Systemic corruption is not a failure of individuals, i.e. the result of their deviant behaviour, but a collective phenomenon shared mainly by public institutions as a whole. The phenomenon is based on an effort to establish a new set of corrupt norms inside such institutions affecting policymaking, administrative procedures, public procurements, and the behavior of employees etc. In spite of the fact that impacts of systemic corruption on the areas of government, civil freedoms, social cohesion, and public economy are well known, there is very little practical research involving concrete evidence of systemic corruption in particular cases. This paper attempts to clarify how to generate a set of indicators of systemic corruption and then identify and verify them in a real-life political environment – in our specific case, the administration and policymaking of Liberec City Council between 1998 and 2010. The research was based upon elaborated interviews (with politicians, public servants, prosecuting authorities etc.), document analysis (reports and papers of the city council and municipal government, contracts and invoices etc.), and political and media analysis. The results are significant, as only an understanding of how a corrupt system really works can lead to the implementation of suitable anticorruption measures.

The paper deals with the problem of systemic corruption in public procurement and, on the example of the Czech Republic, defines its risks, the role of informal structures and the way of failure of public institutions. Th e paper proposes the new methodological possibilities of exploration of systemic corruption and empirically verifies its signs on examples of bid rigging, illegal and non-standard ways of tendering by Czech ministries and in some court cases.

Along with other postcommunist Central and East European countries, the Czech Republic continues to exhibit alarming levels of corruption. The present article draws on unique stakeholder interviews and document analysis to explore the evolving perceptions of corruption by Czech actors who had intimate knowledge of how this practice was occurring in the period between the last years of the communist regime until today. The key finding is that corruption in the Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic evolved from an individual coping strategy at the time of communism to a systemic phenomenon, which is widely institutionalized today, especially in the public procurement procedures.

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