Professor Francisco Bastida from Prince Sultan University (Saudi Arabia) and the University of Murcia (Spain) gave a lecture on political economics and citizens’ engagement in Croatia on 16 June 2023 as part of the thematic presentations based on articles published in the scientific journal Public Sector Economics.

In his article, Bastida empirically evaluates the features of Croatian civil society, how Croatians participate in politics and how they engage in public economics on the national level – in sum, whether Croatian people are willing to hold their politicians accountable.

Based on the Euro Social Survey, the research shows that Croatians’ values do not predict their political partisanship perfectly, which may be a consequence of citizens' lack of interest in politics. The trust of Croatians in their political system (parliament, politicians) is extremely low. Most probably, it is due to the high level of corruption and the post-communism effect (the belief that the state worked against the individual rather than for it). The joint effect of corruption and distrust explains the low engagement in elections, which in turn means low electoral turnout. The low level of trust also explains why Croatians do not keep up with political or economic news.

On the other hand, the budgetary process in Croatia performs very well since the country ranks well above international standards in terms of the quality of the budget and scope of the disclosure. This very positive feature should be reinforced in the future as a way to increase the engagement of Croatians in their government, economy and political system.

The lecture was held as part of the Croatian Science Foundation research project Does transparency pay-off? The political and socio-economic impacts of local government budget transparency in Croatia and was moderated by Josip Franić, a researcher at the Institute of Public Finance.

A recording and a presentation of this interesting lecture are also available.