Corruption Scandals Research Articles

Intergovernmental Conflict and Censorship: Evidence from China’s Anti-Corruption Campaign

Abstract I study how local Chinese newspapers report on the national anti-corruption campaign by collecting a large-scale dataset of newspaper articles, internet searches, and comments on social media. Despite greater reader interest, local newspapers underreport, and deemphasise corruption scandals involving high-level officials from their own province. Underreporting is greater when a corrupt official is well connected, and a newspaper does not rely on advertising revenue. City-level newspapers report less about corruption in their own city but are more likely to report about corruption within the provincial government. I present suggestive evidence that this type of localised censorship reduces the accountability of local governments.

Immobility as loyalty: ‘Voluntariness’ and narratives of a duty to stay in the context of (non)migration decision making

In order to broaden research into different forms of immobility, this article explores how immobility can be motivated by a sense of duty to stay by using data collected from residents of São Paulo, Brazil who had decided not to emigrate despite having the capability to do so. This is in the context of the increasing out-migration that Brazil is experiencing. The article argues that immobility that is motivated by a duty to stay cannot easily be classified as either voluntary or involuntary. Instead, the term ‘active immobility’ is proposed. Staying from a sense of duty to small-scale imagined social object such as ‘family’ is well documented. However, when analysing how duty can influence immobility, variations in scale are particularly important since the larger a social object is the less tangible and more abstract it becomes and thus there is a greater likelihood that there will be contestation about what that social object ‘looks like’. This article thus focuses on how a sense of duty to large scale social and geographical imaginaries such as ‘country’, ‘nation’ and ‘people’ impact (non)migration decision making. Exploring a sense of duty to be immobile amongst stayers thus reveals not only the geographical dimensions of motivations to stay but also the contested nature of the social objects that people imagine themselves as loyal to. The context is the recent political crisis in Brazil starting with the lava jato [car wash] corruption scandal and culminating in the election of President Jair Bolsonaro. These events polarised public opinion and exposed the contested nature of geographical imaginaries such as ‘Brazil’ or social imaginaries such as ‘the people’.

Judicial authority through the experiences of crisis

This article is concerned with law’s experiences and making sense of crisis. When we talk about law’s response to crisis, we refer to law not as an abstract set of rules but as an embodied and animated assemblage of relations and practices. This way, law needs to make sense of any crisis to respond to it. The article draws on cultural legal studies to explore the constitution of judicial authority in the context of a democracy in flux. The article relies on fieldwork data collected in the interviews conducted by the author with Lithuanian judges in 2019. Highest in more than two decades, public trust in the judiciary in 2018 indicated a remarkable achievement for Lithuania, a country whose judicial system had been in a state of flux since the end of the Soviet era. However, after an unprecedented and highly mediated judicial corruption scandal in 2019, the rates of public trust plummeted, uncovering complex dynamics between the image of courts, mass media, and the public. Against this backdrop, the article explores how judges make sense of crisis that develops on the intersections of provocative reality judging and formal judicial institutions. It shows how judicial authority is constituted in the conditions of crisis on the tension between law and culture. Emerging from a crisis of authority is the changing face of judging. A post-colonial vantage point and theatrical jurisprudence are used to respond to a development of a desire of power under a mask of rationality, objectivity, and universality. The article concludes by contemplating how this authority shapes our lifeworlds.

Corruption and Political Knowledge Erosion. A Cautionary Tale from Latin America

Abstract Previous research has shown that corruption diminishes citizens’ level of political support and engagement. We extend this line of reasoning and evaluate whether previous levels of perceived corruption can influence subsequent levels of political knowledge. We test this proposition with data from a two-wave panel probability survey applied in Chile between 2016 and 2017, just after a 2-year period in which an avalanche of corruption scandals shook the country. Our estimates confirm that perceived corruption reduces subsequent political knowledge, while controlling for prior knowledge. This pattern is particularly strong among non-ideologues and people ideologically distant from the incumbent government. Given the status of political knowledge as a democratically valuable trait, our results uncover some normatively disturbing consequences of corruption.

ANALYSIS OF THE FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT OF MUNICIPAL ENTERPRISES IN BLAGOEVGRAD WITH Z-SCORE MODEL

It is generally accepted that municipal property is a basic prerequisite for financial autonomy and administrative independence of local authorities. In Bulgaria, municipalities received ownership rights from the Constitution (1991) and this regulation was further confirmed by the Law on Local Self-Government and Local Administration (1991). In 1996 municipal property was finally settled with the adoption of the Law on Municipal Property and the Law on State Property. In the late 1990s local governments received significant amounts of assets from the central government. The process was accompanied by abuses of administrative authority, corruption scandals, and financial mismanagement. Two decades latter, Bulgarian municipalities have different types of assets, but the effectiveness of local financial management is still a topical issue. This paper aims to analyse and estimate the financial performance of nine enterprises owned by Blagoevgrad municipality with Z-Score model. The analyzed period covers the years from 2006 to 2020. The results indicate that municipal enterprises can achieve profitability while providing a wide range of services to the local community.

A car wash: post-truth politics, Petrobras and ethics of the real

PurposeThe study draws upon three accounts to examine post-truth politics and its link to accounting. In studying Petrobras, a Brazilian petrochemical company embroiled in a corruption scandal, the authors draw upon a politics of falsity to understand how different depictions of similar events can emerge. The authors depict Petrobras' corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosures during the period of corruption juxtaposed against the Brazilian Federal Police investigation (the Lava Jato/Car Wash Operation) and Petrobras' response to the allegations of institutional corruption.Design/methodology/approachThe data set consisted of 56 Petrobras reports including Annual Reports, Financial Statements, Sustainability Reports and Form 20-Fs from 2004 to 2017, information disclosed by the Brazilian Federal Police concerning the Lava Jato Operation and media reports concerning Petrobras and the corruption scandal. The paper employs a discourse analysis approach to depict and interpret the accounts.FindingsThrough examining the connection between ontic accounts and ontological presuppositions, the authors illustrate a post-truth logic underpinning accounting, due to the interpretive, contestable and contingent nature of accounting information. Consequently, the authors turn to the “ethics of the real” as a response, as citizen subjects must be cautious in how they approach accounting and CSR disclosures.Originality/valueRather than relying on simplistic true/false dualities, the authors argue that the “ethics of the real” provides a courageous position for citizen subjects to interrogate the organisation by recognising the role of discourse and disclosure expectations on organisations in a post-truth environment. The study also illustrates how competing, contingent accounts of the same timeframe and events can emerge.

When Theatre Can Wait

On October 17, 2019, riots broke out in Lebanon in response to heightened economic pressure and corruption scandals surrounding the political elite. Within days, Lebanon witnessed one of its largest protests with people flooding the streets across the country and repurposing public spaces. As a resident at the time and activist in solidarity, I searched for theatre arts initiatives within the protest movement. A colleague ended my hunt with one, clear statement: “Theatre can wait.” She argued that this was a time to regroup, to stand en masse with people in the streets. Only a few months later, the pandemic-induced lockdown that swept over Lebanon and abroad enforced another form of silence on theatre artists and activists. The streets went quiet, theatres stood empty, doors were shut. In both of these instances, with or without deliberation, theatre stood still. My colleague's words during the protests - and the context of pandemic lockdown that followed - led me to question when, if at all, theatre should be silent, specifically within the activist initiatives. In the midst of protest movements, what is the significance of socially engaged theatre practice that is still: is it a reflective pause, an opportunity to (re)consider activist strategies, to collectively listen and gather strength? If so, how is the significance of silence transformed when it is imposed by physical restrictions? The following provocation argues that engaging with the idea of silence is an essential skill within the context of socio-political urgency and protest-led calls to action that resound globally today.

The effects of revealing the prosecution of political corruption on local finances

This paper analyzes the financial implications on local public budgets of disseminating information about the prosecution of political corruption at the local level. We build a database from a wave of corruption scandals in Spain to use a quasi-experimental design and find that after corruption is revealed, both local public revenues and expenditures decrease significantly (approximately by 7 and 5%, respectively) in corruption-ridden municipalities. The effect lasts for a period of time equivalent to a full electoral term and comes mostly from other economic agents’ unwillingness to fund or start new projects in municipalities where the prosecution of corruption has been revealed. These results imply that if one of the consequences of corruption is the inefficient allocation of funds to areas where corrupt politicians can extract more rents, the revelation of the corruption scandal frees up resources that can be used to fund activities with a higher social return.

Reputational risk on corporate corruption scandals: evidence from Latin America

PropósitoEste trabajo evalúa cómo los escándalos de corrupción afectan el riesgo reputacional corporativa en las principales empresas representativas de América Latina que cotizan en bolsa y su efecto en la hipótesis del mercado eficiente (EMH) en el índice Standard & Poors.Diseño/metodología/enfoquePrimero realizamos un estudio de eventos estándar para evaluar el impacto negativo de tales episodios de corrupción en términos de retornos anormales (AR) y retornos anormales negativos acumulativos (CAR). En segundo lugar, utilizamos la pérdida operativa derivada del escándalo de corrupción dividida por la capitalización bursátil (índice de pérdidas) para estimar los rendimientos anormales de reputación (RepAR) y su medida acumulativa (RepCAR).HallazgosLos resultados muestran que la reputación corporativa (CR) no afecta el desempeño bursátil de las empresas involucradas en los hechos de corrupción, al menos, en el corto plazo. Los resultados muestran RepCARs positivos debido a pérdidas aún desconocidas de efecto relativo de corrupción luego del anuncio del escándalo por parte de los stakeholders.Implicaciones prácticasEl comportamiento del mercado ante los escándalos de corrupción en América Latina nos debe permitir explorar otras opciones para penalizar sobornos, y el estudio de eventos con una perspectiva de EMH es parte de este trabajo.Implicaciones socialesLa corrupción se ha convertido en uno de los principales problemas en los últimos años en América Latina y esto afecta a los stakeholders.Originalidad/valorObservando en la literatura existente, no se encuentra estudios basados ​​en los escandalos de corrupción y precio de mercado utilizando metodología de eventos.

Mistresses, mothers, and headscarves: media representations of women in corruption scandals in Indonesia

ABSTRACT This article engages with the ways through which women were discursively represented in media reports on corruption cases in Indonesia. Moving away from the traps of universalism and essentialism in conceptualising the causes and consequences of corruption, we unpack the dominant views and contextualise corruption in local-historical perspectives. Our main argument is that gendered meanings around women and corruption in Indonesian news media were constituted through the dominant religious and socio-political discourses; and the consequences were the (re)productions of stereotypical and simplistic meanings around women and corruption. Employing critical discourse analysis on 547 selected Indonesian newspaper articles reporting corruption scandals from 2010 to 2020, we identified three key discourses through which meanings around corruption and women were constituted, namely, a discourse of promiscuous sexuality, a discourse of moral ibuism, and a discourse of Islamic piety. The analysis drew attention to the importance of situating corruption and gendered media representation as an intersecting problem embedded in the social, political, religious, and historical contexts; as opposed to the dominant universal, objective, and positivist approaches to corruption studies.

SEYCHELLES: Corruption Scandal

Africa Research Bulletin: Economic, Financial and Technical SeriesVolume 59, Issue 1 p. 23731C-23732A Policy and Practice SEYCHELLES: Corruption Scandal First published: 04 March 2022 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6346.2022.10434.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume59, Issue1March 2022Pages 23731C-23732A RelatedInformation

Re‐imagining belonging to Brazil: Active immobility in times of crisis

AbstractThis paper uses qualitative data conducted in São Paulo, Brazil with those who possessed the capability to emigrate yet had chosen to remain in place. It explores the strategies these ‘stayers’ employed to create and reproduce a sense of belonging to place in the midst of political disruption and alienation. This is in the context of Brazil's lava jato (car wash) political corruption scandal which culminated in the election of President Bolsonaro and affected many Brazilian citizens' sense of belonging. Particular attention is paid to the way articulations of subnational and supranational scales of belonging relate to the national. Belonging at the national scale remains salient but through a process of interpolation with affective, local, urban and cosmopolitan forms of belonging. Immobility thus becomes an active practice through the (re)imagining and re‐scaling of a sense of belonging. Developing this concept of ‘active’ immobility recognises immobility as a phenomenon that is driven by individual and structural elements that are as diverse and dynamic as those that affect mobility. The paper contributes to debates about the relationship between forms of local national and cosmopolitan belonging.

SamuelsAnnemarie. After the tsunami: disaster narratives and the remaking of everyday life in Aceh. xiv, 199 pp., map, illus., bibliogr. Honolulu: Univ. of Hawai‘i Press, 2019. £68.00 (cloth)StrasslerKaren. Demanding images: democracy, mediation, and the image‐event in Indonesia. 368 pp., illus., bibliogr. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2020, £24.99 (paper)

SamuelsAnnemarie. After the tsunami: disaster narratives and the remaking of everyday life in Aceh. xiv, 199 pp., map, illus., bibliogr. Honolulu: Univ. of Hawai‘i Press, 2019. £68.00 (cloth)StrasslerKaren. Demanding images: democracy, mediation, and the image‐event in Indonesia. 368 pp., illus., bibliogr. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2020, £24.99 (paper)

Fighting economic crime during the pandemic: a Sri Lankan perspective

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to understand the dual crisis in Sri Lanka during the pandemic. The health crisis was followed by democratic backsliding which directly impacted the fight for economic crime. The pre-pandemic political commitment to fight corruption is assessed with the pandemic environment and the policy decisions by the Government. Sri Lanka was a detailed case study of how politicians exploited the pandemic environment to suppress democracy and move their semi-autocratic agenda forward. However, Sri Lanka was not the only nation that faced such autocratic sentiments losing the democratic values. This paper discusses recommendations for improving the resources and investment to address economic crime in Sri Lanka.Design/methodology/approachSecondary data was used for the analysis introducing a theoretical framework referring to the work of Michel Foucault and Francis Fukuyama. The secondary data was used to develop an argument aligning political science with economic crime.FindingsThe Government disciplinary project launched during the pandemic directly impacted Sri Lankan democracy and structural changes made to the constitution. The heavy militarization was a sign of departure of long-cherished values of democracy in the country. Political clientelism backed by nepotism interfered with judicial independence and the fight against economic crime. Many accused, including those responsible for the largest corruption scandal, were not punished. The trust deficit has widened significantly between authorities and the public on fighting corruption in Sri Lanka.Research limitations/implicationsThere are more factors for democratic backsliding than what is presented in this paper. The economic crime environment in Sri Lanka has many dimensions and the paper only highlights a few areas limiting to the secondary data available.Originality/valueThe paper discusses a unique perspective on how a pandemic could be misused to strengthen the autocratic rule and make structural changes to a nation, including constitution amendments. The pandemic environment was used to commit economic crime and suppress public opinion projecting the health crisis in the lockdown environment.

The Philippines in 2021

In his last year in office, populist Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte faced the deadly surge of the Delta variant of the COVID-19 pandemic. His government continued to struggle with the health crisis despite implementing one of the most heavy-handed lockdowns in the world. In his final State of the Nation address, he trumpeted his administration’s “war on drugs” and ordered the military to hunt communist insurgents and “shoot them dead.” At the same time, he admitted that he has failed in his “war on corruption,” the second plank in his 2016 campaign platform. His admission foreshadowed the biggest corruption scandal of his administration. The Senate uncovered evidence of financial misuse, particularly for supplies from Pharmally Pharmaceutical, a business formed just months before securing billions of pesos in government supply contracts. The controversy has eroded Duterte’s popularity ratings, but he has retained high enough numbers to leverage political support in the upcoming 2022 presidential election and deflect impending International Criminal Court prosecution for his bloody drug war.

Contagious Dishonesty: Corruption Scandals and Supermarket Theft

Is dishonest behavior contagious? We answer this question by studying whether corruption scandals affect the propensity of supermarket customers to steal while using a self-service checkout system. Crucially, this system provides shoppers with the opportunity to engage in dishonest behavior by under-reporting the value of their shopping cart. Exploiting data from random audits on shoppers, we show that the probability of a shopper underreporting increases by 16% after a local corruption scandal is made public. The effect starts immediately and is particularly strong during the first four days after the story breaks. This effect is not driven by any change in material incentives or social norms. Rather, we show that it is due to a reduction in the self-imposed moral cost of stealing and is mainly concentrated among taxpayers.

Interest Articulation and Lobbying in Unregulated Legal Contexts: The Case of Albania

The main argument of this paper is that the legal regulation of lobbying is an important factor for disciplining/curbing the undue (illicit) influence of different interests’ groups on the political-making process, especially in countries with post-communist and nonconsolidated democracies as Albania. In three decades of political and economic transition from a one-party communist system to a democratic one and towards a market economy, the democratization of Albania has faced various problems, which have often led to a loss of public confidence in the political class and apathy of citizens towards the political system. In many cases, this has come as a result of the perception or even the disclosure by the media and the public of corruption scandals, political clientelism, or undue influences in the decision-making processes in Albania. Surely, it can be said that political scandals of trading or exercising illicit influences on public officials can affect, as numerous cases have shown, every democratic political system in the world. However, they are more likely to occur in new democracies (post-communist) countries that face weak state structures and a legal environment that is not yet well consolidated and where a culture of informality exists alongside written rules and laws. For this purpose, that of disciplining and controlling the influences that specific interests exert on the decision-making process of governments, legislatures, or other regulatory agencies, a good part of European countries have considered undertaking legal regulatory initiatives for lobbying activity in their environments.

Lack of public participation and good governance, who is fooling who?

This empirical paper sought to determine the lack of public participation and good governance, and to understand who is turning the blind eye on the issue. Local government municipalities have the obligation to exercise good governance, this is to ensure that there is quality service delivery and engagements between the municipalities becomes greater. Therefore, the municipalities are therefore responsible to establish the criterion for participation, transparency, adherence to the rule of law, effectiveness, equity, responsibility, accountability, and consistency. However, in the local government all these important aspects of good governance are neglected and avoided. The question of who is fooling who? Is basically an intention to point out that the idea of good governance does not have a single side but the public, the organisations and the state are included? For the good governance and the democracy of participation there must be an increase in the quality of feedback and the processes of policy formulation, and most importantly with the prevalence of participation. In the south African local government, municipalities have diluted the importance of public participation and that has caused the growing corruption scandals, protests, low service delivery and failing governments.

CORRUPTION IN LAND ADMINISTRATION AND GOVERNANCE: A HURDLE TO TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE IN POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA?

The persistence of corruption in post-apartheid South Africa and the failure to control it adequately pose a significant threat to the country’s transitional justice project and transformation imperatives. This article provides a detailed account of the depth and impact of corruption in land administration and governance in South Africa. It relies on the documented evidence of corruption scandals to establish the emerging trends, scope and impact of land-related corruption. The article is premised on the notion that corruption (which has become an intrinsic political norm in South Africa) not only impedes development and exacerbates rife inequalities in land ownership and access as a result of the apartheid regime, but also strangles the aims and objectives of transitional justice, which are to alleviate those inequalities. A further premise is that land-related corruption is a direct manifestation of untrammeled political power, patronage and impunity. The article problematises the latter premise and tackles the former by attempting to understand the complex interfaces between land, human rights, corruption and women in South Africa. Women are singled out from vulnerable groups because land ownership has traditionally been, and arguably still is, a male privilege. Of concern is the scale and pace of corruption, which boosts this anomaly, allowing it to thrive exponentially in post-apartheid South Africa. The article also presents a brief overview of operational and institutional challenges facing various initiatives aimed at combatting corruption generally. It concludes by proposing some realistic options to consider for the way forward.

USE OF BUDGET REGULATION MECHANISMS OF THE NATIONAL ECONOMY IN THE SOCIO-ECONOMIC MODEL OF UKRAINE

The article is devoted to the review and analysis of the possibilities of using budgetary regulatory mechanisms in Ukraine. Based on previous research, a hypothesis was put forward about the characteristics of budget regulation depending on the socio-economic model of the country, namely the ratio of three vectors of influence: state, social and market. In order to determine the inherent features of the model of Ukraine, an analysis of the dynamics of the main structural items of revenue and expenditure of Ukraine, assessed the effectiveness of such changes in the domestic economy and their impact on the economic environment over the past five years. In the course of the research, the items of expenditures and the main sources of budget revenues were considered separately. Thus, the analytical analysis of the income part allows us to claim an increase in the tax burden on individuals and entrepreneurs, but at the same time indicates a decrease in the share of income from rent for the use of natural resources. In addition, the increase in the minimum wage led to an increase in the transition of the share of workers in the «shadow», which in turn did not allow to realize the forecasts for an increase in this article of income. Along with this, the increase in revenues from entrepreneurial activities due to the nationalization of some enterprises and financial institutions, indicates a relatively large share of the role of the state in shaping the budget process, but also indicates its inefficiency. The decrease in the share of revenues from value added tax and excise duty also reveals the shortcomings of the NBU’s monetary policy and the corruption component in customs. Calculations of the dynamics of growth of absolute indicators of budget revenue items indicate a predominant excess of dynamics on inflation, which in turn confirms the thesis of increasing the tax burden against the background of the economic downturn during the global pandemic. In this case, the use of deterrence instruments (increase in taxes, increase in the discount rate) is not considered appropriate by the state regulator during the phase of decline in terms of generally accepted economic theories. The analysis of budget expenditures by articles indicates the state’s efforts to respond to current challenges. There is a clear increase in health and defense spending. But at the same time, expenditures on education, environmental protection and utilities do not have such a dynamic upward trend. Attempts to use «monetary mitigation» mechanisms in the context of the implementation of the «Big Construction» plan were not effective: the increase in jobs was insignificant, and corruption scandals with budget funding and dubious tenders again indicate the inefficiency of state institutions in general and the budget process in particular. As a result, it is necessary to emphasize the need for a gradual reorientation of the socioeconomic model to a more balanced one, taking into account current trends in the world economy. Indeed, the role of the state in times of crisis is very important. But the state must be effective in its regulatory activities. Therefore, the creation of powerful public organizations and the development of market mechanisms will help balance economic development and prevent the monopolization of Ukraine’s economy.