63 Journal of Economic and Social Development – Vol 4. No 2., September 2017 CORRUPTION AND FORMS OF GOVERNMENT Ronald D. Francis Victoria University, Australia ronald.francis@vu.edu.au Anona F. Armstrong Victoria University, Australia anona.armstrong@vu.edu.au ABSTRACT This paper addresses the issue of corruption, and does in the context of different forms of government. Using democracies as a reference point they are compared, using corruption as a measure, with each of the other forms of government. In the case of small states it was not possible to do an analysis as the Transparency website did not record their corruption score. In each case of governmental style: absolute monarchies, theocracies, dynasties, the most populous states, and countries with lesser attention to human rights. The overall results are that is no instance does the correlation between corruption and population reach statistical significance. With respect to corruption each comparison, of the form of government compared to democracies. This is also conservative in that it uses a two-tailed test, and is thus open to the possibility that the reverse could be true. It is concluded that when compared to democracies each of the other forms of government has a lesser corruption score, taking the mean difference and taking variance into account. This approach may commend itself to other researchers. Keywords: Corruption, sovereign states, forms of government, types of government 1. INTRODUCTION: THE NATURE OF CORRUPTION Corruption may be used to indicate a particular concept, or it can take on the air of abuse. To be called ‘corrupt’ is definitely pejorative, and leads us to consider the nature of what we have come to call ‘corruption’. Transparency International defines corruption as ‘… the abuse of entrusted power for private gain’.