Corruption and the crisis of the post-communist state

Crime, Law and Social Change

Volumn 27, Issue 3-4, 1997, Pages 275-297

  Holmes, Leslie ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 21944444038     PISSN: 09254994     EISSN: 15730751     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/a:1008271702238     Document Type: Article

References (17)

1. For recent analyses of corruption in various kinds of system see D. Della Porta and Y. Mény (eds), Démocratie et corruption en Europe (Paris: La Découverte, 1995);
2. H. Bakker and N. Schulte Nordholt (eds), Corruption and Legitimacy (Amsterdam: SISWO, 1996);
3. and the entire issues of Journal of Law and Society, March 1996 (23:1)
4. and International Social Science Journal, September 1996 (48:3).
5. Examples of recent allegations of corruption at the highest levels include those against three Italian prime ministers (Giulio Andreotti, Silvio Berlusconi, Bettino Craxi), Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, American president Bill Clinton, and NATO Secretary General Willy Claes.
6. Since this paper was completed, some analysts have also seen the "sleaze factor" as one of the two or three major reasons for the massive defeat of the Conservative Party in the May 1997 British election.
7. The first version of this paper was written for the international conference on Corruption in Contemporary Politics organised by the European Studies Research Institute at the University of Salford in November 1996. The publicity material for that conference included the following statement - "Each decade sees the emergence of at least one major new area of political science enquiry. In the 1970s it was terrorism. In the 1980s it was ecology. In the 1990s the new area is corruption: the first half of the decade has witnessed the exposure of corruption on an unprecedented scale. . . ."
8. The increase in the number of allegations and media reports on corruption does not necessarily mean there has been an increase in corruption. But nobody can know whether the scale has increased or not, given the nature of the beast.
9. K. Jowitt, The New World Disorder (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)
10. There were a number of comparative analyses of corruption before the 1990s - see esp. A.Heidenheimer (ed.), Political Corruption (New Brunswick: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970);
11. J. Scott, Comparative Political Corruption (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1972);
12. and M. Clarke, (ed.), Corruption (London: Frances Pinter, 1983). But the growth in both comparative and single-country analyses in the 1990s has been substantial.
13. G. Schöpflin, "Corruption, Information, Irregularity in Eastern Europe: A Political Analysis", Südosteuropa, 1984 (33: 7-8), esp. p. 400.
14. In fairness, it should be noted that, "Before the 1990s, many in the West saw corruption as a problem limited to "underdeveloped" countries. . . However, political scandals in most Western European countries mean that there is now no escaping its systematic presence in developed democracies" (D. Nelken and M. Levi, "The Corruption of Politics and the Politics of Corruption: An Overview", Journal of Law and Society, 1996 (23:1), 1). Given this, the views of Schöpflin and others are understandable.
15. Despite the numerous methodological shortcomings of attitude surveys and focus-group research, and problems in evaluating the findings, there is currently little alternative to using such data in serious attempts at determining whether or not it appears appropriate to refer to corruption-related crises in post-communist countries.
16. L. Holmes, The End of Communist Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp.63-90;
17. L. Holmes, "Corruption . . .", ch. 10.