Quality of public sector audits process
• . Although no objective indicator of
pub-lic sector audits exists as such, a measure of their effectiveness is provided by the Global Competitiveness Report 2010-2011 of the World Economic Forum (WEF).
This measure correlates very well with control of corruption. The quality of control and preventive measures in general is under-emphasised during the EU accession process and in the Mechanism for Cooperation and Verification (MCV) for Roma-nia and Bulgaria, a safeguard clause allowing the European Commission to check on the status of their prior commitments in the field of rule of law even after ac-cession.
Civil society and the capacity for collective action
• . Regression analysis shows
that control of corruption is significantly better in countries with a larger number of NGOs and with more citizens engaged in voluntary activities. The correlation is so strong that its reverse is self-evident: in the absence of public oversight, it is quite impossible to achieve effective control of corruption. During the accession process some funds are earmarked to help civil society in general, but no systematic effort has been made to create a civil society watchdog and mechanism for monitoring spending of EU funds, for instance, although this would prevent waste, provide a timely alert regarding incidents of corruption and contribute to the more effective use of such funds.
Free media and well-informed critical citizens
• . Freedom of the media and the
presence of a large number of well-informed citizens with regular access to newspa-pers or access to the internet explain in considerable part the successful control of corruption. Knowledge of the levels of newspaper readership and use of the internet enables us to predict the corruption score in over three quarters of European
coun-public scrutiny and the society’s capacity for monitoring its own government. The European Commission and Council both noticed that problems affecting freedom of expression and the media remain a particular concern but except for monitoring developments no real remedies have been found. These might include encouraging local governments to support the new media, which are less prone to capture by vested interests, and invest in developing the media’s capacity to play the role of good governance watchdog.
The following factors seem to make less significant statistical impact:
Party funding restrictions
• . In Europe, leaving aside the countries which fund par-ties exclusively from the national budget, the more restrictions a country has on party funding, the more corrupt it seems to be according to regression analysis. It may be because these countries adopted restrictions in recent years to fight political corruption, but the evidence also shows that countries which have achieved good control of corruption have managed it with different party funding arrangements.
In short, the only existing statistical evidence available so far shows that transpar-ency of sources of party funding has some deterrent effect on political corruption. It is more useful to constrain the capacity of political parties to favour companies with public contracts, which are easy to monitor, than to be continually endeavouring to improve party funding legislation, where more restrictions frequently result in more illegal or intricately arranged transfers. If parties cannot deliver to their sponsors, the latter will freeze the money themselves.
Existence of a dedicated anticorruption agency
• . Countries in Europe with special
prosecuting anticorruption agencies do not perform significantly better than coun-tries which deal with corruption through their normal judiciary. In other words, if the judiciary is independent from government, corruption can be controlled through normal prosecution procedures and the law courts (prosecutors can in any case undergo specialised training in this field). If the judiciary is not independent, then an ‘autonomous’ anticorruption agency risks becoming a target for political control, as has already occurred in Slovenia, Latvia or Romania. However, the EC has taken the line that corruption can be controlled through these special agencies, despite evidence that agencies alone cannot cope with the problem if all other policy factors are not addressed. The result is a situation as in Romania in 2009-2012 when corruption worsened while the anticorruption agency performed better and better and received high praise in EU reports.
Existence of a Judicial Council
• . Neither globally nor in Europe is the existence of
a Judicial Council entrusted with the self-regulation of magistrates associated with
alina mungiu-Pippidi alina mungiu-Pippidi
a more effective control of corruption. EU countries which have historically suc-ceeded in achieving effective control of corruption in Europe have done so by means of different institutional arrangements for their systems of prosecution and Courts.
Since their adoption the judiciary has indeed been less subject to direct political intervention, but indirect influence, and especially corruption, remain rife. In many countries the judiciary has become plainly unaccountable since judges have started to rule themselves. Global Integrity reports for instance that, in Albania, Court posi-tions at different levels have in recent years acquired a price tag.
TaBlE 1. ThE WESTERn BalkanS govERnanCE InDICaToRS
Albania Bosnia Croatia Kosovo FYROM Mon-tenegro
Serbia WEF bribery rank
(144 countries) 84 63 91 53 54 86
WEF government
Source: Author’s compilation. All figures are from 2012 unless otherwise indicated.
The evidence that the EU enlargement process, despite the stress on anticorruption, is having a hard time delivering can be explained by an indicator developed by Global Integrity which reports on both the ‘legal framework’ and ‘implementation’ separately,
couple of years show that all Western Balkan countries have improved to reach either a very strong (e.g. Kosovo) or strong legal framework, with weak or very weak (e.g. Serbia) implementation. This shows that the gap between formal rules and their actual imple-mentation only grew, with little impact on corruption so far and suggests that rather than new improvements of laws better enforcement of existing legislation should be stressed.
Table 1 (see previous page) shows the most important factors determining control of corruption. Freedom House’s Nations in Transit project evaluates that the judiciary has not evolved in any country except for a small improvement in Kosovo (0.25, the smallest unit of progress) in the last five years. The media, which plays an essential role, has weak-ened in the last few years, ending up captured by vested interests, and thus becoming useless as an accountability tool. Civil society is still numerically reduced and demoral-ised, with scarce funds for the monitoring of good governance. These three areas – em-powerment of the media and civil society and promotion of fiscal transparency (with, as the Open Budget Index shows, poor performance across countries) – might be the best investment for the EU, at least to diminish the risk induced by the accession process itself, if not to radically change the governance regime of the region.
The EU could also consider the cases of Romania and Bulgaria alongside that of Croatia.
The EU tried to rise to the challenge in these two countries, by using to an unprec-edented degree the Mechanism of Cooperation and Verification (MCV), tied to progress on corruption in both countries, and the temporary freezing of EU funds until better governance arrangements were also put in place. These negative experiences of the un-finished Eastern Balkans governance transformations weigh heavily on the forecast for the Western Balkans accession process. All parties concerned would do well to draw lessons learned from this experience – in particular the EU, which seems sometimes to be pursuing a strategy in the Western Balkans that is not so different from that which it previously experimented in Romania and Bulgaria.