CORPORATE GOVERNANCE IN EASTERN CENTRAL EUROPE : THE STATE OF ART

Arjan Vliegenthart
Department of Political Science
Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam , The Netherlands

Abstract

The current literature on corporate governance in Eastern Central Europe is dominated by economic and juridical accounts. It widely neglects the role of politics in the establishment of a
new corporate governance system in this region. This paper argues that this is a failure because, in contrast to popular beliefs, politics is indeed essential for explaining the developments in this field. By identifying the lacunas of current corporate governance research, this paper provides a first exploration of how studies of political actors and institutions could enrich the existing
literature.
I would like to thank Laura Horn, Catherine Netjes, Andreas Nölke, Henk Overbeek, James Perry, Eline van Straalen, Barbara Vis and the members the peer-teaching group of our department for their helpful comments on earlier drafts. I also wish to thank the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for funding the PhD-project of which this paper is a first result.

(SRS-044, Working Papers Political Science No. 2004/05, Studies in the Transnational Political Economy of Corporate Governance 3 , ISSN 1569-3546 , Amsterdam, November 2004)