Making Sense of Corruption - Cancelled

Due to unforeseen circumstances, this talk is cancelled and will be rescheduled on a future date (TBA)

SPEAKER: Professor Bo Rothstein, University of Gothenburg

Corruption is a serious threat to prosperity, democracy and human well-being, with mounting empirical evidence highlighting its detrimental effects on society. Yet defining this threat has resulted in profound disagreement, producing a multidimensional concept. Tackling this important and provocative topic, the authors of Making Sense of Corruption’ (Bo Rothstein and Aiysha Varraich) provide an accessible and systematic analysis of how our understanding of corruption has evolved. They identify gaps in the research and make connections between related concepts such as clientelism, patronage, patrimonialism, particularism and state capture. Professor Rothstein will address the fundamental issue of how the opposite of corruption should be defined. By arguing for the possibility of a universal understanding of corruption, and specifically what corruption is not, an innovative solution to this problem is presented.

‘Making Sense of Corruption’ provides an accessible overview of corruption, allowing scholars and students alike to see the far reaching place it has within academic research.

There will be an opportunity for questions and discussion after the talk.

Bo Rothstein holds the August Röhss Chair in Political Science at University of Gothenburg in Sweden, where he is head of the Quality of Government (QoG) Institute. He completed his PhD at Lund University in 1986 and became assistant and associate professor at Uppsala University, where he served until 1995. He is the Scientific Coordinator for ANTICORRP – Anti-Corruption Policies Revisited – a five year research project started in 2012 funded by the European Union and consisting of 21 research groups in 16 EU countries. The project is, to date, the largest social science research project funded by the EU. He has been a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, University of Washington-Seattle, Cornell University, Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, the Australian National University and Stanford University. He has served as adjunct professor at University of Bergen and University of Aalborg. His most recent books are The Quality of Government: Corruption, Inequality and Social Trust in International Perspective (University of Chicago Press 2011, also published in Chinese in 2012 by Xinhua Publishers) and the edited volume Good Government. The Relevance of Political Science (Edward Elgar 2012, together with Sören Holmberg).

His earlier monographs in English are Social Traps and the Problem of Trust (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and Just Institutions Matters: The Moral and Political Logic of the Universal Welfare State (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and The Social Democratic State (Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1996). He has published articles in scholarly journals such as World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, European Political Science Review, European Journal of Political Research, and Public Administration and Governance. In 2012, Dr. Rothstein was elected member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and he is a regular contributor to the Swedish public debate about issues related to his research.