This interdisciplinary Research Agenda contains state-of-the-art surveys of the field of corruption and points towards an agenda for future research. Chapters explore top political and grassroots corruption, buying and stealing votes, corruption in relation to gender and the media, digital anti-corruption and an examination of whistleblowing and market-based tools. The book also offers the most advanced research in the measurement of corruption.
Reviews for this publication
“Like the reform movement itself, corruption research needs a reboot. Mungiu-Pippidi and Heywood have assembled a provocative collection that questions old assumptions and takes a fresh look at unresolved issues. Several chapters examine the dynamics of corrupt processes as they fit into broader realities. Concluding chapters examine reforms and reformers themselves, developing propositions about the best way forward.”
Michael Johnston, Colgate University, US
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
Over the past three decades, the study of corruption across several disciplines has greatly increased. Despite the progress on knowledge, anti-corruption scholars and practitioners deplore the lack of progress in the fight against corruption as measured by rankings such as the Corruption Perception Index (CPI). Mungiu-Pippidi (2015), for example, identifies a maximum of ten countries that have managed to reduce corruption significantly in the past 20 years. This leads to the question on whether there is a gap between corruption theory and practice, and if so, what can explain it? This chapter reviews the relevant literature to argue that what looks like a possible disconnect between theory and practice is the product of lack of conceptual clarity and insufficient cross-pollination between different strands of academic literature. It considers two of the main streams of literature, that in favor of less government intervention with anti-corruption policies based on incentive manipulation rather than repression and that in favor of government intervention and legal deterrence. It thus attempts to bring some clarity to the debate around the effectiveness of market and legal solutions for anti-corruption by combining the latest findings and lessons learned from the anti-corruption literature with the main theories of change originated from the economic literature. In addition to the theoretical discussion, I run a few tests of the theories I discuss to substantiate my argument.
Following the “Snowden effect” and more recent whistleblower scandals, such as the Panama Papers, Luxleaks, Cambridge Analytica or the Danish Tax Fraud, the number of whistleblowing cases and laws for the protection of whistleblowers in Europe and around the world has significantly increased as a tool to combat corruption, fraud and organizational wrongdoings. This paper provides a theory-based and empirical analysis of the theory of change behind whistleblower protection legislation as an anti-corruption policy tool. By introducing a new indicator developed in collaboration with ERCAS and based on international best practices on whistleblower laws – the Whistleblower Index (WI) – the report shows that there is only a slightly upward interaction between stronger whistleblower laws, as of the WI, and slightly higher levels of WGI’s Control of Corruption. It also did not find a statistically significant change in WGI’s Control of corruption after the introduction of a specific whistleblower protection law. Based on the empirical analysis carried out for this study, whistleblower protection legislation only seems to be effective in deterring corruption and organizational wrongdoings in a governance system based on ethical universalism and absence of captive media.