Successes and failures of anticorruption in Greece before and after the onset of the economic crisis

Authors Name(s): Dimitri A. Sotiropoulos
Η εκδήλωση της οικονομικής κρίσης προκάλεσε πολλές αλλαγές, αλλά όχι μια «αλλαγή παραδείγματος» στην πολιτική καταπολέμησης της διαφθοράς στην Ελλάδα. Από το 2010 καλύφθηκαν νομοθετικά κενά, δημιουργήθηκαν νέες εισαγγελικές αρχές, κυβερνητικές και διοικητικές θέσεις και δρομολογήθηκε η ποινική διαδικασία σε πολλές υποθέσεις. Ηπίεση της κοινής γνώμης, καθώς και η πίεση εκ μέρους των δανειστών της […] Read more

Between systemic corruption and anticorruption: political scandals and electoral accountability in Italy

Authors Name(s): Alberto Vanucci
In the “dark side” of Italian politics the hidden forces of systemic corruption tend the create an incresing tension related to the connection between illegal financing and official political activities. The underneath frictions can occasionally and suddenly evolve into a new “political earthquacke” shacking previous equilibria. This can happen when judicial inquieries reveal the widespread […] Read more

Tendertracking.eu

Authors Name(s): Mihály Fazekas
The website tendertracking.eu (kozpenzkereso.eu) is showing a database of public procurement contracts in Hungary graded by a corruption risk scorecard. Its goal is to make every contract, issuer and winner and their assigned CRI (Corruption Risk Index) scores are available to the public with better accessibility than from official sources. The CRI is a composite index of […] Read more

The EU’s Rule of Law Promotion in Central and Eastern Europe: Where and Why Does it Fail, and What Can be Done About It?

Authors Name(s): Martin Mendelski
This policy paper identifies two key dilemmas of the EU's rule of law promotion: 1. The problem of supporting unaccountable reformers in a partisan way (ownership dilemma); 2. The problem of valuing quantity over quality (change vs. stability dilemma). It is argued that these dilemmas reinforce legal pathologies which undermine the rule of law in Central and Eastern Europe. The paper offers two unconventional policy recommendations to enhance the quality of rule of law reform and assessment. Read more

Perspectives on gender and corruption

Authors Name(s): Agerberg, Mattias
Quality of Government (QOG) Working Paper 2014:14, “Perspectives on gender and corruption” by Mattias Agerberg The report also includes results from an ongoing in-depth study on Spain (Wängnerud 2015). Read more

Gender and corruption

Authors Name(s): Wängnerud, Lena
Wängnerud (2015) “Gender and corruption,” published in Routledge Handbook of Political Corruption (ed. Heywood) Read more

Why women in encompassing welfare states punish corrupt political parties

Authors Name(s): Stensöta, Wängnerud, and Mattias Agerberg
Stensöta, Wängnerud, and Agerberg (2015), “Why women in encompassing welfare states punish corrupt political parties,” in Elites, Institutions and the Quality of Government: How Institutions Constrain Elites from Destructive Behavior (eds. Dahlström and Wängnerud) Read more

The question of how Denmark got to be Denmark: establishing rule of law and fighting corruption in the state of Denmark 1660 – 1900

Authors Name(s): Mette Frisk Jensen
This article shows how fighting corruption and establishing rule of law has been on the agenda of the Danish rule for more than 350 years and how the level of corruption in the administration of state came to be limited by the middle of the 19th century. The article argues that fighting corruption in an […] Read more

Corruption: an umbrella concept

Authors Name(s): Aiysha Varraich
Research on corruption has grown exponentially in the past decade. An unfortunate development has been the mingling of the concept of corruption with related issues raising the spectre of “collective conceptual confusion” (Sartori, 1970). This paper recasts the concept of corruption as an umbrella concept highlighting the family resemblance structure between corruption, clientelism, patronage, patrimonialism and state capture. This transposes corruption to a category that can fit many cases reasonably well, but as Wittgenstein points out “on close examination it can become clear that for most cases the fit is not perfect.” This approach expounds each of the adjacent concepts in their own right, simultaneously elaborating on the spaces they share with corruption. This not only clarifies a set of commonalities, that are analytically important (Collier and Mahon 1993), but also explains the survival of the implicit understanding of these concepts as corruption thus far. Read more