Why public officials complicit in corruption? It is absolutely a nagging and antiquated question. This thesis examines the corruption on a micro-scale from those convicted in corruption cases in Central Java Province, Indonesia, more specifically by taking the personal views and experiences of the imprisoned actors into account. Broadly speaking, the problem of corruption is a tantalizing daily issue around Indonesia. Despite the government is highly committed to overcome corruption, it is argued that national corruption eradication efforts have not simply failed to diminish the number of corruption cases, but they - at least until 2019 – failed to impede the deployment of corruption from central to local government levels. Empirically, this study explores corruption from leadership theories to build its own analytical framework of corruption, namely administrative and political corruption. Using narrative analysis methods, this study analyses nine interviews with elective public officials at district and village levels, combined with several secondary techniques. In drawing its conclusions, this study highlights three major findings to understand the failure of government in addressing corruption, each of which is related to 1) critical role of public legitimacy built upon informal norms; 2) strict bureaucratic function built upon formal norms; 3) cleavages between formal and informal norms that encourage public officials to enact one or both types of corruption. Above all, the idea of ‘private gain’ as the central element of corruption cannot be found in this study. Ultimately, this study provides some direction for future research that would suggest academia and policymakers to better understand the corruption in the public sector by taking informal norms into consideration.

Magister Legum - LLM / This thesis advocates the expansion of the field of transitional justice to address corruption in African states emerging from conflict or authoritarianism. There is a close connection between corruption and conflict or repressive regimes in Africa. A good example is the Arab Spring of 2011, where citizens of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya protested against endemic corruption, leading to removal of despotic leaders from power. Dictators or conflicts tend to leave African states in situations where their coffers have been emptied corruptly and their citizens subjected to serious physical violence. What is more, corrupt and oppressive leaders use their ill-gotten assets to escape liability for their crimes. The evident link between the two forms of abuse makes it desirable to address them simultaneously when the dictatorship or conflict ends. Many African countries have deployed transitional justice mechanisms, such as criminal prosecutions, truth commissions, institutional reforms and reparations to address violations of civil and political rights. However, they have neglected corruption and other violations of social and economic rights, notwithstanding their crucial role in the violent past. Many countries still are haunted by the unresolved legacies of corruption and other socio-economic injustices. Recently, scholars and practitioners in the fields of transitional justice and anti-corruption have started to call for corruption and other socio-economic issues to be accommodated within transitional justice programmes. Problems encountered with the expansion of transitional justice mechanisms have not been worked out yet at the level of theory, policy and practice. This thesis subscribes to transformative justice theory as the most viable perspective from which to tackle corruption in transitional societies in Africa. Transformative justice theory is gaining increasing attention in the field of transitional justice, and it has been incorporated in the recent African Union Transitional Justice Policy. It champions locally driven mechanisms which reflect the needs of the victims and local communities, and which pursue socio-economic justice and transformation. The thesis argues that the current transitional justice mechanisms have the potential to become transformative and it will seek to answer how best each of these mechanisms may be implemented to address corruption. It is hoped that this thesis will assist in answering critical questions regarding the proximate relationship between corruption and violence, and in offering guidelines towards the total integration of an anti-corruption agenda into the field of transitional justice in Africa.

In the recent years, there have been many reports on the prevalence of corruption in the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development. Corruption impacts negatively on the image of organisations since it erodes public trust and delegitimises such organisations. Therefore, good corporate governance practices should be adopted to prevent corruption. The purpose of this study was to analyse the governance system of the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development with the view to identifying shortcomings in the system.

Dans ce mémoire, nous analysons le fonctionnement des entreprises informelles et celles qui le sont devenues à cause de la réglementation pour les entreprises formelles. Il s’agit d’une analyse des déterminants de la transition des entreprises informelles vers le secteur formel et des déterminants de la volonté à s’enregistrer des entrepreneurs informels dans les pays en voie de développement. Grâce à un modèle de probabilité linéaire, nous examinons dans un premier temps les effets de la corruption, de la réglementation et du financement interne disponible sur fonctionnement des entreprises informelles nouvellement enregistrées. Il s’agit d’une analyse de l’attitude des entrepreneurs en transition par rapport au paiement de la taxe, des pots-de-vin et du financement de leurs activités. Ensuite nous analysons les décisions de l’entrepreneur informel pour l’enregistrement de son entreprise compte tenu de sa perception du fonctionnement des entreprises formelles. Enfin nous examinons le fonctionnement des entreprises formelles et celles informelles. Nos résultats indiquent que l’enregistrement pour une entreprise ne permet pas d’éviter les versements de pots-de-vin pour la réalisation de ses activités. Ces paiements informels proviennent des visites des fonctionnaires auprès des entreprises. Cependant, les entrepreneurs informels sont motivés à s’enregistrer lorsqu’ils constatent l’existence d’avantages pour les entreprises formelles. Les avantages dont les entreprises pourraient bénéficier en s’enregistrant sont les meilleurs accès aux financements, aux matières premières, aux infrastructures et aux services publics ainsi que des facilités de donner des reçus aux clients pour les attirer. Une fois enregistrées, les entreprises continuent de payer des pots-de-vin pour pallier les insuffisances liées aux procédures incomplètes dans leurs processus d’enregistrement.

Public sector corruption is endemic in many economies and is frequently cited as a cause of poor economic performance. Corruption hinders the completion of beneficial transactions and distorts the outcomes of economic policies. It can also affect the policy choices of governments as they attempt to counteract the consequences of corruption. Excessive inflation may be a negative side effect of corruption if the government compensates for lost revenue by increasing the rate of monetary expansion to exploit seigniorage. There is convincing empirical evidence from cross-section studies that inflation and corruption are positively correlated. It has been suggested that this is a consequence of governments in corrupt economies turning to the use of seigniorage as a method of raising revenue (Al-Marhubi, 2000). This seems a likely route through which the correlation can arise, but the mechanism at work has not received any theoretical attention. In particular, there has been no demonstration that an optimizing government will rationally exploit seigniorage as a response to corruption. The contribution of this study is an analysis of this issue in theoretical models in which the growth rate of money supply is chosen by an optimizing government. Although an empirical analysis is undertaken to explore the relationship between corruption and inflation in chapter one, the main focus of the study is on chapters three, four, and five where theoretical analysis plays the principal role in the research.

There has recently been a marked increase in the number of reported cases of corruption in international sport. As such, a growing number of sponsors have taken remedial action in order to protect the reputation of their brand. This study has been designed to analyse how sponsors respond to the threat of corruption in sport and to identify the contextual factors that influence such a response. Maennig (2005) identified two forms of corruption – ‘management corruption’ and ‘competition corruption’. It is the latter, defined by Gorse & Chadwick (2010) as “any illegal, immoral or unethical activity that attempts to deliberately distort the outcome of a sporting contest (or an element within the contest) for the personal material gain of one or more parties involved in the activity” that provides a focus and context for this study and includes such behaviour as doping, tanking, match fixing and spot fixing. In order to identify how sponsors respond both to the threat of being associated with a property affected by this type of behaviour, also referred to as sporting transgression in this study, and to analyse instances of actual corruption, a four-stage research methodology has been employed. A database of cases of sporting transgression was created to provide contextual background and further rationale for the focus of this study; a series of preliminary interviews were conducted with professionals in and around the sponsorship industry to highlight the potential implications of corruption for sponsors; and a number of case studies were developed, recognising the key stakeholders in sponsorship management. A series of in-depth semi-structured interviews were then conducted with multiple stakeholders in the sport industry - sponsors, legal professionals with expertise in sponsorship and commercial managers in governing bodies of sport. Interviews were recorded, transcribed and then analysed using grounded theory coding techniques, allowing for key themes to emerge and responses to corruption in sport discussed. Analysis of the interview data indicates that sponsors adopt a ‘wait-and-see’ approach when dealing with the potential impact of corruption, relying on a number of factors to decide upon remedial courses of action. These factors have been conceptualised and a Sponsor Response to Sporting Transgression, or SRST, Model is proposed.

Participatory budgeting is a tool that can be used to improve social accountability within public institutions through increasing the participation of citizens in decision-making processes about the distribution of public funds. The global experiences from the use of participatory budgeting indicate that the impact of the initiatives has ranged from very weak to highly successful, and that the successfulness depends on certain factors in the environment where it is implemented – even though there is no agreement on what these factors are. Albania is one of the countries where a range of civil society organizations are implementing participatory budgeting initiatives and is at the same time a country that faces one of the highest corruption levels in Europe. Despite the fact that these initiatives could bring very important impacts, very little academic research is done on this topic. The purpose of this thesis was therefore to investigate to what extent the participatory budgeting initiatives in Albania have improved social accountability in the Albanian societies, as well as what factors that have affected this impact and how. The investigation was carried out as a case study in Albania where nine different participatory budgeting initiatives were examined through conducting semi-structured interviews with the organizations implementing these projects, as well as one expert organization that has helped the other organizations to improve their knowledge on the tool and one public official from a municipality involved in one of the initiatives. The research of this thesis found that the Albanian participatory budgeting initiatives have succeeded to do minor improvements on social accountability through strengthening the voice of the citizens and the enforcement mechanism, while formal answerability still is low and negatively affects the sustainability of these improvements. It was further found that seventeen factors from five different categories have affected the ability of the initiatives to improve social accountability – some more than others. These categories were: formal and informal political systems, supportive legal and policy frameworks, local capacity and knowledge, free media institutions, and availability of information. The contributions of the thesis included also the finding of a factor that was not mentioned by the theory (trust by local governments in civil society organizations), as well as a structure on how these influencing factors interact with each other.

published_or_final_version / abstract / Economics and Finance / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation includes three chapters that utilize experimental methods to answer questions relating to social choices. Social choice is a broad category that can incorporate an individual’s choices when it comes to charitable giving, providing a public good or creating externalities through one’s choices. In the first chapter “To Be or Not To Be Corrupt: An Experimental Study on Bribery” I designed a modified version of the bribery game used in Abbink et al. (2002) to study whether information on the prevalence of bribery activity within the experimental environment has an effect on behavior. In addition it also tests whether this prevalence effect can be reduced by implementing a strict punishment. In the second chapter “Can Cooperative Behavior Improve Efficiency in Public Good Provision?” laboratory experiments are used to test whether information about the cooperative behavior of the group members in a trust game affects contribution to a public good game. The first part of the design utilizes a trust game to measure the cooperative behavior of the subjects. This information is provided in the public goods game to see if there is an effect on contributions. The essay also looks at if there is an effect on contribution, and if that effect lasts over time or it merges towards a selfish-man equilibrium of no contribution. The third chapter “Means and Ends in Charitable Giving for Environmental Protection: A Discussion” conducts a discussion on the charitable giving literature related to environmental charities and builds a simple model of warm glow to show that the attributes of an environmental charity may affect giving. The model can also be used to consider attributes on how the money is used. For example, whether there is a difference when a market-based mechanism like Payment for Environmental Services (PES) is used versus more traditional mechanism like education on alternative livelihood. It then proposes a possible design for a field experiment to test the hypotheses.

Despite the pervasiveness of political corruption in Mexico, the topic has received little scholarly attention. Two objectives guide the current study: to contribute to the comparative literature on political corruption, and to incorporate corruption into an analysis of Mexican politics broadly conceived. Prompted by a host of problems with prior approaches to the study of corruption, the theoretical framework highlights the separation of the normative and behavioral dimensions of the central concept, ties corruption to a three-part model of the state and identifies bribery and extortion as two primary types of corruption. A state-society theory of corruption is presented that underscores the relative balance of state and social forces to offer routes of social mobility as the major determinant of political corruption. The direction of the imbalance between state and society determines, in turn, the bribery or extortion type of corruption dominating the system. Applying this framework, attention centers on the causes, consequences and dynamics of political corruption in Mexico. As to cause, it is argued that the overwhelming power of the Mexican state and the relative weakness of social organizations create the incentives for widespread extortion. Analysis focuses on factors internal to the state, the linkages between state and society and general aspects of society. Data on corruption are used to examine types of corruption, bureaucratic location and denouncing parties. In terms of the consequences of corruption, analysis underscores its contribution to political stability by integrating the political elite, cushioning the impact of policy, displacing political accountability and serving as a symbolic device to mobilize society. Although corruption has fostered widespread distrust of the government and governmental officials among the public, it is portrayed and seen as a non-systemic problem and hence does not erode diffuse system support. A survey of public opinion confirms high levels of distrust and shows such factors as socio-economic status and political involvement to be weak yet significant determinants of opinions towards corruption. Examination of the dynamics of corruption center on the short-term impact of the Mexican sexenio (six year political term) on the incidence and intensity of corruption and anti-corruption campaigns. Also, analysis focuses on the "crisis of corruption" characterizing Mexico in the decade of the eighties.