Corruption in schools? The scale and sources of corruption perceptions in Poland

Abstract

This paper analyses the scale and sources of views on the prevalence of corruption in the education sector in Poland. Through the use of public opinion surveys, I answer questions on how the corruption level in Polish educational institutions has changed over time and how it compares to other public institutions (such as the health care sector and police) and to the situation in other European countries. My goal is to investigate the effect of individual-level predictors of perceiving schools as corrupt in Poland, with special attention given to structural determinants and previous bribe-giving experiences of respondents. The results reveal that in Poland relatively few respondents have experienced recent acts of giving bribes in schools or perceive educational institutions as corrupt. However, there is a structural pattern behind the sources of negative opinions. The effect of socio-economic determinants on views relating to corruption in Polish schools is strongly pronounced and trends in the opposite direction compared to the effects reported in other European countries.

Corruption in the public schools of Europe: A cross-national multilevel analysis of education system characteristics

“…contagion effect; Lee and Guven, 2013;Zaloznaya et al, 2018), and (3) the two are not related (or weakly related) since they measure different corruption forms (the weak relation observed by Mocan, 2008). These scenarios are not mutually exclusive and may occur together (Wysmułek, 2017). This article takes the position that corruption perception is informed by experience but may also be related to certain external factors.…”

“…Under this view, corruption perception and experience would “share” some determinants, while others could be outcome specific. However, some scholars argue that perception indicators are not informed by experience alone and that they are “biased” by certain individual and country characteristics (Charron, 2016; Mocan, 2008; Wysmułek, 2017). If so, the relation between them should be weaker.…”