Using World Values Survey data from several dozen countries around the world, this article analyzes the relationship between postmaterialist values and bribery (dis)approval in a multilevel framework. We find that people, who place stronger emphasis on postmaterialist values, tend to justify bribery more. However, the “ecological” effect of postmaterialism operates in the exactly opposite direction: A higher prevalence of postmaterialist values induces more bribery disapproval, and especially among postmaterialists themselves. In our view, this happens because the large number of people who internalized postmaterialist values generate positive social externalities which strengthen negative attitudes toward corruption. We outline a theoretical framework that explains why and how these externalities may emerge. Our results contribute to the literature on the sociocultural factors of corruption, provide a better understanding of the complex nature of postmaterialism, and also might be interesting in the light of ongoing discussions on whether moral attitudes are culturally universal or culturally specific.

Using World Values Survey data from dozens of countries around the world, this article analyzes the relationship between postmaterialist values and attitudes towards bribery in a multilevel framework. This is an inherently interesting and under-researched topic because the various propensities attributed to postmaterialism lead to conflicting expectations about how these values affect attitudes towards bribery. On one hand, the alleged tendency of postmaterialists towards impartiality should lead them to condemn bribery. On the other hand, condemning bribery is a social desirability issue and postmaterialists are known to be less susceptible to desirability pressures and more relaxed about norm deviations. From this point of view, postmaterialists might be more tolerant toward bribery. Reflecting these conflicting expectations, we obtain an ambivalent result, evident in an inverted U-shaped relationship: as we move from pure materialism to mixed positions, people tend to justify bribery more, but then moving from mixed positions to pure postmaterialism, people become again more dismissive of bribery. What is more, the demographic prevalence of postmaterialists in a country moderates these values' effect on bribery: where postmaterialists are more prevalent, the disapproving effect on bribery outweighs the approving effect. This finding contributes to a better understanding of the pronounced negative correlation between corruption and postmaterialism at the country level and has some important implications. for helpful comments and suggestions on early versions of the paper. We are also grateful to Jaime Diez-Medrano for technical support with the WVS data. The paper has benefited much from discussions at regular workshops of the Laboratory of Comparative Social Research (LCSR) at HSE in Moscow and Saint-Petersburg and at the 5 th conference of ESRA in Ljubljana, July 2013.

Economists tend to reduce all corruption to impersonal market-like transactions, ignoring the role of social ties in shaping corruption. In this paper, we show that this simplification substantially limits the understanding of corruption. We distinguish between market corruption (impersonal bribery), and network (or parochial) corruption which is conditional on the social connections between bureaucrats and private agents. We argue, both theoretically and empirically, that these types of corruption have different qualities. Using data from the Life in Transition Survey (LiTS) which covers all post-socialist countries we show, first, that the correlation between market and network corruption is weak, which implies that ignoring network corruption leads not only to an underestimation of the overall scale of corruption but also biases national corruption rankings. Secondly, in line with theoretical expectations, we find that network corruption is more persistent over time, less related to contemporary national socioeconomic and institutional characteristics and has stronger historical roots than market corruption. Yet, network corruption, unlike bribery, is not able to 'grease the wheels' and is not associated with political instability. Lastly, we show that the decline in bribery which was observed in almost all post-socialist countries in the period from 2010 to 2016 was accompanied by rising network corruption in many of them, which has important policy implications.

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