Volume 66, Issue 3

Corruption literature has paid little attention to the way corruption discourses reflect specific ideological agendas. This paper aims to address such shortcoming by comparing official corruption discourses in Albania and Colombia during the last seven years. The paper shows that despite similar levels of corruption, the leaders of the two countries articulate corruption in slightly different ways. While the prime minster of Albania Edi Rama articulates corruption narrowly as bribery, a phenomenon that pertains almost exclusively to the public sector, president Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia articulates it more broadly as a phenomenon that has moral, ethical and cultural dimensions, which can also originate in the private sector although more pervasive in the public one. Based on the findings of this paper, these divergent articulations reflect ideological variations between the two leaders more than different corruption ‘realities’ on the ground.

The research to date shows conflicting results about the effect of perceived corruption on political participation by the public. Corruption perception can mobilize, demobilize, or show no impact on political participation. The Brazilian Anti-Vote-Buying Law of 1999, one of the fastest laws ever to be approved in the country, is an example of how perceived corruption can increase public engagement. Using process tracing, the author tells this story identifying two sets of factors ranked according to their causal power (distal and proximal conditions) and further test the theory. The Brazilian population, who perceived corruption as high, learned about the antidemocratic aspects of vote buying and how to curb it. This ‘informed’ perception of corruption led people to politically participate by signing the popular initiative.

Combining research into the law with the conceptual framework offered by legal anthropology contributes to a more thorough understanding of how individuals experience corruption and anti-corruption legislation. Interviews with elderly Hungarians allow a deeper understanding of traditions and individual behaviour that influence the implementation of anti-corruption law. Informal payments in health care, in the realm of petty or everyday corruption, have become social traditions based on a general faith in their ability to organize and determine social and individual relations. At the same time, they have turned out to be exceptional challenges as far as their legal adjudication is concerned, as individuals are keen to find stability and reliability in norms, traditions and personal relationships outside the scope of the law.

Social practices, such as connections ( veze ) and gift giving, are often labelled as socialist legacies that lead to corruption and are contrary to the establishment of market practices in postsocialist societies. This paper investigates the effects of the selective opening of aspects of maternal care to market practices on patient–provider relationships. Ethnographic research indicates that doctors are navigating between the constraints and opportunities afforded by both sectors, private and public, to negotiate their daily interactions with patients. In the attempt to maintain both authority and trust with their patients in a very precarious economic and social context, doctors have to be both medical experts and entrepreneurs. This practice points towards the conclusion that it may not be the legacies of socialism that have created the need for finding new ways of forging connections between medical providers and their patients, but rather the unbundling of socialist healthcare into the market.

The outbreak of corruption scandals involving elected officials has raised criticism concerning the quality of parliamentary representation in Romania. The public image of the legislature rapidly became that of a ‘reactionary gathering of criminals’, persons who use public office in order to cover abuses of power and office. The core contestation of the legislature aimed above all at the usage by parliament of its constitutional privileges and immunities in order to postpone / impede criminal investigations against members of the legislative. Starting from the analysis of the parliamentary speeches of the members of parliament (MPs) under criminal investigation on corruption charges, this paper focuses on the evolving dynamic of acceptance and contestation with respect to the implementation of anticorruption policies. The paper highlights, based on the analysis of the justifications put forward on the occasion of parliamentary hearings, the gradual configuration of a trans-partisan division within the legislature, promoting countervailing, ‘anti-anticorruption’ discourses, which pit ‘anticorruption’ and democratic representation against each other.

Despite decades of international efforts against it, corruption continues to present multiple challenges to governments, businesses, academics, and the public. This article highlights the importance of complexity, ambivalence and context-sensitive approach to understanding and tackling corruption, and suggests an agenda for future anti-corruption research and policy.

With a view of Georgian cinema under the current spotlights of various international film festivals, the author reviews the state of the art of Georgian film production, linking it to the impressively long history of Georgia’s cinematographic production. Recently, a targeted film promotion policy has focused on international co-productions and on fostering cooperative ventures with European partners. Among the young filmmakers a remarkably large proportion are female.