The endemic nature of corruption in developing countries and the potential damage this can cause if it remains entrenched is not in question. In the search for policy responses attention has increasingly turned to the possible role of civil society in controlling corruption. The argument is that if civil society can be strengthened and its efforts at monitoring the state encouraged, this would ...

This paper describes relationship building among nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in a civil society effort. It presents the results of an interorganizational network analysis of 17 Croatian civil society organizations that participated in the 2000 parliamentary election campaign. The research analyzes network relationships including density, structural holes, and centrality, considering th...

The aim of this paper is to explore some of the gender dimensions of multinational companies’ operations in fragile and conflict-affected areas by highlighting several issues across the extractive and agroindustry on a thematic level. Although the particular manifestations and conditions are highly dependent on the local context, the paper aims to give guidance and to facilitate a learning proc...

Empirical studies often use Freedom House ratings for Political Rights and/or Civil Liberties as institutional proxies for the degree of democracy. In this study, Granger-causality tests are used which reveal that Political Rights tend to precede Civil Liberties, but not the reverse, in a panel data set of former Soviet Republics. For transition nations, Freedom House also publishes a separate ...

In contrast to mass media, which established a kind of global public opinion, interactive media seems to support the development of Teiloeffentlichkeiten (“partial publics”), which are discourses characterised by context-specific argumentation strategies and special themes. We assume that interactive electronic media will not substitute for the traditional mass media, but will be useful for pre...

There is no term for, much less a theory of, civil society in classical Jewish texts. Although the Jewish viewpoint on any given subject is no longer identical with the classical rabbinic viewpoint, until modernity, the latter provided the intellectual framework in which all Jewish thought was set. Any understanding of how Judaism views a topic must begin with the rabbinic tradition. This is st...

This paper reviews the current literature on social accountability as a means to achieve good governance and increased public participation for improved public service delivery. After a brief discussion on concept and tools of social accountability, this paper illustrates that such innovations have led to improvements in the performance of state agencies and actors in varying contexts across th...

Centralized sanctioning institutions have been shown to emerge naturally through social learning, displace all other forms of punishment and lead to stable cooperation. However, this result provokes a number of questions. If centralized sanctioning is so successful, then why do many highly authoritarian states suffer from low levels of cooperation? Why do states with high levels of public good ...