Pathways to Corruption: A Fuzzy-Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis of Corruption in Central Eastern Europe

Recent developments that threaten the sustainability of civil society particularly increasing restrictions on the democratic civic space in the world over have stifled civil society’s work, their anticorruption efforts included. In several countries, state institutions have become more receptive of civil society (CS) and consequently, the legal and political environment within which civil society organizations (CSOs) operate have become hostile. Central Eastern Europe (CEE), as a region, notably experiences this worrisome trend (CSO Sustainability Index, 2016). One is therefore prompted to ask, if democratic grounds are backsliding, where are anticorruption efforts anchored on? Informed by the literature on civil society-corruption nexus, and the broader democracy-corruption linkage, the paper is an attempt to describe the conditions through which the civil society (CS) affects control of corruption in Central Eastern Europe. Following from the belief that civil society cannot constitute a single, independent force in the anticorruption movement and reform, I argue that civil society’s anticorruption effect is conditional upon the presence or absence of two important factors surveyed from the extant literature: e-government development and free media. Consistent with the theoretical underpinnings of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), I also argue that there maybe different trajectories to corruption in the region. Using secondary data culled from various sources, the paper employs a fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to determine the combinations of the following conditions [sustainable CSO (SUSTAINABLECSO), mature e-government (MATUREEGOV) and free media (FREEMEDIA)] that lead to the outcome, corruption (HIGHCORRUP) in the region. While notably democratic backsliding transpires in the region in different degrees, results of the fsQCA also point to different pathways to corruption in the CEE.