Only by understanding the baseline – how much corruption, in what areas, with what consequences – can we begin to formulate the necessary policy responses to it.
Today, the movement against corruption spans all continents, uniting ordinary people in the Global North and the Global South (Bukovansky Reference Bukovansky2002; Hindess Reference Hindess2005; Sampson Reference Sampson, Haller and Shore2005; Zaloznaya Reference Zaloznaya2013). The fight against corruption is also a flagship issue on the foreign policy dockets of most Western governments, the agendas of global governance organizations, and the mission statements of many transnational NGOs. Every year, the international community spends millions of dollars to fuel anti-corruption campaigns carried out by local grassroots groups and national governments and coordinated by intragovernmental organizations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMD), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the United Nations (Blake 2009; Kennedy Reference Kennedy1999; Rose-Sender et al. Reference Rose-Sender, Goodwin, Boersma, Nelen, Boersma and Nelen2010; Sampson Reference Sampson2010; Stapenhurst and Kpundeh Reference Stapenhurst and Kpundeh1999). Through conditional loans, policy development, and research, these organizations generate funding, political support, data, and the ideological grounding for global anti-corruptionism.
Anti-corruption activists worldwide pursue a monumental political objective: establishment and maintenance of democratic governments. For ordinary people, democratization brings a promise that political leaders will hear their voices and address their needs through policy. Increased integrity in political office brings with it a meaningful consideration of constituents’ interests and, consequently, a fair distribution of resources (Bowser Reference Bowser2001; Gray 1998; Gupta and Abed Reference Gupta and Abed2002; Morris and Klesner Reference Morris and Klesner2010; Rothstein Reference Rothstein2011; Uslaner Reference Uslaner2008). While ordinary people denounce corruption as an obstacle to equality and fairness, the IMF, the World Bank, and other financial organizations are also concerned with its negative implications for global markets (Brown and Cloke Reference Brown and Cloke2004; Hankivsky Reference Hankivsky2006; Sampson Reference Sampson, Haller and Shore2005). By diverting resources from the most competitive market actors, corruption undermines the laws of supply and demand, decreases the predictability of economic transactions, and diminishes profits from foreign investment (Hopkin Reference Hopkin2002; Javorcik and Wei Reference Javorcik and Wei2009; Ng Reference Ng2006). For the IMF, the World Bank, and the OECD, democratic governance is an important guarantor of desired economic outcomes. Authoritarian regimes are generally antithetical to a neoliberal agenda: they hamper free markets with excessive regulation, politicized resource distribution mechanisms, and sprawling governmental bureaucracies. The lack of independent media and judiciaries, along with popular distrust toward formal institutions, undermines Western countries’ ability to conduct business with such regimes (Feng Reference Feng1997; Linz Reference Linz2000; Mobarak Reference Mobarak2005; Wright Reference Wright2008).
Even though corruption is at the forefront of international politics, sociologists have not yet pursued the study of corruption in a systematic fashion. Because of the well-documented negative effects of corruption on democratic governance and free markets, its academic study is concentrated in the disciplines of political science and economics. Thus, a brief survey of the past sixteen years of publications in three flagships journals of sociology, American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, and Social Forces, yields only two articles whose main subject is corruption: a 2005 article by Jong-Sung and Khagram and a 2010 piece by Margit Tavits. By comparison, in the same time period, the American Journal of Political Science alone published five articles that explicitly reference corruption in the title and at least ten more that address corruption more generally.
The absence of sociological voices in the existing research on corruption is surprising in light of the discipline’s preoccupation with issues of power and social justice (Khondker Reference Khondker2006; Kurczewski Reference Kurczewski2004). It is also consequential. This noninvolvement of sociologists resulted in the lack of systematic attention to how macro-social contexts shape informal economic behavior of individual actors. The essence of the sociological imagination, after all, lies in uncovering systematic social forces that mold seemingly random micro-level processes. The Politics of Bureaucratic Corruption takes an important step toward the development of a sociological alternative to the dominant way of thinking about corruption in the hybrid governance systems of post-transitional regimes.
In his manifesto on the sociological study of the economy, Mark Granovetter emphasized the importance of treating purposive economic action as “embedded in concrete, ongoing systems of social relations” (Reference Granovetter1985: 487). Granovetter’s approach stresses “concrete personal relations and structures” and embraces the fact that any behavior, including explicitly economic behavior, aims not only at “economic goals, but also at sociability, approval, status, and power” (Granovetter Reference Granovetter1985: 490, 506). The sociological perspective on corruption, laid out in this book, appreciates its embeddedness in concrete social relations, from the micro level of interactions among ordinary people to the meso level of organizations and the macro level of political processes. Such approach generates a number of theoretical and policy-relevant insights about corruption that previous accounts simply could not offer. In this conclusion, I briefly discuss some implications of this sociological analysis and identify the ways that it can help policy makers and anti-corruption activists create more equitable systems of economic distribution and more transparent regimes of political governance.
Countrywide Cultures of Corruption Do Not Exist
First and foremost, a sociological approach embraces the complexity of informal economic action. Through stories of ordinary Ukrainians and Belarusians and descriptions of the formal and informal lives of the institutions that bring them together, this book reveals a wealth of meanings behind bureaucratic corruption, the wide range of behaviors that it entails, and a gamut of functions that it serves for local citizens. By emphasizing the heterogeneity and systematic variation within informal economies, The Politics of Bureaucratic Corruption dispels the dangerous and empirically inaccurate myth of nationwide cultures of corruption in post-Soviet societies.
Popular in mass media and policy circles, this myth implies that citizens of transitioning and underdeveloped societies have lower ethical impediments against breaking the law than their counterparts in mature Western democracies. Consider, for instance, the following headlines from major international news outlets that put forth the idea that a culture of corruption prevails in Ukraine: “Breaking the Bribe Culture is Still a Challenge for Ukraine” (Prentice and Polityuk 2016), “Ukraine’s Unyielding Corruption” (New York Times 2016), “Ukraine’s Culture of Corruption” (KyivPost 2016). Similar claims are also made about other post-Soviet countries, including Russia (“The Culture of Corruption: Russians Pay but They Don’t Like It” (Frye 2014), “Russia’s Culture of Corruption: Easier to Accept than Fight” (Kabanov 2011)), as well as the region in general (“From Bolshevism to Backhanders: Corruption Has Replaced Communism as the Scourge of Eastern Europe” (The Economist 2016)). A number of social scientists also invoke the myth of nationwide corruption cultures to explain the wide spread of informal economic activity in some regions. In reference to Eastern Europe, Bova and Valliere (Reference Bova and Valliere1999) refer to the allegedly ubiquitous embrace of corruption economies as the “infralaw of corruption and bribonomy,” while Frederico Varese (Reference Varese, Ledeneva and Kurkchiyan2000) labels it “pervasive corruption.”
The culture of the corruption myth has deep roots in moralistic thinking about corruption. In the context of the worldwide anti-corruption movement, social scientists have approached corruption from the vantage point of its negative consequences for economic development and democratization. The patterns of variation, cultural meanings, and noneconomic implications of informal exchanges have therefore never emerged as focal points for academic corruptology. In this book, I argued that this oversight distorts our understanding of the political determinants of bureaucratic corruption.
The Politics of Bureaucratic Corruption dispels the myth of countrywide corruption cultures in Ukraine and Belarus. It reveals that while many local citizens engage in bureaucratic illegality, many also avoid it, despite high potential rewards and low risks of punishment. Furthermore, those who do participate in corruption choose from a variety of possible methods of engagement, ranging from the use of connections to the invocation of bribery mechanisms to direct, unmediated money-for-service transactions. Most importantly, my data suggest that citizens’ cultural propensity for corruption is neither universal nor evenly distributed within countries. Rather, it is highly variable across local organizations: while many Ukrainian HEEs have organizational cultures that encourage horizontal corruption, others develop corruption-unfavorable local environments. Through exposure to these organizational cultures, Ukrainian students and instructors evaluate the appropriateness and inevitability of corruption. They then translate such organizationally acquired beliefs into different corruption behaviors. In Belarus, citizens’ propensity for corruption is also a function of exposure to organizational cultures. While certain Belarusian bureaucracies are highly conducive to informal economic exchanges, others provide neither structural opportunities nor favorable cultural environments for horizontal transactions. As a result, both countries exhibit systematic subnational variation in people’s beliefs about bureaucratic corruption that undermines the myth of national corruption cultures.
In contrast to this nuanced portrayal of the variegated economies of exchange in local organizations, the culture of corruption myth reflects a highly reductionist understanding of corruption in the Global South. This myth offers a digestible heuristic for Western policy makers and academics that is as erroneous as it is dangerous: it implicitly builds a hierarchy of cultures in which non-Western societies emerge as inferior.
Sensitivity to the variation in on-the-ground informal economies of hybrid regimes is crucial for a culturally conscious and nonpoliticized study of corruption. Only by appreciating the complexity of local exchange systems can Western scholars build critical and socially embedded accounts of corruption in nondemocratic societies.
Inverse Relationship between Political and Bureaucratic Corruption
A sociological effort to embed bureaucratic corruption in its macrosocial context also reveals an important relationship among its different types that nonsociological accounts often obscure. In contrast to corruption indicators, the data analyzed in this book distinguish between bureaucratic and political corruption. Sociological process tracing, then, reveals an inverse relationship between these two types of corruption under hybrid political governance.
Thus, large pockets of transparency in select organizational fields in Belarus are an outcome of repressive governance over these bureaucratic sectors and consequently of state capture by a nondemocratic leader. In institutional contexts subjected to strict governmental controls and oversight, such as Belarusian universities, legality stems from fear of repression or desire for greater political power. When the law is oppressive and subservient to the power-preservation interests of a nondemocratic leader, corruption – or the violation of law for personal benefit – represents ordinary people’s struggle to maintain their voice and resist political oppression (Ginsburg and Moustafa Reference Ginsburg and Moustafa2008; Hendley Reference Hendley1999; Yang Reference Yang1994). In contrast, horizontal corruption in all bureaucratic sectors of post-Soviet Ukraine is a correlate of the country’s political freedoms and the ensuing high rates of leadership turnover. Together, the Belarusian and the Ukrainian cases demonstrate that the less political choice the citizens of a hybrid regime have (and, consequently, the higher the level of political corruption), the less economic corruption may occur in its street-level bureaucracies. In other words, in hybrid political systems, bureaucratic corruption emerges as an indication of ordinary citizens’ political agency and, therefore, an avenue for popular resistance against nondemocratic governance.
The inverse relationship between political and bureaucratic corruption in hybrid regimes also has important theoretical implications for future academic and policy work on the topic. It suggests that the analytic category of corruption entails a variety of practices with dissimilar local meanings, power dynamics, and relationships to one another. It also implies that critical studies of the political roots of corruption should not fall into the dominant moralistic trap of assuming that corruption is always bad while the absence of corruption is always good. As this book shows, organizational transparency may be a sign of oppression and slippage into authoritarian governance that undermines citizens’ human rights and deprives them of freedom of speech, mobility, and political choice. The meaning of corruption in non-Western settings, therefore, should not to be presumed by Western scholars. Rather, the functions and power implications of corruption should be considered in relation to the social value of legality within the local political system, and assessed vis-à-vis the effectiveness of the formal law in providing basic protections, guaranteeing rights, and ensuring citizens’ representation in the political process.
Organizations as Targets for Anti-Corruption Policy
In addition to its theoretical contributions, a comparative sociology of corruption offers ways to further policy-relevant knowledge about informal economies of exchange that are inaccessible to dominant corruptology. Specifically, it can help evaluate the on-the-ground implications of different anti-corruption initiatives, separate negative and positive effects of illicit economies, and reveal the importance of different political and economic determinants of rule breaking vis-à-vis one another.
For instance, the arguments of this book imply that current anti-corruption policy in the region is, in some ways, misguided. As a rule, such policy prescribes a mixture of educational and punitive measures. On one hand, it includes countrywide outreach programs to eradicate the alleged national culture of corruption. On the other, it entails the tightening of legal and administrative accountability mechanisms and harsh treatment of apprehended offenders (Osyka Reference Osyka2003; Rousso and Steves Reference Rousso and Steves2007; Steves and Rousso Reference Steves and Rousso2003). The evidence presented in The Politics of Bureaucratic Corruption suggests that the basal premises of many such initiatives are as empirically unsupported as they are mutually contradictory (the first one assumes that corruption is a norm, and the rest treat corruption as a deviation from a norm).
As I argued earlier in this Conclusion, nationwide cultures of corruption simply do not exist. There is no uniform, decontextualized popular acceptance of corruption as a normal and appropriate thing to do. Instead, hybrid post-Soviet regimes host numerous organizational domains with more and less corruption-favorable climates, and ordinary citizens make decisions about corrupt engagement based on their experiences within these specific organizational environments. Focusing anti-corruption efforts on the eradication of national corruption cultures, therefore, is unlikely to have much effect on behaviors that are actually encouraged by subnational cultural systems.
This book also shows that most local citizens perpetrate corruption not because they tend toward deviance but rather because they comply with the informal rules of different organizations. The conceptualization of corrupt behavior as a deviation from the norm, the treatment of offenders as criminals, and the reliance on the principles of general deterrence, common in anti-corruption policy, are therefore unlikely to be effective.
The Politics of Bureaucratic Corruption suggests that eradicating bureaucratic corruption in hybrid regimes will require changing local organizational norms instead of eliminating the alleged national culture of corruption or severely punishing individual perpetrators. As sites for anti-corruption policy, organizations have a lot to offer. They represent self-contained cultural domains with built-in reproduction and enforcement mechanisms that can instill either corruption-favorable or corruption-unfavorable ways of thinking and encourage corresponding behaviors from their members. In contrast to countrywide cultures, they also offer reachable policy targets.
Policies tailored specifically to eliminate organizationally embedded bribery mechanisms in Ukrainian bureaucracies are likely to alter their corruption-conducive cultures. In local universities, such policies may include identifying intermediaries and preventing them from facilitating illicit transactions, eradicating price lists, regulating tutoring practices and capping tutoring fees, abolishing exam celebrations, and so on. Although the structural changes mandated by these policies would be relatively small, the organizational cultures of transparency that they would foster could have far-reaching effects on the behavior of organizational members. Comparable small changes in Belarusian hospitals and schools could also produce a major decline in corrupt engagement by their employees and clients.
More broadly, the findings of The Politics of Bureaucratic Corruption prove that academic corruptology would be most useful for policy makers if it were not rooted in data generated by the global anti-corruption movement. Paradoxically, an increased distance between academic and policy worlds could bring about a more fruitful cooperation between them. Nuanced sociological studies that appreciate the complexity of local informal economies and embed them into their real-life social contexts could offer highly effective policy recommendations. By unveiling the meanings and functions of informal economies in non-Western societies, such studies could help refocus policy efforts away from attacking the alleged criminality of non-Western populations and toward fostering the sociopolitical conditions that minimize adverse economic and human rights outcomes for ordinary citizens.
