The Path to Denmark: How Do Societies Develop Control of Corruption?

Date: 

Thursday, March 3, 2016, 4:10pm to 5:30pm

Location: 

Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, 124 Mount Auburn Street, Suite 200-North, Cambridge, MA

The Ash Center cordially invites you to a discussion with Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, Professor of Democracy Studies at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, Germany as part of its Comparative Democracy Seminar Series. 

The author of  The Quest for Good Governance (Cambridge University Press 2015)  and leader of the EU funded 10 million euro framework research project ANTICORRP, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi takes up the challenge from where renowned authors Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson had left it in “Why Nations Fail”. If the difference in economic performance is accounted for by governance, what explains why so few countries engage on the path of open and inclusive government versus one limiting access and spoiling its subjects? She argues that corruption has historically started by being the norm before becoming the exception, and that in over eighty electoral democracies of the present world the spoiling of public resources by ruling elites is still the rule of the game and a major collective action problem. Understanding the historical development of corruption control if the main target of her book.

About the Speaker:  Alina Mungiu-Pippidi is Professor of Democracy Studies at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, Germany.  She has taught Democratisation and Policy Analysis at the Hertie School since 2007. She studied political science at Harvard University after completing a PhD in Social Psychology in 1995 at the University of Iasi in Romania. She chairs the European Research Centre for Anti-Corruption and State Building Research and is Chair of Policy Pillar of the EU FP7 five-year research project ANTICORRP. Since 2015, Prof. Mungiu-Pippidi also heads the DIGIWHIST research team at Hertie School. She constantly serves as an adviser on issues of governance measurement and anticorruption to the European Commission, UNDP, Freedom House, NORAD and World Bank, among others. She was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard, Stanford, the European University Institute and St. Antony's College of Oxford University, among others. In 1996 she founded the think tank Romanian Academic Society, which has since played an important role in promoting good governance in Romania, and inspired and advised many civil society anti-corruption coalitions in other countries. Her research interests are in the area of Europeanization, state building, institutional transformation, and development of modern governance.

 

Listen to a recording of the event: