The public's conception of political corruption: A new measurement tool and preliminary findings

The past two decades have witnessed a burgeoning of scholarship on perceptions of political corruption and their determinants. Yet despite recent advances in understanding these perceptions and their importance to political life, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the question of how the public understands political corruption. We address this gap by reconstructing the conventional conception of political corruption and by presenting a new empirical tool designed to measure the conceptualizations and conceptions of political corruption held by a given population. We present preliminary findings and explore the relevance of the new tool for elucidating the public's understanding of political corruption.