The United States, despite its generally favorable rankings on international indices, has significant corruption problems. Those issues cannot be ignored, but neither should they be exaggerated or oversimplified. American corruption is not any one single problem: contrasts are apparent among the states, across regions, and at different levels of the federal system. Some are illegal, but other types are legal – or not clearly against the law. While corruption is a significant issue in the context of law enforcement, race relations, environmental policy, and public health, its sources, consequences, and context differ from one sector to the next. Inequalities along racial and class lines add further complexities and significantly affect the prospects of reform. Checking corruption and dealing with its consequences will be a matter not only of enacting and enforcing sound laws but of how well we govern ourselves within a large, complicated, multi-level, but fundamentally democratic constitutional framework.

As judged by our three proxy measures of corruption, the fifty states vary greatly in terms of the pervasiveness and types they experience. We analyze those contrasts employing a range of empirical measures and find the political, economic, and institutional factors matter greatly. Particularly intriguing are the ways contrasts in corruption relate to Daniel Elazar’s three major political subcultures – Moralistic, Individualistic, and Traditionalistic – and to the ways they differ and mingle state by state. Contrasts in our corruption measures are linked to a range of explanatory variables in ways consistent with theory. Such links to fundamental influences not only point to the systemic nature of corruption, its causes, and consequences, but also help explain its tenacity and the difficulties we face when we attempt to implement reforms.

While we cannot measure corruption directly, it is possible to employ a number of proxy variables. We describe three useful approaches, all contributing to our understanding of corruption in practice. The Corruption Convictions Index (CCI) employs US Department of Justice data on corruption convictions aggregated by state. The news-based Corruption Reflections Index (CRI) compares the states in terms of the number of stories mentioning corruption. While both the CCI and CRI are proxy measures of illegal corruption, our Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), derived from surveys of statehouse news reporters, compares the states in terms of both legal and illegal corruption broken down by branch of government. While each index has its limitations, the three collectively yield suggestive rankings of the fifty states, not only by indirectly estimating the overall scale of the problem in each state but also, with the CPI, contrasting illegal and legal varieties and perceived corruption by branches of government.