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The more remote, the more corrupt?

3 min read

If the state capital had not been located in Harrisburg, would former state Rep. Mike Veon still be representing his Beaver County constituents rather than tutoring the other inmates at a prison in the Laurel Highlands?

If the state capital had been located in Pittsburgh, would former state Rep. Bill DeWeese be serving up his trademark loquaciousness to his fellow Greene County denizens, rather than his fellow lodgers 200 miles away at the Camp Hill State Prison?

These are some of the questions raised by a fascinating study being led by a Harvard University researcher that finds state capitals located away from the bustle of major population centers are more prone to corruption than those that are more proximate to a state’s major population centers.

Harvard’s Filipe R. Campante and Quoc-Anh Do of Singapore Management University argue that the most corrupt state capitals – which they measure by federal indictments from 1976 to 2002 so that state-level political gyrations and varying degrees of prosecutorial vigor can be factored out – were places like Springfield, Ill., Pierre, S.D. and Albany, N.Y., all of which are relatively isolated. On the other hand, they find that state capitals like Boston and Denver are somewhat less prone to official skullduggery. Harrisburg, situated a little more than 100 miles to the west of Philadelphia and 200 miles to the east of Pittsburgh, was just slightly over the mean on their continuum.

There are, of course, many other factors that come into play when trying to quantify corruption – states with lower levels of education tend to have higher levels of malfeasance, and some states simply have corruption woven into the fabric of their political culture – Louisiana, which has been said to like its food spicy and its politicians colorful, most immediately comes to mind. And the state capital being located in the megalopolis that Atlanta has morphed into in recent decades has not prevented strings of Peach State lawmakers from having handcuffs placed around their wrists. Some have suggested in light of the study’s findings that it could be that the most skilled and savvy potential lawmakers in states such as Massachusetts or Colorado are more enticed at the thought of plying their talents in Boston or Denver, while their counterparts in New York or Florida might find the prospect of spending months out of the year in Albany or Tallahassee a little less enthralling.

But Campante and Do suggest the ultimate reason crookedness might take root in remote state capitals is they receive less coverage from major newspapers. They point to two corruption cases, one centering around New York Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno and the other focusing on Salvatore DiMasi, the now-deposed speaker of the House in Massachusetts. They found The Boston Globe and Boston Herald more comprehensively covered the DiMasi case in comparison with how The New York Times, New York Post and the New York Daily News covered Bruno’s woes. They say the same tendency turns up in other countries.

If this study’s findings are to be believed, they disprove the notion by Founding Father James Madison that state capitals should be as far away as possible from centers of commerce so they would be uncontaminated by money or influence. But it also points out the eternal value of tenacious watchdog journalism.

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