Measuring corruption: perception surveys or victimization surveys? Towards a better comprehension of populations’ perception mechanisms: Press freedom, Confidence and Gossip

While methodologies and survey techniques recorded progress over the years, corruption measurement remains a many-headed monster. Since 2003 and the first publication of Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer, researchers have access to population’s feeling about the corruption scourge across institutions. Thereby, wider room emerged for populations’ perceptions in the field of corruption quantification. In this paper, we analyze the gulf separating perceived corruption from experienced bribe situations using global household surveys in a Panel dataset. We show that the gap between these two types of data can be wide and unevenly distributed across countries. Introducing further objective and subjective data we try to puzzle out perception mechanisms.