Informal Economies, Societal Stability and Regime Resilience in China and Russia
Abstract
Broadly, this project aims to evaluate the relationship between informal economic activity by ordinary Russian and Chinese citizens in local service-provision organizations and the political and economic stability of their societies. This task entails fulfilling three major goals. The first goal is to delineate the content and the boundaries of the informal economies of Russian and Chinese service-provision organizations with a specific emphasis on their understudied organizational, gender, and network dimensions. By contrast to existent studies, we aim to differentiate between four distinct activities, carried out by citizens in exchange for desired bureaucratic services, which are often lumped into the umbrella category of "bureaucratic corruption": monetary exchanges, gift exchanges, favors, and use of connections. The second goal of this project is to identify, and disentangle, the impact of political, economic, cultural, and institutional determinants on rates and causal pathways to bureaucratic corruption behavior by ordinary citizens. Our motivation is to provide a comprehensive and nuanced causal account of bureaucratic corruption that considers the roots of money-based and relationship-based exchanges in two distinct types of organizations: organizations that are central to the well-being of the state (criminal justice and fiscal institutions) and to those that are fundamental for the well-being of citizens (hospitals and universities). Third, and most importantly, our study aims to reveal how such corruption impacts citizensÕ support for authoritarian governments, shapes their voting, campaigning, and protesting behaviors, and how it affects their perceived and actual economic well-being. These findings will allow us and other scholars to adjudicate the long-standing debates on whether informal economies undermine or bolster non-democratic systems.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Feb 14, 2019
- Source ID
- W911NF1810078
Entities
People
- Marina Zaloznaya
Organizations
- Army Contracting Command
- Office of the Secretary of Defense
- University of Iowa