Corruption has been attracting a great deal of attention recently and various organizations together with free and active media have made great efforts to bring this issue to the forefront of the governance debate. This research uses experimental methods to investigate the effect of supranational governing structures on corruption. A second objective of this research is to investigate the effectiveness of the model for the United Nations missions given that transparency and accountability in the presence of these kinds of supranational governing structures are generally weak. Results of this research show that the presence of supranational governing structures leads to an increased level of corruption. These findings can be generalized for other situations in the public sector or private sector that involve a type of supranational governing structure. For the case of the UN missions, increased transparency and accountability can help reduce the level of corruption under these governing structures.

Key words: corruption, experimental methods, supranational governing structures, UN missions