The Politics of Corruption Prosecutions: Varieties of Anticorruption Campaigns
Speaker joining online, Clay Room, Nuffield College // Join Zoom Meeting https://bsg.zoom.us/j/91663686066?pwd=QWNHVEY4YzhWMUtvMHZmN0RKQWsyQT09 Meeting ID: 916 6368 6066 Passcode: 322203
In this book project, I argue that judicial anticorruption campaigns, i.e. clusters of criminal prosecutions of perpetrators of grand political corruption, vary along two dimensions: transparency and effectiveness. Transparency refers to variation in the dominant motives behind corruption prosecutions and effectiveness captures the degree of severity of the legal consequences that flow from criminal prosecutions. The intersection of these two dimensions gives us four ideal types of judicial anticorruption campaigns: 1) a rule of law breakthrough when both transparency and effectiveness are high; 2) a façade campaign when both transparency and effectiveness are low; 3) a witch hunt when transparency is low, but effectiveness is high; and 4) a frustrated corruption-curbing campaign when transparency is high, but effectiveness is low. This chapter lays out the characteristics of these four ideal types and the challenges in finding good evidence that would allow us to differentiate reliably among real-world manifestations/examples of these ideal types. The chapter also presents some evidence from an original dataset on judicial anticorruption in Eastern Europe since 2000 that post-EU accession, Bulgaria had a façade anticorruption campaign and Romania had an, albeit short-lived, rule of law breakthrough in the 2010s.
Date: 30 November 2021, 12:30 (Tuesday, 8th week, Michaelmas 2021)
Venue: Clay Room (speaker joining online)
Speaker: Maria Popova (McGill University)
Organising department: Nuffield College
Organisers: Ezequiel González Ocantos (Nuffield College), Pepper Culpepper (Nuffield College), Professor Jane Green (Nuffield College)
Organiser contact email address: maxine.collett@nuffield.ox.ac.uk
Part of: Nuffield College Political Science Seminars
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: Maxine Collett