be watchdogs, says Nikki Usher , lead author of the paper and an associate communications professor at the University of San Diego.

Watchdog journalism is “the kind of public interest journalism that keeps regular watch on public institutions, lawmakers and businesses,” Usher explains. “That kind of removes the narrow focus on investigative journalism, because you can have watchdog journalism that never really breaks into an investigative mode.”

University of Cardiff professor Bob Franklin , founding editor of several academic journals that analyze the news media, wrote in a 2005 journalism textbook that “the watchdog metaphor imbues the press with the role of being a forum for discussion, investigators of impropriety, an adversary to monopoly over power and knowledge and the defenders of truth, freedom and democracy.”

Journalism, as an institution, does not always act as a watchdog, and particular news outlets or reporters may not be interested in striving for such status.

Yet the watchdog role remains an ideal for many news organizations in the U.S., where voters cast ballots based on their understanding of candidate policies, proclivities and scandals.

Nonprofit news organizations are increasingly offering an alternative model that often allows for editorial autonomy while employing reporters driven by a watchdog mission who do award-winning work along the way. For example, nonprofit news site Mississippi Today last year uncovered a $77 million welfare scandal involving former Gov. Phil Bryant and Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre. Reporter Anna Wolfe won the Pulitzer Prize and the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting.

Legacy newspaper staffing in the U.S. fell from 71,000 employees in 2008 to 31,000 in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center . The internet disintegrated classified ad revenue over the past two decades, making the for-profit news model less viable for local and regional news outlets.

Nonprofit news sites, many of them digital-only, have stepped in to partially fill the void. National, regional or local nonprofit news outlets in the U.S. have grown in recent years, from fewer than 25 in 2009 to nearly 400 as of May 2023, according to an industry report by the  Institute for Nonprofit News , a consortium of nonprofit news outlets. Digital-first INN member organizations employ 4,000 people nationally, with an average of five staffers — editorial and non-editorial — per outlet, according to the report.

Watchdog: Analysis of nonprofit news and corruption prosecutions

Usher and coauthor Sanghoon Kim-Leffingwell , a senior lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, started their analysis by looking at corruption-related prosecutions, such as bribery or obstruction of justice, against federal, local or state officials or other government workers across all 94 federal court districts in the U.S. from 2003 to 2019.

They also look at newspaper employment numbers and circulation by county, along with the presence of nonprofit news outlets that are INN members , plus figures on philanthropic donations to those nonprofit outlets, drawn from data compiled by Media Impact Funders , a membership organization for foundations and individuals that fund news organizations.

“What’s kind of the unique contribution of this paper, that I think really we have not seen before, is it asks, ‘How are these nonprofit news outlets supplementing public life’?” explains Usher. “And we find a really strong connection that they’re able to maintain accountability in these communities. And, actually, the better funded you are the more of a difference you’re able to make.”

The authors use newspaper employment data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics as a measure of the supply of news in a given county, while the circulation data is meant to get at demand for news.

The presence of an INN member organization “is a broader proxy for the commitment to alternative, philanthropic funding for journalism in an area,” Usher and Kim-Leffingwell write in their paper, “ How Loud Does the Watchdog Bark? A Reconsideration of Losing Local Journalism, News Nonprofits, and Political Corruption .”

Key findings

The authors did not find a statistically significant relationship between overall newspaper employment in a judicial district and public corruption prosecutions. But they did learn prosecutions were more likely in judicial districts where there was relatively high demand for news, as measured by newspaper circulation.

Prosecutions for corruption also rise after a nonprofit news outlet is established within a judicial district, and prosecutions are more likely in districts where those outlets enjoy greater philanthropic funding.

“It seems reliable, like a really high-quality finding, that you see more prosecution of public officials — that’s really interesting to me,” says Meghan Rubado , an associate professor of urban studies at Cleveland State University who researches how news coverage affects civic institutions but was not involved with the recent paper.

“I would love to come up with a way to explore this in future research, whether public officials view these independent, nonprofit-funded newsrooms as anything to take seriously,” adds Rubado, who worked as a reporter at the Syracuse Post-Standard in New York from 2004 to 2010. “Maybe local officials or public officials more generally are less likely to change their behavior when the newsroom watching them is an independent nonprofit than when it’s a traditional newspaper.”

Usher and Kim-Leffingwell write that their findings offer partial evidence that local news outlets succeed in their role as public watchdogs. But watchdog journalists, they write, can only illuminate corruption. What happens next is outside the scope of the watchdog journalist’s role.

“Journalism cannot act on behalf of the public to sanction bad actors; journalists can only expose wrongdoing and hope that the public, in turn, acts accordingly — either voting someone out of office or hoping that other public stakeholders exact criminal or civil sanctions,” they write.  

Prior research on journalism and civic engagement

The recent paper builds on past research exploring the relationship between news and civics, a field of study that has grown since the widespread decline of for-profit local news.

In “ Paper Cuts: How Reporting Resources Affect Political News Coverage ,” published in October 2020 in the American Journal of Political Science, Rice University assistant professor of political science Erik Peterson looks at the relationship between newsroom staff cuts and local political coverage.

Across Peterson’s sample of 70 U.S. newspapers covering national, state and local politics from 1994 to 2014, every loss of 12 reporters was associated with 500 fewer political news stories each year.

“Although prior research focuses on how media outlets alter their coverage in anticipation of economic challenges, this account more fully details the consequences when these efforts fall short,” Peterson writes.

Another paper exploring the journalism-civics nexus is “ Political Consequences of the Endangered Local Watchdog: Newspaper Decline and Mayoral Elections in the United States ,” published in April 2019 in Urban Affairs Review. In it, Rubado and Jay Jennings , a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, examine whether the presence of well-staffed local news organizations affects mayoral races.

For many cities and towns, the outcomes of mayoral elections can shape local government policies and programs for years. The dataset Rubado and Jennings developed includes 11 newspapers serving 46 cities in California, from Oroville in the north down to Solvang, roughly two and a half hours west of Los Angeles. They focus on 246 mayoral elections held from 1994 to 2016 — a period when local newsrooms nationally suffered major staffing cuts.

They find less political competition in cities with newspapers that severely cut staff — when newsrooms shrink, fewer candidates run for mayor. They also find smaller margins of victory for mayoral winners in areas with relatively more reporters.

“One way that quality candidates emerge is through vigorous and rigorous coverage of local government,” says Rubado. “So, when local government is perceived to not be doing a good job, you get quality challengers trying to unseat an ineffective public official.”

Usher, lead author of the recent paper on nonprofit journalism, maintains that even if a nonprofit news outlet has a fraction of the reach that a traditional newspaper used to have, it still provides a crucial civic function and helps drive the local news agenda.

“An open question that’s going to depend on each nonprofit is how well integrated they are into a local community’s existing media infrastructure,” Usher says. “Is one of these nonprofits regularly pumping coverage into local televisions, local newspapers? That’s what gives reach to the ordinary public.”

About The Author

Clark Merrefield

How We Know Journalism is Good for Democracy

At Democracy Fund, we see every day how local news strengthens democracy. People rely on local news to figure out who to vote for, how to speak up at school board meetings, how to run for local office, where to find vaccines, when to organize for change, and more. From daily reporting that equips people to act, to huge investigations that reveal corruption, the health of local news is bound up with the health of our democracy.   

Unfortunately, communities across the United States are steadily losing access to this kind of civic information. According to data released in June 2022, at least one fifth of the U.S. — 70 million people — live in a community without a newspaper or a community at risk of losing theirs.

Since 2018, we’ve been tracking academic studies that show in stark terms the impact journalism has on our democracy. This research review has become a critical guide for funders, policymakers, communities, and journalists who care about creating a healthier democracy. In 2022, we overhauled this resource, including adding a section that more clearly names the harms journalism has caused in our communities, especially communities of color.    

These studies and articles provide an enormous set of rigorous data that help quantify what happens when local communities have strong local news — and what happens when they lose it. Understanding the impact of quality local news on our democracy in these sorts of specific, data driven, nuanced ways is critical as we think about how to build a more equitable and sustainable future of local news that truly serves all communities at a moment of threat and uncertainty in democracy. 

Do you have additional research to add, or are interested in how you can be part of the solution? Email us at LocalNewsLab [@] democracyfund.org.

(Ed. Note: This post was originally published June 26, 2018. It was last revised on September 15, 2022. We will continue to update the date in this note for future additions. Andrea Lorenz, PhD candidate at UNC Chapel Hill Hussman School of Journalism and Media, contributed research and guidance for the update of this post in summer 2022.)

Strong local journalism = more people turning out to vote.   

• The amount of local political coverage correlates with increased voter turnout. Researchers in Denmark found that “local news media coverage has a positive effect on voter turnout , but only if the news media provide politically relevant information to the voters and only at local elections.” 
• Voters have been more likely to vote in down-ballot races in places with more local newspapers per capita. By comparing data on legislative ballot completion with news circulation data, researchers from St. Olaf College found that even the existence of local newspapers contributes to the likelihood that voters will fill out more of their ballots. 
• Local media coverage can increase voter engagement in state Supreme Court elections. David Hughes studied how these races can often be considered “low information elections” because of how little information voters can find about the candidates and stakes of the contest, but media attention can generate and distribute as much information about a race as a well-funded campaign.
• People who consume local news are more likely to vote locally. The authors of a study from Pennsylvania State University examined the habits of people who consume local and national media, on both traditional and digital platforms, and found both types of news consumption are positive predictors of voting at both levels. 
• The act of reading a newspaper can mobilize as many as 13 percent of non-voters to vote , Matthew Gentzkow testified to the Federal Trade Commission in 2009. The statistic comes from a study which found that “newspapers have a robust positive effect on political participation” noting in particular that one additional newspaper in a region can boost voter turnout by approximately 0.3 percentage points.
• Consuming local journalism is associated with consistent voting in local elections and a strong connection to community. Pew Research Center analysts found in 2016 that more than a quarter of U.S. adults say they always vote in local elections, and they also have “strikingly stronger” local news habits than people who don’t vote locally on a regular basis. 
• Reading local newspapers’ political coverage helps people understand how important local elections are and affects how much they participate in them . Researchers surveyed people in three small Midwest communities to learn more about their media use, political knowledge, and participation in local elections and found newspaper political news exposure strongly predicted political participation, people’s perceived importance of local municipal elections, and how much they voted.  
• Local news can boost voting by young people, and help them feel better prepared to go to the polls. Research by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement found that local news was a critical tool that young voters, especially people of color, turned to ahead of the 2020 election. The researchers say even more could be done by newsrooms to serve this population, and “local news media holds immense potential as a stakeholder in youth civic and political engagement.”

Weak local journalism = fewer people vote.

• Voters in districts with less campaign coverage had a harder time evaluating candidates and reported they were less likely to vote. Jennifer L. Lawless and Danny Hayes used congressional districts as a lens through which to study political coverage (across 6,000 articles!) and civic engagement (through a survey of nearly 50,000 people) in the month leading up to the 2010 election. Then, the same researchers used longitudinal data to analyze how a decline in local political news coverage reduces citizen engagement. As political news about congressional elections in local newspapers declined over four years, so did citizens’ knowledge about those offices and voting.
• When a major journalistic source of information declines or disappears, there are massive effects on local political engagement. This has happened in hundreds of communities where there have been large declines in local news. Danny Hayes and Jennifer L. Lawless also found that the “hollowing out” of American newspapers over 30 years — including a dramatic reduction in the amount of local news produced by newspapers of all sizes, with the most severe cuts in local government and school coverage — had massive effects on local political engagement, including decreased political knowledge, and less interest in political participation. 
• Places that lost a local newspaper experienced a “significant” drop in civic engagement compared to cities that didn’t lose one. Lee Shaker studied what happened to civic engagement in Denver and Seattle the year the Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Post-Intelligencer closed. “The data from the [U.S. Census Bureau] indicate that civic engagement in Seattle and Denver dropped significantly from 2008 to 2009 — a decline that is not consistently replicated over the same time period in other major American cities that did not lose a newspaper,” Shaker writes.
• When a newspaper shutters, fewer candidates run and incumbents are more likely to win. When the Cincinnati Post, which served both Ohio and northern Kentucky, shut down Sam Schulhofer-Wohl and Miguel Garrido observed that “fewer candidates ran for municipal office […] incumbents became more likely to win reelection, and voter turnout and campaign spending fell.” 
• Less local media can mean less election turnout. Jackie Filla and Martin Johnson used data on voting and weekly and daily newspaper access in the Los Angeles area to investigate how access to local government information affects turnout in municipal elections. “​​We find that absent local news, voters are less likely to turnout,” they write.
• Cities and towns with shrinking newsrooms had “significantly reduced political competition in mayoral races” and lower voter turnout. Meghan E. Rubado and Jay T. Jennings used a data set including 11 local newspapers in California matched up with the municipalities they cover to study the impact of declines in newsroom staffing over 20 years. As Josh Benton notes in his overview of the research , the study is notable because most similar research focuses on newspaper closings, not just shrinking staff. In a follow-up paper , Meghan E. Rubado and Jay T. Jennings interviewed working journalists to understand the impact of newspaper employment cuts on the communities they cover. Journalists they talked to described “corruption, mismanagement, lower turnout, and incumbency advantages” as outcomes of reduced government coverage. (We also recommend Nieman Lab’s excellent summary of the paper .)

Thorough local journalism helps people be less biased when considering candidates.

• Giving voters even the slightest bit of additional information on a candidate (like occupation) in addition to having just the race or gender, eliminated or mitigated gender and racial/ethnic biases. Researchers experimented with ballots mimicking different real-life ballot designs that have varying levels of information about each candidate while using names that signal different genders, races, and/or ethnicities. Online respondents pretended to vote using those ballots. The researchers found that “When respondents have the least information, candidates of color—particularly Black candidates—are disadvantaged, among respondents across party, ideological, and racial attitude lines.” 
• Local news coverage helps voters assess down-ballot candidates. Looking at people who receive information about their local elected officials compared to people who receive information about officials in neighboring states, Daniel J. Moskowitz notes that local political news coverage provides voters with “Information that allows them to assess down-ballot candidates separately from their national, partisan assessment.”

Quality local journalism can counter divisive national narratives that aim to stoke polarization.

• One local newspaper’s experiment of publishing only local editorials slowed polarization among readers compared to a neighboring town’s newspaper readers. Joshua P. Darr, Louisiana State University, Matthew P. Hitt, Colorado State University, Johanna L. Dunaway, Texas A & M University out the reasoning like this: As Americans consume increasingly nationalized news, they become more partisan. By consuming more local information, people are more likely to be concerned with issues that affect them locally and elect leaders using these criteria rather than relying on national partisan rhetoric or cues to choose leaders. This can create a better democratic system. 
• Local media establishes a trusted, shared public understanding of local issues, counteracting distrust of national media. Using focus groups, story diaries, and interviews with residents and local journalists in Kentucky, Andrea Wenzel examined how people navigate tricky conversations about politics and current events, locally and nationally, with neighbors. Wenzel found that recognizing place-based identities and media representations can help facilitate trust in journalism.
• Local news availability keeps leaders accountable to constituents rather than the national party. Research by Marc Trussler shows that this accountability shows potential to mitigate the nationalization of politics. 
• Political polarization among voters increases after local newspapers close down . In research published in Journal of Communication, researchers compared data on split-ticket voting and ballot rolloffs in the context of local newspaper closures.They found that places where newspapers had closed saw more people voting for just one party up and down the ballot.. “It seems like it’s the very existence of a local option doing the work here,” Joshua Darr of Louisiana State University said in a writeup about the report. “Just staying open seems like a fairly important factor, regardless of the level of political reporting in the news.”

Every dollar spent on local news produces hundreds of dollars in public benefit by exposing corruption & keeping an eye on government spending.

• Watchdog reporting has an outsized economic impact. In his book, Democracy’s Detectives: The Economics of Investigative Journalism, James Hamilton is able to quantify the economic impact of watchdog reporting. By looking at the political and social change that resulted from journalism, and the cost of those stories, Hamilton was able to show that “each dollar spent on stories can generate hundreds of dollars in benefits to society.”
• Local newspapers hold companies accountable for company misconduct. After a local newspaper closure, researchers found that local facilities increase violations by 1.1% and penalties by 15.2%, indicating that the closures reduce monitoring by the press. They used a data set tracking a wide range of federal violations and the resulting penalties issued by 44 agencies between 2000 and 2017, for a total of 26,450 violations at 10,647 facilities. 
• When elected leaders are under investigation, more media coverage can increase the chance that they’ll resign from office. Marcel Garz and Jil Sörenson studied examples in Germany and found “resignations are more common when the media covers the case intensely.” 
• Citizens are more likely to vote out elected officials when media outlets highlight the incumbents’ ties to corruption. These findings , from Harvard and Columbia researchers using examples in Mexico, demonstrate support for the media’s role in holding people accountable in a democracy. 
• Without watchdog reporters, cities faced higher long-term borrowing costs — that  translate to immediate costs for citizens. Municipal bond data in the years after a newspaper closure showed that “cities where newspapers closed up shop saw increases in government costs as a result of the lack of scrutiny over local deals.” The study used data from 1996 to 2015 and tracked English-language newspapers in more than 1,200 counties in the U.S. “​​Without investigative daily reporters around to call bullshit on city hall, three years after a newspaper closes, that city or county’s municipal bond offering yields increased on average by 5.5 basis points, while bond yields in the secondary market increased by 6.4 basis points—statistically significant effects,” Kriston Capps wrote in explaining the study for CityLab . 
• “Congressmen who are less covered by the local press work less for their constituencies,” researchers from MIT and Stockholm University documented in a study by evaluating their voting records, participation in hearings and more. They also found that f ederal spending was lower in areas where there was less press coverage of the local members of congress.  
• Where there is unreliable internet access, there is likely limited government transparency and eroding local news capacity. “In areas where declines in local newsrooms and resources inhibit political reporting and scrutiny of government actions,” researchers behind this study of Australian communities write, “there is little impetus for governments to develop interactive digital practices (or to consider and respond to civic input) given that restricting such spaces is arguably an advantage in the maintenance of political power.” Taken together, these forces create “a ruinous triumvirate – ill-informed citizenries, illegitimate local decision making and minimally accountable local governments.”
• A free press helps tamp down bureaucratic corruption, in many countries. “Of the probable controls on bureaucratic corruption a free press is likely to be among the most effective ones,” authors of this study examining corruption in various nations wrote. They found “a significant relationship between more press freedom and less corruption in a large cross-section of countries.” 
• Watchdog coverage is more effective when it includes possible solutions to encourage civic actions. Reporting on its own doesn’t always hold power accountable. To do it most effectively, watchdog coverage should include possible solutions to encourage civic action. This finding comes from Nikki Usher’s interviews with business journalists at The New York Times, Marketplace public radio, and TheStreet to understand how journalists retrospectively considered their responsibilities following the 2007–2009 financial crisis. 

People feel a stronger sense of community in places with strong local journalism.

• Local news — with local owners — keeps people engaged with their physical location and local government. Meredith Metzler’s research on this involved surveying people living in two different rural communities about their information habits and assessing their media landscape in the context of where they live. Metzler found a relationship between engaging with local media, affinity to local community, and engagement with that community. 
• Local newspapers build a community’s sense of shared connection and place, and it’s not easy to replace them. Researchers came to this conclusion after organizing focus groups of community leaders in Baldwin City, Kansas and discussing the impact of the loss of their local paper  on business, technology proficiency, and community attachment. “The overall consensus was that residents miss having a single community information platform,” they write. 
• Community members can experience increased loneliness, disconnection, and diminished local pride when a local paper closes. Through 19 interviews with community members of Caroline County, Virginia, following the Caroline Progress’ closure after 99 years, researcher Nick Mathews compiled examples of increasing loneliness, disconnection from community, and diminished local pride. 
• Communication within place is critical to producing community. Lewis Freidland focuses explicitly on the intersection of communication, community and democracy in his research, and has shown compellingly how communication within place, especially the kind made possible through local media, is critical to producing community.
• Newspaper reading correlates with respondents’ sense of social cohesion. Masahiro Yamamoto has shown that community newspapers are important to community engagement. (Interestingly, Pew found an alternative correlation to also be true. Those who feel “highly attached to their communities demonstrate much stronger ties to local news” than those without a strong local sense of place.)
• It’s not just news outlets — storytelling in general is key. Connection to local storytelling was key to “neighborhood belonging, collective efficacy, and civic participation,” Yong-Chan Kim and Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach found as they examined people’s relationship to community media.
• Even when online news is not as tied to geography, it can build a sense of place . In two separate pieces of research Carrie Buchanan ( 2009 ) and Kristy Hess ( 2012 ) document various ways local news builds sense of place and connection in geographic communities even when online news becomes somewhat more unmoored from location

Local news keeps communities informed during times of upheaval, like disasters, protests, and pandemics — when people need critical information to engage their communities and leaders.

• Epidemiologists depend on local newspapers to identify and forecast disease outbreaks . Helen Branswell wrote that “When towns lose their newspapers, disease detectives are left flying blind.” In other words, America’s journalism crisis is also a public health crisis. 
• Local media is often the first to reveal a crisis and draw sustained attention to it . The Pew Research Center studied how people looked for and found information about the Flint water crisis to help understand “how news spreads in our increasingly fractured information environment.” Their data shows that local media was reporting on the crisis long before national media was involved.
• Media coverage can help reduce pollution. Newspaper coverage of polluters and emissions producers was correlated with a 29% reduction in the emissions compared to factories and plants that were not covered. “While coverage was generally lacking, [Stockholm University’s Pamela] Campa found that plants located in neighborhoods with more newspapers were more likely to receive negative coverage in the press. More significantly, she discovered that plants located in areas with more newspapers had lower emissions,” Sophie Yeo wrote for Pacific Standard about the study. 
• Hyperlocal reporting is vital to research efforts across an array of disciplines . When Gothamist and DNAInfo were shut down suddenly, Samuel Stein, a geographer at CUNY Graduate Center, spoke to a number of academics about how, for researchers, local news really is the first draft of history.

Local news isn’t inherently good for communities just because it’s local though, studies show.

Journalism clearly has positive outcomes for our democracy, but it is not in and of itself inherently good. Studies show how local journalism outlets have harmed many communities with their coverage. Shuttering local newspapers is not the only crisis in local news — we also have to work to reimagine and rebuild how newsrooms serve communities, who gets to lead those newsrooms, and how reporting reflects the diverse needs of our nation. It is not enough to simply replace what has been lost — the following studies remind us that we must build something even better as we move forward.

• “Since the colonial era, media outlets have used their platforms to inflict harm on Black people through weaponized narratives that promote Black inferiority and portray Black people as threats to society,” Free Press staff wrote in their rigorous, seismic Media2070 essay . They documented instances such as the deadly overthrow of a local government in Wilmington, North Carolina where Black people held power and other situations that connects racist journalism to lynching, promoting segregation, and more. 
• Local reporting can fill information needs, but it can also replicate inequities . Local journalism, especially newspapers, provided critical information needed during the height of COVID regarding healthcare, emergency, and civic information. However, there were signs of information inequality, where people in wealthier, whiter counties had better quality and more local coverage than people in diverse, poorer counties.
• Residents of a primarily Black community say they are not served by journalism that follows traditional practices of “objectivity.” In studying the development over 17 months of a journalism project intended to serve a majority Black community, Andrea Wenzel and Letrell Crittenden determined that “residents’ ideals for local journalism at times clash with dominant journalism norms and practices regarding objectivity.”
• Paywalls limit access to information that operates as part of local media’s civic potential. While paywalls can become a helpful revenue stream for local media facing financial pressure, they also “challenge the civic function of the local news media,” researchers looking at Norwegian and Danish outlets assessed .
• When purchased by corporate predators, local news becomes less frequent, relevant, and inherently local. The quantity and quality of local news decreases in correlation to these acquisitions by media conglomerates. Researchers came to this conclusion after studying more than 130,000 articles from the Denver Post, LA Weekly, the New York Daily News, and more.
• Sensationalized coverage emphasizes short-term conflicts rather than social concerns. By studying the impact of a local newspaper in Australia reporting on a local climate change plan, researchers write “rather than providing an arena for public discussion and constructive debate, we find that the newspaper adopted a clear position rejecting the need for changes in planning for anticipated climate impacts.” 

What’s on the horizon for journalism in our democracy?  

These findings call us to take even more seriously the erosion of people’s access to news and information. The faltering of newspapers, the consolidation of TV and radio, and the rising power of social media platforms are not just commercial issues driven by the market; they are democratic issues with profound implications for our communities.

We have seen a lot of transformation and reasons for hope over the past few years since this post was originally published. News leaders are thinking about how to serve their communities, and reckoning with failures of the past. Journalism funders are coming together to fund projects to revitalize local news ecosystems . And funders who haven’t traditionally focused on journalism are joining in as well, realizing they will not achieve the change they seek in healthcare, education and more without information about their focuses. The research above makes the case for why we must continue working to expand support for quality local news that truly reflects and serves its communities. If you want to know more about how, or want to add additional research to this list, reach out to Josh Stearns at [email protected] and Christine Schmidt at [email protected].

• Explore Democracy Fund’s work funding equitable journalism and local news and information ecosystems
• Subscribe to the Local Fix newsletter for regular updates on innovators in local news
• Read “ Advancing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Journalism: What Funders Can Do ” and learn what it means to care about equity in journalism .
• Check out this Q&A with UNC PhD candidate Andrea Lorenz to learn more about her work researching the intersection of local news and democracy.

This website uses cookies to provide you with an improved and personalized experience. By using this site you agree to our use of cookies. Please read our cookies policy for more information on the cookies we use and how to delete or block them.

Mobile Menu Overlay

The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW Washington, DC 20500

FACT SHEET: Establishing the Fight Against Corruption as a Core U.S. National Security   Interest

The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to tackling corruption as an economic and national security priority, and has pledged to lead international efforts to bring transparency to the global financial system and close loopholes that undermine democracy.  As the Interim National Security Strategic Guidance states:

 “We will take special aim at confronting corruption, which rots democracy from the inside and is increasingly weaponized by authoritarian states to undermine democratic institutions…We will crack down on tax havens and illicit financing that contribute to income inequality, fund terrorism, and generate pernicious foreign influence.” 

Today, in line with this commitment, President Biden is releasing a National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) that establishes the fight against corruption as a core national security interest of the United States. The NSSM directs a 200-day interagency review that will culminate in a report and recommendations on how the U.S. government and its partners can: Modernize, Coordinate, and Resource Efforts to Better Fight Corruption. Corruption threatens U.S. national security by eroding citizens’ faith in government, distorting economies, and enabling authoritarians to weaken democratic institutions. The NSSM therefore directs departments and agencies to identify and where appropriate establish new structures and staffing, improve intelligence collection and analysis, and increase resources aimed at confronting corruption at home and abroad. Curb Illicit Finance. The Biden-Harris Administration has pledged to lead efforts internationally to bring transparency to the U.S. and international financial systems, including by reducing offshore financial secrecy, seizing stolen assets, and making it more difficult for those who steal to hide behind anonymity. The NSSM therefore directs departments and agencies to combat all forms of illicit finance, including through accelerating ongoing efforts to establish a “beneficial ownership” registry, so that illicit actors can’t hide the proceeds of corruption behind anonymous shell companies; limiting the ability of illicit actors to hide behind anonymity to buy residential real estate; and closing loopholes in existing regulatory regimes.    Hold Corrupt Actors Accountable. The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to taking new steps to hold accountable corrupt individuals, transnational criminal organizations, and other actors engaged in illicit activity. This includes strengthening and building upon targeted anticorruption sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Act and similar authorities; and bolstering criminal or civil enforcement actions, such as under the Department of Justice’s Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative. It also means increasing support to grow the capacity of civil society, the media, state and local bodies, international partners, and other oversight and accountability actors. Build International Partnerships. As part of its commitment to strengthening America’s alliances and partnerships, the NSSM directs departments and agencies to work with like-minded international partners through the UN, G7, Financial Action Task Force (FATF), and similar bodies to counteract strategic corruption emanating from autocratic and kleptocratic governments, foreign state-owned or affiliated enterprises, and transnational criminal organizations. This work will include closing loopholes exploited by those actors in order to mask the proceeds of corruption or interfere in democratic processes.  Improve Foreign Assistance. The United States partners with foreign governments and civil society to enhance the capacity of their domestic institutions to implement transparency, oversight, and accountability measures. The NSSM therefore directs departments and agencies to focus on anticorruption best practices and improve enforcement measures in the implementation of foreign assistance programs and security cooperation.

Stay Connected

We'll be in touch with the latest information on how President Biden and his administration are working for the American people, as well as ways you can get involved and help our country build back better.

Opt in to send and receive text messages from President Biden.

• Ethics & Leadership
• Fact-Checking
• Media Literacy
• The Craig Newmark Center
• Reporting & Editing
• Ethics & Trust
• Tech & Tools
• Business & Work
• Educators & Students
• Training Catalog
• Custom Teaching
• For ACES Members
• All Categories
• Broadcast & Visual Journalism
• Fact-Checking & Media Literacy
• In-newsroom
• Memphis, Tenn.
• Minneapolis, Minn.
• St. Petersburg, Fla.
• Washington, D.C.
• Poynter ACES Introductory Certificate in Editing
• Poynter ACES Intermediate Certificate in Editing
• Ethics Training
• Ethics Articles
• Get Ethics Advice
• Fact-Checking Articles
• IFCN Grants
• International Fact-Checking Day
• Teen Fact-Checking Network
• International
• Media Literacy Training
• MediaWise Resources
• Ambassadors
• MediaWise in the News

Support responsible news and fact-based information today!

How the local news crisis affects coverage of COVID-19 and the climate … and vice versa

‘local news organizations are just so much less equipped now … to cover even something as consequential as the coronavirus pandemic’.

This report is an abridged version of a report by Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative and Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, a German foundation, based on their project to examine the local news crisis. This version focuses on the U.S. picture. The full report, which also provides a global perspective, is available here .

Huge issues face the United States and the rest of the world — issues that require rigorous local journalism to help people understand the problems and identify solutions. Yet widespread financial disruption has handicapped the news industry just as the need grows. And the news itself — including the pandemic and climate change — has made the challenge even greater for local journalists.

In a series of video interviews and a public webinar in November and December 2021, 17 influential journalists and researchers discussed the local news crisis, its impact on major issues and a few reasons for … yes, optimism.

The project, “Local Journalism: Shrinking Resources, Growing Challenges,” was co-sponsored by Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative and Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, a German foundation. Questioning was conducted by Tim Franklin, Medill senior associate dean and John M. Mutz Chair in Local News; Penny Abernathy, an expert on news deserts who is a visiting professor at the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications; and Sabine Murphy, program manager for KAS USA.

Among the key points raised by experts:

• The loss of local news may have cost lives during the pandemic because it paved the way for misinformation to take hold and hindered journalism on breakdowns in the official response.
• Because programmatic online advertisers avoided pandemic stories, there was a financial disincentive for outlets to cover COVID-19 more extensively.
• National political divisions are filtering down to the local level, threatening the high public trust that many local news outlets have enjoyed.
• Local newsrooms are making more connections between global climate change and climate-related problems in their own areas.

The pandemic: ‘So much less equipped now’

The COVID-19 pandemic is a huge story that has shown the demand for local news, but also has exposed the diminished resources of the journalists tasked with covering it.

“If there was ever a time that local news was important, it was during the pandemic, and it was during that time that also became particularly difficult to stay afloat, if you were a local newspaper,” said Jennifer Lawless, a University of Virginia professor and co-author with Danny Hayes of the new book “News Hole: The Demise of Local Journalism and Political Engagement.”

“Local news organizations are just so much less equipped now, both literally and figuratively in terms of personnel, to cover even something as consequential as the coronavirus pandemic has been,” said Viola Gienger, Washington senior editor for Just Security, based at New York University School of Law, where she is a research scholar.

Gienger, who sees the pandemic as a “national security issue,” said many news organizations have risen to the occasion, adopting an all-hands-on-deck approach at the start. But as Gienger put it, “Today you have very few hands on that ship to come up to the deck.”

Meredith Cohn, health reporter at The Baltimore Sun, said, “We’ve done a pretty good job even though our staff is incredibly diminished. We actually had a health reporter in place. … I’m not sure every other community had that benefit.”

Staff shortages required creativity. Cohn recalled that the Sun’s “nuts-and-bolts numbers” story on the pandemic was initially written by sports reporters “because there were no games, so we deployed them, since I guess they’re good with numbers.”

Boston Globe health care reporter Felice Freyer said her news outlet was better equipped to respond than some.

“Luckily, we’re in a pretty good position,” Freyer said. “We’re not owned by venture capital or anything like that. We’re owned privately by a family that continues to support us. We threw everything at it, and so almost every reporter was covering something about COVID, and during that time, our online circulation doubled. And most of those people have actually stayed with the paper, so we’re up to 225,000 (digital subscribers). That’s just online. Print is different. The number of hits we would get on each COVID story really shows how hungry people were for this information and how important it was to be able to answer their questions.”

Getting statistics from government agencies has been a challenge.

Cohn said the state of Maryland was “fairly forthcoming,” but in order to get racial and ethnic breakdowns, “we just hammered away.” The weakened state of local news means “I think they know we’re not going to sue them. We don’t have the funds always to go after them.”

Freyer, dealing with the state of Massachusetts, said the Globe also had to battle to get racial and ethnic breakdowns. “Similarly, there was information about nursing homes that was being withheld or not being produced. It’s hard to know when they just didn’t have the capacity to produce it and when they didn’t want people to know about it.”

An interesting aspect of pandemic coverage is how national news outlets and non-journalism institutions have created their own local news. For example, COVID-19 statistics from the New York Times and Johns Hopkins University have provided many people with specific information on the areas where they live.

In financial terms, the early days of the pandemic boosted local news organizations by driving a surge in digital subscriptions, but the lockdowns also caused a huge drop in online advertising.

Philip Napoli, the James R. Shepley Professor of Public Policy and director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke University, noted how digital advertising practices worked against pandemic coverage: “Programmatic media buying systems were being used in such a way as to avoid placing ads on pandemic-related news stories. … It created a powerful disincentive to do the very kind of reporting we needed the most.”

Freyer, who is president of the board of directors of the Association of Health Care Journalists, said membership in her group has held steady at about 1,400 since about 2013. But 27% of members were freelancers in 2018. Three years later, that number is up to 31%.

“We haven’t done a survey, but I would be willing to bet that those are people who lost their jobs at newspapers or in other outlets,” Freyer said. “They lost their full-time jobs. They still want to cover health care and they’re going into freelancing.”

The impact of misinformation on public health cannot be denied. Gienger cited a Pew Research Center finding that people who relied on news outlets for their information on COVID-19 were far more likely to get vaccinated than those who relied on former President Donald Trump or on “personal and community connections.”

It’s indeed possible that the loss of local news coverage cost lives.

“When you don’t have a local news outlet,” Freyer said, “you really start to lose your sense of community and the sense that there is a trusted source that you can turn to, and that you understand what the government is doing, and that you understand that the people who run your local government are actually your neighbors, and things like that. You lose that connection with your community and that opens up a doorway for misinformation to pour in. … So the loss of local news has a big role in my mind in the spread of misinformation and all the horrible things that have come as a result of that, including all the people who died because they didn’t get vaccinated. I’m drawing a line between the loss of local news and all these deaths and maybe you can’t connect every one of those dots, but it seems to me that that certainly is one of the big contributing factors.”

Climate: ‘The opportunity to localize the problem’

While the local news crisis has limited some outlets’ ability to cover climate well, bigger outlets and nonprofit organizations seem to be stepping up, according to Erica Goode, managing editor of Inside Climate News.

“Back when Inside Climate News started in 2007, hardly anyone was covering climate regularly,” Goode said. “But if you look around, there’s just many, many news outlets and everyone is starting a climate desk or has assigned a climate reporter. And that’s very encouraging. … What you see is the big players like the Times, L.A. Times, Washington Post, etc. and the next layer of large city newspapers are adding climate coverage, adding climate desks, adding climate reporters. And then the next level down … have lost coverage and maybe take a bit of nonprofit coverage.”

Rick Weiss, founding director of SciLine, a free service that connects journalists to scientific information, believes that “smaller nonprofit and sometimes hyperlocal news outlets [are] enjoying a little bit of a growth period right now thanks to philanthropic and other kinds of funding mechanisms. … But they’re small audiences. Sometimes they tend to be more diverse or ethnic audiences, which is great also to hit those communities that are often overlooked. But I would be surprised if, in terms of number of eyeballs on stories, that that sort of growth is making up for the general loss over the years now of specialty reporters at mid-sized publications.”

Goode recalled the situation at her former newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News.

“We were providing a column to the Mercury for a while, but they — this is telling, I think — they actually wanted this,” Goode said. “It was a clean energy column that we publish every week, and they wanted it, but they couldn’t spare someone for basically the half an hour that it took to produce the column on their website and transfer it. And this was pre-COVID. They were just so pressed for staff that to take — unless they were running something that got 20,000 clicks — they just couldn’t afford to do it.”

One promising sign is that local reporters are more frequently attributing local climate conditions to overall climate change, Weiss said.

“The attribution angle over the last year has been getting stronger,” Weiss said. “Which is to say, when a local reporter in Florida covers a hurricane, when a local reporter in California covers a wildfire, the odds of them actually saying something about the role of climate in the frequency, the intensity, of that kind of incident is higher now than it was a year or two ago. And that’s a good thing.”

Such local coverage can get the public more engaged on the issue, Weiss said.

“Local news outlets have the opportunity to localize that problem, make clear what it means to people in their everyday lives and to focus on solutions that either are already going on and could inspire people in the way of adaptation and mitigation or that could tell a story of one locality that might be applicable in another locality,” Weiss said. “So it seems to me that local news is critical to educating and inspiring policy action from news consumers where national news outlets and global perspectives on climate change can’t really get the juices going for people to care.”

Pandemic coverage did distract from climate coverage, but climate news seems to have bounced back, Weiss said.

“The percentage of our inquiries from when we launched in 2017 until Jan. 21 of 2020 when we got our first COVID request was running, about 10% of inquiries were tagged under the term climatology,” Weiss said. “During the pandemic from January 2020 until actually January of 2021 that number dropped to 4%. And since January 2021 it’s been climbing again and it’s now up to 10% again.”

Sadie Babits, a professor at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and president of the Society of Environmental Journalists, said the Najavo Times in Arizona was an example of a local news outlet that was pulled away from climate coverage by pandemic coverage.

“COVID hit the Navajo nation very hard,” Babits said. “(The Times’) environmental reporter, who also did climate coverage, had to pivot and continues to pivot to this day, and is having to do even more with less staff.”

Another challenge in climate coverage is the segment of the audience that is skeptical about the science, said Frank Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

“There are conservatives, the moment they hear the word ‘climate’ they’ll say ‘fake news,’” Fukuyama said. “You know, ‘This is just liberals lecturing us and telling us that we’re really, really bad people.’ And so, if you think about how do you get past that kind of polarization, it does seem to me that part of the answer’s got to lie at this kind of a local level where people relate to one another through non-political things. … That sort of creates the space that’s in a way protected from this vicious politics on the outside. And it seems to me that if you have a news desert, obviously that’s not going to happen. And I think that’s one of the things that’s really bad about the disappearance of these local papers.”

Local news innovation: ‘We’re happy to share that model’

A number of new tactics are being employed in the United States to bolster local news.

Legacy publications are shifting from dependency on ad revenue to collecting money from their audience through subscriptions and membership. Just this year, more than 50 of them joined the new Medill Subscriber Engagement Index to get a better grip on how to retain their paying customers.

Meanwhile, digital startups are taking root in cities where legacy outlets have scaled back their staff and their mission. And philanthropy is taking a greater role, with a few legacy outlets converting to nonprofit status and nonprofit startups embracing focused missions such as climate and education.

In a major change in approach, collaboration seems to be largely replacing competition as the guiding principle for local news organizations. A strong example of that is The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina and its “Uncovered” project to help smaller outlets in the state conduct government watchdog journalism. Glenn Smith, who heads the Post and Courier’s project, said this model could be applied in news markets around the country.

“A couple states, a couple of newspapers, called us right after the initial piece ran and sort of picked our brains about how we would go about doing that, shared it with other reporters I know around,” Smith said. “We’re happy to share that model, happy to see it, and it’s something that could easily be replicated anywhere around the country.

Another growing focus of local coverage is solutions journalism.

“I think we have to pivot to this idea of solutions for climate change, or even responses,” ASU’s Babits said. “So how do communities, such as Palm Beach, Florida, how are they coming together, and sharing that conversation through their local paper or their local public radio station or their local TV station or digital platform? How are they coming together to solve that? The more we can do that style of reporting, the more we start to move the needle.”

This is especially important to younger people, Babits said.

“We have to think about audience and thinking about our younger news consumers,” Babits said, “because I think it’s shifting dramatically and millennials and Generation Z are demanding more from what they get from their news, and it isn’t enough to just say, ‘Here’s the problem. Our planet is warming.’ It is so important to also include action that they can take and do that in a way that is falling within the tenets of journalism.”

In another philosophical shift, Lawless is calling for greater attention to the demand side of the equation, not just the supply side.

Lawless and her colleagues conducted an experiment outside polling places in Virginia in 2018 and 2019 in which they asked voters to fill out a survey. At the end of the survey, they asked people if they would provide their email address to get a local news update. With some of the participants, they first told them in one sentence that getting information about their community was important and then asked for their email address. With others, they asked for the email address without the sentence about the importance of local information.

“What we found is that one simple sentence was enough to increase the likelihood that people would give us their email addresses substantially,” Lawless said. “We actually found a 7-to-8-percentage-point increase in the likelihood that someone would tell us that yes, they were interested in subscribing and that we could submit their name and they would get this local digest of news. What that suggests to us is that when people are primed to think about local news as an ingredient for being a good citizen … they’re willing to say, yeah, I’d like to actually get that content, I’d like to know what’s going on. It’s just that they’re not thinking about it.”

The bottom line, according to Lawless: “We suggest that a public information campaign around this kind of thing might be what it takes to provide a little bit of a kick-start to saving the local news environment.”

Populism is a major threat to democracy, political scientist Steven Levitsky warns

An independent press is critical to sustaining democracy, says the Harvard professor

Fact-checkers from Turkey, India and Georgia win GlobalFact 11 awards

Turkish outlet Teyit won the Highest Impact award for its work investigating Palestinian land sales to Israelis

‘Frenemies’: The complicated relationship between fact-checkers and tech giants like Meta and TikTok

Many fact-checking outlets are financially dependent on the very platforms that they criticize

Opinion | Media reaction to the newsworthy first presidential debate

Joe Biden had a bad night. That was the story from Thursday’s debate — not anything Trump said, whether it was true or not.

Two years after an open letter to YouTube, fact-checkers remain dissatisfied with the platform’s inaction

YouTube has been dogged by the same problems fact-checkers raised years ago

Start your day informed and inspired.

Get the Poynter newsletter that's right for you.

How to Write an Article for a Newspaper: A Step-by-Step Guide

By: Author Paul Jenkins

Posted on June 15, 2023

Categories Writing

Newspaper articles are essential to journalism, providing readers with the latest news and information on various topics. Writing a newspaper article is not like writing any other informative article. It requires a specific format, style, and tone of voice.

If you are interested in writing a newspaper article, this article will provide you with a step-by-step guide on how to write an article for a newspaper.

Understanding Newspaper Articles:

Before you start writing a newspaper article, it is essential to understand the basic structure of a newspaper article. A newspaper article has a headline, byline, lead paragraph, body, and conclusion. Each section of a newspaper article serves a specific purpose, and knowing how to write each section effectively is essential. In addition, it is essential to understand the difference between a news article and an opinion piece, as they require different writing styles.

Preparing to Write:

Once you understand the structure and purpose of a newspaper article, it is time to prepare to write. This involves researching the topic, gathering information, and interviewing sources. It is essential to have at least two to three primary sources for your article and to contact them as far in advance as possible. This will make arranging interviews with them easier.

Key Takeaways

• Understanding the basic structure of a newspaper article is essential before writing one.
• Preparation is key when writing a newspaper article, including researching the topic and gathering information.
• Writing a newspaper article requires a specific format, style, and tone of voice; knowing the difference between a news article and an opinion piece is essential.

Understanding Newspaper Articles

Definition of newspaper articles.

Newspaper articles are written pieces of information reporting current events or issues. They are published in newspapers and are meant to inform readers about what is happening in the world around them.

The purpose of a newspaper article is to provide factual information in an objective and unbiased manner.

Newspaper articles are typically organized in a specific format, with a headline, a lead paragraph, and the body of the article. The headline is a short, attention-grabbing statement summarizing the article’s main point.

The lead paragraph, or lede, is the article’s opening paragraph, which provides the most important information and sets the tone for the rest of the article.

Types of Newspaper Articles

There are several newspaper articles, each with its purpose and style. Some common types of newspaper articles include:

• News articles: These articles report on current events and are meant to inform readers about what is happening around them. News articles are typically written in a straightforward, objective style.
• Feature articles: These articles are longer and more in-depth than news articles. They focus on a specific topic or issue and provide more background information and analysis. Feature articles are often written in a more narrative style and may include quotes from experts or people involved in the story.
• Opinion articles express the author’s opinion on a specific topic or issue. Columnists or editorial writers often write opinion articles to provide a perspective on the news.
• Reviews: These articles critically evaluate a book, movie, or other cultural product. Reviews are often written by critics and are meant to inform readers about the quality of the product.

In conclusion, understanding the different types of newspaper articles and their purpose is essential for writing a good article. By following a newspaper article’s basic structure and style, writers can effectively inform and engage readers with their stories.

Preparing to Write

Before starting to write a news article, one needs to prepare themselves. This section will cover the three essential sub-sections of preparing to write: researching the topic, identifying the target audience, and outlining the article.

Researching the Topic

The first step in preparing to write a news article is researching the topic. Journalists must gather information from primary and secondary sources to write a credible, well-structured article.

Primary sources are documents or objects created during the event or by someone with direct knowledge, such as interviews, letters, or audio recordings. Secondary sources analyze, interpret, or comment on primary sources, such as books, articles, and reviews.

When researching the topic, it is essential to identify the main points and background information. Journalists must present facts and avoid expressing personal opinions. They should also cite their sources and verify the accuracy of the information.

Identifying the Target Audience

The next step is identifying the target audience. Journalists need to know who their readers are to write an article that is relevant and interesting to them. They should consider the reader’s age, gender, education level, and interests.

For example, if the target audience is teenagers, the article should use simple words, short sentences, and examples that are relevant to their lives. If the target audience is professionals, the article should use technical terms and provide relevant details to their field.

Outlining the Article

The final step is outlining the article. The outline should include a headline, a lead paragraph, and subheadings. The headline should be catchy and summarize the article’s main point. The lead paragraph should provide background information and answer the story’s 5Ws and 1H (who, what, when, where, why, and how).

Subheadings should be used to break up the article into sections and make it easier to read. Each section should have a topic sentence that summarizes the section’s main point. Journalists should use complete sentences and avoid using jargon or technical terms that the reader may not understand.

In conclusion, preparing a news article is essential to writing a well-structured and credible article. Journalists should research the topic, identify the target audience, and outline the article to make it relevant and interesting to their readers.

Writing the Article

Crafting a news article for a newspaper requires a structured approach that ensures the article is informative, engaging, and easy to read. Writing involves crafting a lead paragraph, developing the body, and writing the conclusion.

Crafting the Lead Paragraph

The lead paragraph is the most critical part of a news story. It should grab the reader’s attention and summarize the article’s main points. A good lead paragraph should be concise, engaging, and informative. It should answer the questions of who, what, when, where, why, and how.

Journalists should start with a topic sentence summarizing the article’s main point to craft a good lead paragraph. They should then provide background information, using secondary sources to support their claims. The lead paragraph should be written in short, complete sentences that are easy to understand.

Developing the Body

The body of a news article should provide details, examples, and personal opinions that support the article’s main point. Journalists should use English effectively, choosing strong verbs and avoiding passive voice. They should also use citations to support their claims and avoid plagiarism.

To develop the body of a news article, journalists should start with a clear topic sentence that introduces the paragraph’s main point. They should then provide details and examples that support the topic sentence. Journalists should use short sentences and avoid using complex words that may confuse the reader.

Writing the Conclusion

The conclusion of a news article should summarize the article’s main points and provide a personal opinion or call to action. Journalists should use the conclusion to tie together the article’s main points and give the reader a clear understanding of the topic.

Journalists should start with a topic sentence summarizing the article’s main points to write a good conclusion. They should then provide a personal opinion or call to action that encourages the reader to take action or further research the topic. The conclusion should be written in short, complete sentences that are easy to understand.

In conclusion, writing a news article for a newspaper requires a structured approach that ensures the article is informative, engaging, and easy to read. Journalists can create articles that inform and engage readers by crafting a lead paragraph, developing the body, and writing the conclusion.

Polishing the Article

Editing and revising.

After completing the article’s first draft, editing and revising it to make it more polished is essential. Editing involves checking the article for spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. The writer should also ensure that the article flows smoothly and that the sentences are clear and concise.

On the other hand, revising involves changing the article’s content. The writer should evaluate the article’s structure and organization and ensure it is easy to read and understand. They should also remove any repetitive or irrelevant information and focus on the essential points.

Fact-Checking and Citations

Fact-checking is an essential part of writing an article for a newspaper. The writer should ensure that all the information in the article is accurate and factual. They should also verify the sources of information to ensure that they are reliable and trustworthy.

Citations are also crucial in article writing. The writer should give credit to their sources of information by citing them appropriately. This adds credibility to the article and helps readers find the sources to read more about the topic.

When citing sources, the writer should follow the guidelines provided by the newspaper or publication. They should also use the correct citation style, such as APA or MLA.

In conclusion, polishing an article involves editing, revising, fact-checking, and citing sources. By following these steps, the writer can ensure that their article is well-written, accurate, and credible.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you grab the reader’s attention in the first paragraph of a newspaper article.

The first paragraph of a news article is crucial because it sets the tone for the entire piece and determines whether the reader will continue reading.

To grab the reader’s attention, start with a strong lead summarizing the most important information engagingly. Use vivid language and descriptive details to create a sense of urgency and intrigue.

What are the essential elements of a news story?

A news story should include the five W’s: who, what, when, where, and why. It should also answer the H question: how. In addition, a news story should be objective, accurate, and timely. It should provide context and background information to help readers understand the significance of the events being reported.

How do you write a compelling headline for a newspaper article?

A good headline should be concise, informative, and attention-grabbing. It should accurately reflect the article’s content and entice the reader to want to learn more. Use active verbs and strong language to create a sense of urgency and importance. Avoid using puns or wordplay that might confuse or distract the reader.

What are some tips for conducting effective research for a newspaper article?

To conduct effective research for a news article, start by identifying reliable sources of information. These might include government websites, academic journals, and interviews with experts or eyewitnesses.

Be sure to fact-check all information and verify the credibility of your sources. Organize your notes and keep track of your sources to make it easier to write the article later.

How do you structure the body of a newspaper article?

The body of a newspaper article should be organized in a logical and easy-to-follow way. Start with the most important information and work down to the details.

Use short paragraphs and subheadings to break up the text and make it easier to read. Include quotes from sources to provide additional perspectives and insights.

What are some common mistakes to avoid when writing a newspaper article?

Some common mistakes to avoid when writing a news article include using biased language, making assumptions, and including irrelevant or inaccurate information. It’s important to remain objective and stick to the facts.

Avoid sensationalizing the story or injecting your opinions or biases into the article. Finally, proofread your work carefully for spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors.

• Book a Speaker

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vivamus convallis sem tellus, vitae egestas felis vestibule ut.

Error message details.

Reuse Permissions

Request permission to republish or redistribute SHRM content and materials.

Scope of Federal Corruption Law for State and Local Politicos Narrowed

A state or local official does not violate a federal bribery statute if the official has taken an official act before any gratuity for it is agreed to, much less given, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled June 26.

Gratuities may be such things as gift cards, lunches, plaques, books, or framed photos. They are often given and received among the U.S. workforce of 19 million state and local officials—including mayors, school sports coaches, and firefighters.

“Although a gratuity offered and accepted after the official act may be unethical or illegal under other federal, state or local laws, the gratuity does not violate Section 666,” the court decided.

Section 666 (a)(1)(B) makes it a crime for state and local officials to corruptly accept items worth at least $5,000 with the intent to be influenced or rewarded for an official act. The text of this section was based on Section 201(b), the bribery provision for federal officials. Section 666 bears little resemblance to Section 201(c), the gratuities provision for federal officials, which simply makes it a crime for federal officials to accept a payment for or because of any official act and has no requirements that the official have a corrupt state of mind or have been influenced in the official act, the court held. Moreover, bribery has much longer sentences than violations of prohibitions on receiving gratuities.

The court said the government had asked the court to adopt an interpretation of Section 666 that “would radically upend gratuities rules and turn Section 666 into a vague and unfair trap for 19 million state and local officials. We decline to do so.”

Section 666 is a vital statute, but its focus is targeted, the court added. Section 666 proscribes bribes to state and local officials, while allowing state and local governments to regulate gratuities to state and local officials, the court held.

“The flaw in the government’s approach—and it is a very serious real-world problem—is that the government does not identify any remotely clear lines separating an innocuous or obviously benign gratuity from a criminal gratuity,” the court said.

The government simply opines that state and local officials may not accept “wrongful” gratuities. That is no guidance at all, the court said.

“How are state legislators, city council members, school board officials, building code inspectors, probation officers, human resource directors, police officers, librarians, snow plow drivers, court clerks, prison guards, high school basketball coaches, mayors, zoning board members, animal control officers, social workers, firefighters, city planners and the entire army of 19 million state and local officials to know what is acceptable and what is criminalized by the federal government? They cannot,” the court stated.

The government’s guidance would leave state and local officials at sea to guess about what gifts are allowed under federal law, with the threat of up to 10 years in federal prison if they guess wrong. “That is not how federal criminal law works,” the court stated.

We’ve gathered articles on the decision, Snyder v. United States , from trusted media outlets.

Ex-Mayor’s Bribery Conviction Overturned

The Supreme Court overturned the bribery conviction of a former Indiana mayor, narrowing the scope of public corruption law. The court sided with the ex-mayor, who was convicted of taking $13,000 from a trucking company after prosecutors said he steered about $1 million worth of city contracts their way.

Timing Matters

“A state or local official can violate Section 666 when he accepts an up-front payment for a future official act or agrees to a future reward for a future official act,” the court said.

( The Center Square )

Related Content

Why AI+HI Is Essential to Compliance

HR must always include human intelligence and oversight of AI in decision-making in hiring and firing, a legal expert said at SHRM24. She added that HR can ensure compliance by meeting the strictest AI standards, which will be in Colorado’s upcoming AI law.

A 4-Day Workweek? AI-Fueled Efficiencies Could Make It Happen

The proliferation of artificial intelligence in the workplace, and the ensuing expected increase in productivity and efficiency, could help usher in the four-day workweek, some experts predict.

Advertisement

Artificial Intelligence in the Workplace

​An organization run by AI is not a futuristic concept. Such technology is already a part of many workplaces and will continue to shape the labor market and HR. Here's how employers and employees can successfully manage generative AI and other AI-powered systems.

HR Daily Newsletter

New, trends and analysis, as well as breaking news alerts, to help HR professionals do their jobs better each business day.

Success title

Success caption

Articles on Political corruption

Displaying 1 - 20 of 40 articles.

Prosecuting a president is divisive and sometimes destabilizing – here’s why many countries do it anyway

Victor Menaldo , University of Washington ; James D. Long , University of Washington , and Morgan Wack , University of Washington

Corruption: how the UK compares to other countries

Daniel Hough , University of Sussex

Owen Paterson saga sees government integrity called into question

Rebecca Dobson Phillips , University of Sussex

Prosecuting ex-presidents for corruption is trending worldwide – but it’s not always great for democracy

Election spending in 2020 doubled to $14 billion – 3 takeaways from a campaign finance expert

Robert Boatright , Clark University

Putin’s plagiarism, fake Ukrainian degrees and other tales of world leaders accused of academic fraud

Ararat Osipian , George Mason University

Can Mexico’s elites thwart a surging left-wing presidential candidate?

Irving Huerta , Goldsmiths, University of London

Understanding Chinese President Xi’s anti-corruption campaign

David Skidmore , Drake University

Speaking with: Cameron Murray on grey corruption and the ‘Game of Mates’

William Isdale , The University of Melbourne

Rodrigo Duterte risks losing support if he gets too close to Donald Trump

Maddy Thompson , Newcastle University

We need to talk about Zambia as it falls from grace under President Lungu

Nic Cheeseman , University of Birmingham

How the Spanish political laboratory is reconfiguring democracy

Ramón A. Feenstra , Universitat Jaume I ; Andreu Casero-Ripolles , Universitat Jaume I ; John Keane , University of Sydney , and Simon Tormey , University of Sydney

Stamping out political rorts requires a cultural change, not more bodies to police it

Adam Graycar , Flinders University

South Korean protests the first to bring down a president in a long history of civic activism

Eunjung Lim , Johns Hopkins University

Reflections on building the South Africa of Nelson Mandela’s dreams

Amanda Gouws , Stellenbosch University

No bribes please, we’re corrupt Australians!

Iain McMenamin , Dublin City University

With Dilma Rousseff impeached, Brazil is set for years of political turmoil

Marieke Riethof , University of Liverpool

Why Zuma’s ‘African way’ is at odds with the African Union’s vision

Joleen Steyn Kotze , Nelson Mandela University

From Panama papers to Brazilian bribes: why corruption is so costly

Jay L. Zagorsky , The Ohio State University

Dos Santos maintains the status quo while suggesting change in Angola

Claudia Gastrow , University of the Witwatersrand

Related Topics

• Accountability
• African politics
• South Africa
• South African politics
• UK politics

Top contributors

PhD Student in the School of Social and Political Sciences, The University of Melbourne

Professor of Political Science and Co-founder of the Political Economy Forum, University of Washington

Assistant Research Professor of Political Science in the Media Forensics Hub, Clemson University

Professor of Politics, University of Sussex

Professor of Political Science, Co-founder of the Political Economy Forum, University of Washington

Emeritus Professor of Cultural Research, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University

Professor of World Politics, SOAS, University of London

Profesor titular de filosoría moral, Universitat Jaume I

Founding Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics, University of Sheffield

Professor of Public Policy, University of Adelaide

Adjunct professor, University of Technology Sydney

Professor of Politics, University of Salford

Professor of Political Economy at the Department of Geography and Fellow of Fitzwilliam College., University of Cambridge

Senior Lecturer in China Studies, Nottingham Trent University

Adjunct Fellow, T.C. Beirne School of Law, The University of Queensland

• X (Twitter)
• Unfollow topic Follow topic

Supreme Court Further Weakens Public Corruption Prosecutions (1)

By Kimberly Strawbridge Robinson

The US Supreme Court again pared back a public corruption law, this time saying that state and local officials who accept “gratuities” aren’t covered by a federal bribery statute.

The 6-3 ruling by Justice Brett Kavanaugh on Wednesday was the latest in a string of cases cutting the reach of federal corruption laws and prosecutorial discretion to bring charges against government officials.

In the latest case, Snyder v. United States , the justices said a law which makes it a crime for certain state or local officials to “corruptly” accept anything of value over $5,000 doesn’t reach gratuities paid in recognition of past actions.

The ruling undoes the conviction of former Portage, Indiana, Mayor James Snyder for receiving $13,000 from a trucking company after it was awarded city contracts.

A contrary ruling had the potential to criminalize “commonplace gratuities” like a Dunkin’ Donuts gift card, Chipotle dinner, or tickets to a Hoosiers game, the court said.

The ruling split the justices along ideological lines. Writing for the liberal justices in dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said “Snyder’s absurd and atextual reading of the statute is one only today’s Court could love.”

The justices’ concern over prosecutorial overreach could have implications for a number of criminal cases over the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. The justices in Fischer v. United States are considering whether federal prosecutors went too far in charging some defendants with an Enron-era statute prohibiting obstruction of an official proceeding.

Commonplace Gratuities

In siding with Snyder, the majority distinguished between gratuities and bribes. Bribes, typically offered in advance of an official act, are “inherently corrupt and unlawful,” the court said. But gratuities, typically offered after an official act, aren’t.

Although federal law prohibits federal officials from accepting both bribes and gratuities, the majority cited a litany of reasons why the federal law at issue, 18 USC Section 666, doesn’t reach gratuities offered to state and local officials.

Among them was federalism, which the majority said required that the regulation of gratuities for state and local officials be left up to those state and local governments. The majority noted that local governments have addressed that concern and that “different governments draw lines in different places.”

“Section 666 does not supplement those state and local rules by subjecting 19 million state and local officials to up to 10 years in federal prison for accepting even commonplace gratuities.”

Palm Greasing

In dissent, Jackson wrote, “The Court’s reasoning elevates nonexistent federalism concerns over the plain text of this statute and is a quintessential example of the tail wagging the dog.”

She said the majority’s “fretting” over commonplace gratuities “falls flat,” noting that actual prosecutions under Section 666 “were not the dragnet for public school teachers, soccer coaches, or trash collectors that the majority conjures.”

“Rather, the real cases in which the Government has invoked this law involve exactly the type of palm greasing that the statute plainly covers,” Jackson wrote.

The case is Snyder v. United States, U.S., No. 23-108.

To contact the reporter on this story: Kimberly Strawbridge Robinson in Washington at [email protected]

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Seth Stern at [email protected] ; John Crawley at [email protected]

Learn more about Bloomberg Law or Log In to keep reading:

Learn about bloomberg law.

AI-powered legal analytics, workflow tools and premium legal & business news.

Already a subscriber?

Log in to keep reading or access research tools.

Essay on Corruption for Students and Children

500+ words essay on corruption.

Essay on Corruption – Corruption refers to a form of criminal activity or dishonesty. It refers to an evil act by an individual or a group. Most noteworthy, this act compromises the rights and privileges of others. Furthermore, Corruption primarily includes activities like bribery or embezzlement. However, Corruption can take place in many ways. Most probably, people in positions of authority are susceptible to Corruption. Corruption certainly reflects greedy and selfish behavior.

Methods of Corruption

First of all, Bribery is the most common method of Corruption. Bribery involves the improper use of favours and gifts in exchange for personal gain. Furthermore, the types of favours are diverse. Above all, the favours include money, gifts, company shares, sexual favours, employment , entertainment, and political benefits. Also, personal gain can be – giving preferential treatment and overlooking crime.

Embezzlement refers to the act of withholding assets for the purpose of theft. Furthermore, it takes place by one or more individuals who were entrusted with these assets. Above all, embezzlement is a type of financial fraud.

The graft is a global form of Corruption. Most noteworthy, it refers to the illegal use of a politician’s authority for personal gain. Furthermore, a popular way for the graft is misdirecting public funds for the benefit of politicians .

Extortion is another major method of Corruption. It means to obtain property, money or services illegally. Above all, this obtainment takes place by coercing individuals or organizations. Hence, Extortion is quite similar to blackmail.

Favouritism and nepotism is quite an old form of Corruption still in usage. This refers to a person favouring one’s own relatives and friends to jobs. This is certainly a very unfair practice. This is because many deserving candidates fail to get jobs.

Abuse of discretion is another method of Corruption. Here, a person misuses one’s power and authority. An example can be a judge unjustly dismissing a criminal’s case.

Finally, influence peddling is the last method here. This refers to illegally using one’s influence with the government or other authorized individuals. Furthermore, it takes place in order to obtain preferential treatment or favour.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Ways of Stopping Corruption

One important way of preventing Corruption is to give a better salary in a government job. Many government employees receive pretty low salaries. Therefore, they resort to bribery to meet their expenses. So, government employees should receive higher salaries. Consequently, high salaries would reduce their motivation and resolve to engage in bribery.

Tough laws are very important for stopping Corruption. Above all, strict punishments need to be meted out to guilty individuals. Furthermore, there should be an efficient and quick implementation of strict laws.

Applying cameras in workplaces is an excellent way to prevent corruption. Above all, many individuals would refrain from indulging in Corruption due to fear of being caught. Furthermore, these individuals would have otherwise engaged in Corruption.

The government must make sure to keep inflation low. Due to the rise in prices, many people feel their incomes to be too low. Consequently, this increases Corruption among the masses. Businessmen raise prices to sell their stock of goods at higher prices. Furthermore, the politician supports them due to the benefits they receive.

To sum it up, Corruption is a great evil of society. This evil should be quickly eliminated from society. Corruption is the poison that has penetrated the minds of many individuals these days. Hopefully, with consistent political and social efforts, we can get rid of Corruption.

{ “@context”: “https://schema.org”, “@type”: “FAQPage”, “mainEntity”: [{ “@type”: “Question”, “name”: “What is Bribery?”, “acceptedAnswer”: { “@type”: “Answer”, “text”: “Bribery refers to improper use of favours and gifts in exchange for personal gain.”} }, { “@type”: “Question”, “name”: ” How high salaries help in stopping Corruption?”, “acceptedAnswer”: { “@type”: “Answer”, “text”:”High salaries help in meeting the expenses of individuals. Furthermore, high salaries reduce the motivation and resolve to engage in bribery.”} }] }

Customize your course in 30 seconds

Which class are you in.

• Travelling Essay
• Picnic Essay
• Our Country Essay
• My Parents Essay
• Essay on Favourite Personality
• Essay on Memorable Day of My Life
• Essay on Knowledge is Power
• Essay on Gurpurab
• Essay on My Favourite Season
• Essay on Types of Sports

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Download the App

US Supreme Court narrows reach of federal corruption law

• Medium Text

Sign up here.

Reporting by John Kruzel; Editing by Will Dunham

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. New Tab , opens new tab

World Chevron

Britain's Labour aims for closer EU ties without reopening Brexit wounds

For a decade, leaving the European Union was the question that dominated British politics. These days it barely comes up. Which is clearly how Labour Party leader Keir Starmer likes it.

Letter to Editor of Newspaper on Corruption

Letter to Editor of Newspaper on Corruption to draw the kind attention of the concerned authorities and common masses to the Growing Level of Corruption.

Corruption is one of the most serious problems in our society . It is cancer that will gobble up all the socio-economic and political achievements . Write a letter to the Editor on the growing level of corruption in our society.

H.No. 211, Green Park New Delhi March 22, 2020 The Editor The Times of India New Delhi Sir, Subject Growing Level of Corruption Through the column of your esteemed daily, I would like to draw the kind attention of the concerned authorities and common masses to the Growing Level of Corruption. Our society is facing a very grave problem of corruption that has threatened the basic foundations of society. The major reasons for fast-creeping corruption are political instability, poverty, the unequal structure of society, unemployment, lack of accountability, weak political institutions and absence of rule of law. It undermines democracy, hinders good governance, and weakens democratic institutions. It hampers economic growth and sustainable developments. In order to curb this menace, Institutions should be made strong for the proper working of the democratic system. A proper system of accountability and check and balance should be implemented. Justice delayed is justice denied. In time justice can minimize corruption. Salaries and wages should be increased. The education system must be revised and improved. Moreover, proper planning and strictly implemented policies with public support can put halt to this growing menace. Yours sincerely Ram

Download the above Letter in PDF (Printable)

You are a social worker. You are upset as some good schools are exploiting the parents at the time of admission by taking capitation fee in the name of donation or building fund. Write a letter to the Editor of a national daily highlighting this corrupt practice. Sign the letter as Rahul / Rakhi.    

62 Jai Parkash Narayan Nagar Patna March 18, 2020 The Editor The Times of India Delhi Sir Sub:- Highlighting Corrupt Practice Through the editorial column of your esteemed newspaper, I wish to draw the kind attention of the concerned authorities regarding Highlighting Corrupt Practice. Parents are a harried lot at the time of school admissions every year. In their desire to have their children educated in good schools, they get fleeced and exploited mercilessly. These so-called good schools are in fact palatial shops that sell education for the highest bidders. First of all, they price their admission forms at more than a hundred rupees each which costs them hardly more than a few paise. Then the admission seekers are taxed with capitation fees in the name of donations and building funds. They are in thousands per head. The regular monthly fees are also unimaginably high. The rich few can, no doubt, afford all this. But for the average salaried class, they are a terrible drain on their pay-packet. Thus the imparting of education to their young ones has become a tortuous problem for the poor parents. It is the duty of the government to come to the rescue of these exploited people. Forcing capitation fee in the name of donation and building fund is a corrupt practice which should immediately be stopped. Yours truly Rahul

Related Posts

Write A Letter To The Editor Of Newspaper About Corruption In Government Offices In English

M18, Janakpuri, Delhi

The Editor, The Hindustan Times Delhi

Through an article in your newspaper, I would like to draw attention towards the issue of corruption in government offices .

Recently I  had some work at the government office near my locality. My experience there was less than satisfactory. I had to wait there in a line for more than an hour for very simple work. Moreover I saw in front of me two men paid some money to the man and their work was done immediately.

I couldn’t believe my eyes that I was seeing corruption happening in such a clear way. I felt like the police should look into this matter as government offices are the last place on which such things should be happening. 

I hope that the prestigious columns of your newspaper will help this case reach the concerned authorities so that it can be solved and nothing like this should be repeated ever again in a government sphere.

(Signature)

Roshan Pathan C

Related Posts: