This article examines how the EU conceptualises the relationship between anti-corruption and lobbying regulation (be it lobbying regulation that applies to the EU institutions or lobbying regulation adopted in the EU Member States). Since 2020, the EU’s annual Rule of Law Reports have mentioned lobbying regulation in the context of anti-corruption measures, but this framing pertains to lobbying regulation in the Member States and not at the level of the EU. Yet, especially after the 2022 Qatargate lobbying and corruption scandal, the EU has been under pressure to reform itself and to protect its institutions from foreign influence and corruption. The article discusses recent developments in this area and examines their relationship to the EU’s broader anti-corruption and lobbying framework. It builds on relevant literature on political corruption in constitutional law and political theory. It compares the EU’s approach to foreign vs “standard” (domestic), private vs public, and supranational vs national lobbying and corruption.

This article considers the interpretation of the provisions of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention that regulate investigation and prosecution of foreign bribery. The central claim is that the function of these ‘enforcement obligations’ is to prevent under-enforcement, discriminatory enforcement or concealed enforcement. Interpretation should involve close attention to the specificities of their text as well as the contexts in which the obligations operate, and, when those methods fail, their functions. These claims are illustrated through a study of the application of the provisions to Canada’s handling of the SNC-Lavalin case.

This comment assesses the evidence from four papers on the development process for four breakthrough drugs or treatments. The comment notes that the papers show all the key breakthroughs in the development process were financed either through the National Institutes of Health or various foundations or charities, not drug companies looking to be compensated through patent monopolies. It argues that this evidence suggests patent monopolies are an unnecessary distortion that results in high drug prices and creates perverse incentives. Expanded public funding could replace patent monopolies, allowing new drugs to be sold at free market prices, ending the problem of high drug prices blocking access.

Why do leaders intensify identity entrepreneurship? Existing scholarship treats it as a structural constant, available where cleavages are salient, rather than a behavior whose intensity varies with political conditions. Working within the instrumentalist tradition of social identities, this article theorizes anti-corruption pressure as a cause of that variation. Such pressure varies in biographical content (whether media revelations, congressional proceedings, and prosecutorial acts name the leader and the family), and this content makes legal exposure translatable into a persecution frame. When credible, the translation activates a solidarity mechanism with two outputs emerging at different rates: a loyal base among identity-linked publics whose disapproval attenuates independently of programmatic performance, and endorsement from identity-led social organizations that raises the political costs of accountability. Credibility requires a pre-political biographical anchor; prior polarization and macroeconomic deterioration relax the strategy’s costs. Process tracing of peripheral identity entrepreneurship (PIE) during Pedro Castillo’s presidency in Peru (2021–22) illustrates the argument.

We evaluated an edutainment intervention to encourage electoral corruption reporting in northern Nigeria via a live broadcast of a popular Hausa-language TV show, which aired October–December 2022, shortly before the February 2023 presidential elections. We incorporated behaviorally informed anticorruption messages into the scripts of the TV drama to encourage its tens of millions of viewers to report instances of electoral corruption. We used a randomized encouragement trial design, sampling over 6,000 participants across northern Nigeria through pre-recorded phone surveys. Watching the show caused a statistically significant increase in the perceived helpfulness and frequency of reporting, but we could not detect changes in knowledge of how to report or reporting behaviors.

The EU chose “anti-corruption” to target a particular mode of citizenship acquisition: citizenship by investment. The fact that no other mode of acquiring citizenship has been actively stigmatised through “corruption” rhetoric, including discretionary naturalisations based on economic contributions, suggests that corruption was by no means the European Commission’s main concern. The high importance of citizenship could indeed carry corruption risks associated with it. This, however, cannot be the sole ground for closing particular avenues for naturalisation. Improving the enforcement of the rule of law and the effective implementation of anti-corruption mechanisms are more suitable approaches. Fighting “corruption” served as a rhetorical device deployed by the Commission to stop the supposedly corrupting effects of investment naturalisations on the ethno-nationalist Eurowhiteness model, which this institution, together with the Court of Justice, has chosen for Europeans in direct departure from the law in force. “Anti-corruption,” thus, helped achieve institutional ends unrelated to either fighting corruption or reinforcing the rule of law and other values in the EU.

This paper argues that the pervasive political and economic power of the Thai military is fundamentally rooted in a neo-feudal logic, echoing the Thai sakdina culture. While modern in appearance, the armed forces operate a patrimonial system where high-ranking officers behave like feudal lords, managing fragmented and autonomous fiefdoms of wealth across decentralized branches. This research identifies two structural pillars of the system: the autonomous fiefdoms and the near-total absence of external oversight. These two pillars facilitate systematic extraction and distribution of commercial revenues hidden from the public gaze. The military’s dominant political position allows it to reclassify private interests as matters of national security, effectively bypassing the rule of law and shielding its economic fiefdoms from civilian scrutiny. Ultimately, this paper underscores that the military’s business operations represent an institutionalized neo-feudal construct, a primary obstacle to professional military reform.

At Tabula Cebetis 19.2, the medieval Greek manuscripts transmit a sentence with one word in it that makes no sense in this context. Though editors print this text, they do not explain this word satisfactorily. Normally this is the sort of textual problem that scholars would attempt to resolve by emending the word in question; but there is no satisfactory conjectural emendation available. Comparing the Arabic translation of this text, however, suggests that the problem lies deeper and involves not just this one word but instead a missing conditional clause.

While existing literature has studied the political consequences of corruption, surprisingly little is known about how corruption is associated with voters’ preferences for particular leader characteristics. Using both micro- and macro-level cross-national data, this study analyses whether prevalent corruption is associated with a greater likelihood that young leaders attain executive office. We argue that, in democracies, a higher level of corruption makes younger leaders more electorally attractive because they can be perceived as less embedded in entrenched political networks and more likely to pursue anti-corruption reforms. By analysing data on various political leaders’ backgrounds from 110 democracies between 2001 and 2020, we find that a higher level of corruption is associated with younger elected leaders in democracies. Using the Afrobarometer survey data from 15 African democracies between 2019 and 2020, we find additional evidence that a negative perception of corruption increases citizens’ support for introducing a maximum age limit for presidential candidates. Our study contributes to the literature on leadership selection by highlighting the role of corruption in shaping voter preferences for young leaders.

A conjecture in Aristophanes, Peace 246.

Land sales have been a significant source of revenue for Chinese local governments since the early 2000s. Contrary to popular belief, local governments did not turn to land finance to make up for lost tax revenues after the 1994 tax sharing reform. Rather, both before and after 1994, corrupt land sales were widespread, as officials sold land far below market prices in return for bribes. Even as the fiscal incentives for local governments to adopt land finance increased in the 1990s, state agents continued acting on their own personal interests rather than the institutional interests of local governments. Local governments only began to sell land at higher, market prices when an anti-corruption campaign launched by the central government made doing so a political imperative in the early 2000s. Local governments were much more responsive to political imperatives than to fiscal incentives.