Research papers

The paper takes the economic concept of convergence and applies it to corruption in the new member states and their relationship with the rest of the EU. Using the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index, the analysis points to modest convergence in the EU as a whole, with the new member states as a group converging with the old member states at the rate of 0.08 points per year during the 1999-2008 period.

The paper looks at what policy-makers can do to decrease corruption in developing and transition countries, based on an in-depth examination of effectiveness of actual anticorruption measures in Slovakia. The research presents a synthesis of 12 case studies where measures in the sectors most associated with corruption as well as horizontal measures were analysed. The research shows that corruption can be decreased significantly within several years and external actors can play a substantial role in the process. An overall decrease in corruption can be based on aggregation of individual sectoral changes in areas most suffering from graft.

The paper is concerned with the issue of how the postsocialist new member states of the European Union fit into the established methodologies of worlds and varieties of welfare capitalism. The paper argues that the postsocialist welfare state is different from the welfare states of the old member states and does not resemble any of the four existing models as present in Europe. The welfare states of the EU-10 countries are much smaller than those in the western half of the continent and generally demonstrate much stronger emphasis on redistribution to prevent poverty. The EU-10 are also highly internally differentiated as a group. We describe dimensions of welfare states in the new member states along three dimensions: size of the social protection expenditure, redistributive nature of the social transfers and relative redistribution effects based on the ratio between the first two variables.

The paper deals with the issue of the relationship between political parties and their electorates from the following angle: how and why do parties differ within the same electoral system and can one construct a meaningful taxonomy of parties based on the answer to this question? To answer the question, we use evidence from the Slovak electoral system, particularly analysis of the preferences of the electorate directly as revealed in the act of voting through the use of the so-called “preference votes”.