Olympic corruption

Are the Olympic games awarded cities (and countries) more corrupt than they used to? The news about corruption in the Olympic Committee and FIFA were all around in 2016. Both have been and still are investigated by the CIA and Swiss authorities. Here I wanted to analysed if that corruption scandals could be correlated to those games being awarded to more corrupt countries. Polity IV and Freedom house have been measuring corruption perceptions and Civil liberties for many years. In general, both corruption perceptions and Civil liberties have been improving since WWII. So, first, I therefore standarised their data by year (countries in the 60s were much more corrupt and Civil liberties scored much lower than today). Secondly, I compared the awarded countries with the rest of the world to see if these days corruption perceptions and Civil liberties do correlate more (or less) than before.

The first graph is the Polity IV corruption measure for each country awarded with the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup  (standarised by year)

The second graph is the Freedom House Civil liberties corruption measure for each country awarded with the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup  (standarised by year):

The analysis shows that the awarded countries of both events are less democratic and more corrupt these days than before (by moving avg. measure). 

The  FIFA World Cup have ranked specially low (record lows historically) in both measures in the last two decade. Russia and Qatar were the awarded countries.