A new corruption index based on individual attitudes

The aim of this paper is to propose a new corruption index based on individual attitudes referring to the European citizens. The index is defined by means of the person location parameters estimated by a Partial Credit Model (PCM). This model is particularly suitable since the synthetic value of the interest latent variable ‘Corruption Perception’ is first evaluated at individual level; its estimated scores are then naturally aggregated to higher levels in order to obtain a measure at Europe and nation-wide.