Corruption and Democracy.

This will be mostly a summary of information sources of the correlation between Democracy (which is broadly defined as a liberal democracy with a certain level of freedoms) and Corruption.

I had already been somewhat familiar with Dr. Rummels theories and knowledge. And this post was a good starter to think about the topic title.
Environmentalist Looks at Corruption.|RDR
Saturday Responses 8-20-05|DR
Saturday Responses|DR 02-06

RJR: Good point. Aside from convictions, etc., how can we gauge the tendency to corruption in a state? By how close in electoral power the two parties are. If they are very close, and the turnover in power is frequent, then the parties tend to check the corruption of each other's officials, since the party in power knows that will likely cause it to lose the next election. One party states, as with one-party nations, tend to be very corrupt.

Corruption Top Threat to African Animals, Study Says



Next is just a summary of some places of information about eco-environmentalism.
Markets/Democracy Protecting Environment|RDR


This one points out the struggle that young democracies(YD) have. And this has been an area of great interest in recent years. Including ideas that young democracies have sustainable credibility problems as well as another that looks at whether YDs are more violent than other forms of government.
Corruption Trap|RDR
The Corruption Trap|EconoLodge

While this is not an article about Democracy, it is an important issue that needs to be addressed. I see the best way to proceed when a nation/state/area derives a large amount of its wealth from mineral extraction is the use of a PDF as they have in Alaska. A person interested in these problems should also look at Dutch Disease.
Fuelling poverty: oil, war and corruption

The below link is to an excellent post by Dr. Rummel on a variety of democracy issues, but I wanted to point out the segment on "Myths and Realities of Governance and Corruption" (pdf) by Daniel Kaufmann (World Bank) that also links to that PDF report in the next two links. And his last three links deal with good governance starting with "Governance Matters IV: 
Governance Indicators 
for 1996–2004".
This And That On Democracy/Democratization|DR
Myths and Realities of Governance and Corruption|World Bank|PDF

After learning about democratic peace ideas, I too have come across times when a report seems to sidestep the issue of democracy as the root cause of the solution or lack thereof being the problem, as I noted in the Corruption being a Threat to African Animals. The second link is to the 2005 report.
Democracies are the Least Corrupt In 2006|DR
Transparency International|Corruption Perceptions Index 2005

Two more posts by Dr. Rummel on Corruption and Democracies.
Global Corruption and Democracy 2006|DR
Are Democracies Least Corrupt?


I am not sure if Dr. Rummel has used these numbers because they only rank ordinally and thus do not allow groupings of countries. Not as useful for statistical measurements. But I did notice one thing of interest. That the better a countries ordinal rank in democracy and thus press freedom the better a countries ordinal rank in Corruption is, and vice a versa. There is a couple of cases to note. Both Cuba and China have a better rank in corruption than what would be expected by the statistics. This tends to support that strong central governments can control corruption but the transitional democracies do often suffer corruption and other forms of poor governorship.
WorldAudit
WorldAudit|Cuba
WorldAudit|China

And to end with a graph that should help explain some things: