An experimental survey on bureaucratic responsiveness in the social welfare arena in Poland and Russia shows that both countries’ social welfare workers are capable of performing in a manner deemed helpful to local Polish and Russian citizens—a key component of effective governance. Such findings are surprising given an absence of reforms to create Weberian bureaucracies out of both countries’ social welfare agencies, differences in Polish and Russian overall governance, and variations in civil society legacies. The findings suggest that Weberian features, designed to keep outside interests at bay, may not necessarily be essential for local government to be perceived as being responsive and may not be relevant for certain sectors, such as social welfare, where opportunities for corruption are more limited. Because “customer service” is important for an effective state, citizen perceptions of local bureaucrats’ responsiveness need to be recognized as critical components of on-the-ground governance.

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Taxes and Trust is the first book on taxes to focus on trust and the first work of social science to concentrate on how tax policy actually gets implemented on the ground in Poland, Russia and Ukraine. It highlights the nuances of the transitional Ukraine case and explains precisely how and why that 'borderland' country differs from the more ideal-types of coercive Russia and compliance-oriented Poland. Through nine bespoke taxpayer surveys, an unprecedented bureaucratic survey and more than fifteen years of qualitative research, the book emphasizes the building and accumulation of trust to transition from a coercive tax state to a compliant one. The context of the book will appeal to students and scholars of taxation worldwide and to those who study Russia and Eastern Europe. This title is also available as Open Access.

To a large extent, the recent global economic-financial crisis has not affected how the social welfare system in Ukraine provides assistance. While Ukraine did contribute more funds to help meet the greater demands for assistance during the crisis, the country did not maintain the value of social benefits in real terms (after discounting inflationary effects), and it introduced new eligibility qualifications that restricted the numbers of those able to apply for unemployment assistance, thereby easing the burden on the state. All in all, the crisis did not change the way politics is done in Ukraine, nor did it change the fact that the relatively passive and nascent civil society has remained largely inclined to let the state carry on developing and implementing social welfare policy in the same way as before. As such, acceptance and avoidance of the state largely has become the norm.