Doctoral Dissertation Research: Structural Transformation and Bureaucratic Corruption

SES-1003489John L.Hagan Marina Zalonznaya西北大学这个项目是对东欧大学中的小官僚腐败进行混合方法的研究。大学腐败需要交换，学生通过交换补偿大学官员非法的学术援助、证书分配和优惠待遇。这项研究的核心是对当今乌克兰和白俄罗斯的大学以及它们共同的发源地--苏联晚期大学--进行比较。苏联的解体标志着乌克兰和白俄罗斯社会在文化上相似的发展轨迹上的分歧。这项研究将苏联集团的解体视为一个自然的实验，探索结构转型如何影响官僚腐败，重点是乌克兰和白俄罗斯的大学腐败制度在应对从极权主义过渡到不同路径的不同方面的差异。一方面，本研究考察了经济和政治变化是如何通过改变公民的物质环境来影响公民参与官僚腐败的。另一方面，它探讨了结构变化是否也改变了人们对私人和公共领域之间的界限的普遍理解，以及对金钱、法律和官僚机构的态度，从而影响了轻微腐败的模式。在方法上，该项目是基于比较历史、民族志和访谈研究的组合。玛丽娜在乌克兰呆了3个月，在白俄罗斯呆了3个月，目的是观察大学的非正式文化，与学生、家长和教授交谈，并参观当地档案和图书馆，以揭示大学腐败的机制，并了解腐败制度如何与更广泛的结构背景联系在一起。这项研究的结果将通过揭示贿赂和裙带关系的实际机制，显著提高对官僚腐败的社会法律理解。由于很难研究非法和污名化的活动，社会学家、政治学家和法律学者对轻微腐败实际上是如何发生的知之甚少。更广泛的影响这些调查结果将有助于我们理解以打击街头腐败为目标的反腐败政策的有效性。虽然目前的大多数反腐败举措都是基于理性选择的威慑模式，但这项研究将探讨除了工具性激励之外，文化逻辑在塑造非法行为方面的重要性，并为这一社会弊病提供新的见解和不同的解决方案。该项目的结果将广泛传播给学术界、政策团体和非政府组织，他们对减少政治和经济转型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.