In this book project, I argue that judicial anticorruption campaigns, i.e. clusters of criminal prosecutions of perpetrators of grand political corruption, vary along two dimensions: transparency and effectiveness. Transparency refers to variation in the dominant motives behind corruption prosecutions and effectiveness captures the degree of severity of the legal consequences that flow from criminal prosecutions.

Following the 2011 Arab Spring, autocrats have sought to limit citizens’ ability to publicize offline protests over social media. In this paper, we explore how users can adapt to these restrictions. To do so, we analyze 33 million tweets sent from Egypt during the “Day of Anger” protests in September 2020. We find evidence of learning and online tactical evasion in a highly repressive context. To avoid detection, opponents are more likely to issue calls for offline protests using new or dedicated accounts that contain no personal information.

Large corporations are increasingly on trial. Over the last decade, many of the world’s biggest companies have been embroiled in legal disputes over corruption charges, fraud, environmental damage, taxation issues or sanction violations, ending in convictions or settlements of record-breaking fines, well above the billion-dollar mark. For critics of globalization, this turn towards corporate accountability is a welcome sea-change showing that multinational companies are no longer above the law, simply because they are too big, too mobile and too important for economic growth.

Political parties in Europe compete in a pluralized issue space. In combination with the ongoing socio-structural realignment of party electorates, this pluralization has been argued to entail several strategic trade-offs, especially for Social Democratic parties, whose electoral support has been dwindling over the past decades. In particular, Social Democratic parties may face sharp trade-offs when it comes to addressing working class vs. new middle class voters, as well as young vs. elderly voters.

This paper argues that political elites may weaken bureaucratic capacity in anticipation of future redistribution. One such instance occurred in the Colonial Indian provinces, where incumbent elites hollowed out tax capacity in anticipation of franchise expansion.