Is The EU Less Corrupt Than The UK?

There are people out there who believe that the EU is somehow less corrupt than the UK. This, they argue, is one good reason not to vote for Brexit. But is it?

Assumptions

Some people believe that a large organisation is inherently less prone to corruption than a small one - I am inclined to believe the opposite. For this post I will be keeping opinions out of the equation and focusing on facts, as much as possible. My first assumption, then, is that an organisation is as corrupt as the individuals which make it up, no more so, no less.

My second assumption is that MEPs are as corrupt as the country they represent. This seems reasonable to me, although I know there are some people who seem to think that the honour of representing one's country in the European Union has some sort of cleansing effect on the soul. Others believe the opposite. Again, I will not be taking such opinions into account.

My third assumption (and this is a big one) is that Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) is anything to go by. If not, the whole thing has been an even bigger waste of my time than it already was.

The European Parliament

Before we get round to corruption, it will be useful to know something about the make-up of the European Parliament.

The apportionment (that's just a posh way of saying allocation, which is a posh way of saying divvying up) of seats in the European Parliament is roughly based on population (a fact that will become important later), but with some extra weighting supposedly given to smaller states. There is no exact formula, presumably for complex diplomatic reasons.

The UK has 73 seats in Europe, 9.7% of the total. This compares with 12.8% for Germany, and 9.9% for France. In other words, no one country has a hugely significant portion of the vote, which is good to know, although the largest 5 countries have nearly as many seats as the remaining 23.

Apportionment is important when considering corruption, because a country could be the most corrupt in the EU, but if it only has 17 seats its corruptive effect on the European parliament will be relatively minor. Bulgaria, I'm looking at you.

Corruptive Influence

The CPI measures a country's level of corruption on a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is completely corrupt and 100 is completely clean. Transparency International are keen to point out that no country scores 100 on their scale. Corruption is everywhere.

I have combined the CPI data with the seat apportionment to give what I will call the corruptive influence. Very simply, corruptive influence is the number of seats allocated to a country multiplied by the level of corruption according to the CPI.

Since the CPI scores corrupt countries low I have inverted their score, by subtracting it from 100. Thus a country like Denmark - Denmark is a good example - whose CPI score is 91 will be interpreted by me as having a low score of 9. They have 13 MEPs, so their corruptive influence is 117 (I shall use the unit monkeys, as they are known for their meddling ways).

Italy, by comparison, has 4088 monkeys.

If we add all of the monkeys together and divide them by the number of MEPs, we arrive at a weighted average value for corruption. This will tell us how corrupt the EU is, as a whole.

The result of this calculation (25,392 - that's a lot of monkeys - divided by 751) is 34 or, to convert back to the CPIs scoring system, 100 minus 34, which is 66.

Conclusion

The CPI score for the UK is 81. This may surprise a lot of people living in the UK who regard the government as, shall we say, not entirely free from corruption. But then again, 81 is not entirely free from corruption. It's 19 short of being entirely free from corruption. That 19 is not an insignificant number, whatever the hell it means in real terms.

Furthermore, if you think the UK is corrupt, try living in North Korea (CPI score of 8), or even Bulgaria (41).

The European parliament has a CPI score, according to my calculations, of 66, which would make it the 27th least corrupt country in the world, if it was considered as such. That's just behind the United Arab Emirates, just ahead of Bhutan and 16 places behind the UK.

So is the EU less corrupt than the UK? I certainly see no reason to think so.

But Wait...

There is a further complication: The EU is changing. Six countries are likely candidates for membership of the union in the not too distant future: Albania, Iceland, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Turkey.

Actually, Iceland have ceased negotiations for the moment, but their inclusion makes very little difference to the calculations, due to Iceland's size (if it did join, it would be the least populous nation in the EU), so I figured: what the hell, throw it in there.

So what would the European Parliament look like if all six of these countries joined? Probably something like this:

I know what you're thinking: "you just made those figures up!" Well, yes, but I have very good reasons for choosing those numbers.

As I mentioned earlier, the number of seats allocated to a country is roughly proportional to its population. Although there is no exact formula, it is true to say that no country has fewer seats than a country with a smaller population, and no country has more seats than a country with a larger population.

(Well, almost true. Hungary has one more seat than Sweden, despite it (Sweden) having a fractionally larger population. I doubt this has anything to do with Hungary's low CPI score of 51.)

This means that, if we list all of the countries in order of population, we can relatively easily interpolate the apportionment of seats for the new countries. To make a long story short(er), I have done this with some care.

Note: the UK's proportion of the vote is now down from 9.7% to 8.2%. I will leave it to you to decide whether you think this is significant.

But what about those monkeys?

As you can see, the biggest corruptive influence on the EU is now Turkey. This is why many people are worried about Turkey's involvement in the union. Not only would they be among the most corrupt countries in the EU, but they would be one of the largest, exerting a significant influence.

(Of course some people, I am sure, are simply opposed to the idea because they are gross racists.)

In fact, five of the six future members of the union would be among the seven most corrupt countries in the EU, if they were to join (along with Italy and a country which I will not mention again, for fear of accusations of victimisation).

So what does all of this mean for the future CPI score of the EU? Well, if we do the calculations (as I have) we come up with a value of 63, down 3 points and down to 28th in the world rankings.

This is not as bad as I expected, perhaps because there is plenty of corruption in the EU already.