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The purpose of this paper is to explore elites' prevalence in the process of participatory budgeting (PB) in a Ukrainian municipality.

The paper draws on the elite control and capture literature to examine the occurrence of unintended consequences resulting from the process of PB. Data for this case study are derived from document analysis and semi-structured interviews.

This study demonstrates how the involvement of a non-governmental organisation (NGO) promoted PB in a Ukrainian municipality. In the process of orienting politicians and administrators to PB, its normative benefits tend to be prioritised, whilst very little attention has been paid to making inhabitants aware of their role in the process of participatory decision-making. Although PB is intended to propagate good governance and accountability, it has in fact turned out to be a means of promoting corruption and furthering the personal interests of rent-seeking actors.

The paper demonstrates how elites can capture and control PB in the context of emerging economies, thereby preventing its propagated benefits of ensuring equality, justice and emancipation in local communities from being realised.

Exploring PB in Ukraine, the authors urge that caution should be exercised with regard to the wholesale adoption of externally/NGO-propagated ideas. Each emerging economy context is distinct, and an appreciation of this uniqueness is key to the success of PB reforms in different countries.

The purpose of the paper is to examine features and impact of recent reforms introduced by the Philippines government to deal with the longstanding shortcomings in its procurement system.

The research for the paper is based on reports by international organizations, official documents of the Philippines government, surveys by international and domestic organizations, interviews with relevant officials and media reports.

The findings show that the reforms have focused on fostering competition, increasing transparency, standardizing procedures, enhancing end‐product quality and contractor reliability, ensuring proper planning and budgeting, combatting corruption, and strengthening accountability. These reforms were intended to create a procurement system more in line with international best practices. However the paper shows that the impact has been less than promised. This is due to limitations of certain provisions of the reforms and weaknesses in both implementation and in the accountability of the procuring entities. A key factor in undermining the reforms is widespread corruption, which continues to affect many aspects of the procurement system. The article identifies two important and related reasons for such failings: elite capture of the government and bureaucracy by a powerful network of business leaders from well‐established landed families, who have close links with the political establishment; and second, a long‐established culture of informal influence in the Philippine state bureaucracy (what may be termed the informal bureaucracy), which has been used to maximum effect by the elite network of business leaders. As a result, this network has been able to influence the reforms to serve its own interests and ensure its continued dominance of the procurement market.

The value of the paper is to show how administrative reforms, no matter how well formulated they are, may be readily undermined in the process of implementation by elite groups able to influence government bureaucracy through an informal culture.

The purpose of this paper is to engage a contentious World Bank publication beyond its controversy. In particular, it assesses mechanisms that facilitate elite capture of foreign aid and potential strategies of accountability.

This paper adopts desk research methodology, relying primarily upon journal papers, books and internet sources related to international development and corruption.

This paper isolates three factors that contribute to elite capture of foreign aid: the codified secrecy of offshore tax havens, customary clientelism and decentralised aid. Regarding accountability measures, it advocates decreasing livelihood dependence on local elites and encouraging meaningful involvement by civil society.

This paper de-sensationalises the controversial World Bank working paper, providing a contextualised reading that at the time of publication does not yet exist.

This study employs Stein Rokkan's methodological approach to analyse state formation in the Greater Middle East. It develops a conceptual framework distinguishing colonial, populist and democratic pacts, suitable for analysis of state formation and nation-building through to the present period. The framework relies on historical institutionalism. The methodology, however, is Rokkan's. The initial conceptual analysis also specifies differences between European and the Middle Eastern state formation processes. It is followed by a brief and selective discussion of historical preconditions. Next, the method of plotting singular cases into conceptual-typological maps is applied to 20 cases in the Greater Middle East (including Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey). For reasons of space, the empirical analysis is limited to the colonial period (1870s to the end of World War 1). Three typologies are combined into one conceptual-typological map of this period. The vertical left-hand axis provides a composite typology that clarifies cultural-territorial preconditions. The horizontal axis specifies transformations of the region's agrarian class structures since the mid-19th century reforms. The right-hand vertical axis provides a four-layered typology of processes of external intervention. A final section presents selected comparative case reconstructions. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time such a Rokkan-style conceptual-typological map has been constructed for a non-European region.

This paper aims to investigate the prevalence of corruption in Ghana to understand how and why it has turned public procurement into a mere money-making scheme instead of a means to provide needed public goods and services.

The study focuses on Ghana as a case study and mobilizes the monetization of politics lenses. Data are collected via interviews with key officials across the procurement sector (including the government, donors and civil society), documents, documentaries and news articles.

The findings suggest that the increasing costs of elections and political financing coupled with the costs of vote-buying, which has become informally institutionalized, intensify corruption practices and, consequently, turns public procurement into a mere source of cash for political ends. Political appointments and legalized loopholes facilitate this by helping to nullify the safeguard accounting and other control institutions are designed to provide. Likewise, enduring poverty and rising inequality “force” citizens into a vote-buying culture which distorts democratic premises that may drive out unscrupulous politicians; thus, perpetuating capture schemes. Civil society's efforts to remedy these have had little success, and corruption and inequality remain rife.

The main practical implication of the study lies in the need for a gradual demonetization of elections, and the consideration of the fundamental function of public procurement as a policy instrument embedded in economic, social, cultural and environmental plans. Additionally, given the connectedness of the various corruption issues raised, a comprehensive system-based approach in dealing with them would be more effective than a piecemeal approach targeting each issue/problem in isolation.

While extant literature has examined the issue of endemic corruption in developing countries using state capture, few have attempted to explain why it remains enduring, particularly in public procurement. This study, therefore, contributes to the literature on corruption and state capture theoretically and empirically by drawing on monetization of politics from political science to explain why corruption and state capture endure in certain contexts (with Ghana as an illustrative example) which reduce public procurement to a cash-milking scheme.

The aim of the paper is to argue that accounting practices in colonial systems of government can help to construct the identity and “competency” of colonised communities.

The approach was a historical analysis of the colonial political and economic policies of the USA in the Philippines from 1898 to 1924. The role of accounting practices was demonstrated by focusing on the case of the Philippine National Bank from 1916 to 1924. The bank was created by a wholly‐Filipino Legislature when Americans were actively promoting “home rule” by the Filipinos as a prelude to independence. Using Weber's theoretical distinction between modern and traditional societies, primary documents on the bank and secondary references of the policies of the USA during the period of study were examined.

It was found that the Americans used controls over government moneys to express their modernity, efficiency and goodness, while the Filipinos resisted them to perpetuate traditional social arrangements in the context of a “modern” Philippine state. The controls “failed” under the stress of such tensions. The Americans concluded that the Filipinos were unable to manage government moneys “properly”, thus denying them their independence.

Weber's theorization of traditional and modern societies should be applied to understand interactions between coloniser and colonised in cases other than the Philippines.

This paper will be valuable to academics and policy makers because it shows that accounting need not be an active agent by colonisers/administrators to appropriate spoils from its colony.

This paper aims to provide an overview of recent research on accountability of local and state governments in India.

The Downsian theory of electoral competition is used as a departure point for classifying different sources of government accountability failures. Subsequent sections deal with each of these sources in turn: limited voter participation and awareness; ideology, honesty and competence of political parties and electoral candidates; capture by elites; clientelism and vote-buying. Each section starts by explaining the relevant departure from the Downsian framework and then reviews available empirical evidence in the Indian context for each of these possible “distortions”, besides effects of related policy interventions. The final section summarizes the lessons learnt, and the fresh questions that they raise.

The paper describes a range of possible reasons that limit the effectiveness of elections as a mechanism inducing governments to be accountable to their citizens and reviews the evidence available from the Indian context concerning each of these.

The contribution of the paper is to provide an overview and perspective of recent literature on political economy problems affecting performance of state and local governments in India.

This study aims to analyze the effects of economic inequalities on state capture in Latin America. Economic inequalities are the defining issues of our time. While the effect of economic inequality has been explored before on its impact on state capture in Latin America, it has often been done in a qualitative manner. Moreover, most quantitative research to date uses poor proxy variables to assess the impact of inequalities on corruption and or state capture, such as the Gini coefficient, which suffers from a lot of missing data.

A random effects regression model is used to enable the exploitation of between level variation to greater generalize the results across the Latin American region while minimizing bias to the coefficient estimates.

The results demonstrate that the top 1% wealth inequality is highly statistically significant and positive in explaining the variation in state capture. The greater the share of wealth the 1% hold, the more state capture we should expect.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper presents the first empirical study using a novel variable, the top 1% share wealth inequality derived from the World Inequality Database that directly measures the top 1%’s share of wealth overall. The study examines the empirical effect of the top 1%’s share of wealth inequality in contributing to state capture. Nineteen Latin American countries are analyzed across the temporal period 1996–2021.

This paper aims to examine the present Sri Lankan political-economic crisis and its connection to corruption. The paper will discuss the autocratic rule, elite domination of state extractive systems, which have been moulded and configured by Sri Lanka’s political environment over decades. Elite capture has become a significant factor. Sri Lanka’s authoritarian model exercised by Gotabaya Rajapaksa reduced competitive mode and shifted towards a monopolistic corruption structure, centralising on the first family and military rule where powerful elites supported the model. The paper attempts to find the connection between dysfunctional political model and economic crimes committed through several case studies.

The paper discusses five case studies using qualitative analysis using secondary data. The insider trading case study is discussed with quantitative data. Several political and social analyses were carried out with primary data captured from field research by the author.

Sri Lankan economic crisis was triggered because of high-level corruption. The autocratic model introduced by the political authority failed to fight corruption. Transnational mechanisms will fail if there is no credibility and commitment in their own respective nations such as in the USA. External factors such as China in Sri Lanka did have an impact for elite capture.

This study is limited only to five case studies. Transnational mechanism and recommendations require a lengthy study. Only one external factor was assessed because of its significance; there could be other external factors for elite capture.

This study has limited access to capture primary data because of sensitivity during a heavy autocratic regime. Because of state and self-censorship, secondary data had to be tested.

Economic crisis in Sri Lanka is an example to many developing nations fighting corruption. The autocratic family rule supported by external forces crippled the state anti-corruption processes. Economic crime is a key driver for poverty and economic crisis.

This is a unique paper that examines Sri Lanka’s present economic crisis and its political model and economic crime. The paper will discuss transnational mechanisms for anti-corruption and attempt to apply to the Sri Lankan crisis.

The overall aim of this paper was to examine the impact of the Australian research assessment exercise on the research approaches (positivist/non-positivist) favoured by accounting disciplines in Australia. Our key research question examined how the outputs and foci of research in elite accounting disciplines changed over a 16-year period. Our analysis was informed by Bourdieu's notions of academic elitism and symbolic violence.

We analysed all papers published in 20 major accounting journals across a 16-year period by Australian accounting disciplines that were highly rated in the research assessment exercise. We also compared our results from this group against two case study accounting disciplines that were not rated as “world class”.

Our key finding is that the introduction of a research assessment exercise in Australia has resulted in research outputs of elite accounting disciplines over this period being increasingly focused on positivist rather than non-positivist research. Our findings evidence a narrowing of accounting disciplines' research agendas and foci across the period.

Our findings highlight a considerable narrowing of the research agenda and paradigms in accounting disciplines that is not in the public interest. Our findings also have implications for the literature on academic elitism. The narrowing of the research agenda and greater foci on positivist research exhibited in our findings demonstrates the role of dominant elites in controlling the research agenda through a research assessment exercise.

A practical implication is that proper research, regardless of the approach used, must be appropriately recognised and accepted by Accounting Disciplines, not ostracised or discouraged. Research implications are the breadth of accounting research should be celebrated and concentration eschewed. Australian accounting discipline leaders should not fall for the illusion that the only good research is that which is published in a small number of North American positivist journals.

Our findings provide insights into Bourdieu's work through demonstrating how dominant players have successfully exploited an external regulatory mechanism, a research assessment exercise, to strengthen their position within a field and exert control over the research agendas of accounting disciplines. Previous work by Bourdieu has not directly examined how actors utilise these outside forces as instruments for shaping their own field.