Corruption is often defined as a deviant conduct from established legal and formal norms and expected ways of behaving in the exercise of official duties and the discharge of official responsibilities. Readiness to tolerate corruption will hinge primarily upon the evaluator’s understanding of what those ethical standards are. This means that citizens’ willingness to accept corruption as something “normal” to the functioning of democracy or “beneficial” to economic development is likely to be affected by how knowledgeable they are about the ethical standards of governing public office. Such knowledge can be instilled by academic and experiential learning. So, we question to what extent citizens’ knowledge of official ethical standards affect their tolerance towards corruption? Based on new individual level data collected from six focus groups conducted in Portugal, we show a possible negative association between the appropriate knowledge of official ethical standards and tolerance towards corruption. The results are exploratory, but sufficiently interesting to test our hypothesis with a larger sample. 

Keywords: corruption, democratic norms, knowledge, tolerance, ethics

This article explores press coverage of sport-related violence in the Czech Republic by applying Stuart Hall’s analytical framework to articles published in selected newspapers between 1998 and 2017. Covering a gap in the current scholarship, this case study shows that in the Czech Republic there are similar trends to the ones present in other European countries when it comes to media coverage of sport-related violence. However, the typical simplifications and exaggerations associated to the topic are present only in a minor part of the analysed sample and even tabloid press articles report rather neutrally on the matter. There is also a marked difference in how the newspapers report on football- and ice hockey-related violence, with the former largely explained by football supporters’ characteristics and the latter more readily interpreted as directly influenced by the game. The scarce calls for action and reactions from politicians, as well as the fact that police and game authorities are usually those who seem to frame the topic support the thesis that sport-related violence is more often politicised by actors that deal with it as part of their everyday duties, while politicians only exploit it under certain socio-political circumstances.

Keywords: hooliganism, sport-related violence, press coverage, football supporters, ice hockey supporters, political treatment of sport

Who has led Poland in the past 20 years, technocrats or politruks? Were those placed at the top of ministries merely party cadres, or were they experts in the domain of their ministerial activity? To uncover the answer, the present paper surveys 257 ministers spread across 10 governments and 19 years, starting with the 2001 government led by Leszek Miller and ending with the second Mateusz Morawiecki cabinet instated in November 2019. The findings suggest that the share of technocratic ministers – defined minimally as individuals who received formal education in the field of their ministerial activity – varied from 65% in 2001 to 35% in 2006, averaging at 50.19% in the entire period. 129 ministers have been technocrats and 128 politruks, as defined in this paper. The latter, however, have steadily increased their share since 2000. Consequently, half of the Polish ministers were politruks – creations of the political parties, non-experts that headed National Defense, Health, Interior, and other Ministries of paramount importance.

Keywords: post-communism, Poland, elite selection, ministerial selection, cabinet formation, democracy

The article analyses how the emergence of bulk international surveillance impacts the boundary problem in political theory. It first describes how the boundary problem was defined and developed as well as the solutions proposed in the literature. Then, the paper analyses surveillance as a violation of privacy which has a chilling effect and presents the specificities of bulk collection of electronic information. The main argument of the article is that the permanent uncertainty that bulk international surveillance causes triggers the need for a cosmopolitan legal regime to govern it under any of the solutions proposed to the boundary problem.

Keywords: surveillance, boundary problem, democracy, legitimacy, Snowden

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