Protecting integrity at the local level: the role of anticorruption and public management networks

This article argues that anti-corruption agencies at the local-level have been successful in a way that can be evaluated and emulated. A related contention is that corruption control is most effective when the central public integrity agency is part of both a local anticorruption network and a local public management network. Quite reasonably, the international anti-corruption project has focused most time and energy on advocating and assessing efforts made to ensure public integrity at the national level. Baseline studies by scholars and supra-national integrity nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) identify the form of corruption control (if any) adopted by the central government. Key considerations in assessing the status of national anti-corruption agencies (ACAs) are the ones mentioned in the introduction to this special issue: political independence, scope of authority, investigatory powers, position in the national legal/political network, durability, and use of effectiveness measures. Similar taxonomies are deployed by OLAF, Transparency International, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and by scholars on corruption control.     

A difficulty with oaths: On trust, trustworthiness, and signalling

In the wake of the Enron and Worldcom financial scandals that rocked Wall Street in 2002, the US government’s financial regulatory body, the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) took the unprecedented step in June 2002 of requiring that the chief executives and chief financial officers of America’s 947 biggest companies to swear on oath that their company results and financial reports were to the best of their knowledge accurate. The one-off order was quickly followed by the passing of the Sarbanes-Oxely act, which will require many more CEOs and CFOs to certify their company reports and financial statements at regular intervals. In this paper we apply a simple signalling model to examine whether or not this type of institutional signal of trustworthiness is always efficient. We find that in the presence of signalling costs, the separating equilibrium can be socially inefficient as well as causing a general loss of trust. JEL classificationC72. D81. D82. K22     

Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East. Hashemi Nader and Danny Postel,eds. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

In 2014, the Middle East appeared to teeter on the brink of an all-out sectarian war between Sunnis and Shi’as. In June of that year, the major Iraqi city of Mosul fell to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria in a matter of days, bringing the group closer to its vow to eliminate all Shi’as and other religious minorities living in its self-proclaimed Islamic caliphate. Several hundred miles to the west, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps were actively training Afghan Shi’a fighters to support the demoralized troops of Bashar Assad.