Public authorities often enforce pollution abatement through monitoring and penalties. However, monitoring is costly and only a small percentage of firms are monitored. Inspectors may be corrupt and permit evasion for a bribe. For firms in developing countries, it is expensive to enter formally and install costly abatement technologies, which are accessible only to formal firms. This paper studies a framework where firms, depending on abatement cost, the probability of inspection, the likelihood of a corrupt inspector and the bribe, choose whether to organize formally or informally and whether to abate before inspection. Firms that do not abate beforehand are liable to either pay a penalty and abate or close down post-inspection. Greater monitoring and lower abatement costs encourage firms to move towards formal organization, while excessively high penalties may discourage entry.

Milícias are mafia-style organizations, often composed of current and former state agents, that have rapidly expanded in areas with limited state presence and weak legal oversight. In Rio de Janeiro, their territorial control is not maintained by coercion alone, but also through strategic political alliances. This article theorizes and tests a mechanism linking milícia expansion to electoral politics: milícias deliver concentrated electoral support to specific politicians, who in return shield their operations by influencing bureaucratic appointments and law enforcement priorities. Using original geospatial and electoral data, we show that milícia entry into a new area increases electoral concentration and disproportionately benefits milícia-aligned candidates in adjacent territories. We further demonstrate that this electoral capital is converted into political power through key bureaucratic appointments that facilitate further expansion and institutional impunity. Our findings support a theoretical framework in which elections reinforce, rather than constrain, criminal governance in democratic settings.

Current scholarship conceives of courts as victims or targets of populist authoritarians. But can empowered courts facilitate democratic backsliding? This article develops a new framework for understanding the approaches judiciaries take when tackling political corruption and argues that when judges attempt to replace ‘corrupted’ elected branches as the primary representative institution, their actions and rhetoric can enable populist authoritarians to seize power, raising the risk of democratic backsliding. I combine jurisprudence, newspaper archives and interviews to trace the process through which Pakistan’s Supreme Court, committed to playing a representation-replacement role, enabled the military-backed populist Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf to come to power in 2018, and use its powers to reverse Pakistan’s democratic transition. I also probe the political impact of anti-corruption jurisprudence in more established democracies. In doing so, I introduce a typology for understanding approaches courts take when combating corruption, and highlight the threat to democracy that can emerge from judiciaries.

Recent elections around the globe have seen politicians increasingly adopt anti-corruption rhetoric, yet little is known about the conditions under which such appeals are effective. While existing literature has focused on the factors that mitigate electoral sanctions for corrupt politicians, it has often overlooked the relevance of anti-corruption efforts. This paper investigates the impact of anti-corruption promises on electoral support and perceived effectiveness in cleaning up government. Using an unforced conjoint experiment in corruption-prone Paraguay, I vary candidate profiles with different anti-corruption platforms, genders, and disciplinary records. The results reveal that anti-corruption appeals significantly influence electoral support. Concrete anti-corruption promises with specific policies are more persuasive, indicating citizens prefer substance over vague rhetoric. Surprisingly, a clean disciplinary record does not substantively enhance a candidate’s anticorruption appeal, and male candidates appear to benefit more from adopting anticorruption platforms. These findings illuminate under what conditions anti-corruption platforms are more effective. They highlight the importance of specific policy stands and reveal that having a history of corruption surprisingly does not damage the credibility of anticorruption advocates.

This study examines how to counter the legalization of proceeds from illicit drug trafficking in the context of Kazakhstan’s digitalizing economy. It analyses industry reports and applies Walker’s gravity formula and a related conceptual model. Such proceeds account for 2 to 5% of annual gross domestic profit globally, highlighting a serious economic issue. In Kazakhstan, this problem is intensified by the country’s location on major drug trafficking routes and insufficient alignment of its financial sector with international standards for monitoring financial transactions. The risks are worsened by the anonymity and speed of digital tools, which hinder the detection and blocking of suspicious activity. Criminals exploit digital technologies – such as debit cards, peer-to-peer platforms and privacy coins – to launder illicit funds. To combat this, the study recommends using big-data analytics to detect risks, machine learning to respond to them, international cooperation to establish transaction standards, and continuous monitoring to ensure compliance. Implementing these measures will require multi-sectoral reforms and coordinated efforts across public administration.

This study tests the causal link between corruption perception and corruption in the public sector by using stereotyping theories. Using three experiments, this study manipulates corruption perception in 1,356 Anglo-Saxon public servants through information consistent with corrupt bureaucrat stereotypes. While the treatment significantly influenced their belief in the stereotype, it did not alter dishonest behaviors. However, public servants selectively use the information in line with how acceptable they perceive the corrupt behavior to be to decide whether they will engage in corruption. The findings shed light on how public servants process corruption-related information and its implications on anti-corruption policies.

A conjecture in Birds 786–8.

An emendation in Euripides, Hecuba 1045.

The scholarly and popular commonsense about corruption in the Philippines is that the country has always been corrupt. Seventy-eight years of corruption as an independent state (1946–2024) may as well have been a thousand. Lay and scholarly accounts explain this continuity with respect to traditional values and premature democratization. In both accounts, corruption is all but genetic to Philippine culture or politics. To be sure, continuity is self-evident if we are looking only at corruption scandals—but scandals have been accompanied by anti-corruption movements, broadly speaking. The two have gone hand-in-hand historically, suggesting that we need to understand them together. Taking them together, that is, focusing on their dialectic, produces, as I will show, a history of change. Specifically, how Filipinos relate to corruption has changed. They have become less tolerant of it in general and learned to embrace an anti-corruption model of politics. How scholars and policymakers conceive of corruption has changed. They have come to adopt a view of corruption as a generic social problem, effectively disembedding it from society. These developments have enabled a more intolerant approach such that, today, the greater danger lies in an anti-corruption “fundamentalism” leading to the rejection of politics altogether. Viewed as a whole, the history of corruption/anti-corruption has been a popular struggle over what politics should look like, and thus we might read their dialectic as driving the progress of political modernization from below.

Wrong-doers may try to collaborate to achieve greater gains than would be possible alone. Yet potential collaborators face two issues: they need to accurately identify other cheaters and trust that their collaborators do not betray them when the opportunity arises. These concerns may be in tension, since the people who are genuine cheaters could also be the likeliest to be untrustworthy. We formalise this interaction in the ‘villain’s dilemma’ and use it in a laboratory experiment to study three questions: what kind of information helps people to overcome the villain’s dilemma? Does the villain’s dilemma promote or hamper cheating relative to individual settings? Who participates in the villain’s dilemma and who is a trustworthy collaborative cheater? We find that information has important consequences for behaviour in the villain’s dilemma. Public information about actions is important for supporting collaborative dishonesty, while more limited sources of information lead to back-stabbing and poor collaboration. We also find that the level of information, role of the decision maker, and round of the experiment affect whether dishonesty is higher or lower in the villain’s dilemma than in our individual honesty settings. Finally, individual factors are generally unrelated to collaborating but individual dishonesty predicts untrustworthiness as a collaborator.

How do bribes and lobbying distort judgment? In our experiment, referees are tasked with judging a worker’s performance, and awarding a bonus to workers who score above a certain threshold. We find that bribes and lobbying are both distortionary, but in different ways. Whereas lobbying increases the number of workers receiving a bonus, bribes weaken the relationship between performance and success, with bonuses mostly being awarded to workers who bribe. We discuss implications for anti-corruption interventions.