Illinois has a notorious reputation for criminal convictions of elected government officials. But government corruption can be accomplished legally as well as illegally. They both matter, in turn, for the quality of life for residents and taxpayers.A recent study published by the Edmond Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University ranked the 50 states on both “legal corruption” and “illegal corruption.” The authors described the shortfalls in relying exclusively on legal measures like conviction rates, and defined “legal corruption” as “political gains in the form of campaign contributions or endorsements by a government official, in exchange for providing specific benefits to private individuals or groups. …”After ranking the 50 states on both measures, the study identified seven states that appeared in the list of both “most legally corrupt” states and “most illegally corrupt” states. The study also identified 7 states ranking among the least corrupt states in both categories.
The “most corrupt” states included Illinois, Kentucky, New Jersey, Alabama, New Mexico, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.
With the State Data Lab website we’ve developed at Truth in Accounting, we can take a look at how these “corrupt” states stack up against others on a variety of outcomes that matter, including economic growth, state financial conditions, and trust in government.
Below are charts comparing the average results for each of these six measures for three categories of states – the seven “most corrupt” states identified in the Harvard study, the seven “least corrupt” states, and the average for 34 other states (after taking out Hawaii and Alaska).
Bottom line, corrupt states have had higher deterioration in their unemployment rates, higher declines in their relative “quality of life,” lower trust in state government, fewer truly “balanced budgets,” higher Taxpayer Burdens as calculated by Truth in Accounting, and higher outmigration.
And Illinois’s results are particularly gruesome, within the “corrupt states” category. For all six of these measures, Illinois ranks either the worst, or close to the worst, for all seven “corrupt” states.
Unemployment. This reports the average change in state unemployment rates from 1997 to 2013, for all three categories.
“Quality of Life.” Ballotpedia, a project of the Lucy Burns Institute, has developed a measure of the “Quality of Life” across the 50 states, with a wide variety of economic and demographic data. We compute the change in this index over the last 20 years, for all 48 states, and then compute the average change for all three categories.
Trust in State Government. In late 2014, a Gallup poll measured how much likely voters trusted their state government, with results for all states.
Balanced Budgets. 49 of the 50 states have “balanced budget” requirements, either in state constitutions or state law. But some states truly “balance the budget” more often than others. We count the frequency of real balanced budgets over the last seven years across the states.
Taxpayer Burden. This is Truth in Accounting’s “bottom line” measure of each taxpayer’s individual share of state debt loads.
People leaving. This is drawn from United Van Lines’ annual migration study. People are leaving corrupt states.
Is there a bright side?
Hopefully, the time has come for more people to realize it is time for new public and private sector governance habits in Illinois. Well-organized special interest groups from a variety of walks of life have been feasting on the public purse, with consequences for state finances and economic growth, and at the expense of the Average Joe. And it isn’t just the Average Joe; we also see evidence that deteriorating finances in corrupt states have reduced service quality for welfare programs.
Accounting practices have long papered over the consequences for taxpayers and government services, but the chickens are now coming home to roost. We need a rebirth of leadership and citizen engagement in Illinois, sooner than later.
NEXT ARTICLE: Measuring illegal and legal corruption in Illinois
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