Corrupt countries are more likely to Approve MSOOXML

There is an excellent article by Kai Puolamäki from the Electronic Frontier Finland (Effi), where he has studied the ISO voting results and found a correlation between the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) of the voting countries and their Voting decisions.

"We studied the relation between the corruption level and voting behaviours of the countries. We found that more corrupted the country is, the more likely it was to vote for the unreserved acceptance of the OOXML standard proposal."

Of which he produced this chart:

If you look at the dark areas, it represents countries who have unreservedly voted "Yes" with no comments to MSOOXML. Given that there are over 10,000 comments against MSOOXML, one would expect responsible countries to at least provide some input unless of course they have been bought out.

To further illustrate this point, I have relooked at the data, and changed the type of chart. Here are the voting results when presented as percentages within a wider range:

Now it becomes clearer that there is a trend that the lower the CPI (more corruption) the more likely a National Body would vote "Yes" unconditionally. In contrast, the more responsible the country, the more likely the country would vote "Disapproval", and even if it did approve, it would be with technical comments. No responsible country would vote without comments on the problem riddled MSOOXML spec.

Also, MSOOXML only has about 30-40% Approval subject to technical changes as voted by non-corrupt countries. The requirement is a Approval rating of over 67%. In contrast ODF had a 100% Approval rating when it became an ISO standard last year.

Malaysia BTW, has a lowly CPI score of 5.0, losing out to Bhutan and Macao. The fact that its technical and standards committees deliberated and voted "Disapprove" yet its official vote was subverted to "Abstain" probably justifies the Transparency International score.

yk.