Beyond Anti-Corruptionism: Sociological Imagination and Comparative Study of Corruption

Abstract

This article outlines and illustrates a theoretical blueprint for comparative sociology of corruption. The author argues that existing cross-national studies of corruption, influenced by the global political movement for transparency, undermine fundamental sociological principles. At the same time, truly sociological studies of corruption are unfavorable to comparisons due to their emphasis on the singularity of exchange economies in non-Western societies. The author argues that there are three analytical foci that can help researchers resolve the tension between 'insensitive' large-N and 'overly-sensitive' small-N studies of corruption: the principle of social embeddedness, multiplicity of rationality, and localized pov/et implications. A comparative study of university corruption in Post-Soviet Ukraine and Belarus is used to illustrate the strengths of the proposed analytical framework.Currently, comparative study of corruption does not exist outside the politicized paradigm of international relations. Corruptology is permeated with inaccurate and profoundly non-sociological assumptions, adopted from anti-corruptionism -the transnational movement coordinated by •' I would like to thank Elizabeth Onasch, Terrence Halliday, Michael Sauder, Amy Myrick, anonymous reviewers, and attendees of Theory Workshop at the University of Iowa Sociology Department for their insightful comments on the drafts of this paper.

Does Authoritarianism Breed Corruption? Reconsidering the Relationship Between Authoritarian Governance and Corrupt Exchanges in Bureaucracies

“…The roots of this assumption can be traced to neoliberal foundations of the global anticorruptionism movement. In neoliberal thought, corruption is construed as uniformly problematic as it interferes with the dynamics of the market (Sampson 2010; Zaloznaya 2013). Yet, the analytical separation between political and bureaucratic corruption—or between corruption perpetrated by political elites and by ordinary people—reveals their potential inverse relationship in autocratic societies.…”

The Social Psychology of Corruption: Why It Does Not Exist and Why It Should

“…Originally compiled to mark the ‘danger zones’ for Western businesses, international indicators of corruption are highly problematic as social scientific data. Based on ad‐hoc surveys of experts and business leaders, they suffer from reductionism, inconsistent and unreliable sources, and cultural myopia (see Knack, for an overview; Lambsdorff, ; Zaloznaya, ). These indicators construe corruption as an instrumental, strategic deviation from laws and administrative regulations, driven by a self‐interested pursuit of material profits and power .…”

“…These indicators construe corruption as an instrumental, strategic deviation from laws and administrative regulations, driven by a self‐interested pursuit of material profits and power . In adopting this conception of corruption, the indicators (and, by extension, social scientists who use them as data), make a number of unjustified and West‐centric assumptions about the desirability of formal rules that are broken by informal exchanges and the motivation of people who carry them out (see Zaloznaya, for a more extended discussion). Perhaps not surprisingly, regression analyses of numeric indicators suggest that many non‐Western societies are afflicted with ubiquitous corruption while Western capitalist democracies tend to be fairly non‐corrupt (Montinola and Jackman ; Sung ; Treisman ).…”

“…Thus, in many non‐Western contexts, corrupt exchanges are contracted in public spaces (i.e. through newspaper announcements or semi‐formal organizational mechanisms) and discussed openly in the local media, online, political speeches, and other public forums (Karklins, ; Smith, ; Zaloznaya, ).…”

“…While some of these policies have enjoyed limited success (as in Singapore and Georgia, for example (Quah, ; Di Puppo 2010)), most share the fate of infamous anti‐corruption reforms in the Ukrainian police. Despite the absence of hard data to support these claims, ordinary Ukrainians and the country's popular media concur that the rise in the costs of corrupt behavior associated with anti‐corruption reforms did not eradicate corruption in Ukrainian police but, rather, increased the amounts that policemen were demanding in bribes to offset the changes in their incentive structures (Zaloznaya, ). This popular myth goes to show that in places where corruption has deep cultural roots, modifications in cost‐and‐benefit considerations are likely to be insufficient as people will find ways around these obstacles without changing their corrupt behavior.…”