POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT AND CORRUPTION PERCEPTION IN NIGERIA: AN EMPIRICAL ASSESSMENT

ABSTRACT : The study investigates the relationship between Nigeria political environment and corruptionperception. The study covers the period from 1999 to 2019 using five indicators of political environmentnamely, government effectiveness index, rule of law index, voice accountability index, political stability indexand political rights index. Corruption perception index is used as the dependent variable. The study uses Autoregressive Distributed Lags to analyse the relationship and the results show that out of the five indicators ofpolitical environment, only political stability has significant impact on corruption perception in Nigeria. Thisunderscores the importance of the uninterrupted democracy being witness in Nigeria since 1999 in corruptionperception of the country. On the contrary, government effectiveness index, rule of law index, voiceaccountability index and political rights index failed to have significant impacts on corruption perception andcontrol in Nigeria. The implication is that, with the current political environment in Nigeria, corruptionperception index of the country has continued to rise hence it means that the Nigeria political environment isweak to have any significant effect on corruption control.

KEY WORDS: Political environment, Corruption perception, Empirical assessment