This book offers a fascinating, thought-provoking and ground-breaking study of post-communist political life. It is published just as the countries of Central and Eastern Europe mark thirty years since gaining freedom and have embarked on the path of democracy.This book is one of the first full-length academic works to explore the question of how informal structures, headed by bosses, godfathers and oligarchs, affect formal party politics and democracy. The unique post-communist tr...

This volume considers corruption as a multidimensional, complex phenomenon in which various forms of corruption may overlap at any given time. Extending the seemingly paradoxical notion of “legal corruption” to such settings as the USA, Spain, and the Czech Republic, the book seeks to augment our understanding of corruption in democracies by focusing on conduct that is considered by large segments of the population to be corrupt even though they are not explicitly defined as such by the la...