Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This research focuses on the structural correlates of corruption in the global environment. Crime in its narrow sense is defined by criminal law of a state. However, this does not exhaust the whole subject matter of criminology. Selllin (1938) and Sutherland (1940) suggest that criminologists should use an expanded definition of crime based on behavior prohibited either by criminal or regulatory law. The definition of corruption we use here views the behavior as the use of one's position for illegitimate private gains (see a more detailed discussion of the corruption by Genaux, 2004). Data from Transparency International's Annual Bribe Payers Index and data from Human Development Report 2004 were merged to form a new data set for our purposes. It is found that the growth, more than inequality, is related to corruption.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: AAs the ideological gap between political parties’ narrows and party identification decreases, parties need new strategies to attract voters. Politicizing political corruption is one option and this paper explores to what extent and with what results political parties have used the issue of corruption in European parliamentary elections between 1983 and 2007. 171 electoral campaigns in 32 European democracies are analyzed and the main results are that politicization of corruption is correlated with the level of corruption. Moreover, the issue is rather under than over politicized, implying that it is not a used as a populist strategy to win votes. Rather it is established mainstream parties that are the main champions of anti-corruption. Finally, the results show that corruption allegations quite substantially increase the likelihood of governmental turnover in medium and highly corrupt countries, whereas corruption is not politicized at all in low corrupt countries.

Publication Type: Proceeding

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The proliferation of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) over the past half century has gained much attention from scholars, with increasing attention directed to the domestic impact of IGO membership. Recent work demonstrates that membership in intergovernmental organizations with a high proportion of democracies increases the likelihood of democratic survival and increases levels of democracy in member states. To gain a better understanding of democratic consolidation and its processes, it is useful to disaggregate the concept into its component parts, one such component being the level of perceived corruption. High levels of democracy are correlated with decreasing levels of corruption, and since IGO membership may have an effect on level of democracy, the question arises as to whether it also affects corruption. This paper explores the relationship between IGO membership, a state’s political and economic systems, and corruption. The main hypothesis is that IGOs exert direct and indirect influence over member states by way of the formalized rules and requirements of membership and by serving as a conduit for information, thereby affecting their level of democracy, economic performance, and level of corruption. The analysis includes all 133 countries for which data on these variables are available and covers the period 1982-1999. Time-series cross-section analysis using OLS regression with panel-corrected standard errors provides evidence of a statistically significant relationship between membership in democracy dominant IGOs and levels of perceived corruption in their member states.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper explains why, among a group of relatively similar states, certain states but not others would comply with the same international legal commitment. Drawing on concepts from the ‘ideas’ literature in comparative politics, the literature on global norms in IR, and analyses of reasoning and adjudication in legal philosophy, the paper develops a theoretical framework with which to explain variations in compliance by the US, Germany, France, and the UK with the 1997 OECD anti-bribery Convention. The central argument is that state compliance with an international commitment is a function of the effectiveness with which the global norm at stake in that commitment is articulated in a state’s domestic politics. Effective norm articulation can create the conditions under which a state is unable to produce justifiable reasons for non-compliance, and can provoke compliance despite important countervailing material interests. In the case of the OECD Convention, both powerful strategic trade interests and a powerful international anti-corruption norm are at stake. An analysis of state compliance with the OECD Convention in light of strategic trade theory, however, reveals the limitations of a materialist explanation based on the rationalist framework. Instead, an analysis of norm articulation in the four cases shows the importance of non-materialist variables, having to do with features of the actor that is doing the norm articulation in the domestic political context – the norm entrepreneur – and of the domestic political and normative context into which the global norm is introduced. These features generate four key variables: the legitimacy of the domestic norm entrepreneur; whether the norm entrepreneur enjoys access to the relevant political institutions and policy makers; whether the norm is framed as an element of a high priority policy area, with this framing the result of strategic, instrumental rationality on the part of the norm entrepreneur; and whether the norm resonates in the domestic public policy context, with this resonance a function of public sentiment.