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State capture and corruption are widespread phenomena across the globe, but their empirical study still lacks sufficient analytical tools. This paper develops a new conceptual and analytical framework for gauging state capture based on microlevel contractual networks in public procurement. To this end, it establishes a novel measure of corruption risk in government contracting focusing on the behavior of individual organizations. Then, it identifies clusters of high-corruption-risk organizations in the full contractual network of procuring authorities and their suppliers using formal social network analysis. Densely connected clusters of high-corruption-risk organizations are denoted as the domain of state capture. The paper demonstrates the power of the new analytical framework by exploring how the radical centralization of the governing elite following the 2010 elections in Hungary affected centralization of state capture. Findings indicate the feasibility and usefulness of such microlevel approach to corruption and state capture. Better understanding the network structure of corruption and state capture opens new avenues for research and policy on anticorruption, budget deficit, market competition, and quality of democracy. Supporting further empirical studies of corruption, the data are made available at digiwhist.eu/resources/data.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the role of media and journalists in uncovering of corruption cases in Hungary. How does the Hungarian media deal with corruption cases and how do the structure of political polarization and ownership structure of Hungarian media influence this special activity of journalists? The paper consists of two parts describing the relation between the corruption and media in Hungary from two perspectives. In the first section we present four particular Hungarian corruption cases by briefly describing their background and analysing thoroughly the role of media in the outbreak of these scandals. The cases were selected in order to be able to explain the function of the Hungarian press, especially its investigative departments. The second part of the study focuses on the general nature of the Hungarian press with special emphasis on investigative journalism. The aim of this chapter is to provide insights into the Hungarian media market and its influencing factors. The cases of the first section are often quoted to make the findings more illustrative. At the end of the paper we summarize the main lessons from this analysis. The study is based on eight semi-structured interviews with leading investigative journalists and one with a media expert in Hungary. The results of the fieldwork were processed anonymously; the conversations were not recorded. We subsequently analysed the articles and documents using the Google and other applications and databases3 related to the topic. The findings related to people, organizations or news outlets that are based on publicly available sources are indicated in the footnotes.

Agent based models are proposed as an adequate tool for analysing tax payer decisions and, thereby, the consequences of such decisions as they manifest themselves at the macro level. TAXSIM models the conduct of agents of three types, i.e. employers, employees and the government, in an economy of a single sector. Using this model, we examine the conduct of each individual agent and the impact of their decisions on the size of tax evasion and aggregated tax revenues. The main objective is the analysis of the relations between the government and tax payers, as well as the identification of how this relationship affects tax evasion. In this paper, the operation of several factors affecting the incidence of non-registered employment is studied with the help of an improved version of the TAXSIM agent-based simulation model. We analyse the effects of unemployment experience, the quality of government services and the audit strategy of the tax authority on totally hidden, mixed (hidden and legal) and totally legal payments. We start by a brief overview of the TAXSIM model and introduce the novel components in detail. This is followed by a thorough analysis of a vast series of computational experiments, analysing the behavior of the base model, as well as the effect of the newly introduced components (i.e., unemployment experience, adaptive audit strategy, etc.) and their various parameters. Our computational results suggest that the government can use effective tools to improve tax morale and curb tax evasion. Beyond improving the frequency and precision of tax audits the implementation of an adaptive tax audit strategy, the reduction of the exposure to unemployment or, on the motivation side, the improvement of the quality of government services can also be effective.

Although both the academic and policy communities have attached great importance to measuring corruption, most of the currently available measures are biased and too broad to test theory or guide policy. This article proposes a new composite indicator of grand corruption based on a wide range of elementary indicators. These indicators are derived from a rich qualitative evidence on public procurement corruption and a statistical analysis of a public procurement data in Hungary. The composite indicator is constructed by linking public procurement process 'red flags' to restrictions of market access. This method utilizes administrative data that is available in practically every developed country and avoids the pitfalls both of perception based indicators and previous 'objective' measures of corruption. It creates an estimation of institutionalised grand corruption that is consistent over time and across countries. The composite indicator is validated using company profitability and political connections data.

The article presents and summarizes some results from extensive cross-national content analysis of media coverage of corruption. The authors examined a sample containing 12,742 articles published in France, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Romania, Slovakia and the United Kingdom from 2004 to 2013. A limited number of studies have been done thus far to reveal how the media deals with corruption cases in certain countries, and cross-national comparative analyses are exceedingly scarce. The core focus of the study is to reveal the significant differences in the corruption cases covered by the media according to the countries under analysis. We assume that some differences exist between the media coverage of corruption in the new and the old European Union member states and also that by classifying countries into groups based on their perception of the level of the corruption, some dissimilarities will be revealed between them. We conclude that the distinction between countries based on whether they are old or new European Union members does not wholly determine the nature of reporting on international or national corruption cases, for example, Italy was more similar to the old European Union member states in this sense. Considering the level of institutionalization of corruption cases, Italy appears to be more similar to the other old European Union members, but we should clarify that differences based on this feature of the cases are not clearly highlighted in the interaction model. However, if we use the variable perceptions of corruption to classify countries, we find that countries with a 'cleaner' environment (the United Kingdom, France) place more focus on reporting corruption cases in the international arena.

Coverage of corruption in the Hungarian media was analysed for four online news portals, Magyar Nemzet Online (short name: MNO, web: mno.hu), Népszava (web: nepszava.hu) and Heti Világgazdaság (web: hvg.hu) and Origo (web: origo.hu). The first three have both online and printed versions. MNO is considered a centre-right elite/general portal, HVG may be considered a center-left, economics-focused newspaper, while Népszava is a centre-left elite/general medium. Origo does not have a precise political affiliation; it is considered here a neutral, tabloid-like portal due to its variety of entertainment-focused content, but it has a more professional journalistic style than most tabloids, especially in the case of political (domestic and international) articles. In the following section we describe the news portals separately, but refer to the typologies by political affiliation and by media typology.