Doctoral Dissertation Research: Structural Transformation and Bureaucratic Corruption

john L. HaganMarina zalonznay西北大学这个项目是对东欧大学中小官僚腐败的混合方法研究。大学腐败涉及交换，即学生补偿大学官员的非法学术援助、分配证书和优惠待遇。这项研究的核心是比较当今乌克兰和白俄罗斯的大学，以及它们共同的起源点——苏联后期的大学。苏联的解体标志着文化相似的乌克兰和白俄罗斯社会在发展轨迹上出现了分歧。本研究将苏联集团的解体视为一个自然实验，探讨了结构转型如何影响官僚腐败，重点关注乌克兰和白俄罗斯大学腐败制度在其从极权主义过渡的不同路径中所体现的差异。一方面，本研究考虑经济和政治变化如何通过改变公民的物质环境来影响公民参与官僚腐败。另一方面，它探讨了结构变化是否也改变了公众对私人和公共领域边界的理解，对金钱、法律和官僚机构的态度，从而影响了小额腐败的模式。在方法上，该项目是基于比较历史、人种学和访谈研究的结合。玛丽娜将分别在乌克兰和白俄罗斯停留三个月，观察大学的非正式文化，与学生、家长和教授交谈，访问当地档案馆和图书馆，以揭露大学腐败的机制，并了解腐败系统如何与更广泛的结构背景联系在一起。本研究结果将透过揭示贿赂和裙带关系的实际机制，显著增进对官僚腐败的社会法律理解。由于研究非法和污名化活动的困难，社会学家、政治学家和法律学者对轻微腐败的实际发生方式知之甚少。更广泛的影响这些研究结果将有助于我们了解以打击街头腐败为目标的反腐败政策的有效性。虽然目前大多数反腐败举措都是基于威慑的理性选择模型，但本研究将探讨文化逻辑在塑造非法行为方面的重要性，以及工具激励，并为这一社会问题提供新颖的见解和不同的解决方案。该项目的调查结果将广泛散发给学术界、政策团体和非政府组织，他们对减少正在经历政治和经济转型的地区的教育腐败感兴趣。

SES-1003489John L. HaganMarina ZalonznayaNorthwestern UniversityThis project is a mixed-methods study of petty bureaucratic corruption in Eastern European universities. University corruption entails exchanges whereby students compensate university officials for illicit academic assistance, allocation of credentials, and favorable treatment. At the heart of the study lies a comparison between present-day Ukrainian and Belarusian universities, and their common point of origin - late Soviet universities. The breakdown of the Soviet Union marked a divergence in the development trajectories of culturally similar Ukrainian and Belarusian societies. Treating the fall of the Soviet bloc as a natural experiment, this study explores how structural transformation affects bureaucratic corruption, focusing on the differences that materialized in Ukrainian and Belarusian university corruption systems in response to their different paths of transition from totalitarianism. On the one hand, this study considers how economic and political changes affect citizens' participation in bureaucratic corruption by changing their material circumstances. On the other hand, it explores whether structural changes also alter popular understandings of the boundary between private and public domains, attitudes to money, law, and bureaucracies, thereby affecting the patterns of petty corruption. Methodologically, the project is based on a combination of comparative-historical, ethnographic, and interview research. Marina is spending 3 months in Ukraine and 3 months in Belarus in order to observe the informal cultures of universities, talk with students, their parents, and professors, and visit local archives and libraries to uncover the mechanisms of university corruption and understand how corruption systems are connected to the broader structural contexts. The findings of this study will significantly enhance the socio-legal understanding of bureaucratic corruption by revealing the actual mechanisms of bribery and nepotism. Due to the difficulty of studying illegal and stigmatized activity, sociologists, political scientists, and legal scholars know very little about how petty corruption actually happens. Broader ImpactsThese findings will contribute to our understanding of the effectiveness of anti-corruption policies, oriented at combating street-level corruption. While most current anti-corruption initiatives are based on the rational-choice model of deterrence, this study will probe the importance of cultural logics, in addition to instrumental incentives, in shaping illicit behaviors, and offer novel insights and different solutions to this social malaise. The findings of the project will be widely disseminated to academics, policy groups, and non-governmental organizations, interested in decreasing educational corruption in the regions undergoing political and economic transition.