Prosecuting high-level corruption in Eastern Europe

Popova, Maria; Post, Vincent

doi:10.1016/j.postcomstud.2018.06.004

Cited by 27 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 34 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…It might also be the case that the sample was not able to capture the most relevant firms to disclose these practices in all the countries, and it could also be the case that the managers who participated in the Survey decided to respond strategically. An interesting study by Popova and Post (2018) relies on the comparison of indictments of ministers for the act of corruption and actually did not find evidence that EU membership, existence of specialised anti-corruption prosecution or a more independent judiciary raises the profile of grand corruption. According to their findings, Croatia 29 took the middle position in indicting its ministers during the 2000-2012 period, but had a relatively high conviction rate.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Managers’ Perception of Corruption in Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia

Botrić

2020

HKJU-CCPA

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The paper provides a comparative analysis of managersꞌ perception of corruption in three post-transition economies based on The World Bank Enterprise Survey data in the period 2002-2019. Results suggest that although the main forms of corruption seem to differ among the countries, there does not seem to be any systemic change within individual countries. While in Slovenia managers are most likely to notice grand corruption, petty corruption seems to be more widespread in Croatia and Serbia. Those who perceive corruption to be higher on the power ladder are also the ones more likely to consider it an obstacle for their business endeavours. The difference is the most significant in Croatia, suggesting that additional efforts to reduce corruption would be most readily welcomed by the business sector in that country. Limitations of the present study rely on the quality of the data source used. While there is no doubt that the survey has been carried out with the highest quality standards, the potential strategic answering of respondents can hardly be avoided when it comes to such an illusive phenomena as corruption. A possible remedy could be to supplement the results with a similar survey that would focus on questions specific to corruption practices of the analysed countries.

show abstract

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Managers’ Perception of Corruption in Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia

Botrić

2020

HKJU-CCPA

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…6 Information regarding the date on which party leaders were convicted was drawn from media sources and Wikipedia: as of this writing, only four party leaders have ever been convicted of corruption. Finally, data on the conviction of Romanian ministers have been graciously shared by Maria Popova (Popova and Post 2018). I focus only on the three legislatures that featured convictions of party leaders and ministers: 2008-2012, 2012-2016, and 2016-2020. Temporality is central to the processes outlined above: it matters whether one switches parties or retires early or late in a four-year mandate, just as it matters whether one's party leader is convicted at the beginning or end of one's legislative term.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Decoupled Rationalisation: Judicial Anticorruption and Fragmentation of Parliament and the Magistracy

Pârvulescu¹

2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Anticorruption campaigns rely on a promise and ideal of rationalisation: public officials should–and will–behave in an impersonal, rule-governed, and ultimately predictable manner. So why do anticorruption drives often increase political and administrative chaos, instead of decreasing it? In this paper I address this puzzle by analysing the simultaneous effects of judicial anticorruption on both the legislative and judicial spheres. Using the case of Romania from 2005 to 2020, I first demonstrate that the successful drive to jail corruption politicians has increased legislative instability by causing waves of party switching, thereby perforating the political opportunity structure and making space for new, populist political parties. I then show how the new structures of judicial anticorruption have fractured the career lines of judges and prosecutors, while at the same time giving magistrates a reason to weaponise their growing professional heterogeneity as they struggle for control over the new and scarce professional resources brought by the anticorruption drive. This increasing complexity in both legislative and judicial spheres results in ever-growing discursive commitment to rule-following coupled with a decreasing ability to actually follow those rules as the set of veto players becomes increasingly unstable, an outcome that, following institutional theorists in sociology, I term “decoupled rationalisation.”

show abstract

“…3 Instead of working in earnest to expose corruption, the prosecution opens dead-end investigations or files shoddy indictments, and the courts regularly hand down acquittals. In the end, few, if any, important players in the political conspiracy of state capture suffer any legal consequences (Innes 2014;Popova and Post 2018).…”

Section: From State Capture To World Government: How Authoritarianism...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Will the Real Conspiracy Please Stand Up: Sources of Post-Communist Democratic Failure

Marinov¹,

Popova²

2021

Perspect. polit.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

At the start of the pandemic, it looked like the biggest COVID-related threat to democracy, in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, was executive aggrandizement. This focus, however, may lead us to overlook a bigger threat to Eastern European democracy. We argue that Eastern European democracies’ original sin of state capture has been exacerbated by the rise of conspiracy theories, whose stock has only increased with the addition of COVID misinformation. Eastern European voters struggle to differentiate between the true political conspiracy that enables private interests to control the state and conspiracies without empirical basis, such as COVID denialism, world government, or political correctness as a tyrannical plot. As a result, conspiracy theories enable the state capture camp to divide the reformist opposition and maintain their grip, while simultaneously claiming that they are governing competently and in line with European values. We use an original survey from Bulgaria and a GLOBSEC 2020 cross-national survey to explore this hypothesis. Finally, we draw some theoretical implications from the empirical evidence for assessing the nature of democratic backsliding in Eastern Europe. We call for more research on the conspiracy cleavage as a factor in explaining backsliding processes.

show abstract

Prosecuting high-level corruption in Eastern Europe

Cited by 27 publications

References 34 publications

Managers’ Perception of Corruption in Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia

Managers’ Perception of Corruption in Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia

Decoupled Rationalisation: Judicial Anticorruption and Fragmentation of Parliament and the Magistracy

Will the Real Conspiracy Please Stand Up: Sources of Post-Communist Democratic Failure

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About