True, although the old argument that no one but your committee reads a PhD thesis generally applies. My MSc in comp sci was I think 180 or so pages. Of that probably 100 were menial background information, now days I catch people copying that section from wikipedia because it takes a long time to write and doesn't actually convey much useful information. Congratulations you can write on a topic anyone can look up on the internet or from a book. The actual work of the thesis, writing software and analysing how it behaved I couldn't have plagiarized because well, my boss watched me write it day after day for months, and we did a lot of analysis that turned out to be useless and had to be tossed and so on.

With political science (and the arts in general) I would think it's a lot harder. What 'work' are you doing that couldn't just be written down by someone else already anyway? Your whole work could always be in question, certainly cases like that crop up in sciences, but it's much harder to steal someone else's work when you have to be doing the work in a lab full of people. For them, you have a position, you argue it with evidence, which is hard to distinguish from found an argument you like, you copied it, and found work that supports it and copied that too.

I suppose this growing plagiarism problem highlights what's wrong with the dissertation format of masters and PhD's, which is that there's a lot of information in there which no one cares about, isn't really yours anymore than you're just re-writing it for the sake of demonstrating that you know the information exists, and that could probably be cut entirely from the process and not negate much. Let people replace 1 line with "this textbook or these articles cover all of the relevant background information'. Obviously you don't really want people graduating who can't (and don't) follow relatively simple rules, but at the same time, asking people to regurgitate 100 pages of material they just pulled out of a book isn't working to well, especially as grad students are relatively poorer, and don't really want to be wasting type typing something that isn't their own work anyway.

And yes, learning to say what someone else did in your own way is a skill, but one you should be working on and demonstrating in your undergraduate thesis.

Where I am now offers a 'Papers only' PhD, where you staple together 4 published papers and call that your thesis basically, which comes with its own problems related to when you've submitted your last paper but have no work to do, and no PhD and are stuck waiting around on low pay for feedback when you could be doing something useful that pays something, but I think that general idea is the future. If someone is going to plagiarize that work they're going to end up taking their supervisor who is usually a coauthor with them, and that person has a vested interest in keeping you honest.

All of the background information in a thesis serves to do three more things, when properly written, beyond what you mentioned, i.e., showing that you appear to know the material:

- First, it should provide a nice, high-level summary of the research area you're focusing on, perhaps with a nod to related ones, so that a new researcher coming into the field can immediately get a foothold and decide what he or she needs to read to become more proficient. (Merely citing a slew of papers is great, but definitely not as meaningful as posting what work was done in them, providing some insights, etc.) In fact, being rather thorough in your literature review is a great way to garner plenty of citations: even if you don't intend for it to be a review paper, others will start viewing it as such.

- A second, intertwined point is that it should provide enough background information for someone who is sufficiently well-versed in that discipline, but not necessarily your topic, to gauge the credibility of your work. For example, in my S.M. Applied Math thesis, I had some nice sections on (special) functions of bounded variation, gamma convergence, k-currents, and variolds, along with some novel proofs of some fundamental notions associated with each of those, as my committee members were not completely knowledgeable about each. Moreover, the proofs I included had the effect of making my later analyses simpler than if I had gone with some of the standard proofs, e.g., by L. Ambrosio, G. Dal Maso, etc.

- Finally, it should explain how what you are doing is sufficient to merit an advanced degree.

Romania today is just as stable as 2 months ago or 2 years ago. Sorry to pop your drama bubble, but there is no such spiral in Romania.

That's how real democracies work: prime ministers get office only for political reasons. The stronger the reasons, the better. And yes, you seem unaware of basic rules of functional, Western-style democracy.

Chauvinist much?

Such paranoid statement is beyond ridiculous. Yeah, the Romanian nerd will have to emigrate if some despicable new politician conspiracy to cover-up his plagiarized PhD thesis will end up in capturing the entire justice system.

My advice is to stop playing drama queen on Slashdot and start realizing it's all a storm within a tea cup, affecting a few politicians in a small democracy already part of the EU.