Timothy Model

Former Short-term Scholar, Kennan Institute Title VIII Summer Research Scholarship

Professional Affiliation

Ph.D. Candidate, Indiana University

Expert Bio

Timothy Model is a doctoral candidate at Indiana University’s Department of Political Science and a fellow at the Indiana University Russian Studies Workshop. His dissertation, “The Politics of Anti-Corruption Campaigns,” investigates the variation in anti-corruption strategies in autocracies.

Previously, he was a visiting researcher at the International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow and an affiliate of the Ostrom Workshop.

He received bachelor’s degrees in Diplomacy/Global Politics and in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies in 2012 from Miami University where he was affiliated with the Havighurst Center.

Wilson Center Project

The Politics of Corruption

Project Summary

Writers often liken corruption to that of a societal disease. In Democracy in America, de Tocqueville wrote that corruption resembles an "illness." More recently, international leaders have compared corruption to a "cancer." Bolstering these statements are findings that corruption stunts political and economic development. In response to the problems of corruption, Western democracies and international organizations have spurred a global fight against corruption. A number of autocracies have heeded the call, undertaking massive, domestic anti-corruption campaigns. To the dismay of observers, however, these campaigns have yielded few positive outcomes, resulting in a debate over how to understand the failures of anti-corruption campaigns. The central goal of the project is to understand these failures. In doing so, the project asks what explains the variation in anti-corruption campaigns and argue that their variation is a result of autocratic responses to the fluid nature of corrupt relationships.