Daniel sent us this one — he's been watching the news out of Israel, where Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara just issued a public warning about democratic backsliding, specifically calling out cronyism and systemic corruption in the current government. And he's asking us to zoom out: how long have humans been trying to measure corruption, where does Israel actually rank globally, and what does day-to-day corruption look like when it's not making headlines? There's a lot to unpack here.
It's timely, because that AG warning is not small potatoes. She's essentially saying the guardrails are coming off. The phrase she used — democratic backsliding — is a term of art in political science. It doesn't mean a coup. It means the slow erosion of norms: stacking courts, handing regulatory agencies to cronies, trading policy favors for coalition survival. Corruption is the lubricant that makes that whole machine run.
Before we get to Israel's numbers, let's define the thing we're trying to measure. What are we actually talking about when we say corruption?
That's exactly the right starting point. Most people hear "corruption" and think bribery — cash in a briefcase. But the technical definition is much broader: the abuse of entrusted power for private gain. That covers bribery, sure, but also nepotism, cronyism, regulatory capture, the revolving door between government and industry, campaign finance loopholes that create implicit quid pro quos, and something called state capture, where private interests literally shape legislation to benefit themselves.
It's a shape-shifter. And we're trying to measure something that is, by its nature, secret. It's like trying to weigh smoke.
That's the core tension, and it's been with us for a very long time. To understand why measurement is so tricky, we need to look at how humans have tried to quantify corruption for thousands of years. The earliest known anti-corruption law is the Code of Ur-Nammu, from around twenty-one hundred BCE in ancient Sumer. It's a legal text that predates Hammurabi by about three centuries, and it includes a specific penalty for bribery.
What did that look like in practice?
The text says, and I'm paraphrasing from the translation, "If a man... gave a bribe, he shall pay fifteen shekels of silver." Now, fifteen shekels in that era was a substantial sum — we're talking months of wages for a laborer. So even four thousand years ago, societies recognized corruption as a problem that needed a deterrent. But here's what's fascinating: it was purely punitive. No one was trying to measure how much corruption existed. They just said, if we catch you, you pay.
Which is a very different project from saying, let's quantify how corrupt our society is relative to our neighbors. That impulse — the measurement impulse — that comes much later.
Jump forward to Aristotle in the fourth century BCE. In his Politics, he writes about something he calls katalysis — the corruption of constitutions. His argument was that every form of government has a corrupted version: monarchy becomes tyranny, aristocracy becomes oligarchy, and what he called politeia — constitutional government — becomes democracy, which he actually used as a pejorative term meaning mob rule. The corruption he's describing isn't financial, it's moral and institutional. But the framework is the same: power intended for the common good gets diverted to private or factional interests.
Then Machiavelli picks up that thread.
In his Discourses on Livy, published in fifteen thirty-one, Machiavelli analyzes how corruption destroys republics. His insight was devastatingly simple: republics don't die from external conquest, they die from internal decay. Citizens stop valuing the common good, institutions become tools of private enrichment, and eventually the whole thing collapses and gets replaced by tyranny. He wasn't measuring corruption in any statistical sense, but he was the first to describe it as a systemic disease with predictable stages.
We've got four thousand years of humans noticing corruption and trying to punish it, but the measurement project — actually trying to put a number on it — that's incredibly recent.
Nineteen ninety-five. That's when Transparency International launched the Corruption Perceptions Index, the CPI. Before that, nobody had tried to rank countries globally on corruption. The first edition covered forty-one countries. The twenty twenty-four edition covers a hundred and eighty. The methodology has evolved significantly. The CPI doesn't measure corruption directly — it measures perceptions of corruption among experts and business executives. They survey analysts at institutions like the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, risk consultancies, and they ask them to assess public sector corruption in each country.
That distinction between perception and reality — that's where a lot of the criticism lands.
It's the single biggest misconception about the CPI, and it's worth dwelling on. When Denmark scores a ninety out of a hundred and South Sudan scores an eight, people think those are objective corruption levels. They're not. They're what experts believe about those countries. And perceptions can be wrong. A country with a very effective PR operation can look cleaner than it is. A country with a hyperactive media that reports every scandal can look dirtier than it is.
Like adopting a feral cat — the one that hisses gets labeled aggressive, the one that hides might be just as difficult but nobody notices.
That's a perfect compression of the problem. And it gets more complicated. In twenty twenty-three, Transparency International changed the CPI methodology from a simple average of sources to a Bayesian statistical model. The idea was to make year-on-year comparisons more valid, but it caused score shifts for several countries. Denmark's score moved slightly, not because Denmark got more or less corrupt, but because the math changed.
Which means we're measuring perception through a shifting statistical lens. It's not nothing — but it's also not truth.
No, and the other major indices have their own blind spots. The World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators, the WGI, launched a "Control of Corruption" component in nineteen ninety-six. It aggregates data from over thirty sources, including household surveys and commercial business information. The Global Corruption Barometer, which started in two thousand three, actually surveys regular citizens — have you paid a bribe in the last year, do you trust the police, that kind of thing. And there was the Bribe Payers Index, last published in twenty eleven, which flipped the lens and measured which countries' companies were most likely to pay bribes abroad.
That last one seems especially useful, and of course it's the one that stopped being published.
Because it made wealthy countries uncomfortable. The Bribe Payers Index consistently showed that companies from rich countries — including several Western European nations — were among the most likely to pay bribes when operating in developing countries. It's much easier to point fingers at corrupt officials in poor countries than at the multinational executives greasing their palms.
Which brings us to another misconception: the idea that corruption is worse in poor countries.
Grand corruption in wealthy countries — the kind that's often legal — can be more damaging in absolute terms. Lobbying that shapes legislation to benefit a single industry, campaign finance systems that create implicit quid pro quos, the revolving door where regulators leave to work for the companies they regulated. None of that is bribery in the legal sense, but it's absolutely the abuse of entrusted power for private gain. It's just that we've built elaborate legal structures to legitimize it.
The musical equivalent of beige wallpaper — corruption that's been painted to match the room so you stop seeing it.
And that's the segue into where Israel fits in this picture. So where does Israel actually land, and what does corruption look like on the ground, not just in indices?
Let's get into the numbers. In the twenty twenty-four CPI, Israel scored sixty-two out of a hundred, ranking thirty-third out of a hundred and eighty countries. That puts it between Botswana at sixty-three and Poland at sixty-one. For regional context, the United Arab Emirates scored sixty-eight, Qatar fifty-eight. Denmark topped the list at ninety.
Israel's score has been slipping. It was sixty-three in twenty twenty-three, and it's been on a slow downward trend for several years. That's not catastrophic — thirty-third out of a hundred and eighty is still in the top quintile — but the direction matters, especially combined with institutional indicators like the AG's warning about democratic backsliding. The CPI is backward-looking by design; it captures what experts already perceive. If the institutional erosion is happening now, the CPI won't fully reflect it for another year or two.
What the AG is flagging might not even be priced into that sixty-two yet.
That's the concern. Now, at the bottom of the list, the twenty twenty-four CPI's worst performers: South Sudan scored an eight out of a hundred, the lowest ever recorded. Syria at thirteen, Venezuela at thirteen, Yemen at fourteen, Somalia at nine. These are collapsed or near-collapsed states where corruption is essentially the operating system of whatever governance remains.
You mentioned earlier that perception can be misleading. Are these actually the most corrupt societies, or just the ones where the corruption is most visible?
That's a critical question. There's a strong argument that stable kleptocracies — places like Equatorial Guinea or Azerbaijan — may have more deeply embedded corruption than some of the failed states at the bottom, but they score slightly higher on the CPI because they maintain enough stability and PR to manage perceptions. Equatorial Guinea has an authoritarian regime that's been extracting oil wealth for decades, but it's not in a civil war, so the chaos that makes corruption visible in South Sudan is absent. The corruption is quieter, more organized, and arguably more effective at enriching a small elite.
The index penalizes messiness as much as it penalizes actual theft.
That's a genuine limitation. But let's move to what corruption actually looks like day-to-day, because this is where the abstraction of indices meets lived reality. Most people think of corruption as the headline-grabbing stuff — grand corruption. In Israel, the paradigmatic example is Case Four Thousand, the Bezeq-Elovitch affair from twenty seventeen. The allegation was that regulatory favors were traded for positive news coverage on the Walla news site, which was controlled by Bezeq's majority shareholder. That's a multi-million-shekel scandal involving the prime minister, media moguls, and telecommunications regulation. It dominated headlines for years.
That's the corruption people recognize — the big, dramatic, courtroom-ready version. But that's not what most people encounter.
Not even close. Day-to-day corruption is mundane. It's what political scientists call petty corruption and administrative corruption. In Israel, there's a concept called protektzia — using personal connections to get preferential treatment. A twenty twenty-three Knesset Research and Information Center report found that forty percent of Israelis reported using protektzia to access public services in the past year. That's not a fringe behavior — that's a norm.
What does that actually look like in practice?
It's calling your cousin who works in the municipality to skip the permit queue. It's knowing someone at the hospital to get an earlier appointment. It's having a friend in the school system who can get your child into a better class. None of this involves cash changing hands. It's all social capital, favors, networks. And because it's so normalized, most people don't even think of it as corruption. They think of it as being resourceful.
Which is how systemic corruption sustains itself — it doesn't feel corrupt to the people doing it.
And then there's the more explicitly transactional stuff. In twenty twenty-four, a municipal official in Ashkelon was convicted for taking bribes of fifty thousand shekels to expedite building permits. Fifty thousand shekels — that's about fourteen thousand dollars. It's not glamorous. It's not a political thriller. It's a mid-level bureaucrat taking envelopes of cash so a developer can break ground six months faster. That's the kind of corruption that shapes urban landscapes and goes completely unnoticed unless someone gets caught.
Then there's the police accepting free meals, the building inspector who doesn't look too closely at a foundation pour because the contractor is his brother-in-law, the ministry official who steers a contract to a company where he'll work after he retires.
The revolving door. That's one of the most pervasive forms of systemic corruption, and it's almost entirely legal. Regulators leave government and immediately take jobs in the industries they regulated. Sometimes there's a cooling-off period, sometimes not. The implicit promise of a future job shapes regulatory decisions in the present. In Israel, this has been documented across multiple sectors — telecommunications, energy, finance. The mechanism is the same everywhere: the regulator knows that being tough on the industry today means a smaller salary tomorrow.
Then there's the legislative side. The NGO law from twenty sixteen — critics saw that as a direct attempt to silence watchdogs.
The law required NGOs that receive more than half their funding from foreign governments to disclose it prominently in all public communications. On its face, transparency. In practice, it was almost exclusively applied to human rights organizations that were critical of government policy, while similar requirements weren't imposed on organizations receiving private foreign donations, which often support settlement activity. Whether you see that as legitimate transparency or targeted harassment depends largely on your politics, but the structural effect was to make it harder for certain watchdog groups to operate. And watchdog groups are one of the main mechanisms for exposing corruption.
You've got multiple layers — the petty stuff that's normalized, the administrative bribery that's criminal but small-scale, the revolving door that's legal but corrosive, and the legislative maneuvers that weaken accountability. And none of that shows up directly in a CPI score.
The CPI captures the aggregate perception that all of this creates. When experts look at Israel, they see a country that has functioning democratic institutions but where those institutions are increasingly being hollowed out from within. The score of sixty-two reflects that tension — it's not a failed state, it's not even a particularly corrupt country by global standards, but it's a country where the trajectory is concerning and the norms are fraying.
For comparison, what does day-to-day corruption look like at the other end of the spectrum — in the South Sudans and Somalias?
Different in kind, not just degree. In South Sudan, corruption isn't an exception to how things work — it is how things work. Government payrolls include tens of thousands of ghost workers who don't exist. Oil revenues, which are essentially the entire state budget, disappear into offshore accounts. To get a driver's license, you pay a bribe. To get a hospital bed, you pay a bribe. To avoid being harassed at a checkpoint, you pay a bribe. It's not protektzia — it's not about who you know. It's purely transactional, and it's universal.
Yet South Sudan only scores three points lower than Somalia on the CPI. At that end of the scale, the index loses resolution.
It's a blunt instrument at the extremes. The difference between an eight and a nine isn't meaningful — both indicate a state where corruption is essentially total. The CPI is most useful for tracking changes in the middle range, where countries can actually move the needle. Estonia is the case study everyone cites: they built an e-governance system starting in the early two thousands that made virtually all public transactions digital and auditable. You can't slip an envelope to a website. Bribery in public services dropped by an estimated ninety percent.
That's not marginal improvement — that's transformation.
It worked because it changed the system, not the people. Anti-corruption efforts that rely on moral suasion — "don't be corrupt, it's bad" — almost always fail. The ones that work remove the opportunity for corruption. Estonia made it so that if you want a building permit, you log into a portal, you submit your documents, and the system processes it. There's no human gatekeeper to bribe. Transparency through design, not through exhortation.
Which brings us to the question of what actually works. Given all this — the four thousand years of history, the flawed indices, the spectrum from protektzia to ghost payrolls — what can citizens and policymakers actually do about it?
Let's move from diagnosis to action. The first thing is to look at multiple indices, not just the CPI. The CPI tells you what experts think. The Global Corruption Barometer tells you what citizens experience. The WGI's Control of Corruption indicator gives you a broader institutional view. If all three are pointing in the same direction, you've got a signal. If they diverge, that divergence itself is informative — it might mean that elite perceptions don't match citizen experiences, which is its own kind of problem.
The actionable advice is: read the methodology notes. Which sounds boring, but it's the difference between being informed and being misled by a number.
The second thing is to understand that the most effective anti-corruption measures are systemic. Independent judiciaries, whistleblower protections, open procurement data, transparent campaign finance, freedom of information laws. These aren't exciting. They don't make for good headlines. But they work. Estonia's e-governance is the star example, but there are others: Georgia's police reform after the Rose Revolution, which fired the entire traffic police force and rebuilt it from scratch, dramatically reduced street-level bribery. Rwanda's electronic procurement system reduced the cost of public contracts by making bidding transparent.
For the individual citizen who's not a policymaker?
Support local transparency initiatives. In Israel, there's an organization called Shvilut that tracks government contracts and makes the data publicly accessible. In other countries, similar groups exist. Use freedom of information requests — they're not just for journalists. Attend municipal council meetings, where a shocking amount of corruption happens in broad daylight because nobody's watching. And vote for candidates who make anti-corruption reform a specific, concrete priority — not just a slogan.
The municipal level is where this gets real. National corruption makes the news, but municipal corruption is where most people actually encounter the state — permits, schools, zoning, local contracts.
It's where citizen attention can have the most impact. A municipal council meeting with fifty engaged citizens is a very different environment than one with three retirees and a bored journalist. Corruption thrives in the dark. Showing up is literally an anti-corruption measure.
Even with all these tools, one question lingers: are we any better at fighting corruption than Ur-Nammu was four thousand years ago? We've got better measurement, better transparency, better technology — but has the underlying behavior actually changed?
The honest answer is: we don't know. The optimist's case is that corruption has declined dramatically in many countries over the past century. The pessimist's case is that it's just gotten better at hiding. What's changed is our ability to see it and our expectation that it should be fought. For most of human history, corruption was just how power worked — the king's favorites got rich, and everyone accepted it. The idea that public power should be exercised for public benefit, and that we should measure whether it is, is a genuinely modern norm.
Norms can be eroded. That's what the AG in Israel is warning about — not that corruption is new, but that the expectation that it's wrong is weakening.
That's the most dangerous form of democratic backsliding: not the corruption itself, but the normalization of it. When protektzia stops being an embarrassing shortcut and starts being the expected way to get things done, you've lost something that's very hard to get back.
Looking forward, there are some interesting developments on the horizon. The OECD Anti-Bribery Convention review is underway, and the twenty twenty-six UN Convention against Corruption conference is happening in Doha later this year. These are opportunities for norm-shifting at the global level. But without political will — without leaders who actually want to reduce corruption rather than just manage its appearance — measurement alone won't change behavior.
Then there's the technology question. AI and blockchain are creating new transparency tools. Smart contracts for public spending could make procurement automatically auditable. AI anomaly detection could flag suspicious patterns in government transactions faster than any human auditor. But corruption evolves too. The same AI tools that detect fraud can be used to design fraud that's harder to detect. The arms race continues.
We end where we started: trying to weigh smoke. We're better at it than we were in twenty-one hundred BCE, but the smoke has gotten better at hiding. The project isn't futile — the Estonias of the world prove that real progress is possible — but it requires constant maintenance. Democratic hygiene, not a one-time cure.
That's the note to leave on: measurement matters because it creates accountability, but measurement without political will is just scorekeeping. The CPI gives us a number. What we do with it is up to us.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the nineteen eighties, the provincial government of Newfoundland accidentally created a legal loophole that made it impossible to prosecute anyone for municipal corruption in the town of Gander for approximately three years, because a legislative amendment inadvertently referenced a section of the municipal code that had been repealed six months earlier. Nobody noticed until a local journalist tried to file a complaint and was told, essentially, "we don't have a law that covers this." The loophole was closed in nineteen eighty-seven, but no one is entirely sure whether any prosecutions were missed during the gap.
...right.
That's one way to eliminate corruption statistics. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for that. This has been My Weird Prompts. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts — it helps other people find the show. We'll be back next week.
