Doctoral Dissertation Research: Structural Transformation and Bureaucratic Corruption

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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.