More than 20 years ago, when Eastern European countries embarked on their corruption-prone transitions from communism, Robert Klitgaard (Adjusting to Reality: Beyond “State versus Market” in Economic Development, 1991), once designated the “world's leading expert on corruption” (in The Christian Science Monitor, March 2, 1994), proposed the abandonment of the search for the “many, many causes and conditions” of corruption. In despair at what he saw as academic hair splitting in the burgeoning study of corruption, he claimed to be more “pragmatic” by focusing instead on ways by which policy and management could reduce corruption. In hindsight, Klitgaard's intellectual impatience appears ironic as the debate on the causes of corruption was only about to commence, resulting in an expanding list of suggested causes—often derived from Eastern European experiences.

To her credit, Tatiana Kostadinova is not deterred and insists in Political Corruption in Eastern Europe that growing and still pervasive corruption in the region continues to cry out for causal explanations. She rightly argues that only such understandings will help us to better explain why some Eastern European countries (e.g., Estonia and Slovenia) managed to clean up their act better than others (especially Russia and Bulgaria). Her policy recommendations follow from a quantitative and qualitative comparison of corruption in 15 postcommunist countries informed by two key questions: Why are some postcommunist societies more prone to corruption than others, and what are the effects of public office abuse on mass political behavior?

Primarily based on cross-regional, multivariate regression analysis, Kostadinova's argument is that “excessive regulation” of the economy, national economic capacity, prospects for European Union accession, and international trade openness together best explain the variation in corruption scores throughout Eastern Europe. In terms of the political effects of pervasive corruption, the author finds that corruption damaged public confidence in public institutions and often led to mass disengagement from politics. Yet this disillusionment does not seem to have undermined popular adherence to democratic values as such, something that the author underscores as presenting a glimmer of hope for reforms to be pressed on politicians from below. More generally, Kostadinova's findings here are valuable as she points out with some justification that the political effects of perceived corruption, opposed to purported economic effects, rarely receive attention in the literature despite their pertinence.

It has been commonly argued that public officeholders throughout Eastern Europe, having been socialized in the environment of communism and its distorted incentive structures, in the 1990s seized escalating opportunities for personal enrichment once economic reforms, especially privatization, were launched in a context of legal uncertainty and failing property rights. Although Kostadinova does not necessarily disprove or reject such arguments, her appreciation and analysis of varying country scores on persistent corruption, and her introduction of additional explanatory variables, demonstrate that there is a lot more going on. Her additional or alternative explanations for prevailing corruption are based on carefully stylizing and testing independent variables derived from extant research on corruption in Eastern Europe. Accordingly, the authors she discusses are placed in categories of analysis focusing on, respectively, domestic and international factors (p. 24). Such an approach, of course, entails the risk that extant research simply has been looking the wrong way—not improbable in a highly charged and politicized discussion like that on corruption wherein ideologically driven market enthusiasts and skeptics have sought to dominate the debate. Indeed, path dependency in researching the causes of corruption may have caused scholars like Klitgaard to become exasperated as the ensuing debate is less likely to produce genuinely new insights. On the other hand, however, Kostadinova is able to sift out the more robust explanations from those that her data do not support. Methodologically her exhaustive use of indices and surveys of perceived corruption levels may have caused the author to give less attention to qualitative explorations of multiple forms of corruption in their varying, complex, institutional and political contexts. Yet to a degree, she manages to compensate for this by way of a qualitative overview of corruption-prone “friendly circles” in Bulgaria (Chapter 5).

Kostadinova's study is not designed to offer a heavily contextualized, detailed examination of corruption in its many incarnations. After all, it aims at comparing the phenomenon in no fewer than 15 countries. Yet readers willing to accept the strengths and limitations of this choice of methodology may be left with some questions.

The author argues that “excessive regulation” of the economy is partly responsible for high corruption levels in some of her case countries (pp. 49, 55). But as the lack of a regulative framework for Eastern Europe's privatization in the early 1990s has demonstrated so painfully, too little market regulation leads to high levels of discretionary powers and makes it more likely that public agencies and their staff involved in privatization are prone to corruption. Kostadinova's reliance on the Business Freedom Index of the Heritage Foundation, set on demonstrating the perils of market interventions in order to measure “excessive regulatory burden,” does not seem to allow for such nuance.

Furthermore, Kostadinova's study focuses on countries' openness to international trade (the amount of foreign trade calculated as percentage of imports and exports from GDP) and “economic capacity” (measured in GDP per capita) (pp. 33–34, 37–38). These factors are respectively argued to increase the costs of corruption (and hence provide incentives to counter it) and to free up resources for cleaning up policies (e.g., by allowing for higher public wages acting against the temptation of bribery). The risk of endogeneity is duly discussed in another context (p. 53), but here, too, one may suspect a possibility of reversed causalities, that is, lower corruption levels causing greater openness to international trade and indeed higher GDP levels per capita.

Finally, Kostadinova finds partial or weak support for “cultural explanations” of pervasive corruption that argue that “corruption is a cultural thing that is well rooted and widespread in places where people show more tolerance to the illegal exchange of money and favors in obtaining services” (p. 139). Kostadinova in this way underpins those who similarly argued against culturalist explanations of corruption in other parts of the world, which often slide into prejudice. Yet those less prepared to write off culturalist approaches to corruption may object to Kostadinova's supporting data, which she derived from an index developed by Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel (Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy, 2005). Here, nations are ranked along a “secular-traditional continuum”; some would find that hard to accept given the unwieldiness and complexity of “culture.”

Kostadinova's study considers a great array of independent variables and explanations in order to arrive at an informed assessment of the causes of corruption in Eastern Europe. Indeed, there is only so much that a book can cover. Yet given her manifestly intimate knowledge of the debates on corruption in Eastern Europe, it would also have been interesting to hear the author's views on two puzzles with regard to corruption in Russia. This country ranked number 133 out of 174 surveyed countries in the 2012 Corruption Perceptions Index of Transparency International, thereby receiving the worst score in Eastern Europe. First, rents from Russia's hydrocarbon sector account for a significant share of Russia's economy and government revenues. One may wonder in this context whether this makes the country a likely candidate for the “natural resource curse” that elsewhere has also been argued to invite high levels of corruption (Carlos Leite and Jens Weidmann, Does Mother Nature Corrupt? Natural Resources, Corruption, and Economic Growth, IMF Working Paper, 1999). Second, Russia was the main country that Joel S. Hellman, Geraint Jones, and Daniel Kaufmann had in mind when they developed their influential idea of “state capture,” arguing that in a “decade of transition, fear of the leviathan state is giving way to increased focus on oligarchs” through collusion and corrupt payments (“Seize the State, Seize the Day”: State Capture, Corruption and Influence in Transition, World Bank Working Paper 2444, 2000; emphasis in the original). With the rise of Vladimir Putin to power, the leviathan state and the oligarchs seem to have reversed roles again, and one may wonder where that leaves the theory of state capture and, by implication, the origins of corruption.

These and similar questions remain to be addressed. In my view, this will require a kind of fine-grained and contextual research that only occasionally surfaces in Kostandinova's book. Political Corruption in Eastern Europe is much stronger as a general consideration of corruption than it is as an account of the politics of postcommunist societies. All the same, it offers a valuable quantitative approach to the study of a pervasive problem that is especially serious for societies undergoing transitions.