Judicial corruption score (V-Dem)

How often people and businesses bribe the courts. Higher means less corruption; 0 is about the average.

The V-Dem judicial corruption score measures how often people or businesses make undocumented extra payments or bribes to speed up or delay a court case, or to win a favourable decision. Unlike the V-Dem corruption indices, a higher score means less corruption. A score of 0 is about the average across all countries and years, and scores run from about -3 to 4. It is one of the four parts of the political corruption index. Like the other V-Dem measures, it combines the ratings of thousands of country experts through a statistical model. Our World in Data republishes the central estimates.

World map · Judicial corruption score

Source: V-Dem (2026) – processed by Our World in Data (updated 2026-03-17) · fetched 26 Oct 2026

Over time · Judicial corruption score

Source: V-Dem (2026) – processed by Our World in Data (updated 2026-03-17) · fetched 26 Oct 2026

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Every country and year, with the source on each row.

Portrait of Klaus Jürgen Folz

About the author

Hello there, I’m Klaus Jürgen Folz. I studied Mechanical Engineering at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Brazil, and I work in Austria as a lead Python and Power BI developer. I built Data Mechanics because good decisions start with facts. Public data is often scattered, hard to find or locked behind paywalls, and too much of what we read about the world is biased. Here, every number is shown as it was published, next to its source, so anyone can check it, compare countries and leaders, and draw their own conclusions.