The study of clientelism has pointed in the direction of a pyramid structure in which selective benefits are distributed with the help of brokers to individuals or groups in exchange for political support. This approach treats the resources aimed to enhance electoral mobilization as endogenous and fails to explain what happens when brokers have very low capacity. To address these problems this article proposes a bi-dimensional model of clientelism that emphasizes the role of exogenous resources. Accordingly, the vertical linkage between political parties and electorate is complemented by a horizontal nexus between parties and private contributors. In an environment characterized by low internal resources, parties involve external actors to get the necessary money. To illustrate how this mechanism works we focus on Romania between 2008 and 2012, a crucial case for the study of clientelism.

Studies examining the effects of gender on honesty, deceptive behavior, pro-sociality, and risk aversion, often find significant differences between men and women. The present study contributes to the debate by exploiting one of the largest tax compliance experiments to date in a highly controlled environment conducted in the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Italy. Our expectation was that the differences between men’s and women’s behavior would correlate broadly with the degree of gender equality in each country. Where social, political and cultural gender equality is greater we expected behavioral differences between men and women to be smaller. In contrast, our evidence reveals that women are significantly more compliant than men in all countries. Furthermore, these patterns are quite consistent across countries in our study. In other words, the difference between men’s and women’s behavior is not significantly different in more gender neutral countries than in more traditional societies.

This article brings an important empirical contribution to the academic literature by examining whether gender differences in tax compliance are due to higher prosociality among women. We conducted a large cross-national tax compliance experiment carried out in different countries—Italy, UK, USA, Sweden, and Romania. We uncover that women declare a significantly higher percentage of their income than men in all five countries. While some scholars have argued that differences in honesty between men and women are mediated by prosociality, we find that women are not more prosocial than men in all countries and we do not find a mediating effect of prosocial behaviour on tax compliance. Though tax evasion is a form of dishonesty, the tax compliance experiment is quite different from an honesty experiment, which is certainly one explanation for the different results. We conclude that although differences in prosociality between men and women seem to be context-dependent, differences in tax compliance are indeed much more consistent. (JEL codes: D90, D91, H26)

Earlier research focused extensively on political parties as promoters and users of clientelism. However, previous studies have also revealed that parties are not monolithic organizations and they can be seen through the lenses of several faces or components. As such, it is unclear which of the party features is more conducive to clientelism than others. This article analyses several party features in relation to clientelism and tests their explanatory power. Our analysis is driven by a differentiation between several features of the political parties: performance in office, public funding, territorial coverage and notoriety of local political leaders. We rely on data from an original expert survey conducted for 15 parties in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine between February and June 2018.

The process of reaching carbon neutrality by 2050 and cutting CO2 emissions by 2030 by 55% compared to 1990 as per the EU Green Deal is highly complex. The energy mix must be changed to ensure long-term environmental sustainability, mainly by closing down coal sites, while preserving the energy-intensive short-term economic growth, ensuring social equity, and opening opportunities for regions diminishing in population and potential. Romania is currently in the position of deciding the optimal way forward in this challenging societal shift while morphing to evidence-based policy-making and anticipatory governance, mainly in its two coal-mining regions. This article provides possible future scenarios for tackling this complex issue in Romania through a three-pronged, staggered, methodology: (1) clustering Romania with other similar countries from the point of view of the Just Transition efforts (i.e., the energy mix and the socio-economic parameters), (2) analyzing Romania’s potential evolution of the energy mix from the point of the thermal efficiency of two major power plants (CEH and CEO) and the systemic energy losses, and (3) providing insights on the socio-economic context (economic development and labor market transformations, including the component on the effects on vulnerable consumers) of the central coal regions in Romania.

An extensive body of literature refers to the informal linkage channels developed and supported by political parties as part of their survival strategy. This article's contribution to the existing literature is twofold. First, it presents original empirical evidence on the party patronage phenomenon in the post-communist context, which gives us a better understanding of the specific mechanisms that grant discretionary control over public resources. Second, this article extends our theoretical understanding of the functions of party patronage by exploring the exploitative function performed by patronage networks, and evaluates their potential detrimental effects for the patron parties.

Three decades since the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe, the ideal of liberal democracy is under considerable strain. Recent developments in the region show that democratic institutions do not only evolve and consolidate, but they can also decay. The article intends to provide a comprehensive theoretical account to shed light on the ongoing multifaceted and multi-layered processes of change in the region. Drawing on the literature on the role of ideas and on the body of research explaining ongoing transformations in Central and Eastern Europe, it conceptuali ¶ ses the normative core of antiliberal ideas. It shows that this core is embedded in a set of narratives pitted against liberal democracy, which take the form of causal stories, put forward values and solutions, being ultimately used to legitimi ¶ se institutional change in politics ( ¶ i.e. agency and the social power structures) policies ( ¶ i.e. how economic nationalism alters the neoliberal model) and the polity ( ¶ i.e. the rules of the political game). This conceptual map, which is derived inductively from the literature, is meant to guide future empirical studies and theory building exercises seeking to understand institutional change in the region and beyond.

The COVID-19 crisis and countries’ reactions led to analyses about how governance systems influenced the management of the pandemic and how COVID-19 influenced businesses. The concept of institutional resilience transcends these directions of research, but we know little about what it means and how to measure it. This paper proposes an innovative framework to conceptualize and assess institutional resilience based on three organisational traits: preparedness, agility and robustness. This approach provides the opportunity to sequence actions before, during and after the pandemic. This framework will be applied through various cases studies in Europe in the contributions to this symposium. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1057/s41304-022-00380-y.