Ethics by Design: The Impact of Form of Government on Municipal Corruption

While trust in government at all levels is at an all-time low, actual corruption at the municipal level has been declining. One factor often credited with this decline is the introduction of the council-manager form of government. One of the key reasons the council-manager form was created in the early 1900s was to act as an antidote to the corruption prevalent in the big-city machine politics of the era. Despite this, no one has tested whether the council-manager form has in fact influenced the decline in corruption rates. This article uses a rare events logit model to analyze corruption convictions in municipalities between 1990 and 2010 to determine which factors, including form of government, affect the probability that a corrupt act will occur. The findings indicate that municipalities with the council-manager form are 57 percent less likely to have corruption convictions than municipalities with the mayor-council form.