Corruption in Contemporary Spain

Interest in the links between corruption and politics has increased significantly since the early 1990s. Although the public widely sees corruption as a phenomenon that particularly afflicts the developing world—as reflected in the growing emphasis placed on anti-corruption initiatives by such international agencies as the World Bank, IMF, OECD, and Transparency International—the issue is also attracting significant attention in established democracies. Politicians, civil society activists, and media commentators have expressed concerns about a host of high-profile scandals contributing to a decline of trust in the political class, whilst a perceived “culture of corruption” in several of the post-communist countries of east-central Europe is seen as an obstacle to their full integration into the European Union. Indeed, corruption has started to become a powerful policy narrative in many countries, blamed for a host of shortcomings in democracies and non-democracies alike (Heywood and Krastev 2006).