Corruption and Anti-corruption in Post-communist Europe: major trends and lessons learned

This paper examines the state of the art in research on corruption and anti-corruption in post-communist Europe, with a focus on EU member states and the Western Balkans. It traces the development of the field, beginning with earlier literature that captured the trends of the post-communist transitions revealing entrenched practices of grand and petty corruption, shaped by socialist legacies and political power structures (Sajo 1998, Holmes 2006). The paper then moves to do three things: the first is to discuss the types of corruption that exists in the region now and its conceptualization, focusing mostly on grand and petty corruption (bribery) and reviews the claim about their ubiquitous nature in the region. The second section focuses on political corruption as an independent variable and reviews the main arguments about how corruption and its perception impact phenomena such as new party emergence and party system fragmentation, voter behavior and support for populist alternatives, public engagement with politics and protest activities. The third part reverses the causal link to outline the main arguments emerging from the literature about the causes of corruption; it zooms in on judicial dependence, political interference, concentration of power, economic underdevelopment and transnational actors as asses their role in fostering and limiting corruption in the region. The paper concludes with some lessons learned about the efficiency of anti-corruption reforms and the role played in these by international and local political actors in interplay with cultural and social characteristics.