The Corruption Perceptions Index has drawn increasing criticism in the decade since its launch, leading to calls for the index to be abandoned. This criticism has been directed at the quality of the Index itself, and the lack of actionable insights created from a simple country ranking. Because corruption is willfully hidden, it is impossible to measure directly; instead proxies for corruption are used. The CPI uses an eclectic mix of third-party surveys to sample public perceptions of corruption through a variety of questions, ranging from "Do you trust the government?" to "Is corruption a big problem in your country?"
The use of third-party survey data is a source of criticism. The data can vary widely in methodology and completeness from country to country. The methodology of the Index itself changes from year to year, thus making even basic better-or-worse comparisons difficult. Media outlets, meanwhile, frequently use the raw numbers as a yardstick for government performance, without clarifying what the numbers mean.
The lack of standardization and precision in these surveys is cause for concern. The authors of the CPI argue that averaging enough survey data will solve this; others argue that aggregating imprecise data only masks these flaws without addressing them. In one case, a local Transparency International chapter disowned the index results after a change in methodology caused a country's scores to increase—media reported it as an "improvement". Other critics point out that definitional problems with the term "corruption" makes the tool problematic for social science.
Aside from precision issues, a more fundamental critique is aimed at the uses of the Index. Critics are quick to concede that the CPI has been instrumental in creating awareness and stimulating debate about corruption.[not in citation given] However, as a source of quantitative data in a field hungry for international datasets, the CPI can take on a life of its own, appearing in cross-country and year-to-year comparisons that the CPI authors themselves admit are not justified by their methodology. The authors state in 2008: "Year-to-year changes in a country's score can either result from a changed perception of a country's performance or from a change in the CPI’s sample and methodology. The only reliable way to compare a country’s score over time is to go back to individual survey sources, each of which can reflect a change in assessment."
The CPI produces a single score per country, which as noted above, cannot be compared year-to-year. As such, the Index is nearly useless as a tool for evaluating the impact of new policies. In the late 2000s, the field has moved towards unpackable, action-oriented indices (such as those by the International Budget Partnership or Global Integrity), which typically measure public policies that relate to corruption, rather than try to assess "corruption" as a whole via proxy measures like perceptions. These alternative measures use original (often locally collected) data and so have the same non-comparability problem as the CPI and are limited in scope to specific policy practices (such as public access to parliamentary budget documents) and so they are only an indicator of visible corruption/policy corruption.
The inherent value-ladeness of any definition of what represents a corrupt policy is also a concern for the CPI or any other measure corruption. For example, any measure must weight the extent to which corruption has a negative impact on citizens of that country. Measures can focus on the extent to which corruption negatively impacts citizens' lives on many dimensions including quality of life, health, economic well-being and liberty. Therefore, current measures have also been criticized not just for their methodology but for their breadth and the value choices that are required to be made in deciding how to weight the importance of various aspects of corruption.
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