Administrative Accountability, Transparency, and Anti-Corruption Effectiveness in South West Nigeria: An Integrated Framework

This dissertation develops an original integrated theoretical and empirical framework for understanding how administrative accountability mechanisms, transparency institutions, and anti-corruption enforcement jointly determine anti-corruption effectiveness in South West Nigerian states, encompassing Lagos, Ogun, Oyo, Osun, Ondo, and Ekiti. Existing anti-corruption studies typically examine accountability, transparency, and enforcement as separate variables, missing the critical interaction effects and complementarities among them that determine systemic anti-corruption outcomes. The dissertation employs a multi-state comparative design covering all six South West states over a nine-year observation period from 2015 to 2023, combining panel data analysis of corruption perception indices, anti-corruption prosecution data, and state governance quality assessments with 72 elite interviews and a public opinion survey of 1,800 respondents. Bayesian Network Analysis, system GMM panel regression, and structured comparative case analysis provide the methodological toolkit. The Accountability Web Theory, Principal-Agent Framework, and the Transparency International Integrity Systems Approach jointly underpin the theoretical architecture. The dissertation proposes the Integrated Anti-Corruption Effectiveness Model (IACEM), which specifies complementarity thresholds: accountability mechanisms generate anti-corruption effects only above a minimum transparency baseline, and transparency investments generate returns only when enforcement credibility exceeds a defined threshold. Empirical application of the IACEM reveals that Lagos and Ekiti States have the highest complementarity scores and show the strongest anti-corruption performance trajectories, while states below complementarity thresholds on one or more dimensions underperform regardless of investments in other dimensions. Keywords: administrative accountability, transparency, anti-corruption, South West Nigeria, integrated framework.