Political Data in 2006

‘Trying to take money out of politics,’ suggested former United States Senator and NBA star Bill Bradley, ‘is like trying to take jumping out of basketball.’ It was perhaps inevitable, then, that the year 2006 saw financial scandals impact on politics in both the newer and the older democracies. In many of the post-communist states affected (such as Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Slovenia), they were often a legacy of privatization. In some of the older democracies, they were just the latest examples of longstanding problems created by patronage (Austria, Belgium, Ireland and Japan). In Sweden, however, the problem was personal tax-evasion of the pettiest kind, though nonetheless serious for that, perhaps: Ministers can hardly claim to uphold the rules when they themselves turn out to have broken them.