Corruption, Inequality, and the Rule of Law

Eric M. Uslaner is Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he has taught since 1975. He has written seven books including The Moral Foundations of Trust (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and The Decline of Comity in Congress (1993). In 1981–2 he was Fulbright Professor of American Studies and Political Science at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel, and in 2005 he was a Fulbright Senior Specialist Lecturer at Novosibirsk State Technical University, Novosibirsk, Siberia, Russia. In 2006 he was appointed the first Senior Research Fellow at the Center for American Law and Political Science at the Southwestern University of Political Science and Law, Chongqing, China.

• 1. Corruption: the basic story; 2. Corruption and the inequality trap; 3. Corruption, inequality, and trust: the linkages across nations; 4. Transition and the road to the inequality trap; 5. The rocky road to transition: the case of Romania; 6. Half empty or almost full? Mass and elite perceptions of corruption in Estonia, Slovakia, and Romania; 7. The easy and hard cases: Africa and Singapore and Hong Kong; 8. Corruption isn't inevitable, but; 9. Conclusions.

“One cannot help but be impressed by the scope of quantitative econometric analysis presented, both within the text and in the appendices. . . . the presence of such analysis is a clear and bold merit of the book. Indeed, it makes it an unparalleled source of information to which a graduate student or a scholar may turn not just for excellent analytical points, but for the results of data analysis as well.” – Ararat L. Osipian, Demokratizatsiya