Volume 23, Issue 2

Drawing on historical and contemporary evidence from Great Britain and Italy, this article examines actions that fall under official definitions of corruption and actions that are not illegal but are widely regarded as morally corrupt. As a social anthropologist, I argue that when dealing with the complexity of corruption and abuses of power, we need to identify what aspects of the system encourage or generate illicit practices (illegal and legal) and what aspects could instead generate real change. It is imperative to assess the precise identity of the dividing line between the legitimate and the illegitimate and between the legal and the moral, and to address both the exact relationship of the protagonists in public life to formal law and its production and their perceived legitimacy in the broader society. Empirical evidence suggests that the production of the law must take into account the moralities which inform the definition of legitimacy at the grassroots, for legislation that enjoys such legitimacy is authoritative-therefore effective-legislation, and thus is governance that benefits from and abides by such legislation.

Integrity ought logically to be a particularly important concept within political science. If those acting within the political system do not have integrity, our ability to trust them, to have confidence in their actions, and perhaps even to consider them legitimate can be challenged. Indeed, the very concept of integrity goes some way towards underwriting positive views of political actors. Yet, despite this importance, political science as a discipline has perhaps focused too little on questions of integrity. Where political science has looked at the subject of integrity, it has often done so without using the specific linguistic formulation “integrity”. Most commonly, the focus has instead been on “corruption”—a strand of research which has produced results that cannot always be translated into discussions of integrity, by virtue of its narrower focus upon the “negative pole” of public ethics. Other measures, such as “Quality of Government”, focus on positive attributes, notably impartiality, but this also fails fully to capture the notion of integrity: dishonesty can be impartial. Specific formal “codes” used within public life and among political practitioners can be much more nuanced than the most widely used measures, and can be much closer to what we understand—academically—as “integrity”. This paper argues that the hard conceptual and empirical work of elaborating integrity into a fully operationalizable concept offers the potential reward of an analytical concept that is more closely aligned with political reality.

This study is an empirical approach to answering the question: are there any universal factors that account for the origin, diffusion and persistence of corruption in human societies? The paper enquires whether the perception of corruption in politics and economics can be tackled as a form of cultural adaptation, driven by exogenous and endogenous forces. These are respectively: freedom of access and management of economic resources, and the pressures towards human grouping. Following the analytical insights of cultural theory, developed by Mary Douglas and later Aaron Wildavsky, variation is introduced through the ways in which corruption is perceived through the different behavioral and cultural biases that prevail in societies. This research introduces a cross-country comparative analysis of 57 countries attempting to test quantitatively whether institutional pressure and emphasis towards social grouping are correlated with corruption perception at country levels.

Niche parties have been increasingly successful during the last 30 years and have accordingly received a lot of scholarly attention. So far most of the focus has been on Green and radical right parties, and to a more limited extent, regional parties. In this paper I analyze the electoral fates and policy outcomes of another type of niche party, namely those focusing on anti-corruption, whose successes culminated during the 2000s. The study is limited to all new parties campaigning on the issue of anti-corruption in Central and Eastern Europe since the fall of the Berlin wall and the questions to be answered are: To what extent are these parties successful in obtaining relevant positions in the government so that they are able to effectively fight corruption? What impact do they have on anti-corruption measures, thereby influencing the level of corruption? How successful are these parties in the elections that follow? In short, to what extent do anticorruption parties matter? Apart from electoral and governmental data, the analysis is based on the Freedom House Nation in Transit annual reports, in which one section deals with the efforts to curb corruption. The results are rather mixed, but indicate that the more influential positions the anti-corruption parties (ACPs) have in government, the better are their anti-corruption performances. That implies that they are serious and competent enough to tackle those issues, despite their newness and lack of experience. Not surprisingly, the incumbent ACPs fare worse than those in opposition in subsequent elections, but quite a few still remain popular. Finally, all but one party abandoned their anti-corruption rhetoric in their second election, which implies that anti-corruption is a different type of issue, compared to the ones used by previous niche parties.

This essay draws on comparative ethnographic material from Albania and Italy. It addresses different forms of corruption, arguing that in order to understand the way in which phenomena such as corruption occur and are experienced in any given society, we should contextualize them in the historical and cultural traditions of that specific society. In doing so, however, we should be alert in avoiding falling into the trap of either moral relativism or cultural determinism. The essay suggests that an anthropological analysis of corruption should distinguish between legal rules and social norms. In particular, the empirical study of such norms helps to understand the meanings—both individual and inter-subjective—that actors give to the social and political situation in which they operate.

In the past two decades academic and research literature on “corruption” has flourished. During the same period organizations and initiatives fighting against corruption have also significantly expanded, turning “anti-corruption” into a new research subject. However, despite a few exceptions there is a division of labor between scholars who study corruption itself and those who study the global anti-corruption industry. Juxtaposing corruption’s local discourses and anti-corruption international practices, this article is an attempt to bring together these two intertwined research dimensions and explore how an ethnographic approach might contribute to framing them together. Firstly, it describes how corruption in Romania is often conceptualized and explained in terms of national heritage, something related to old and recent cultural history, including traditional folklore. Secondly, it explores how anti-corruption works in practice, focusing on international legal cooperation projects monitoring the progress and shortcomings both prior to and post Romania’s accession to the European Union. Finally, revealing the articulations of these two apparently unrelated research fields, the article argues that corruption’s local explanations and the circular logic of auditing observed within the anti-corruption industry share a common developmental ideology mirroring the crypto-colonialist structure of power relations and dependency among European nation-states emerging out of the Cold War.

The aim of this article is to describe the consequences of state intervention at the local level after a destructive earthquake hit the south of Italy in 1980. The kind of intervention adopted, the amount of financial investment and the way in which it was distributed affected the social and economic equilibrium of the local community in terms of perceptions of trust, patronage and effects on development.

Words and phrases must be interpreted within the proper cultural and contemporary political and historical context. In particular, the language of politics is distinguished by the use of specific terms and phrases which often allude to other associated meanings. This means that caution must be exercised when interpreting the terms used not only within the context of the other language, but often also within its own linguistic context. The translator or commentator has to be familiar with the language code used in the given environment and within the cultural biases of that particular society so that meanings are not lost and the often crucial connotations are not misinterpreted. Political rhetoric often employs words and language in a manipulative yet frequently subtle manner. This paper analyzes examples of shifts in language code by looking at a number of cases in Japan and their cultural construction where loss of integrity and backstage practices are at stake.

Slovak Slavistics has adopted the interdisciplinary research approach based on examining the processes involved in language, literature, history, culture, ethnics and religion. From a scholarly and investigative point of view, Slovak Slavistics is primarily concerned with researching Slovak and Slavic relations, and Slovak and non-Slavic relations. Although Slavistics at home and abroad has been affected by the recession, it maintains its role of accelerating systematic and comprehensive investigation. The priority of Slovak Slavistics, both in a domestic and international context, is to safeguard scholarly outputs and make them available in the competitive international arena. Ensuring continuity in Slavistic research is also important and is not merely a question of prestige, but is also a fundamental means of continually improving the quality of the academic discipline. Internationally recognised Slavistic research is conducted in collaboration with the Ján Stanislav Institute of Slavistics at the Slovak Academy of Sciences. The institute sees modern Slavistics in Slovakia as having currency and exigency. Slovak Slavistic research is indispensable, provides continuity and constitutes an inseparable component of wider Central European and international Slavistic research.

The following contribution is an overview of the gradual and systematic establishment of the institutional foundations of Slovak Slavistics. It looks at how the research focus and programme were developed and its coordination centre set up, beginning in 1988.Following that, the Slovak Committee of Slavists was established and its were statutes drawn up. Preparations then began for the 11th International Congress of Slavists in 1993. The Department of Slavistics at the Slovak Academy of Sciences was also established, becoming the Ján Stanislav Institute of Slavistics in 2005. The article describes in detail the initial beginnings of the programmatic focus of research in Slovak Slavistics, highlighting the difficulties encountered and the various twists and turns that complicated the process of establishing the research programme and institutionalising Slovak Slavistics. It also stresses the results produced thus far and its future prospects.

In his paper the author argues that interdisciplinary research and collaboration between different scientific branches are important in ensuring that research captures the wider picture. The author ascertains common points in history, ethnology, dialectology, and folkloristics by looking at various examples of onomastic research conducted in Slovakia. The research findings are part of broad pan-Slavic research and are important in Slovak Slavistics as well.

The article is devoted to an analysis of Carpathian-Balkan studies conducted by the Russian Academy of Sciences since 2006. The Slovak tradition is an important one, as it displays characteristics which are common to the Carpathian region as a whole. Furthermore, there are a number of Carpathian-South Slavic and Carpathian-Balkan parallels in terminology and related phenomena in folk culture.

In Slovakia Slavic literary studies can be found at the institutes of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (SAS) and at university departments. The only SAS institute to truly focus on Slavic studies is the Ján Stanislav Institute of Slavistics. Other SAS institutes that deal with Slavic studies to a lesser extent are the Institute of Slovak Literature and the Institute of World Literature. There are also Slavic-oriented academic initiatives involving short-term projects. Considering this situation, there is a need to prepare a programme for Slavic literary studies in Slovakia so that a framework can be created outlining a new, systematic approach.

The article introduces readers to the current state of Slovak studies in Russia. The fate of Slavic studies in Russia is complicated and it has had its ups (late 19th and early 20th century) and downs (1920s and 1930s), but until now there has been a multidisciplinary tradition of studying all Slavic peoples, their languages, literature, history and culture. The article focuses on the study of Slovak language, literature, history and culture at Moscow State University, the Institute for Slavic Studies in Moscow, and Saint-Petersburg State University. It deals with the main researchers and their work and publications. The article is based on general research into the history of Slavic studies carried out by leading Russian scientists.

This study refers to the discursive transformation in perceptions of preschool age children generated by central European Union policy on early childhood education and care. This policy is representative of the pervasion of contemporary entrepreneurial culture and curricula within preschool education. At the same time, the field is also starting to become subordinated to the neoliberal trend of economising the social. This study highlights the fact that, within discourses on the child, these trends are encouraging a particular conception of childhood and of developmental theories. This conception is also enabling entrepreneurial logic to be applied to the preschool education sector via the use of theoretical tools. Consequently, children are being shaped into so-called knowledge-workers, or gold-collar workers, as they are referred to in current employment discourse. Even authorised preschool education documents (e.g. NAEYS’s Developmentally Appropriate Practice etc.) are responding to this transformation by introducing a new type of normality into this sphere, as can be seen in the Slovak state education programme for preschool education.