Why Do Citizens Engage in Bureaucratic Corruption? Political Causes and Consequences of "Illicit Exchanges" in the Post-Soviet Region
Abstract
Major Goals: This project had three interconnected goals: -To collect empirical evidence on how Russian, Ukrainian, and Georgian citizens participate in bureaucratic (everyday) corruption and on a range of related attitudes and behaviors. -To provide a novel, theoretically grounded and empirically supported account of the relationships among participation in the informal economy, public support for the political regime, and political values more broadly. -To understand and compare the dynamics and on-the-ground implications of anti-corruption work by governmental and non-governmental agencies in Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia. Accomplishments: Our data collection is complete. The mass public surveys in all three countries are complete, and we have been analyzing the data since fall 2015. Also completed are the interviews with governmental and nongovernmental anti-corruption experts in the same three countries. In Georgia, our partner firm was only able to conduct 19 expert interviews instead of the 20 planned. The papers written so far provide scholars with a deeper understanding of the antecedents to participation in the informal economy, and the impact of this participation on public support for the political regime as well as voting decisions. Because no previous surveys have probed both citizens behaviors and attitudes relevant to corruption in the way we do, we were able to correct the overly general and inaccurate assumptions that are common in the literature, such as the propositions that corruption is ubiquitous and undifferentiated in high-corruption societies or that citizens across and within such societies have similar pathways to corruption and face the same consequences of corruption participation. First, we were able to confirm that engagement in corruption by individuals is influenced by individual-level determinants of need and opportunity, as posited in the literature.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Feb 28, 2019
- Accession Number
- AD1080955
Entities
People
- Marina Zaloznaya
- Vicki H Claypool
- William M. Reisinger
Organizations
- University of Iowa