Alina Mungiu-Pippidi
Alina Mungiu-Pippidi is a Romanian political scientist, academic, journalist and writer. She currently holds the professorship of Comparative Public Policy at the Department of Political Science of LUISS Guido Carli in Rome. She also chairs the multi-site European Research Centre for Anticorruption and State-Building and is Academic Coordinator of BridgeGap, an EU Horizon research project. Alina Mungiu-Pippidi also holds the honorary presidency of Romanian Academic Society. She also consults for various governments and international organizations and contributed work for the European Parliament as principal investigator on "clean trade", the Swedish Government on effectiveness of good governance assistance programs, the EU Dutch Presidency on trust and public integrity in EU-28, for the European Commission DG Research on governance innovation, for the World Bank Development Report and the International Monetary Fund, among others.
Her main monographs are Europe's Burden. Promoting Good Governance across borders, A Quest for Good Governance and A Tale of Two Villages. She published in Nature and Nature Human Behavior alongside social science journals and was frequently cited in The Economist and mainstream media. BBC screened A Tale of Two Villages as a documentary.
Alina Mungiu-Pippidi is also the designer of corruptionrisk.org, a forecast on good governance, of the Index of Public Integrity, of the T-index and of the public accountability tools repository Europam.eu.
Starting within 2001, she chaired the Romanian Coalition for a Clean Parliament, a civic anticorruption campaign scaled up by Open Society Foundations network in over 10 countries, most notably as Chesno! in Ukraine. She sits on the board of various research centers in Ukraine and the Balkans, as well as the ECPR Standing group on Anticorruption and Public Integrity.
She is the older sister of film director Cristian Mungiu.
In 2023, her work surpassed 5800 citations on Google Scholar, more than any other Romanian political scientist.
Biography
Alina Mungiu was born on 12 March 1964, in Iași, the biggest city in the north-eastern part of Romania. Between 1982 and 1988, she studied medicine at the Institute of Medicine and Pharmacy of Iași, specializing in psychology. During her student years, she began contributing literature pieces and essays of literary criticism to the magazines Cronica and Opinia Studențească.Early career: 1990s
After the Romanian revolution of 1989, which brought the fall of the communist regime and the return to democracy, she pursued a PhD in social psychology and political communication at the University of Iași and worked as a journalist for the Iași newspaper Opinia Studențească and the Bucharest daily Express. She was also the Romanian correspondent for the French newspaper Le Monde and a contributor to the Bucharest weekly Revista 22.After obtaining the PhD in social psychology with a research on the political attitudes of Romanians after 1989, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi visited Harvard University twice, first as a Fulbright fellow in the Government Department, and then as Shorenstein fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. In 1995, her dissertation, Romanians after ’89, was published by Humanitas and translated into German by Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and Intergraph Verlag.
Back in Romania, she founded the country's largest think tank, the Romanian Academic Society, and for a short period of time she was employed as a news editor by the Romanian Television Company.
Romanian Academic Society: 1995-2007
Since 1995, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi led Romania's largest political think tank, the Romanian Academic Society. The Society participated in most public debates regarding democracy, the rule of law, transparency, taxation, anti-corruption policies, and issued several reports that guided Romania's accession to the European Union. Since 2007, she has been the honorary president of the Romanian Academic Society.Between 1997 and 2007, Mungiu-Pippidi was an associate professor at the Romanian National School of Government and Administration, where she held courses on nationalism and electoral behavior. During this time, she conducted a research on inter-ethnic relations in Transylvania, which was published in Romanian and translated into English. She also edited the first post-1989 Romanian textbooks on politics and public policies, along with a textbook on political sciences for the optional studies in high schools.
In 2002, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi published A Tale of Two Villages, a monograph about two villages from Romania with their different pasts: Nucșoara and Scornicești. In 2003, the book was turned into a documentary, which also aired on BBC. In 2009, she was the screenwriter of another documentary, Where Europe Ends, which was directed by Sinisa Dragin.
Alina Mungiu-Pippidi has also lectured on post-Cold War transition to a market economy at several universities and business schools, including Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Oxford, European University Institute and London School of Economics.
In the wake of the 2004 legislative elections, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi created and led the Coalition for a Clean Parliament, which campaigned for candidates with reported moral problems to be excluded from party lists. Among other achievements, this civil society coalition managed to make adopted and enforce one of the strongest freedom of information acts in the Balkans, and export it across the border of neighboring Western Balkan countries.
In 2010, the Coalition for a Clean Parliament turned into a permanent democracy watchdog under the name Clean Romania.
Professor at Hertie School of Governance in Berlin: 2007-2023
For fifteen years, between 2007 and 2023, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi held the Chair of Democracy Studies at Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, Germany, where she tenured as a professor of Democracy Studies.During this time, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi was a visiting scholar at Oxford, LUISS (Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali) - Guido Carli in Rome and Sciences Po in Paris.
Between 2012 and 2017, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi was the designer and co-principal investigator of ANTICORRP, a 10 million euro European Seventh Framework Research Project on the effectiveness of good governance policies. The results of the project's investigations were published in a 4-volume series, The Anticorruption Report.
She was also a contributor to DIGIWHIST, a Horizon 20-20 project which resulted in the creation of EU's public procurement scoreboard, the open public contracts’ repository Opentender.eu and the public accountability tools repository Europam.eu.
Professor at LUISS Guido Carli, Rome: 2023-present
Since September 2023, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi is Professor of Comparative Public Policy at LUISS (Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali) - Guido Carli in Rome, Italy.She is also the academic coordinator of BridgeGap, which is a Horizon Europe research and innovation project, funded by the European Union.
Political writer and public intellectual
A commentator on national politics and European affairs, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi is one of the most prominent civil society activists in post-1989 Romania. Since 1990, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi contributed with articles in a multitude of mass media publications, including La Nouvelle Alternative, Le Monde, Foreign Policy, The Economist.In the Romanian press, she held opinion columns in Revista 22, România Liberă and România Curată. She appears regularly on Romanian TV channels and she gives interviews on current events to several media outlets.
Works
Scholarly books
- Rethinking Corruption, London: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2023 - ISBN 9781800379824
- A Research Agenda for Studies of Corruption,, London: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020 - ISBN 978-1-78990-499-4
- Europe's Burden: Promoting Good Governance across Borders, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019 - ISBN 9781108459662
- *Reviewed in The Times and Foreign Affairs
- Transitions to Good Governance. Creating Virtuous Circles of Anti-corruption,, London: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017 - ISBN 978-1-78643-914-7
- Beyond the Panama Papers. The Performance of EU Good Governance Promotion. The Anticorruption Report, volume 4,, Leverkusen: Barbara Budrich Publishers, 2017 - ISBN 978-3-8474-0582-5
- The Quest for Good Governance: How Societies Develop Control of Corruption, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015 - ISBN 9781316286937
- *Reviewed in Journal of Interdisciplinary History, International Review of Administrative Sciences, Governance and Journal of Democracy
- *Translated into Macedonian, Romanian, Spanish
- Government Favouritism in Europe. The Anticorruption Report, volume 3,, Leverkusen: Barbara Budrich Publishers, 2015 - ISBN 978-3-8474-0795-9.
- The Anticorruption Frontline. The Anticorruption Report, volume 2,, Leverkusen: Barbara Budrich Publishers, 2014 - ISBN 978-3-8474-0144-5
- Controlling Corruption in Europe. The Anticorruption Report, volume 1,, Leverkusen: Barbara Budrich Publishers, 2013 - ISBN 978-3-8474-0125-4
- A Tale of Two Villages. Coerced Modernization in the East European Countryside, Budapest: CEU Press, 2010 - ISBN 978-963-9776-78-4
- *Previously published in Romanian and French
- *Reviewed in The Economist and H-Net
- Ottomans into Europeans: State and Institution Building in South-Eastern Europe, London: Hurst; Boulder: Columbia University Press, 2010 - ISBN 9781849040563
- Nationalism after Communism. Lessons Learned from Nation and State Building,, New York and Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004 - ISBN 963-9241-76-8
- *Translated into Albanian and Serb-Croat
- Romania after 2000. Threats and Challenges, Iași: Polirom, 2002 - ISBN 973-683-951-6
- Politica după communism, Bucharest: Humanitas, 2002 - ISBN 973-50-0246-9
- Transilvania subiectivă, Bucharest: Humanitas, 1999 - ISBN 973-50-0020-2
- Românii după '89, Bucharest: Humanitas, 1995 - ISBN 973-28-0566-8
Textbooks (in Romanian)
- Politici publice: teorie și practică,, Iași: Polirom, 2002 - ISBN 973-683-950-8
- Introducere în politologie. Manual opțional pentru liceu,, Iași: Polirom, 2000 - ISBN 973-683-527-8
- Doctrine politice. Concepte universale și realități românești,, Iași: Polirom, 1998 - ISBN 973-683-052-7