Alina Mungiu-Pippidi

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at LUISS Guido Carli, Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali

The European Union (EU) has long been lauded as a champion in public integrity. However, corruption in Europe remains a persistent challenge. This report presents an evidence-based assessment of corruption trends across EU Member States (EUMS), accession candidates (EUCC), and neighboring countries (EUN), identifying key risks and proposing targete...

Latest 5.7 million crossborder corruption cooperative research project funded by the European Commission in 2023. Focused on objective indicators and evaluation of anticorruption policies.

Following the ambiguous performance of Washington consensus economic reforms, the Bretton Woods institutions rediscovered the importance of the state as a factor in driving economic growth. Evans and Rauch produced evidence that the variation in the government effectiveness ('quality') of nation-states, notably the presence of a Weberian like burea...

Despite the salience of transparency in policy and democracy debates a global measurement of transparency has always been missing. It its absence, measuring the impact of transparency on accountability and corruption for a large number of countries has been difficult, with scholars using more or less adequate proxies. This paper introduces a new me...

The Western Balkans EU candidate countries face rule of law challenges far more serious than Hungary or Poland did at the time of their accessions in 2004. Despite extensive EU conditionality and support, with 16% of EU pre-structural funds dedicated between 2014 and 2020 to rule of law projects, governance indicators show no substantial change. Th...

This chapter argues that the adoption of the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) in 2004 and its subsequent ratification by more than 180 parties indicates universal agreement on the norms of quality of government, putting an end to moral relativist arguments. While UNCAC does not define corruption, it defines good governance and s...

Corruption risk indicators in Albanian public procurement health and education based on red flags. This long executive summary of a long report uses full data to construct risk indicator at tender level and at contracting authority level for two sectors, health and education. It comes with full recommendations for the Albanian Public Procurement Ag...

Linked to declining levels of trust in core state actors and bodies, corruption has emerged as a key challenge to effective and legitimate governance, posing a growing threat to political stability. This comprehensive work addresses the most pressing debates in the field, covering the evolution of different concepts and approaches to analysing corr...

Approaches to studying corruption are hugely diverse, reflecting myriad competing understandings of what the term means and how it should be applied. Our approach looks at corruption as an issue within the science of government more generally, tracing its evolution from ‘classical’ approaches that understand corruption as a distortion of the proper...

Progress in corruption research and anticorruption policies has been hampered by the lack of adequate measurement in at least two ways. On the one hand, shortcomings of corruption measurement limits our capacity to understand what works and hence develop effective policies. On the other hand, in the absence of sufficiently sensitive measures of cor...

Cambridge Core - European Government, Politics and Policy - Europe's Burden - by Alina Mungiu-Pippidi

The last decades saw a new flare up of international democracy and good governance promotion. But can good governance really be promoted across borders, and how much does the international factor count? This paper draws on an unprecedented review of evidence in 127 countries where EU offers assistance in the context of some good governance conditio...

Corruption and development are two mutually related concepts equally shifting in meaning across time. The predominant 21st-century view of government that regards corruption as inacceptable has its theoretical roots in ancient Western thought, as well as Eastern thought. This condemning view of corruption coexisted at all times with a more morally...

Nature asked nine leading Europeans to pick their top priority for science at this pivotal point. Love, money, and trust got most votes. Nature asked nine leading Europeans to pick their top priority for science at this pivotal point. Love, money, and trust got most votes. A person walks on the street outside the campus of the Central European Univ...

After a comprehensive test of today’s anticorruption toolkit, it seems that the few tools that do work are effective only in contexts where domestic agency exists. Therefore, the time has come to draft a comprehensive road map to inform evidence-based anticorruption efforts. This essay recommends that international donors join domestic civil societ...

In Romania today, as in Italy twenty years ago, the gradual politicization of anticorruption has come to shape the political scene. When the EU asked Romania to establish an anticorruption agency as a condition of EU accession (2004), the country responded by creating the National Anticorruption Directorate (DNA). Yet three unforeseen problems dera...

Romania is presented as a success story of judicial anticorruption. If this were the case, it would range alongside Hong Kong and Singapore. In fact, no democracy has ever succeeded to control corruption solely by judicial repression, due to politicization of anticorruption which sooner or later catches up with the specialized anticorruption bodies...

This paper asks if current indicators of low trust and moral decay in Europe can be better traced to facts than similar perceptions on record from the Western Roman Empire during its decline. The answer is provided by complementing individual-level analysis of corruption survey data with national-level data, using three novel fact-based indicators....

This paper asks if there is evidence that the most common legislation recommended and used in the current anticorruption toolkit is effective in reducing corruption and if specific contexts can be identified which enable or disable effective legislation for control of corruption. The paper draws on documented public accountability and anticorruptio...

Why have so few countries managed to leave systematic corruption behind, while in many others modernization is still a mere façade? How do we escape the trap of corruption, to reach a governance system based on ethical universalism? In this unique book, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi and Michael Johnston lead a team of eminent researchers on an illuminating...

While the last twenty years have seen the development of global rankings for corruption, allowing comparison between countries and shaming of corrupt governments, the measurements remain based largely on the perceptions of experts, and so lack both specificity and transparency. New research, based on a comprehensive theory of governance defined as...

While the last twenty years have seen the development of global rankings for corruption, allowing comparison between countries and shaming of corrupt governments, the measurements remain based largely on the perceptions of experts, and so lack both specificity and transparency. New research, based on a comprehensive theory of governance defined as...

Once of interest mainly to specialists, the problem of explaining how institutions change is now a primary concern not only of economists, but of the international donor community as well. Many have come to believe that political institutions are decisive in shaping economic institutions and, with them, the course of innovation and investment that...

The interest of social science, media, and policymakers for corruption has exploded after 1990 due to increasing evidence that corruption is accountable for poor growth and chronic underdevelopment. This had impressive policy consequences: by 2012, no less than 161 state parties had adopted the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC),...

Francis Fukuyama’s latest book, the sequel to his 2011 work The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, brings the story told in the earlier volume up to the present day. The treatment of the past two centuries takes over six-hundred pages, more than its predecessor had employed in recounting the prior 200,000 year...

Why do some societies manage to control corruption so that it manifests itself only occasionally, while other societies remain systemically corrupt? This book is about how societies reach that point when integrity becomes the norm and corruption the exception in regard to how public affairs are run and public resources are allocated. It primarily a...

The gradual drop in public confidence in the EU since the beginning of the 2008 economic crisis indicates an erosion of the long-held belief among citizens and elites alike that European integration is the best option to secure a better future. But is it EU democracy that is being challenged here, or is democracy itself challenging the prospects fo...

Corruption is a barrier to innovation, warns Alina Mungiu-Pippidi.

There are two radically different versions of the postcommunist narrative. One tells the triumphal tale of the only world region in which the reforms recommended by the “Washington consensus” worked, where democracy quickly consolidated and the transition came to completion—a model for the rest of the world that Western policy makers and developmen...

The impact of European accession as an opportunity for cultural mobilization, political representation and institutional participation at the supranational, national and regional- local levels in Romania is strong and shown not only in political mobilization, but also in the concrete achievements of these years by the Hungarian minority, such as th...

Over the past couple of years, international law and international relations scholarship has shifted its focus from the question of whether human rights treaties bring any state-level improvements at all to investigations in the domestic context of the factors and dynamics influencing state compliance. In this direction, and focusing on the Europea...

Why has the EU succeeded in promoting democracy in the new member states but failed in promoting good governance? This essay seeks to answer this question first by distinguishing governance from political regimes, and second by exploring to what extent national governance—which is defined as the set of formal and informal institutions that determin...

Why has the EU succeeded in promoting democracy in the new member states but failed in promoting good governance? This essay seeks to answer this question first by distinguishing governance from political regimes, and second by exploring to what extent national governance — which is defined as the set of formal and informal institutions that determ...

Teaches democratization and policy analysis at the Hertie School of Governance and chairs the European Research Centre for Anti-Corruption and State Building Research. She also codirects the EU FP7 five-year research project ANTICORRP. 1. Bologna, Archivio di Stato, Tesoreria e contrallatore di tesoreria, bb. 2 regg 107. 2. Archivio di stato di Fer...

Control of corruption in a society is an equilibrium between resources and costs which either empowers or constraints elites predatory behaviour. While most research and practice focuses on legal constraints, this paper investigates normative constraints, deemed to be more important, especially civil society and the press. Fresh evidence—both histo...

This article studies comparatively the property restitution policies of Eastern and Western Balkan countries, focusing mostly on internal and external constraints to a permanent solution. The role of the European Court of Human Rights is analyzed in depth, as well as the subtle shift of policy of the EU institutions from the earlier Eastern Balkan...

Romania's politics after its 1989 ‘entangled revolution’ can be roughly divided into two phases. The first phase was one of democratisation, following the only ‘revolution’ in central and eastern Europe which did not bring about a victory for anti-communists in the subsequent elections. Ion Iliescu, a former communist leader, and his populist Natio...

This paper surveys the South-East European experience in this key area of transformation: the establishing of a secure basis for property rights by the post communist regime. We ask what determined the a given country´s choice of a specific policy towards restitution, and what the consequences were: what, in addition, made European institutions inv...

Romania is perceived as the most corrupt EU member state according to Transparency International Corruption Perception Index. In 2008–2009, a grassroots coalition of civil society organizations and education stakeholders created the Coalition for Clean Universities which organized the first assessment of integrity of the Romanian higher education s...

Fighting corruption has long been a high priority for Norwegian and international development cooperation. This work includes efforts directed at reducing corruption in the delivery of aid, at country level, and at the international policy level.The present study is one of three recent studies about corruption commissioned by Norad’s evaluation dep...

Romania and Bulgaria encounter today problems in joining the visa-free Schengen area. The main one in the public eye is corruption. Both countries pledged to improve their rule of law when signing their accession treaties in 2005, yet little progress is perceived by observers or captured with governance measurements relying on perception, such as C...

This article investigates the public perception of corruption in Romanian higher education. It reviews the governance practices of public universities in Romania through a survey of governance practices organized by the Romanian Coalition for Clean Universities (CCU), an alliance of NGOs, professional associations and student and teacher unions. CC...

The goal of creating a process based on rational, evidence based policymaking has not succeeded in Romania despite the existence of all formal institutions which could facilitate such a process. There is one essential feature which did not change after Romania’s EU accession: the state did not manage to gain more - in fact, sufficient - autonomy to...

This paper assesses the ten years of experience of East Central European (ECE) with the reform of the judiciary in view of EU accession. The paper examines in depth the cases where the challenges to rule of law and the EU conditionality were both at a maximum to generate some explanations (Romania, and Bulgaria in particular). It then proceeds to t...

Why, despite their most remarkable progress on democracy, have most East Central European states retained modest levels of governance? Is civil society still able to play any significant role in improving governance, even after its institutionalization at low levels of participation, after its initial high mobilization in the early years of democra...

This 2004 paper is based on an original public opinion survey on nationalism in five East European countries and deals with the grassroots of ethnic conflict in postcommunist Europe, with a special focus on the Balkans. In other words, it is concerned with Milosevic’s voters (and others like them) rather than with the historical circumstances that...

The social representation of Europe as a common project driving unification of East and West proved the most powerful tool used in the post-Helsinki Europe to bridge the divisions of the Cold War and subvert the Communist takeover of Eastern Europe. It was endowed with historical legitimacy despite historical evidence in its favor being rather ambi...

Introduction: Understanding the gravity model one of the main theses of this book is that the international system plays a critical role in democratization, although a highly variable one. Undeniably, foreign influence was a powerful factor in the democratic transformation of Eastern Europe, from Gorbachev’s decision that Eastern Europe needed to l...

Is international democracy promotion in the European neighbourhood running out of steam, after the disappointing results from the ‘colour revolutions’ in Georgia and Ukraine of 2004-2005? What is the changing impact of factors such as corrupt state capture, energy resources, rent-seeking behaviour, the financial crisis and the perceived threat of r...

The paper argues that the history of the postcommunist transition can be rewritten as a renegotiation of a social contract between state and society after Communism. A strong state based on coercion alone is not sustainable, as it is not based on a social contract. Repression is costly, and once the global order of communism broke down, communist r...

If ever a test case was perfectly designed for Europe’s smart power, it is the situation of Romania, Bulgaria and Slovakia. These countries break the circularity of the argument over the EU’s transformative power. They were not invited to join the EU after they were successful in their transitions, but rather as their transitions hung in the balanc...

Angry young men stoning police in a European capital over the Easter break does not make a promising opening scene for a democratic revolution. Few Europeans had heard of Moldova, a tiny state on the EU’s eastern flank, before seeing images of the strife that broke out there in early April 2009 after the Communist Party (PCRM) won reelection in a l...

Few Europeans had heard of Moldova, a tiny state on the EU's eastern flank, before seeing images of the strife that broke out there in early April 2009 after the Communist Party (PCRM) won reelection in a landslide. Except for their international context, the events in Moldova did not differ substantially from those that sparked the color revolutio...