Bribes as data on the importance of institutions:

Here’s an interesting abstract I just saw (go here to download the paper):

JOHN MCMILLAN, Stanford University – Graduate School of Business; CESifo (Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute for Economic Research)

PABLO ZOIDO, Stanford University – Graduate School of Business

April 2004

CESifo Working Paper Series No. 1173

Which of the democratic checks and balances — opposition parties, the judiciary, a free press — is the most critical? Peru has the full set of democratic institutions. In the 1990s, the secret-police chief Vladimiro Montesinos systematically undermined them all with bribes. We quantify the checks using the bribe prices. Montesinos paid television-channel owners about 100 times what he paid judges and politicians. One single television channel’s bribe was four times larger than the total of the opposition politicians’ bribes. By revealed preference, the strongest check on the government’s power was the news media.

I haven’t read the paper (and probably won’t have the time to), and I realize that there are obvious objections to this sort of argument — no need to pass them along. I just thought that it’s an interesting research project, a creative though necessarily imprecise way at getting at some soft variables, and potentially interesting to some readers.