Corruption in Eastern Europe: A Challenge to a Common European Home?

Legacies of communist-era corruption have been considered a challenge to Eastern Europe’s integration with Western Europe.  Yet, to what extent have illicit practices from the Soviet era endured?  Is corruption in countries of Eastern Europe even distinctive—in terms of its quality or quantity—from corruption in Western Europe?  Our ability to answer these questions has been hampered by the lack of data about types of corruption throughout Europe and over time.  Scholars have provided useful multi-country studies, but these have not examined both Eastern and Western Europe and most have examined only the postcommunist period (Holmes, Karklins, Ledeneva, Miller et al.).  This paper uses the Varieties of Democracy dataset, which includes measures of different types of corruption for all countries of Europe from 1900 to 2012.  It investigates whether there has been a shift in the type of corruption between communist and post-communist eras in Eastern Europe and whether current corruption differs in type or amount between Eastern and Western Europe.  This more fine-grained analysis will help us better understand the extent to which corruption is a challenge to a Common European Home.