This chapter sets out the book's two main arguments about the causes of corruption. First, when essential goods and services are not available from alternative sources, individuals engage in corrupt ...behaviors to try to acquire what they need from government officials. Second, market reform—policies to decrease state economic intervention—can limit these alternatives and thus encourage corruption. The first argument reveals the absence of alternative goods and services as a cause of corruption, and the second argument offers an explanation for why the absence exists. Together, the arguments constitute an “absence-of-alternatives framework” for studying corruption. This book focuses on petty corruption—ordinary citizens' use of bribes, personal connections, and promises of political support to try to secure small quantities of goods or services from low-level government officials.
This chapter details the petty corruption that goes on in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The interviews conducted offer direct evidence that citizens use bribes, personal connections, and promises of ...political support to try to obtain money, credit, and employment from government officials. Whereas the interview data reveal the illicit nature of citizens' efforts to secure resources from government officials, the survey data demonstrate how citizens are competing among themselves for state resources, and thus a bribe, connection, or promise of political support can provide an individual with an edge. The survey data also show how relatively common the practice of seeking help from government officials is. Citizens' most pressing needs are money, credit, and employment, and they try to obtain these resources from village leaders and raion (district) and oblast (provincial) bureaucrats and to a lesser extent oblast and national deputies.
This chapter demonstrates how market reform has limited market actors' ability to provide goods and services, and thus has encouraged citizens to seek them illicitly from government officials. ...Interviews with ordinary citizens and officials reveal that market reform in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan has reduced the availability of government resources and discouraged reliance on the state, thus providing incentives for individuals to use corruption in the competition to secure state goods and services. This is not the case, however, in Uzbekistan, where market reform has not been undertaken. The absence-of-alternatives framework can account for the difference between Uzbekistan and the market reformers, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, whereas other theories of corruption cannot.
This chapter demonstrates the advantages of the absence-of-alternatives approach presented in this book over other corruption explanations. It also presents definitions of the arguments' core ...concepts—basic needs, market reform, legacy of significant state economic intervention, and market-enhancing institutions. The absence-of-alternatives approach accounts for differences in corruption among countries and among individuals, and offers a parsimonious, generalizable, causal explanation for why people engage in corruption. It shows that corruption is more common in countries where alternative sources of essential goods and services are more limited. Even within a single country some individuals have greater access to alternative resources than others, and this enables them to avoid corruption. Market reform can account for individuals' differing access to resources as well as the paucity of resources in a country. By enriching some families and impoverishing others, market reform leads individuals whose relatives have not prospered to engage in corruption to meet their everyday needs.
A farmer in Kazakhstan summed up life before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union as follows: “We are freer now. Before the KGB monitored with whom we spoke. Freedom is freedom, but people need ...to live and we have not reached a good level yet.”¹ The farmer’s comment suggests that the political liberties many people of the former Soviet Union have acquired do not compensate for the greater economic hardships they now face. New governments have emerged from the Soviet state and introduced political and economic changes; however, these new governments have not necessarily improved everyday life. As
Hybrid Regimes McMann, Kelly M.
Economic Autonomy and Democracy,
05/2006
Book Chapter
The third wave of democratization – beginning in 1974 with a military coup in Portugal and washing over much of Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Eastern bloc during the next two decades – raised ...expectations among scholars, activists, and journalists that democracy would flourish in regions outside of Western Europe and North America. Political leaders in third wave countries had circumvented socioeconomic conditions not conducive to democratic development by opting to dismantle old regimes and craft new political institutions. Yet, in the 21st century, our euphoria over these extractions from authoritarianism has dissipated as many of these new governments have shown themselves to be hybrid regimes; in other words, they combine elements of democracy and authoritarianism. Nearly half of all countries worldwide can be characterized as having hybrid regimes. Typically, these regimes hold elections without guaranteeing the civil liberties that make electoral outcomes accurate expressions of citizens' preferences.Why have hybrid regimes proliferated? The concept of economic autonomy and the model of interaction developed in this book offer some clues. Interventionist states had developed in many of the third wave countries by the time democratic institutions were introduced there. The emergence of interventionist states robbed citizens of their economic autonomy and thus enabled governments to more easily harass their opponents. The interaction among components of democracy compounded the problem by allowing government officials to undermine entire nascent democracies through the restriction of only a few civil liberties.
“My wife asked me to not be involved in politics so that I could feed our family,” a middle-aged man in the former Soviet Union recounted to me in 1997. This simple, pragmatic statement reveals a ...fundamental way in which capitalism influences democracy. Specifically, capitalism acts on democracy through individuals' assessments of their economic autonomy, or their ability to earn a living independent of the state. With the end of Soviet communism in 1991, this man became actively involved in democratic politics. He founded a branch of a political party, which supported candidates for regional and national elections. “When I created the party, I did not think there would be risks,” he explained. He had assumed that greater political freedom in the late Soviet period meant that he no longer had to fear government reprisals for oppositional activity. He was wrong. Provincial authorities fired this man from his job as a school director three times between 1991 and 1997 as punishment for his political activism. Meanwhile, his organization dwindled from 100 to 12 members as others faced similar workplace harassment. Unable to find a job beyond the reach of local officials, the man decided to abandon the party. He and his fellow leaders dissolved the organization, even though the party was thriving in other regions of the country.This story is typical of the accounts I heard from current and former activists in post-Soviet countries.
Description of Surveys McMann, Kelly M
Economic Autonomy and Democracy,
05/2006
Book Chapter
In Moscow in the early spring and summer of 1997, a colleague and I asked experts to rate regions according to Dahl's definition of democracy. I conducted a similar survey in Bishkek in May 1997. ...This appendix describes the selection process for the respondents, the structure of the surveys, the validity and reliability of the results, and the results themselves.RESPONDENTSTwenty-six experts in Russia completed the survey, and 23 respondents filled out the questionnaire in Kyrgyzstan. The respondents from Russia included representatives of universities and research centers in Moscow, members of the Russian presidential administration and the Federation Council, and foreign scholars residing in Moscow at the time of the survey. The Kyrgyzstani experts were members of universities and research centers in Bishkek and staff in the administrations of the president and prime minister.I used a snowball sample to select respondents in each country because there is no defined group of experts on regional politics and, as a group, experts are more difficult to reach than other populations, such as the public. The snowball sample was generated as follows: I worked with a local scholar of regional politics in each country to create an initial list of regional experts, and in the questionnaires I then asked respondents to suggest additional experts. My colleagues and I distributed the survey to those recommended according to a number of conditions.
