Kraske: Study Claims Remote State Houses Contribute to Trouble

KC Star:

I knew it.
I just knew there was something about Jefferson City that made it prone to ethical challenges and blatant lawbreaking.
For years, I’ve wondered why Missouri’s capital city deals with corruption as often as it does while Topeka chugs along blissfully free of such problems.
And now we’ve got scientific evidence — proof that there’s something about Jeff City, population 43,000, that makes it different than a Topeka or a St. Paul or a Des Moines.
It’s called geography.
“Isolated state capital cities are robustly associated with greater levels of corruption,” conclude Harvard Kennedy School scholar Filipe Campante and Singapore Management University’s Quoc-Anh Do in a new study, “Isolated Capital Cities,”

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