Category Archives: Announcement

New Podcast, Featuring Leonor Ortiz Monasterio and Miguel Meza

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this episode, I interview Leonor Ortiz Monasterio and Miguel Meza of the Mexican civil society organization Mexicanos Contra Corrupcion y la Impunidad (MCCI) (“Mexicans Against Impunity and Corruption). They describe how MCCI works to fight corruption in Mexico, and critically evaluate the anticorruption efforts of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO), who ran in large part on an anticorruption platform, but whose approach to anticorruption during his first year in office has been met with significant controversy.

You can find this episode, along with links to previous podcast episodes, at the following locations:

KickBack is a collaborative effort between GAB and the ICRN. If you like it, please subscribe/follow, and tell all your friends! And if you have suggestions for voices you’d like to hear on the podcast, just send me a message and let me know.

New Podcast, Featuring Monika Bauhr

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this episode, I interview Monika Bauhr, Associate Professor of Political Science and former head of the Quality of Government Institute at the University of Gothenburg. During our conversation, Professor Bauhr discusses her research work in three key areas: (1) the impact of pro-transparency reforms (particularly the adoption of freedom of information laws) on corruption; (2) the disaggregation of the broad category “corruption” into different types of corruption (such as “need” corruption versus “greed” corruption); and (3) the relationship between gender and corruption, in particular what factors might account for the apparent correlation between greater representation of women in elected office (or the business or political elite more generally) and lower (perceived) corruption levels.

You can find this episode, along with links to previous podcast episodes, at the following locations:

KickBack is a collaborative effort between GAB and the ICRN. If you like it, please subscribe/follow, and tell all your friends! And if you have suggestions for voices you’d like to hear on the podcast, just send me a message and let me know.

Anticorruption Bibliography–November 2019 Update

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An updated version of my anticorruption bibliography is available from my faculty webpage. A direct link to the pdf of the full bibliography is here, and a list of the new sources added in this update is here. As always, I welcome suggestions for other sources that are not yet included, including any papers GAB readers have written.

New Podcast Episode, Featuring David Barboza

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this episode, I interview Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times correspondent David Barboza, best known (at least in anticorruption circles) for his investigative reporting on the vast wealth accumulated by the Chinese elite, especially his 2012 expose on the wealth held secretly by members of the family of then-Premier Wen Jiabao (see here and here). Our interview begins with a discussion of how Mr. Barboza and his colleagues were able to uncover the information they needed to substantiate this blockbuster story, and the various ways that the Chinese government attempted to block its publication. We then turn to a discussion of the broader implications of this and similar investigations, as Mr. Barboza explains why the wealth held by the families of the political elite is such a sensitive topic in China, how norms relating to the business activities of these families has changed since the end of the 1980s, and the role that Western companies played in facilitating the corrupt accumulation of hidden wealth by these elite Chinese families. At the conclusion of the interview, Mr. Barboza discusses the current anticorruption drive headed by President Xi Jinping, and whether this crackdown represents a serious effort to get at the sorts of problems that Mr. Barboza’s reporting helped to reveal, or whether the current crackdown is more of a politically motivated effort to weaken rival factions without fundamentally changing the system.

You can find this episode, along with links to previous podcast episodes, at the following locations:

KickBack is a collaborative effort between GAB and the ICRN. If you like it, please subscribe/follow, and tell all your friends! And if you have suggestions for voices you’d like to hear on the podcast, just send me a message and let me know.

Tracking Corruption and Conflicts of Interest in the Trump Administration–November 2019 Update

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While ongoing developments in the impeachment inquiry into President Trump’s attempt to pressure Ukraine to open investigations that might damage Trump’s political rivals continue to dominate the headlines, there are plenty of other reasons to be concerned about other serious ethical problems (some might say “corruption”) in the Trump Administration, including a slew of credible allegations that the President, his family members, and close associates have been using the presidency to advance their personal financial interests. Back in May 2017, GAB began tracking and cataloguing credible allegations of this sort of profiteering by President Trump and his family and cronies. Unfortunately, each month brings a new incidents, or new information about old incidents, and so we try to do regular updates of this catalogue, and the newest update is now available here.

A previously noted, while we try to include only those allegations that appear credible, many of the allegations that we discuss are speculative and/or contested. We also do not attempt a full analysis of the laws and regulations that may or may not have been broken if the allegations are true. (For an overview of some of the relevant federal laws and regulations that might apply to some of the alleged problematic conduct, see here.)

New Podcast Episode, Featuring Shaul Shalvi

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this episode, Nils Köbis interviews Professor Shaul Shalvi, of the University of Amsterdam’s Center for Research in Experimental Economics and Political Decision-Making (CREED), about how experimental research in behavioral psychology can help us understand corruption, and unethical behavior more generally. In addition to covering some of the main experimental results on ethical behavior (some of which can be found here), Professor Shalvi also discusses how and when children develop the ability to cheat, and the shift in research on ethical decision-making from an individual perspective (studying people who make ethical decisions by themselves) to a more social perspective (studying contexts in which people make ethical decisions together). This latter perspective considers questions like how unethical behavior by some can encourage others to break ethical rules as well, and how the perception of the identity of the victim (an abstraction, like “society,” versus a concrete person or people) can affect people’s willingness to break ethical rules.

You can find this episode, along with links to previous podcast episodes, at the following locations:

KickBack is a collaborative effort between GAB and the ICRN. If you like it, please subscribe/follow, and tell all your friends! And if you have suggestions for voices you’d like to hear on the podcast, just send me a message and let me know.

Anticorruption Bibliography–October 2019 Update

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An updated version of my anticorruption bibliography is available from my faculty webpage. A direct link to the pdf of the full bibliography is here, and a list of the new sources added in this update is here. As always, I welcome suggestions for other sources that are not yet included, including any papers GAB readers have written.

New Podcast Episode, Featuring Kevin Davis

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this episode, I interview Professor Kevin Davis, of the New York University Law School, about his new book, Between Impunity and Imperialism: The Regulation of Transnational Bribery (OUP 2019). As the book’s provocative title suggests, Professor Davis has a mixed assessment of the current legal framework on the regulation of transnational corruption (a framework dominated by rules set by the OECD countries, especially the United States), recognizing the progress that has been made in ending impunity, but at the same time highlighting the costs and limitations of the current system, especially from the perspective of developing countries. In addition to our general discussion of his critique–including the reasons for his use of the term “legal imperialism”–we also discuss a number of more specific legal questions, including individual vs. corporate liability for corruption, the nullification of contracts tainted by bribery, the asset recovery framework, and victim compensation more generally.

You can find this episode, along with links to previous podcast episodes, at the following locations:

KickBack is a collaborative effort between GAB and the ICRN. If you like it, please subscribe/follow, and tell all your friends! And if you have suggestions for voices you’d like to hear on the podcast, just send me a message and let me know.

Tracking Corruption and Conflicts of Interest in the Trump Administration–October 2019 Update

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The recent and still-unfolding scandal involving President Trump’s apparent pressure on Ukraine to investigate and/or provide dirt on his political rivals has to some degree overshadowed many of the other ethical concerns about President Trump’s behavior in office, including a slew of credible allegations that the President, his family members, and close associates have been using the presidency to advance their personal financial interests. (That said, the Ukraine scandal has also drawn greater attention to at least one aspect of this problem, as it did not go unnoticed that in the now-infamous phone July 25 phone conversation between President Trump and President Zelensky, the latter went out of his way to emphasize how much he enjoyed staying in a Trump hotel in New York, which is consistent with longstanding fears that those hoping to influence Trump will give their patronage to his businesses.)

Back in May 2017, GAB began tracking and cataloguing credible allegations of this sort of profiteering by President Trump and his family and cronies. Until May 2019, we’d been updating that report on a monthly basis. The tracker hadn’t been updated for several months since then, partly due to my own lack of organization, and partly because there are now a number of other higher-profile, better-resourced projects with a similar goal. (Among these, I particularly recommend the those from the Sunlight Foundation and from the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.) But I think GAB’s somewhat distinctive approach to organizing and describing these concerns might still have sufficient added value that we’re restarting our regular updates to the Trump conflict-of-interest tracker. The newest update is now available here.

A previously noted while we try to include only those allegations that appear credible, we acknowledge that many of the allegations that we discuss are speculative and/or contested. We also do not attempt a full analysis of the laws and regulations that may or may not have been broken if the allegations are true. For an overview of some of the relevant federal laws and regulations that might apply to some of the alleged problematic conduct, see here.

New Podcast Episode, Featuring Sergei Guriev

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this episode, I interview Professor Sergei Guriev, who until last month served as the Chief Economist for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). In the conversation (which took place a couple of months ago, when Professor Guriev was still in his EBRD post), we discuss a range of topics, including his academic work (both his research on the role of oligarchs in the Russian economy and his more recent work on how expanded high-speed internet access affects both perceptions of and political responses to widespread corruption); the question why some post-socialist countries were more successful than others in making a transition to a market economy and reasonably well-functioning democratic government, while others remain mired in corruption; and some of the major challenges and opportunities confronted by international organizations, like the EBRD, that want to help advance the fight against corruption in challenging political environments.

You can find this episode, along with links to previous podcast episodes, at the following locations:

KickBack is a collaborative effort between GAB and the ICRN. If you like it, please subscribe/follow, and tell all your friends! And if you have suggestions for voices you’d like to hear on the podcast, just send me a message and let me know.