Citizens often enable corruption by paying bribes, yet even in highly corrupt settings only a minority always pay. This study asks why individuals choose to bribe in some situations but not others by combining insights from two major literatures on corruption.
This paper asks how patron–client ties among officials affect information flows inside bureaucratic hierarchies. The authors argue that lower-level officials with patronage ties to higher-level leaders undertake informal information campaigns—sending signals of diligence and defending themselves—to compete for favors. Drawing on newly assembled Chinese sources, including a corpus of internal emails between city patrons and county clients and original data on county governments’ public replies to citizen complaints, the study compares communication patterns between client and non-client counties. The contribution is a descriptive account showing greater upward communication from client counties without detectable differences in public-facing complaint responses.
This article asks why armed groups form high-end cooperation—training or intelligence sharing—even though such ties raise downstream political risks. The author develops a principal–agent theoretical logic: principals (providers of high-end support) mitigate risk by choosing agents who are skill-complementary but politically non-substitutable, while agents accept support only when it does not politically overshadow them. The study uses original network data on 53 groups in Northeast India from 1981–2021 and applies temporal exponential random graph models (TERGMs) to test the theory, producing evidence about organizational capacity differences, complementary attack portfolios, and constituency distinctiveness as correlates of high-end cooperation.
Lawyers dominate many national parliaments. This study compares three countries with mixed electoral systems - Japan, South Korea and Germany.