SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC EXPLANATIONS FOR CORRUPTION Chair: Alex Stevens Chair: Alex Stevens

187 responses to, injecting drug use. In this paper, I explore, through the analysis of ethnographic data the meaning of injecting drug use in the context of rural women’s lives and how living in a rural community of place shapes women’s experiences and perceptions of ‘risk’ behaviour.

Methods:

This paper is based upon ethnographic accounts of the lives and experiences of twenty active female injecting heroin users in the rural communities of North Wales, UK. North Wales is a socially and economically disadvantaged region, witnessing crises in the agricultural sector and local economy as well as housing decline in recent years. Life history interviews, shorter follow-up interviews and many more informal discussions were conducted with the women over a twelve-month period. The women were recruited through ‘network’ sampling techniques. All interviews were audio-recorded with the respondent’s permission and transcribed verbatim for analysis using the constant comparative method of generating and linking categories.

Findings:

The women all provided rich ethno-depictions of their lives, their experiences of injecting drug use and how living in a rural community of place impacted on them and their IDU careers. In their accounts, a number of overlapping themes emerged about injecting drug use, rural gender roles and relations and the management of the rural self. In the women’s accounts, we can see evidence of the multiple roles these women (attempt) to manage (drug user, mother, daughter, lover, etc.) and the social discreditation processes experienced in their day-to-day lives as ‘known’ IDUs. Much of this social discreditation in rural communities seems to be premised upon the individualisation of women’s drug use. Here, women are characterised as having in some way failed in their adult responsibilities as women. However, the women interviewed were not passive recipients of social discreditation processes and the paper concludes with a discussion of some of the responses from the self and the ways in which women respond to, and resist, the persistent negative imagery of female injecting drug users as ‘polluted’ women in a local community of space.

3.16 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC EXPLANATIONS FOR CORRUPTION

During the last several years the word corruption became a very frequently used term in the Czech Republic. The problem of corruption has even become one of the important words of the vocabularies of politicians. Paper presents the overview of knowledge on the situation of corruptive behaviour in the Czech Republic. It is based on the secondary analysis of findings from surveys on public opinion carried out in the Czech Republic, on the analysis of Czech governmental documents concerning this phenomenon but also on partial analyses of funding of political parties.

Paper is focused on the feelings and fears of public, on the findings about the “corruptive climate” in the society but it also calls attention to the lack of factual knowledge on its phenomenon itself. It takes into account the development of this phenomenon under the socialist regime and subsequently within the period of transition and characterised the types of corruptive behaviour changing in the time course. It tries to differentiate between the levels of corruptive behaviour that could be characterised as „common“ corruptive behaviour on the everyday level, a corruptive behaviour as an organised activity and systemic corruption steering for the „state capture“.

0246 - INEQUALITY AS A CONTINGENT CAUSE OF CORRUPTION: A QUALITATIVE COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

Alex Stevens (United Kingdom)¹ 1 - University of Kent

The relationship between corruption and income inequality at the national level has been the subject of repeated debates. Studies using regression methods have established a clear bivariate association between the two phenomena. Some (e.g. Karstedt 2000, Zhang et al 2009) have argued that inequality does not have a direct effect on corruption, but that this effect is mediated through cultural and institutional dimensions, including human development and social support, when using multivariate models. Others (e.g. You & Khagram 2005) have found that inequality regains a significant, direct effect when indicators of democracy or a socialist legacy are added to the models, but that this effect is stronger in more democratic countries. Such studies imply that the effect of inequality on corruption is contingent on the presence or absence of other conditions in each country. But traditional regression techniques are not well suited to the analysis of complex, multiple, contingent causation. As has been argued by Charles Ragin (2008) and others, the approach of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) is better suited to exploring such patterns of causation in actually occurring cases. This paper will present the results of a fuzzy set QCA (fsQCA) of the contingent causal combinations that are consistently present in countries that have high or low perceptions of corruption (using both the Corruption Perception Index and the Bribery Propensity Index) in a dataset of over 50 countries. It will ask: Is inequality always an element

189 contingent contexts in which this occurs and on the comparative study of corruption, as suggested by Zimring & Johnson (2005).

0247 - ACTORS AND REGULATIONS IN GRAND CORRUPTION CASES: COMPARING SOUTH AMERICA AND MEDITERRANEAN EUROPE.

José María López Riba (Spain)¹; Jaris Mújica (Peru)³; Albert Pedrosa (Spain)²; Riccardo Milani (Italy)¹; Daniel Wasserman (Chile)¹

1 - Pompeu Fabra University; 2 - Autonomous University of Barcelona; 3 - Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú

Reports and corruption cases about major public infrastructures have appeared constantly in several countries all around the world and they underline consistent institutional control, accountability and transparency problems in resources and auctions management. The aim of this paper is focus on comparing grand corruption cases in four countries (Spain, Chile, Italy and Peru) to determine: i) kinds of players (public official or private actor) who take part in corruption acts; ii) the comparative structure in criminal practice development (sequence of crime); iii) the mechanism of action and the institutional design which facilitate corruption (problems in effective use of preventive monitoring mechanism, grey areas about information access and transparency and the restricted capacity of the State to check out efficaciously all kinds of players and all types of crimes). Based on the systematization of forty cases held by mass media or court's records sources, during the last decade, in the four countries mentioned above, and using a comparative method formed by attributes and sequences in order to establish a series of recurrence chronological evidence, this paper shows, on one side, the difficulty in corruption acts detention and investigation owing to main actor (private actor) is out of state legal control and regulations. On the other hand, this paper shows that the configuration of preventive mechanisms and accountability regulations (mechanisms of horizontal accountability, social surveillance and transparency in the bidding process) are permeable when main actor is the private actor and this situation produces a lack of control and surveillance. Finally, this paper highlights that in a circumstance characterized by oligopoly market, the private field of action seems to be less guarded due to distance from state vigilance. Our research discusses the crime opportunity theory. Even situations characterized by high levels of formal control, regulation and surveillance do not necessarily imply any deterrents for the attainment of grand corruption acts. Moreover, this study discusses the situational crime prevention theory, as corruption acts take place even when formal surveillance devices and bureaucratic control accomplished. This evidence suggests the importance of studying main players and the structure of these crimes that can also come about despite the fulfilment of all formal requirements of control.

0248 - AN EXAMINATION OF COUNTRY-LEVEL CORRUPTION AND TERRORISM: A PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS

Nancy Morris (United States of America)¹ 1 - Virginia Commonwealth University

The idea that corruption and terrorism are closely linked is not new. In recent years both scholars and policy makers have discussed the possibility that government-based corruption facilitates or causes domestic terrorism. Corruption, defined as, the misuse of entrusted power for private gain may be related to increased domestic terrorism because it creates sustained perceptions and feelings of injustice among the populace. Corruption may also weaken the ability of government to police and regulate internal conflicts between opposing factions. In spite of the prevailing belief that corruption is connected to domestic terrorism there have been surprisingly few studies to empirically examine the connection. In the current study, we examine the relationship between corruption and domestic and transnational terrorism at the country-level. Specifically, we expect that corruption should be positively related to terrorism, net of other relevant socio-political, economic and demographic correlates of terrorism. We use data taken from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) to estimate domestic and transnational terrorism. The GTD is an open source data set with over 70,000 incidents of domestic and transnational terrorism incidents recorded between 1970 and 2013. We supplement data from the GTD with data taken from several country-level databases of corruption (Corruption Perceptions Index, Global Corruption Barometer, and WBI Governance and Anti-corruption Index). We conclude with a discussion of our findings and the implications for both terrorism research and counterterrorism policies.

3.17 HUMAN TRAFFICKING I: OFFENDERS, PROCESSES AND FACTORS