From Corruption to State Capture

Abstract

State capture and corruption are widespread phenomena across the globe, but their empirical study still lacks sufficient analytical tools. This paper develops a new conceptual and analytical framework for gauging state capture based on microlevel contractual networks in public procurement. To this end, it establishes a novel measure of corruption risk in government contracting focusing on the behavior of individual organizations. Then, it identifies clusters of highcorruption-risk organizations in the full contractual network of procuring authorities and their suppliers using formal social network analysis. Densely connected clusters of high-corruption-risk organizations are denoted as the domain of state capture. The paper demonstrates the power of the new analytical framework by exploring how the radical centralization of the governing elite following the 2010 elections in Hungary affected centralization of state capture. Findings indicate the feasibility and usefulness of such microlevel approach to corruption and state capture. Better understanding the network structure of corruption and state capture opens new avenues for research and policy on anticorruption, budget deficit, market competition, and quality of democracy. Supporting further empirical studies of corruption, the data are made available at digiwhist.eu/resources/data.

Beyond Vote Rigging: Common Patterns in Electoral Malpractices in De-Democratizing Regimes

“…We can observe a similar process in other analyzed cases (Petsinis, 2017;Wilkin, 2018). In Central and East European countries, similarly to Turkey, liberal reforms influenced the structure of economy through creating powerful clientelistic networks (Anastasakis, 2017;Bozóki, 2014;Fazekas and Tóth, 2016;Stark and Vedres, 2012). Together with a constant disappointment with democratic opposition, this sets a background for current actors (incumbents) to extend and further abuse those networks in creating a non-competitive political environment, particularly during the elections.…”

Caesarean politics in Hungary and Poland

“…The second key aspect of Caesarean politics is state capture. State capture is not just widespread corruption but its essence lies in networks of corrupt actors that act collectively to pursue private interest at the expense of the public good (Fazekas and Tóth 2016). Abby Innes (2014, 88) argues that states in CEE cluster around two dominant modes of dominance over state institutions: the party state capture (political monopoly of a party taking control over key state institutions, including courts and enterprises) and corporate state capture where public power is exercised mainly for private gain.…”

Western Balkans Integration into European Union: Challenges and Consequences

“…So, in its entirety, the capture of the state is understood as appropriation or control of state resources by elites, which then use these resources either for personal gains or for political gains, thus causing the deformation of the democratic process [28,26]. Forms of state capture and capture types are different, for Lily Evelina Sitouris [46] in discussing the type of state capture, the emphasis should be on the institutions that are the subject of capture and the type of actors that aim at capture in the wake of this logic referring to Mihaly Fazekas and Istvan Janos Toth [27], the capture appears to us to be of two types: local, which means entering into a relationship captured only by some public and private organizations, thus leaving a certain number of 'islands' relatively autonomous and global, which presents the situation when an elite at the national level controls the captured organizations that are related to each other.…”