The document entitled Political Graft in Europe on the Loose: Anti-Corruption Legal Frameworks in Comparative Historical Perspective has been prepared under the EU-sponsored RESPOND project.

The authors of the paper have conducted comparative analysis of laws of Sweden, the Netherlands, the UK, France, Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria, Serbia and Ukraine.

The countries represent two large European macroregions – Western and Central-East Europe – differing in their historic experience of democracy development and rooted anti-corruption traditions. In particular, the paper states that anti-corruption systems of Western Europe develop from the bottom up through cultural affirmation of justice and accountability, whereas in Central and Eastern Europe they develop from the top down due to the impact of external obligations and integration processes; in Southern and post-Soviet countries legal reforms are hampered by persistent clientelistic practices, where personal relations and informal agreements remain in often cases stronger than formal institutions.

In assessing the regulation concerning political corruption in the selected regions, the IGA experts stress that the approach centered on the presence or absence of laws and the degree of their implementation and inherent in the positivist institutional theory normally used to assess effectiveness of anti-corruption measures can be incomplete and should be complemented by analysis of a wide spectrum of the factors of domestic context: cultural and historical, social and political. As a consequence, the model of legal regulation of a jurisdiction cannot be simply replicated by another even in the same EU institutional space, while the content and implementation of norms should take into consideration the specifics of social and political dynamics in each state.

This is why the authors of the report carry out their analysis of (anti-)corruption in the regions guided by interactive constructivist theory focusing on two key areas:

• Analysis of long-term cultural and historical processes forming the anti-corruption environment of a country;
• Understanding of the modern legal regimes through reconstruction of legal norms in political financing, lobbying, revolving doors and the media.

This approach allowed the experts to formulate a definition of political corruption that is not limited to the dichotomy “legal – illegal” (as is the case in the positivist institutional theory): according to the document, political corruption covers the actions and behaviour that are often in the “grey zones” of legality that lead to the distortion of the decision-making process and exclusion of certain groups from the political cycle. This means that political corruption includes the forms of influence that are not necessarily illegal or are qualified as crimes, but undermine trust and exclude equal participation in democratic politics, jeopardizing the values, objectives and mission of the public institutions.

The report identifies four main areas through which political corruption can manifest itself: political financing, lobbying, revolving door and the media. Such forms of corruption acts are characterized as components of the “legal corruption” phenomenon in the case of which the law is not formally violated, but the actual consequences of illegal influence is similar to the effect of bribes, because they reflect the strict relationship between wealth and power. These four forms of corrupt practices are inherent, primarily, in developed industrial democracies, where legislative structures can deliberately ignore the matter of their regulation (unlike the strictly prohibitive provisions against bribery).

The main part of the report contains profiles of the aforementioned nine countries the evolution of the national legal regimes in the areas related to political corruption and the influence of cultural and political factors on the effectiveness of law enforcement of which are explored. In order to compile them, the first stage of the research was centered on a review of national laws and strategies with regard to the four forms of political influence identified; catalogues describing laws, oversight bodies and sanctions for violations were created for each country. At the second stage, the authors analysed how laws are formed and applied in specific political circumstances, considering examples of legislative reforms and omission of authorities, impact of investigative journalism, pressure from civil society and international standards, as well as the cases where the political elites deliberately distort and block legal mechanisms.

*The Institute for Global Analytics is a Bulgarian NGO conducting research in the area of democracy, freedom of the media, propaganda and strategic communications, models of public opinion in the pan-European context and political corruption in digital societies.