Explaining enforcement patterns of anticorruption agencies: comparative analysis of five Serbian, Croatian and Macedonian anticorruption agencies

摘要

Anticorruption agencies (ACAs) have drawn scholarly attention in recent times. While authors focused predominately on studying ACAs’ performance and their contribution to the reduction of corruption, ACAs’ enforcement – as a process that precedes policy outcome - has remained understudied so far. This thesis seeks to contribute to filling this gap, by exploring the enforcement choices of five ACAs from three Western Balkans’ countries – Serbia, Macedonia, and Croatia, in the period 2001-2012.udThe thesis utilises three theoretical accounts in order to explore the determinants of the enforcement of the five ACAs’ enforcement. These are organisational, temporal, and leadership based accounts. Organisational accounts include de-jure independence and agency resources as key factors, temporal accounts include life-cycle and political-cycle as determinants of agency behaviour and, finally, leadership-based accounts highlight the role of leaders, i.e. human agency, in shaping agency enforcement. While failing to lend support for the organisational and temporal accounts, the empirical analysis offers evidence in support of the leadership based account. Overriding the organisational and temporal boundaries and constraints, the ‘personal’ (human) factor turns out to have been the key driver of the analysed ACAs’ enforcement.udThe thesis also sets out to investigate whether the ACA model has implications for ACAs’ enforcement. The first – the preventive ACA model - is argued to be able to exhibit the harshest forms of enforcement even if the organisational factors are weak. The other - the suppressive ACA model - is hypothesised to be able to exert the harshest forms of enforcement only under strong organisational factors. The empirical analysis yields support to this hypothesis. It is shown in the thesis that the two ACA models provide for different reputational opportunities and risks, factors that crucially shape the enforcement choices.