The Politics of Bureaucratic Corruption in Post-Transitional Eastern Europe

Abstract

Using a mix of ethnographic, survey, and comparative historical methodologies, this book offers an unprecedented insight into the corruption economies of Ukrainian and Belarusian universities, hospitals, and secondary schools. Its detailed analysis suggests that political turnover in hybrid political regimes has a strong impact on petty economic crime in service-provision bureaucracies. Theoretically, the book rejects the dominant paradigm that attributes corruption to the allegedly ongoing political transition. Instead, it develops a more nuanced approach that appreciates the complexity of corruption economies in non-Western societies, embraces the local meanings and functions of corruption, and recognizes the stability of new post-transitional regimes in Eastern Europe and beyond. This book offers a critical look at the social costs of transparency, develops a blueprint for a 'sociology of corruption', and offers concrete and feasible policy recommendations. It will appeal to scholars across the social sciences, policymakers and a variety of anti-corruption and social justice activists.

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

“…Tapping into these networks to access an appropriate and interested bribe-taker is imperative; and the bigger the personal networks, the more likely citizens are to succeed. Case studies from Russia and other nondemocratic regimes provide indirect evidence that corruption success increases with the number and diversity of service-providers, officials, and organizational insiders that a bribe-giver can reach (Humphrey, 2012;Oka, 2019;Rose, 2000;Zaloznaya, 2017). Besides having large networks, I also expect bribe-givers to have ties to well-connected others who are capable of building pathways that extend beyond bribe-givers' own connections.…”

“…America, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East document widespread illicit payments, favors, and string-pulling in schools, utility services, permit-issuing agencies, police precincts, courts, tax administrations, and other bureaucracies (Ijewereme, 2015;Mbate, 2018;Monem and Baniamin, 2017;Sabet, 2013;Zaloznaya, 2017). In the literature, such exchanges go by different names; hereafter, I use terms public sector, petty, and bureaucratic corruption interchangeably.…”

The ties that bribe: Corruption's embeddedness in Chicago organized crime*

“…Definitions range from moralistic, which capture a wide range of behaviors harming the public good (Ermann & Lundman, 1996;Simon & Eitzen, 1990), to the explicitly criminal, such as the 17 federal statutes used by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (Cordis & Milyo, 2016). As with criminal behavior, corruption exists in contrast to noncorrupt behavior, and as such, the boundaries rely on local norms, laws, and culture (Fisman & Miguel, 2006;Hoang, 2018;Polese, 2008;Zaloznaya, 2017). At its core, corruption is a crime of the powerful leveraged from an occupational position for economic or political gain.…”

Litigating for legality: Nature conservation, commercial fisheries and disputed territoriality in Ukraine's Danube Delta

“…While socio‐legal scholarship about post‐Soviet citizens' relationship to courts and litigation can help understand fishing firms', fishermen's and DBR administrators' legal conundrums, it does not provide a clear‐cut answer as to why litigation was pursued. In Ukraine, scholars have highlighted issues such as the “weak demand for the rule of law” (Burlyuk, 2015), the politicization of justice (Popova, 2012), the impact of the state bureaucracy's (mal)functioning on lower civil courts (Kurkchiyan, 2013), bureaucratic corruption (Zaloznaya, 2017), and how private property's introduction undermined democratic community formation (Eppinger, 2015). On the one hand, they note high levels of litigation among Ukrainian and Russian citizens (Hendley, 2015; Popova, 2012).…”