Can Democracy Promote the Independence of the Ombudsman System? A Study of European Countries
Author: Tse-hsin Chen, Lin-ling Uang
Abstract / Chinese PDF Download
After studying the operational and core definition of the independence of the European Ombudsman, this paper builds the Independence Index of 46 country samples in Europe for an empirical analysis on the relationship between the independence of the European Ombudsman and the Democracy Index (DI, published by Freedom House), the Corruption Perception index (CPI, published by Transparency International) and the Gross Domestic Income Index (GDI, published by Fact Book of U.S. Central Intelligence Agency). It’s found that among the 46 samples of European countries, both the CPI、GDI had a negative correlation with the IDI. Moreover, in the 31 highly free (freedom index=1) countries, the DI、CPI & GDI all showed a higher negative correlation with the IDI. Thereafter, it’s also found that if the samples were the 26 high GDI European countries, a negative correlation with the IDI was shown. This paper concluded that the higher the independence of the ombudsman system, the lower the development of democracy, corruption and gross domestic income.