Obesity of politicians and corruption in post‐Soviet countries

Abstract

We collected 299 frontal face images of 2017 cabinet ministers from 15 post‐Soviet states (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan). For each image, the minister's body‐mass index is estimated using a computer vision algorithm. The median estimated body‐mass index of cabinet ministers is highly correlated with conventional measures of corruption (Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index, World Bank worldwide governance indicator Control of Corruption, Index of Public Integrity). This result suggests that physical characteristics of politicians such as their body‐mass index can be used as proxy variables for political corruption when the latter are not available, for instance at a very local level.

Obesity of politicians and corruption in Ukraine in 2000–2020– Reply

“…This ‘hedonic theory of corruption’ postulates the existence of a positive relationship between median body mass index of public officials and the level of grand political corruption in society. Blavatskyy (2020) tested this conjecture and found high cross‐country correlation between conventional measures of corruption and a median body mass index of cabinet ministers estimated using a computer vision algorithm developed by Kocabey et al. (2017).…”

“…(2017). Kis (2020) questioned this result since the sample used by Blavatskyy (2020) – 15 former republics of the Soviet Union – arguably constitutes an ad hoc group of countries cherry‐picked for spurious correlation. This paper collects data only from one country (Ukraine) and finds that the median estimated body mass index of its cabinet ministers co‐moves over time with the existing measures of corruption.…”

Motives underlying the intentions of youth to get involved in bribery: evidence from Lithuania

“…This system of unofficial gift-offering, particularly in the medical sector, is still common today, especially among the elderly, who do not realise that these gifts are essentially bribes. There is a very low level of anti-corruption awareness among those who grew up in the Soviet Union (Shlapentokh, 2013;Blavatskyy, 2021), with many still believing that bribery is a widely accepted way of achieving a positive outcome from an uncomfortable situation (Baimenov and Liebert, 2019); "if almost everyone is being engaged in various forms of informal payments it cannot be a very bad thing" (Osipian, 2012). As we are specifically investigating the younger generation, we wonder if this cultural legacy still plays a role in shaping anticorruption attitudes in the younger generations, so we formulate our fourth hypothesis: H4.…”

“…The size of the Coben effect is average (0.164), so there are significant relationships between constructs, and the determined discriminant validity (0.444) is acceptable. We assume that young people do not have ingrained habits of a corrupt nature, such as offering gifts to doctors, which were identified as a Soviet legacy; this signals the possibility to avoid post-Soviet legacy shaping in an economic (Berkowitz and DeJong, 2011), political (Blavatskyy, 2021), electoral (Leukavets et al, 2023) and cultural (Kim and Comunian, 2022;Yerken and Luu, 2022) context and hindering the socio-economic development and Westernisation processes in Baltic countries ( Agh, 2019) part of which Lithuania is. Since the studied sample consists of young people, the negative path coefficient is related to the age of individuals and the political system.…”

Conceptual and methodological issues in Obesity of politicians and corruption in post‐Soviet countries – A comment

“…In this comment, I am presenting several issues concerning the paper Obesity of politicians and corruption in post‐Soviet countries , written by Pavlo Blavatskyy and published in Economics of Transition and Institutional Change (2020). The issues are grouped into two categories: conceptual, which deals with research design and ethics; and methodological, which includes specific statistical methods, concepts and decisions.…”