On Sat, 2 Dec 2006, Wendy Lyon wrote:
> It's interesting to compare Gallup's rankings to Transparency
> International's:
>
> http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi/2006
Indeed. Example after example pretty much confirms what you proposed earlier about Ireland -- that the Gallup poll makes more sense as a survey about citizens' standards for and satisfaction with their government rather than as a relative ranking of corruption by an attempted common standard. For me, Saudi Arabia and Germany are the cases that really stand out. Germans rate themselves so low because their standards are so high, and vice versa. I wonder if the Saudi definition of corruption is even in the same universe as the rest of us. Their form of government is virtually institutionalized nepotism. Maybe they mean not corrupt in god's eyes.
Michael