The civic crime of corruption: Citizen networks and public sector bribery in the non-democracies

Abstract

In the Global North, corruption is considered incompatible with civic health: scholars argue that it decreases social trust, atomizes communities, and discourages active citizenship. Using the first-ever national dataset from Russia with behavioral measures of corruption, ego-centric networks, and political participation, this article develops an alternative theory of corruption’s impact on civic life in societies where freedoms of association are limited. Analyses of these new data suggest that: (1) Russian bribe-givers are embedded in outward-oriented and mobilizable personal networks, supportive of civic connectivity; and (2) Russian bribe-givers are significantly more likely than law-abiding citizens to mobilize others when pushing back against the state. Counterintuitively, then, in non-democracies, corruption in the public sector sustains the kind of social networks that underlie civic culture.

Nepotism in Post-Soviet States: The Quantitative Assessment on Socio-Demographic Factors and the Corruption Perceptions Index

“…However, the closeness of the corruption perception index indicators in these countries makes it possible to perceive the proposed data as model data, which may be very close to similar ones in other post-Soviet countries. This assumption is partly confirmed by a number of studies (Pyankova, 2020;Steenberg, 2021;Zaloznaya, 2022).…”

“…Research stress that the collapse of the Soviet Union, newly emerged countries lacked political and democratic traditions of electing representative power, which would form a legal basis for its legitimization and replacement (Steenberg, 2021;Zaloznaya, 2022). The reason for this was that the post-Soviet leaders of the states that replaced the former republics derived directly from the Soviet 'nomenklatura' system (Czerewacz-Filipowicz & Konopelko, 2017;Samuratova, 2019).…”

“…On the flip side, the lack of strong institutional support contributed to a proliferation of decision-makers in parliamentary groups based on personal loyalty or group solidarity, giving them a patronizing character. In different countries of the CIS, a patronalistic and more pluralistic system of relations and more traditional nepotism or various forms of parochialism associated with it are mixed in various proportions (Tytko et al, 2020;Zaloznaya, 2022). Accordingly, group solidarity, lack of political experience, corruption, and mixing public service with individual entrepreneurship continued to work at this level (Maczak, 2017).…”

“…This, in turn, leads to the fact that he will not be effective as a manager because in such a patriarchal traditional society, in most cases, it is possible to "solve issues" only through personal connections and personal agreements. If a politician, official, or businessman does not follow the path of nepotism, he quickly becomes ineffective and is thrown out of the system (Boateng et al, 2020;Vakhnina & Vakhnin, 2019;Zaloznaya, 2022).…”

The impacts of corruption on forest loss: A review of cross‐national trends

“…Still, these measures are not suitable to account for the many perspectives of corruption found in case study work, including that corruption is not always a deviation from a norm—sometimes corruption is normal and sometimes corruption increases civic ties (Zaloznaya, 2021), sometimes it is experienced as a contradiction (Garrido, 2021), sometimes corruption is beneficial to masses of people, and sometimes corruption is less material and more of an idea, accusation, or threat (Wilson, 2021), and sometimes corruption is not value laden at all (McDonnell, 2020). Though this review is primarily focused on quantitative cross‐national research, qualitative research, and single‐country research is intentionally under‐examined in this article, it is important to emphasize the cross‐pollination across research modes.…”