Beyond Transparency: How Governance Complexity Shapes Corruption’s Political Consequences

Transparency reforms frequently fail to translate disclosure into political accountability. This paper argues that the missing concept is legibility: the citizen-side capacity to interpret governance information, attribute responsibility, and pursue remediation. Using World Values Survey data from 64 countries, the analysis shows that governance complexity, proxied by city size, is associated with lower corruption perception yet amplified well-being consequences when corruption is perceived. These patterns suggest that transparency fails not because disclosure is unimportant, but because governance complexity undermines citizens’ capacity to act on disclosed information. The findings reframe the policy challenge from increasing disclosure to preserving legibility.