U.S. Impeachment Inquiry Amid Declining Executive Oversight and Increased Executive Malpractice
By: V-Dem Staff
Dec 02, 2019
The impeachment inquiry against U.S. President Trump is now entering its 11th week. This week we use the V-Dem Country Graph tools to look at indicators related to checks on the executive and corruption within the United States over the past 50 years.
The first graph includes three indicators: ‘Executive respects constitution’, ‘Executive bribery and corrupt exchanges’, and ‘Executive embezzlement and theft’. All three indicators range from 0 to 4, where higher values represent a higher level of respect for the constitution and a lack of executive wrongdoing. Over the past 50 years, values on these indicators remained fairly steady, but we can observe a sharp downturn on all three between 2016 and 2017, coinciding with the first year of the Trump administration. The largest of these drops is for ‘Executive embezzlement and theft’, which declined from 3.88 to 2.63.
The downward trend for all five indicators suggests that the executive branch of the United States has had higher instances of corruption and less respect for the constitution over the past few years, but is less likely to be investigated for these actions compared to what the norm was over the past half-century.
Will the current impeachment inquiry prompt an increase on the ‘Legislature investigates in practice’ indicator for the U.S. in 2019? Check out the V-Dem v10 data release in March 2020 to find out!
To learn more about these and other indicators, visit v-dem.net.
