The Transparency of Transparency International

This paper analyzes the Non-Governmental Organization Transparency International (TI) and its golden product: the Corruption Perception Index (CPI). Examining detailed information of five years of external audit reports, assessing the methodology of the CPI and, researching the professional background of its executives, I found elements to conclude that the NGO is not interested in the reduction of the levels of corruption –as it public statement says– but in: 1) monopolize the construction of the social category of government corruption and to expand its influence as a center of policy, 2) signal specific developing countries as the worst performers when trying to diminish the perception of corruption and, 3) create and recommend programs associated with the institutionalization of free market policies. A salient point of the empirical results reveals that there is a closed circuit of money in the budget administrated by the NGO: the main donors countries are, at the same time, the main beneficiaries of budgetary expenses. Additionally, since the existence of the CPI, these countries are qualified as “non-perceived as corrupts.”

TI, I argue, takes advantage of the technical ambiguity of the category of government corruption to transform it in a subject of public policy to justify assistance from international organisms. In this sense, TI becomes a mutation of traditional capitalist organizations that promoted and imposed a development model in the Global South, using as a tactical tool the redefinition of good government, creating categories of public performance and redefining mechanisms of legitimation of the public sphere.

The configuration of the CPI is a signal of a socio-technical system that pretends to be interpreted as an objective measure of performance. In some implicit ways, its subjective appreciation is translatable to monetary terms, always in a neoclassical framework. What I argue is the relationship between knowledge and power, and how it creates interactive mechanisms to evaluate, from the global north to the behavior of developing countries. The statistical processing of information –here the CPI and its pitfalls– allows the exercise of power to be targeted quite precisely under an environment of the subjective concept of corruption. I recall Bourdieu (1991) and Simon (1988) at the moment to link the statistical practice with ideological effects that are present in societies even at an unconscious level. The advantage of this new face of capitalist organizations is the reduction of the political cost of their interference; with a soundlessly execution of power and making possible to segment populations (in this case, groups of countries: corrupts and non corrupts) to then organize them and influence a sense of belonging (under a subjective categorization, developing countries are the corrupts).