Using a mix of ethnographic, survey, and comparative historical methodologies, this book offers an unprecedented insight into the corruption economies of Ukrainian and Belarusian universities, hospitals, and secondary schools. Its detailed analysis suggests that political turnover in hybrid political regimes has a strong impact on petty economic crime in service-provision bureaucracies. Theoretically, the book rejects the dominant paradigm that attributes corruption to the allegedly ongoing political transition. Instead, it develops a more nuanced approach that appreciates the complexity of corruption economies in non-Western societies, embraces the local meanings and functions of corruption, and recognizes the stability of new post-transitional regimes in Eastern Europe and beyond. This book offers a critical look at the social costs of transparency, develops a blueprint for a 'sociology of corruption', and offers concrete and feasible policy recommendations. It will appeal to scholars across the social sciences, policymakers and a variety of anti-corruption and social justice activists.

Perhaps no other function of a free press is as important as the watchdog role-its ability to monitor the work of the government. It is easier for politicians to get away with abusing power-wasting public funds and making poor decisions-if the press is not shining its light with what is termed "accountability reporting." This need has become especially clear in recent months, as the American press has come under virulent direct attack for carrying out its watchdog duties. Upending the traditional media narrative that watchdog accountability journalism is in a long, dismaying decline, The Watchdog Still Barks presents a study of how this most important form of journalism came of age in the digital era at American newspapers. Although the American newspaper industry contracted significantly during the 1990s and 2000s, Fordham professor and former CBS News producer Beth Knobel illustrates through empirical data how the amount of deep watchdog reporting on the newspapers' studied front pages generally increased over time despite shrinking circulations, low advertising revenue, and pressure to produce the kind of soft news that plays well on social media. Based on the first content analysis to focus specifically on accountability journalism nationally, The Watchdog Still Barks examines the front pages of nine newspapers located across the United States to paint a broad portrait of how public service journalism has changed since 1991 as the advent of the Internet transformed journalism. This portrait of the modern newspaper industry shows how papers of varying sizes and ownership structures around the country marshaled resources for accountability reporting despite significant financial and technological challenges. The Watchdog Still Barks includes original interviews with editors who explain why they are staking their papers' futures on the one thing that American newspapers still do better than any other segment of the media: watchdog and investigative reporting.

Corruption is one of the biggest global issues, ahead of extreme poverty, unemployment, the rising cost of food and energy, climate change, and terrorism. It is thought to be one of the principal causes of poverty around the globe. Its significance in the contemporary world cannot be undervalued. In this Very Short Introduction Leslie Holmes considers why the international community has only highlighted corruption as a problem in the past two decades, despite its presence throughout the millennia. Holmes explores the phenomenon from several different perspectives, from the cultural differences affecting how corruption is defined, its impact, and its various causes to the possible remedies. Providing evidence of corruption and considering ways to address it around the world, this is an important introduction to a significant and serious global issue. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

In this comparative, historical survey of three East Asian democracies, Jong-sung You explores the correlation between inequality and corruption in the countries of South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines. Drawing on a wealth of rich empirical research, he illustrates the ways in which economic inequality can undermine democratic accountability, thereby increasing the risk of clientelism and capture. Transcending the scope of corruption research beyond economic growth, this book surveys why some countries, like the Philippines, have failed to curb corruption and develop, whilst others such as South Korea and Taiwan have been more successful. Taking into account factors such as the success and failure of land reform, variations in social structure, and industrial policy, Jong-sung You provides a sound example of how comparative analysis can be employed to identify causal direction and mechanisms in political science.

In many recent democracies, candidates compete for office using illegal strategies to influence voters. In Hungary and Romania, local actors including mayors and bureaucrats offer access to social policy benefits to voters who offer to support their preferred candidates, and they threaten others with the loss of a range of policy and private benefits for voting the "wrong" way. These quid pro quo exchanges are often called clientelism. How can politicians and their accomplices get away with such illegal campaigning in otherwise democratic, competitive elections? When do they rely on the worst forms of clientelism that involve threatening voters and manipulating public benefits? Conditionality and Coercion: Electoral Clientelism in Eastern Europe uses a mixed method approach to understand how illegal forms of campaigning including vote buying and electoral coercion persist in two democratic countries in the European Union. It argues that we must disaggregate clientelistic strategies based on whether they use public or private resources, and whether they involve positive promises or negative threats and coercion. We document that the type of clientelistic strategies that candidates and brokers use varies systematically across localities based on their underlying social coalitions. We also show that voters assess and sanction different forms of clientelism in different ways. Voters glean information about politicians' personal characteristics and their policy preferences from the clientelistic strategies these candidates deploy. Most voters judge candidates who use clientelism harshly. So how does clientelism, including its most odious coercive forms, persist in democratic systems? This book suggests that politicians can get away with clientelism by using forms of it that are in line with the policy preferences of constituencies whose votes they need. Clientelistic and programmatic strategies are not as distinct as previous have argued. Oxford Studies in Democratization is a series for scholars and students of comparative politics and related disciplines. Volumes concentrate on the comparative study of the democratization process that accompanied the decline and termination of the cold war. The geographical focus of the series is primarily Latin America, the Caribbean, Southern and Eastern Europe, and relevant experiences in Africa and Asia. The series editor is Laurence Whitehead, Senior Research Fellow, Nuffield College, University of Oxford.

The book provides a detailed description of the Russian crime of the twenty-first century as well as a thorough examination of the eighty sessions of the nine-month-long trial (during 2016-2017) of Boris Nemtsovs alleged killers. It directs attention to the chief obstacle in determining what precisely happened shortly before midnight on February 27, 2015, on a bridge located a mere stones throw away from the Kremlin, in an area under the active surveillance of the Russian Federal Protective Service. The glaring absence of closed circuit videos from this most heavily guarded site in Russia is underscored. Given the absence of such key evidence, those seeking to investigate the murder have been akin to blind people stumbling about in obscurity. The attempts to penetrate this man-made fog undertaken during the course of the trial by the Nemtsov family attorneys, Vadim Prokhorov and Olga Mikhailova, as well as by numerous tenacious analysts of the crime, such as former deputy Russian energy minister Vladimir Milov, former Russian presidential economics advisor Andrei Illarionov, and leading mathematician Andrei Piontkovskii, are covered in full. The uneven case mounted by the prosecution and the scrappy defense effort of the attorneys for the alleged killers, many of them ethnic Chechens, are highlighted, as is the non-unanimous verdict which was reached by the twelve jurors. The findings of this study are in agreement with those of a number of commentators who contend that the actual organizers of the crime remain at large as does the assassinations shadowy mastermind.

‘A witty, lucid investigation into one of the great political mysteries of our time: the enduring love felt by the British people for the party which regularly manages to persuade them, against all the evidence, that it has their best interests at heart’ JONATHAN COE, author of Bournville _________________________________________________________________________________ The story of the most successful political party in the world, and a nation made in its image.   Since 2010, the Conservative Party has presided over countless corruption scandals, blundered its way through a pandemic and trapped Britain in a cycle of permanent dysfunction. This has coincided with four election wins in a row, each one with a larger share of the vote than the last. How? The strange dissonance between the Conservatives’ destructive record in government and their record of victory – which has seen them suffer only seven major defeats in the last 150 years – is one of the defining riddles of British politics. Tory Nation sets out to solve this puzzle. With dazzling clarity and insight, Samuel Earle explores the roots of the current crisis and the real reasons for the Conservatives’ success, from their ruling class origins in the eighteenth century and their disproportionate influence on the British press to their stranglehold over national identity. He also sheds light on the Conservatives’ historic appeal among the working classes and why the Labour Party so often disappoints.   Tory Nation describes the making of Britain through one party’s astonishing staying power. It’s only by reaching into our history, Earle argues, that we can understand how we got here – and how we can find a way out _________________________________________________________________________________ 'Finally, someone has explained why the British electorate behaves like Turkeys voting for Christmas. Sam Earle has set out clearly and eloquently why our democracy is incapable of solving our political problems' ROBERT VERKAIK, author of Posh Boys ‘Eviscerating. Less a political book and more a mystery novel . . . untangles the riddle of the strange cognitive dissonance between the Tories’ bumbling, destructive political record and their inexplicable electoral success’i-D  

How reforms limiting electoral misconduct completed the process of democratization Between 1850 and 1918, many first-wave democracies in Europe adopted electoral reforms that reduced the incidence of electoral malfeasance. Drawing on analysis of parliamentary deliberations and roll-call votes in France, Germany, Belgium, and the United Kingdom, Protecting the Ballot explores how these electoral changes came about. Reforms limiting electoral malfeasance came in a variety of forms. Some reforms imposed harsher punishments for bribing or the politicization of state resources during campaigns. Other changes improved electoral secrecy, providing better protection of voters' autonomy. By mandating the presence of candidate representatives supervising electoral operations, reforms also reduced the incidence of electoral fraud. Isabela Mares documents how elite splits facilitated the formation of parliamentary majorities in support of electoral reforms. The political composition of these majorities varied across countries and across issue area, depending on the distribution of political resources and the economic and electoral costs incurred by politicians with opportunities to engage in malfeasance. Unpacking the electoral determinants of the demand for reforms, Mares offers an alternative to theories of democratization that emphasize economic considerations alone. By studying the successful adoption of reforms limiting electoral irregularities in first-wave democratic transitions, Protecting the Ballot sheds light on the opportunities and obstacles for ending electoral wrongdoing in recent democracies.

This last title in the series covers the most important findings of the five yearsEU sponsored ANTICORRP project dealing with corruption and organized crime.How prone to corruption are EU funds? Has EU managed to improve governancein the countries that it assists? Using the new index of public integrity and avariety of other tools created in the project this issue looks at how EU funds andnorms affected old member states (like Spain), new member states (Slovakia,Romania), accession countries (Turkey) and the countries recipient of developmentfunds (Egypt, Tanzania, Tunisia). The data covers over a decade of structuraland development funds, and the findings show the challenges to changing governanceacross borders, the different paths that each country has experiencedand suggest avenues of reforming development aid for improving governance.

Conventional wisdom suggests that partisanship has little impact on voter behavior in Brazil; what matters most is pork-barreling, incumbent performance, and candidates' charisma. This book shows that soon after redemocratization in the 1980s, over half of Brazilian voters expressed either a strong affinity or antipathy for or against a particular political party. In particular, that the contours of positive and negative partisanship in Brazil have mainly been shaped by how people feel about one party - the Workers' Party (PT). Voter behavior in Brazil has largely been structured around sentiment for or against this one party, and not any of Brazil's many others. The authors show how the PT managed to successfully cultivate widespread partisanship in a difficult environment, and also explain the emergence of anti-PT attitudes. They then reveal how positive and negative partisanship shape voters' attitudes about politics and policy, and how they shape their choices in the ballot booth.

The Washington Post journalist and legal expert Ruth Marcus goes behind the scenes to document the inside story of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation battle and the Republican plot to take over the Supreme Court-thirty years in the making-in this "impressively reported, highly insightful, and rollicking good read" (The New York Times Book Review). In the summer of 2018 the Kavanaugh drama unfolded so fast it seemed to come out of nowhere. With the power of the #MeToo movement behind her, a terrified but composed Christine Blasey Ford walked into a Senate hearing room to accuse Kavanaugh of sexual assault. This unleashed unprecedented fury from a Supreme Court nominee who accused Democrats of a "calculated and orchestrated political hit." But behind this showdown was a much bigger one. The Washington Post journalist and legal expert Ruth Marcus documents the thirty-year mission by conservatives to win a majority on the Supreme Court and the lifelong ambition of Brett Kavanaugh to secure his place in that victory. The reporting in Supreme Ambition is full of revealing and weighty headlines, as Marcus answers the most pressing questions surrounding this historical moment: How did Kavanaugh get the nomination? Was Blasey Ford's testimony credible? What does his confirmation mean for the future of the court? Were the Democrats outgunned from the start? On the way, she uncovers secret White House meetings, intense lobbying efforts, private confrontations on Capitol Hill, and lives forever upended on both coasts. This "extraordinarily detailed" (The Washington Post) page-turner traces how Brett Kavanaugh deftly maneuvered to become the nominee and how he quashed resistance from Republicans and from a president reluctant to reward a George W. Bush loyalist. It shows a Republican party that had concluded Kavanaugh was too big to fail, with senators and the FBI ignoring potentially devastating evidence against him. And it paints a picture of Democratic leaders unwilling to engage in the no-holds-barred partisan warfare that might have defeated the nominee. In the tradition of The Brethren and The Power Broker, Supreme Ambition is the definitive account of a pivotal moment in modern history, one that will shape the judicial system of America for generations to come.

Corruption, Party, and Government in Britain, 1702-1713 offers an innovative and original reinterpretation of state formation in eighteenth-century Britain, reconceptualising it as a political and fundamentally partisan process. Focussing on the supply of funds to the army during the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-13), it demonstrates that public officials faced multiple incompatible demands, but that political partisanship helped to prioritise them, and to hammer out settlements that embodied a version of the national interest. These decisions were then transmitted to agents in overseas through a mixture of personal incentives and partisan loyalties which built trust and turned these informal networks into instruments of public policy. However, the process of building trust and supplying funds laid officials and agents open to accusations of embezzlement, fraud and financial misappropriation. In particular, although successive financial officials ran entrepreneurial private financial ventures that enabled the army overseas to avoid dangerous financial shortfalls, they found it necessary to cover the costs and risks by receiving illegal 'gratifications' from the regiments. Reconstructing these transactions in detail, this book demonstrates that these corrupt payments advanced the public service, and thus that 'corruption' was as much a dispute over ends as means. Ultimately, this volume demonstrates that state formation in eighteenth-century Britain was a contested process of interest aggregation, in which common partisan aims helped to negotiate compromises between various irreconcilable public priorities and private interests, within the frameworks provided by formal institutions, and then collaboratively imposed through overlapping and intersecting networks of formal and informal agents.

This book offers a rare insight into the transnational expansion and various corners of the illicit economy in Turkey including the smuggling of pharmaceuticals, oil, antiquities, drugs, nuclear materials and cigarettes. Mahmut Cengiz and Mitchel P. Roth provide an in depth analysis of the criminals, terrorists, money launderers, and corrupt politicians at the highest levels of the Turkish government. They analyze the unintended consequences of corruption scandals which have resulted in the purging of important law enforcement and intelligence entities formerly responsible for countering terrorism and organized crime threats as well as growing political tensions with the United States.

Counterterrorism experts and policy makers have warned of the peril posed by the links between violent extremism and organized crime, especially the relationship between drug trafficking and terrorism funding. Yet Central Asia, the site of extensive opium trafficking, sees low levels of terrorist violence. Webs of Corruption is an innovative study demonstrating that terrorist and criminal activity intersect more narrowly than is widely believed-and that the state plays the pivotal role in shaping those interconnections. Mariya Y. Omelicheva and Lawrence P. Markowitz analyze the linkages between the drug trade and terrorism financing in Central Asia, finding that state security services shape the nexus of trafficking and terrorism. While organized crime and terrorism do intersect in parts of the region, profit-driven criminal organizations and politically motivated violent groups come together based on the nature of state involvement. Governments in high-trafficking regions are drawn into illicit economies and forge relationships with a range of nonstate violent actors, such as insurgents, erstwhile regime opponents, and transnational groups. Omelicheva and Markowitz contend that these relationships can mitigate terrorism-by redirecting these actors toward other forms of violence. Offering a groundbreaking combination of quantitative, qualitative, and geographic information systems methods to map trafficking/terrorism connections on the ground, Webs of Corruption provides a meticulously researched, counterintuitive perspective on a potent regional security problem.

A NEXT BIG IDEA CLUB 'MUST-READ' CNN senior legal analyst and nationally bestselling author Elie Honig explores America's two-tier justice system, explaining how the rich, the famous, and the powerful- including, most notoriously, Donald Trump-manipulate the legal system to escape justice and get away with vast misdeeds. How does he get away with it? That question, more than any other, vexes observers of and participants in the American criminal justice process. How do powerful people weaponize their wealth, political power, and fame to beat the system? And how can prosecutors fight back? In Untouchable, Elie Honig exposes how the rich and powerful use the system to their own benefit, revealing how notorious figures like Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, and Bill Cosby successfully eluded justice for decades. He demonstrates how the Trump children dodged a fraud indictment. He makes clear how countless CEOs and titans of Wall Street have been let off the hook, receiving financial penalties without suffering criminal consequences. This doesn't happen by accident. Over the four years of his administration, Donald Trump's corruption seemed plain for all to see. The former president obstructed justice, flouted his responsibility to the Constitution, lied to the American people, and set the United States on a dark path to disunity and violence. Yet he has never been held accountable for any of his misdeeds. Why not? Untouchable holds the answer. Honig shows how Trump and others use seemingly fair institutions and practices to build empires of corruption and get away with misdeeds for which ordinary people would be sentenced to years behind bars. It's not just that money talks, Honig makes clear, but how it can corrupt otherwise reliable institutions and blind people to the real power dynamics behind the scenes. In this vital, incisive book, Honig explains how the system allows the powerful to become untouchable, takes us inside their heads, and offers solutions for making the system more honest and fairer, ensuring true justice for all-holding everyone, no matter their status, accountable for their criminal misdeeds.

Why do businesses contribute to political parties? Is money a universal language? Do business contributions to political parties convey different messages in different countries? This book answers these questions based on intensive case studies of Australia, Canada, and Germany, as well as data from other countries. Business money does talk politics. In liberal Australia and Canada, the competitive short-term focus of firms generated substantial demand for private goods that could help firms develop an advantage over their rivals. Thus, business financing of parties conveyed a pragmatic message: in exchange for small but certain financial benefits, contributing businesses expect, as a reciprocation, to receive special consideration of their lobbying efforts. Australia's left-right party system created an awareness of policy risk, which motivated ideological payments, but there was no ideological bias in business financing of politics in centrist Canada. In Germany's co-ordinated economy, the most important policies for firms tend to be the public goods defined, championed, and delivered by their business associations. In this context, the pragmatic motivation for contributions to political parties is weak. The combination of consensual political institutions and constrained parties means there is a very low risk of major policy change from election to election. So, there is also little interest in ideological financing of political parties. If money talks, what does it say? places business financing of political parties in the context of debates about political corruption and offers advice on political reform. Comparative Politics is a series for students, teachers, and researchers of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterised by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.ecprnet.eu The Comparative Politics series is edited by Professor David M. Farrell, School of Politics and International Relations, University College Dublin, Kenneth Carty, Professor of Political Science, University of British Columbia, and Professor Dirk Berg-Schlosser, Institute of Political Science, Philipps University, Marburg.

"RADICAL NATION makes it clear what is at stake. If you want to Save America you must read this-it is MAGA all the way." - PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP The Biden-Harris progressive agenda presents a radical change to the American economy, values, national security, and freedom. From the former Trump White House press secretary and New York Times bestselling author of THE BRIEFING and LEADING AMERICA comes a stark warning: Under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, America is lurching towards economic collapse, runaway inflation, wide-open borders, an all-out assault on human life and religious liberty, a K-12 school indoctrination plan, "election reforms" to ensure never-ending Democratic Party rule, and more. RADICAL NATION is a bold grassroots agenda for defending America against the Progressives' Socialist agenda. Featuring powerful stories that will move you and keep you riveted, this book will channel conservatives discouragement, anger, and betrayal into meaningful action to keep America free, strong, and secure for our children and grandchildren.

From activist, Pussy Riot member and freedom fighter Maria Alyokhina, a raw, hallucinatory, passionate account of her arrest, trial and imprisonment in Siberian jail for standing up for what she believed in. 'One of the most brilliant and inspiring things I've read in years. Couldn't put it down. This book is freedom' Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick 'A women's prison memoir like no other! One tough cookie!' @MargaretAtwood 'Once you begin reading, you are completely disarmed, unable to put it down until the last page' Marina Abramovic People who believe in freedom and democracy think it will exist forever. That is a mistake. What happened in Russia - what happened to me - could happen anywhere. When I was jailed for political protest, I learned that prison doesn't just teach you to follow the rules. It teaches you to think that you can never break them. It's inevitable that the prison gates will open at some point. But this doesn't mean that you leave the 'prisoner' category and go straight into the category of 'the free'. Freedom does not exist unless you fight for it every day. This is the story about how I made a choice.

An explosive investigation into how the United States of America built one of the largest illicit offshore finance systems in the world. For years, one country has acted as the greatest offshore haven in the world, attracting hundreds of billions of dollars in illicit finance tied directly to corrupt regimes, extremist networks, and the worst the world has to offer. But it hasn't been the sand-splattered Caribbean islands, or even traditional financial secrecy havens like Switzerland or Panama that have come to dominate the offshoring world. Instead, the country profiting the most also happens to be the one that still claims to be the moral leader of the free world, and the one that claims to be leading the fight against the crooked and the corrupt: the United States of America. American Kleptocracy examines just how the United States' implosion into a centre of global offshoring took place: how states such as Delaware and Nevada perfected the art of the anonymous shell company; how post-9/11 reformers watched their success usher in a new flood of illicit finance directly into the U.S.; how African despots and post-Soviet oligarchs came to dominate American coastlines, American industries, and entire cities and small towns across the American Midwest; how Nazi-era lobbyists birthed an entire industry of spin-men whitewashing transnational crooks and despots, and how dirty money has now begun infiltrating America's universities, think tanks, and cultural centres; and how those on the frontline are trying to restore America's legacy of anti-corruption leadership and finally end this reign of American kleptocracy. It also looks at how Trump's presidency accelerated all of the trends already on hand and how the Biden administration can, and should, act on this tawdry inheritance.

'This pioneering and judicious history of foreign intervention in elections should be read by everyone who wants to defend democracy now.' Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny The definitive account of covert operations to influence elections from the Cold War to 2016 - and why the threat is greater than ever in 2020. Russia's interference in 2016 marked only the latest chapter of a hidden and revelatory history. In Rigged, David Shimer tells the sweeping story of covert electoral interference past and present. He exposes decades of secret operations - by the CIA, the KGB, and Vladimir Putin's Russia - to shape electoral outcomes, melding deep historical research with groundbreaking interviews with more than 130 key players, from former CIA directors to a KGB general. What Americans should make of Russia's attack in 2016 is still hotly debated, even after the release of the Mueller Report and years of media coverage. Shimer shows that Putin's operation was, in fact, a continuation of an ongoing struggle, using familiar weapons radically enhanced by new technology. Casting aside partisanship and sensationalism, Rigged reveals new details about what Russia achieved in 2016, how the United States responded, and why Putin has also been interfering in elections across the globe in recent years. Understanding 2016 as one battle in a much longer war is essential to understanding the critical threat currently posed to America's electoral sovereignty and how to defend against it. Illuminating how the lessons of the past can be used to protect our democracy in the future, Rigged is an essential book for readers of every political persuasion.