The EU is many things: a civilization ideal to emulate, an anchor of geopolitical stabilization, a generous donor, and a history lesson on cooperation across nations. A fixer of national governance problems, however, it is not. In this book, Mungiu-Pippidi investigates the efficacy of the European Union’s promotion of good governance through its funding and conditionalities both within the EU proper and in the developing world. The evidence assembled shows that the idea of European power to transform the quality of governance is largely a myth. From Greece to Egypt and from Kosovo to Turkey, EU interventions in favour of good governance and anti-corruption policy have failed so far to trigger the domestic political dynamic needed to ensure sustainable change. Mungiu-Pippidi explores how we can better bridge the gap between the Europe of treaties and the reality of governance in Europe and beyond. This book will interest students and scholars of comparative politics, European politics, and development studies, particularly those examining governance and corruption.
Reviews for this publication
“A blistering and contrarian critique of EU anti-corruption efforts from one of the field’s leading authorities. Based on extensive quantitative data spanning both EU member states and a large number of the union’s external partners, the book’s findings have troubling implications for the future of EU good governance strategies – and deserve to be considered with the utmost seriousness.”
Richard Youngs – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Europe
United Kingdom is one of the oldest countries in the world to have established good governance. While often justly criticized for not taking harsher measures against corrupt foreigners who launder their funds through its financial system, UK has an impeccable domestic control of corruption, with extremely competitive and transparent public procurement and a party finance regulation which far exceeds the European average. Its anticorruption legislation is the most advanced in the world and its increasing enforcement for corrupt dealings abroad opens room for great progress in other nations as well. There is some concern towards the capacity of the press to play the role it has historically played against corruption, due to its financial vulnerability and the legal harassment of journalists in civil Courts. Control of conflict of interest at executive level could also be stepped up.
For politicians seeking to use a clientelist approach to achieve political and private gain, i.e., to prolong their hold on power and maximize personal profit, control of government contracting is a key tool. We theorise that politicians wishing to exploit government contracting for such ends will seek to increase their influence over three stages of public procurement – policy formation, implementation and monitoring – but that their efforts can be constrained by institutional controls and checks. We examine these influence strategies and institutional constraints by comparing one young democracy and one mature democracy, Hungary and the United Kingdom. Developing new procedural and outcome indicators of corruption risk in contracting, we use a change of government as a natural experiment to analyse partisan favouritism in procurement. We find that, in Hungary, where political influence is systematic and far-reaching, 50-60% of the market is dominated by favoured companies, compared to only 10% of the UK market.
Using a panel dataset on 103 developing countries, this paper empirically analyzes the impact of the European aid flows on quality of governance in aid recipient countries. The analysis employs aggregated Official Development Data as well as disaggregated project level data. The results show that while bilateral aid from the largest European donors does not show any impact, multilateral financial assistance from the EU Institutions leads to an improvement in governance indicators. These findings thus suggest that European development assistance can help to promote good governance if aid is allocated at the EU supranational level rather than at the national level of the member states.
Using a panel dataset on 103 developing countries, this paper empirically analyzes the impact of the European aid flows on quality of governance in aid recipient countries. The analysis employs aggregated Official Development Data as well as disaggregated project level data. The results show that while bilateral aid from the largest European donors does not show any impact, multilateral financial assistance from the EU Institutions leads to an improvement in governance indicators. These findings thus suggest that European development assistance can help to promote good governance if aid is allocated at the EU supranational level rather than at the national level of the member states.
The Computer Laboratory is an academic department within the University of Cambridge that encompasses Computer Science, along with many aspects of Engineering, Technology and Mathematics. It consists of 41 academic staff, 29 support staff, 5 research fellows, 81 post-doctoral research workers and 119 PhD students. We have over 300 undergraduates studying for Part I, II and III of the Computer Science Tripos and 36 graduate students studying for the MPhil in Advanced Computer Science.
Cambridge has a strong and vibrant tradition of teaching and research in sociology. Some of the best-known figures in British sociology – including Anthony Giddens, Michael Mann, John Goldthorpe, David Lockwood, Philip Abrams and Michael Young – were formerly based in Cambridge, and some of the most distinguished names of twentieth-century sociology, from Talcott Parsons and Daniel Bell to Pierre Bourdieu, Jürgen Habermas, Zygmunt Bauman, Ann Oakley, Ulrich Beck and Bruno Latour, have lectured here.
For many years, sociology in Cambridge has been practised and taught in connection with other disciplines – we have particularly strong connections with politics, psychology, anthropology, economics and history. In 1968 the University established a Social and Political Sciences Committee which brought together sociology, politics and social psychology into a single administrative unit. In 1986 the SPS Committee became a fully-fledged Faculty of Social and Political Sciences which offered a one-year Part I and a two-year Part II. The formal establishment of the Department of Sociology dates from January 2004, when the Faculty was divided into three Departments. In 2012 the Faculty was enlarged to include Archaeology and Anthropology as well as Sociology and Politics; this new, larger Faculty is called the Faculty of Human, Social and Political Science (HSPS). While Cambridge sociology has always existed within an interdisciplinary context, it has also maintained a distinctive profile as a centre of excellence for outstanding work in social theory and empirical sociological research.
Cambridge offers a unique environment in which to study sociology, either on its own or in combination with other disciplines, and to pursue sociological research at the cutting edge of the discipline.