What kinds of issues are raised in the survey questions used in the polls that form the CPI base?
Each of the sources assesses the “extent” of corruption among public officials and politicians in the countries in question but few of them explicitly distinguish between political and administrative corruption. One source that does, e.g. Gallup International, has a correlation of 0.8 between the assessment of politicians and public officials. This underscores the close relationship between these two main forms of corruption. It can therefore be argued that the CPI seeks to capture the perception of all forms of corruption affecting the public sphere. To be sure, more detailed information can be obtained by performing in-depth surveys in individual countries.
