Alina Mungiu-Pippidi

Alina Mungiu-Pippidi (born March 12, 1964) 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 (ERCAS) 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.

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 (The Chronicle) and Opinia Studențească (Students' Opinion).

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 (1991-1995) and worked as a journalist for the Iași newspaper Opinia Studențească (Students' Opinion) and the Bucharest daily Express (1993-1994).

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 (1994–1995), and then as Shorenstein fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government (1998–1999).

She also edited the first post-1989 Romanian textbooks on politics (Doctrine politice, 1998) and public policies (Politici publice, co-edited with Sorin Ioniță, 2002), along with a textbook on political sciences for the optional studies in high schools (2000).

She was also the Romanian correspondent for the French newspaper Le Monde (1992–1993) and a contributor to the Bucharest weekly Revista 22.

In 1995, her dissertation, Romanians after ’89, was published by Humanitas (in Romanian) and translated into German by Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and Intergraph Verlag.

Since 1995, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi led Romania's largest political think tank, the Romanian Academic Society (in Romanian: Societatea Academică din România / SAR).

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.

Back in Romania, she founded the country's largest think tank, the Romanian Academic Society (SAR), and for a short period of time she was employed as a news editor by the Romanian Television Company (1997–1998).

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 (Subjective Transylvania. A Case Study of Ethnic Conflict).

Starting with 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.

In 2002, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi published A Tale of Two Villages, a monograph about two villages from Romania with their different pasts: Nucșoara (home of anti-communist resistance) and Scornicești (childhood home of Nicolae Ceaușescu).

In 2003, the book was turned into a documentary, which also aired on BBC.

In the wake of the 2004 legislative elections, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi created and led the Coalition for a Clean Parliament (in Romanian: Coaliția pentru un Parlament Curat), which campaigned for candidates with reported moral problems (such as incompatibility or undergoing the investigation of judicial authorities) to be excluded from party lists (98 candidatures were withdrawn following the coalition's campaign).

Among other achievements, this civil society coalition managed to make adopted and enforce one of the strongest freedom of information acts (FOIA) in the Balkans, and export it across the border of neighboring Western Balkan countries.

Since 2007, she has been the honorary president of the Romanian Academic Society.

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.

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 2010, the Coalition for a Clean Parliament turned into a permanent democracy watchdog under the name Clean Romania (in Romanian: România Curată).

During this time, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi was a visiting scholar at Oxford (St Antony's College, 2010-2014), LUISS (Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali) - Guido Carli in Rome (2019) and Sciences Po in Paris (2022).

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 (2015-2018) 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.

Promoting Good Governance across borders (Cambridge University Press, 2020), A Quest for Good Governance (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and A Tale of Two Villages (CEU Press, 2010).

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 (computer mediated transparency for 143 countries) and of the public accountability tools repository Europam.eu.