Recent years marked several major corruption and clientelism scandals in Lithuania: from opaque business and political party-related transactions in Lithuanian Railways corporation to likely bribing activities related to the leader of the Liberal Party and other politicians. Highly scrutinized by the press, these events have put a spotlight on the nature of political parties’ co-operation with business actors. In light of that, this paper aims to look into how these corruption scandals affect the business-partisan relations. Specifically, we aim to examine to what extent these external shocks are able to produce substantive shifts in the path-dependent dynamics of business-politics nexus.
We hypothesize that high-profile corruption scandals have two effects. On the one hand, they encourage systematic changes in the well-established practices of the exposed political party and lead to a substantive transformation of party-business relations. Alternatively, scandal-free political parties tend to adapt to new realities by making only formal adjustments. Finally, acknowledging the role of the press and its sensitization effects, we find that press scrutiny triggers excessive fear of another scandal by affected political actors leading them to reduce the transparency of their political day-to-day activities. With this paper we seek to contribute to path dependence theory and specifically to understanding of institutional critical junctures. Empirically, we combine original interview data with qualitative media analysis.
