"Subnational political units are growing in influence in national and international affairs, drawing increasing scholarly attention to politics beyond national capitals. In this book, leading Russian ...and Western political scientists contribute to debates in comparative politics by examining Russia's subnational politics. Beginnings with a chapter that reviews major debates in theory and method, this book continues to examine Russia's 83 regions, exploring a wide range of topics including the nature and stability of authoritarian regimes, federal politics, political parties, ethnic conflict, governance and inequality in a comparative perspective. Providing both qualitative and quantitative data from 20 years of original research, the book draws on elite interaction, public opinion and the role of institutions regionally in the post-Soviet years. The regions vary on a number of theoretically interesting dimensions while their federal membership provides control for other dimensions that are challenging for globally comparative studies. The authors demonstrate the utility of subnational analyses and show how regional questions can help answer a variety of political questions, providing evidence from Russia that can be used by specialists on other large countries or world regions in cross-national scholarship.Situated within broader theoretical and methodological political science debates, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Russian politics, comparative politics, regionalism and subnational politics"--
While corruption of different types has been shown to lower popular political trust in democratic regimes, evidence from non-democracies remains inconsistent. In some post-Soviet countries, for ...instance, widespread bribery and nepotism in the government co-exist with enduring popularity of top political leadership. Drawing on an unusually nuanced dataset from Russia (N = 2,350), we show that, in general, encounters with corruption in the public sector are associated with citizens' lower trust of their government. At the same time, we theorize two caveats that attenuate this relationship, contributing to inconsistent findings in previous studies. First, we find that the negative association between corruption and political trust is significantly weaker when such corruption is beneficial to ordinary people. Second, citizens tend to "penalize" local rather than central government officials, which, we argue, is a result of top leaders' ability to manipulate public discourse around corruption.
Following its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the Russian government sharply broadened what actions were illegal and raised the level of punishment. Many more topics of interest to survey ...researchers became politically sensitive. Questions about these topics may generate high levels of misleading responses and question-specific (item) non-responses, both of which introduce biases that undermine inference. We use survey data from 2015 and 2018 in Russia and neighboring countries to illustrate how these two problems were already issues prior to the invasion, especially for questions that invoked potential punishment by the state. In a climate of heightened state punishment, it becomes even more important to address misresponse and item non-response when interpreting survey data. We argue that, in addition to employing list experiments regularly and taking advantage of recent innovations in their design, scholars must develop ways to reduce item non-response and model how it biases estimates of interest.
Russia's growing energy cooperation with China is central to several of Moscow's top foreign-policy objectives. Analyzing what drives Russia's energy diplomacy with China can therefore shed important ...light on the dynamics of Russian foreign policy-making. We go beyond other recent studies of this topic by examining the role of domestic political influences and the countries' bilateral interactions. We show that personalist elements influence both Russia's policy-making and its diplomacy with China. The personalism has made it hard for Russia to coordinate the relevant decision-making institutions and get the most from its energy strength. The economic gains from recent energy deals, particularly to Russia's Far East, have been less than expected, and Russia has met only limited success in achieving its foreign-policy priorities in the Asia-Pacific region. Moving forward, Russia must further institutionalize its decision-making process, limit the role of personalism, and better coordinate the activities of its energy firms with the goals of its central agencies and local governments.
Pathways to Corruption Zaloznaya, Marina; Claypool, Vicki Hesli; Reisinger, William M.
Social forces,
06/2018, Letnik:
96, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Though bureaucratic corruption is widespread, social scientists have yet to develop a comprehensive model predicting ordinary people’s engagement in corrupt exchanges with street-level bureaucrats. ...Our article fills this gap by specifying an individual-level causal model of bureaucratic corruption centered around three theoretically derived predictors: beliefs about acceptability of corruption, its perceived riskiness, and its utility to the offender. In doing so, we develop a theory of how institutional stability affects rates and causal pathways to bureaucratic corruption. Using the data from nationally representative surveys in Russia (N = 2,000) and Ukraine (N = 1,535), we test a path-diagramed structural equation model that accounts for endogeneity and the relationships among the theoretically derived predictors of corruption. The tests of our model in institutionally more stable Russia and less stable Ukraine, combined with OLS regression models on split samples from conflict areas within each country, show that when institutions have greater stability, (1) citizens are less likely to partake in bureaucratic corruption, and (2) the effects of theoretically derived predictors on corruption behavior are stronger. We are the first to incorporate into a theory of bureaucratic corruption a feedback loop whereby engagement in corruption reinforces perceptions of its spread, which in turn contributes to the belief that bribery is acceptable. Our findings explain the variation in corruption behavior among citizens of high-corruption societies, extend the institutional theory of social control, testify to the importance of contextualizing theories of crime, and reveal the need to tailor anti-corruption policies to specific institutional environments.
The current system of international governance entails several legal regimes that address social issues ranging from terrorism to environmental degradation. While these regimes' policy prescriptions ...are standard, the reforms that they inspire within individual countries are strikingly diverse. Based on a case study of anti-corruption reforms in Russia and Ukraine, we use the notion of decoupling to analyze the process by which regime policy prescriptions translate into unique country-level reforms. Using the grounded theory method, we derive four mechanisms for decoupling from the global anti-corruption regime: sabotage, appropriation, intransigence, and accommodation. Our data suggest that the distribution of power among the domestic political actors who compete for ownership of reforms has an impact on which mechanism is likely to be used.
In developing countries, the fight against corruption entails purges of political and business elites and the restructuring of electoral, financial, and social provision systems, all of which are ...costly for the incumbents and, therefore, unlikely without sustained pressure from civil society. In the absence of empirical analyses, scholars and practitioners have, therefore, assumes that civil society plays an unequivocally positive role in anti-corruptionism. In this article, we challenge this dominant assumption. Instead, we show that, under certain conditions, an engaged non-governmental community may, in fact, undermine the fight against corruption. Using the data from forty interviews with anti-corruption practitioners in Ukraine and Russia, as well as primary documentary sources, we present two models of anti-corruptionism whereby active civil engagement produces suboptimal outcomes. One is faux collaboration, defined as a façade of cooperation between the state and civil society, which hides the reality of one-sided reforms. The other model is that of non-collaborative co-presence, whereby the governance role is shared by the government and non-governmental activists without compromise-based solutions. In both cases, civil engagement helps perpetuate abuses of power and subvert such long-term goals of anti-corruption reforms as democratization and effective governance.
Using data from nationally representative surveys in 2015 in Georgia, Russia and Ukraine, we show that legal attitudes are shaped by experiences within a country's specific political-legal order. ...Many who expressed support for legality when their own needs were at stake became more willing to evade the law when reminded of elites doing so. And, in an authoritarian, rule-by-law setting, expressed respect for legality correlates negatively with support for democracy. Whether a country's most democracy-supporting citizens more strongly support legality will depend on whether the legal system is a fair and neutral arena or a tool of undemocratic political authorities.
This article argues that citizens exposure to corrupt transactions with bureaucrats, many of whom are only representatives of the state these people encounter, leads to a conclusion that the ...political leadership is corrupt and therefore undeserving experiences.
Do Russians' personal experiences with corruption influence how they evaluate their political leaders and, if so, in what direction? In addressing this question, we focus specifically on small-scale ...corruption that arises when Russians encounter employees of service provision organizations. We analyze survey data gathered in the summer of 2015 from Russia to trace the links between personal corrupt behavior and political attitudes. We show that participation in everyday corruption lowers a person's support for the political regime, both as a bivariate relationship and in a multivariate model with controls. Being involved in corrupt transactions reduces support for the regime through two indirect mechanisms: by making the political leadership's performance seem worse and by heightening perceptions that corruption is widespread among the country's leaders. We find no support for arguments in the literature that bribery and other forms of bureaucratic corruption help citizens pursue their needs in the face of inefficient state institutions and less developed economies. In Russia, those who frequently encounter corruption are less, not more, happy with the regime.
