What explains corruption perceptions?: The dark side of political competition in Russia's regions

Comparative Politics

Volumn 42, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 147-166

  Sharafutdinova, Gulnaz ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 77749343097     PISSN: 00104159     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5129/001041510X12911363509431     Document Type: Article

References (112)

1. An English version of the speech is available at http:www.kremlim.ru/eng/ speeches/2006/05/10/1823-type70029type82912-105566.shtml. (All electronic references in these notes were last accessed on December 14, 2009.)
2. "Sistemnyi otvet," Rossiiskaia gazeta, July 4, 2008.
3. From the preliminary report on the Diagnostics of Russian Corruption: 2001 -2005 (INDEM Foundation), available at http://indem.ru/en/publicat/ 2005diag-engV.htm.
4. Georgii Satarov, ed., "Anticorruption Diagnostics in Russia: Sociological Analysis," (Moscow, INDEM Foundation, 2001), available at http://www.anti-corr.ru/awbreport/index.htm.
5. "Korruptsia - norma zhizni," http://wciom.ru/arkhiv/ tematicheskii-arkhiv/item/single/2861.html).
6. "Korruptsia - norma zhizni," http://wciom.ru/arkhiv/ tematicheskii-arkhiv/item/single/2861.html).
7. WCIOM Press-vypusk # 950 from May 7, 2008, entitled "Glavnye ugrozy dlia Rossii" ( http://wciom.ru/arkhiv/tematicheskii-arkhiv/item/single/ 10110).
8. Satarov, "Anticorruption Diagnostics in Russia."
9. http://bd.fom.ru/report/cat/power/corr/d081021.
10. Quoted in Stephen D. Morris, "Political Corruption in Latin America: A Research Note," unpublished manuscript, 2004, p. 8, available at www.southalabama.edu/.../sdmweb/crptn%20in%20LA%20note.pdf.
11. Dilyan Donchev and Gergely Ujhelyi, "What Do Corruption Indices Measure?" unpublished manuscript, 2009, available at http://papers.ssrn. com/sol3/papers.cfln?abstract-id=1124066.
12. Leslie Holmes, Rotten States? Corruption, Post-communism, and Neoliberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006);
13. Ivan Krastev, Shifting Obsessions: Three Essays on the Politics of Anticorruption (Budapest: CEU Press, 2004);
14. William L. Miller, Ase B. Gredeland, and Tatyana Koshechkina, eds., A Culture of Corruption: Coping with Government in Post-communist Europe (Budapest: CEU Press, 2001);
15. Rasma Karklins, The System Made Me Do It: Corruption in Post-Communist Societies (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2005);
16. Anna Grzymala-Busse, "The Discreet Charm of Formal Institutions: Post-communist Party Competition and State Corruption," Comparative Political Studies, 39 (April 2006): 271-300;
17. Steven Kotkin and Andras Sajo, eds., Political Corruption in Transition: A Skeptic's Handbook (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2002).
18. For an excellent review, see Johann Lambsdorff, "Corruption in Empirical Research - A Review," Transparency International Working Paper, 1999.
19. Susan Rose-Ackerman, Corruption and Government: Causes, Consequences, and Reform (New York: Cambridge University, 1999);
20. Arnold Heidenheimer, Michael Johnston, and Victor T. LeVine, eds., Political Corruption: A Handbook (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press, 1989);
21. Michael Johnston, "The Political Consequences of Corruption: A Reassessment," Comparative Politics, 18 (July 1986): 459-477
22. Michael Johnston, Syndromes of Corruption: Power, Wealth and Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
23. David Hoffman, The Oligarchs: Wealth, Power, and the New Russia (New York: Public Affairs, 2002);
24. Chrystia Freeland, Sale of the Century: Russia's Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism (New York: Crown Publishers, 2001);
25. Joel Hellman, "Winners Take All: The Politics of Partial Reforms in PostCommunist Transitions," World Politics, 50 (January 1998): 203-234
26. Karklins, System Made Me Do It;
27. Alena Ledeneva, How Russia Really Works: The Informal Practices That Shaped Post-Soviet Politics and Business (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006) ;
28. Igor Kliamkin and Lev Timofeev, Tenevaia Rossiia: ekonomiko- sotsiologicheskoe issledovanie (Moskva: RGGU, 2000).
29. Charles Sampford, Arthur Shacklock, Carmel Connors, Fredrik Galtung, eds., Measuring Corruption (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate 2006).
30. On systematic corruption, see John J. Wallis, "The Concept of Systematic Corruption in American History" in Corruption and Reform: Lessons from America's Economic History, ed. Edward L. Glaeser and Claudia Goldin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
31. Naci Mocan, "What Determines Corruption? International Evidence from Micro Data," NBER Working Paper No. 10460, May 2004;
32. Roman P. Zyla, "Corruption in Ukraine: Between Perceptions and Realities," in State and Institution Building in Ukraine, ed. Taras Kuzio, Robert. S. Kravchuk, and Paul D'Anieri (St. Martin's Press, 1999).
33. Charles L. Davis, Roderic Ai Camp, and Kenneth M. Coleman, "The Influence of Party Systems on Citizens' Perceptions of Corruption and Electoral Response in Latin America," Comparative Political Studies, 37 (August 2004), p. 678;
34. Barbara Geddes and Artur Ribiero Neto, "Institutional Sources of Corruption in Brazil," Third World Quarterly, 13 (December 1992), p. 657;
35. see also, Satarov, "Anticorruption Diagnostics in Russia."
36. Geddes and Neto, "Institutional Sources," p. 657.
37. Klaus Offe, "Political Corruption: Conceptual and Practical Issues," in Building a Trustworthy State in Post-socialist Transition, ed. Janos Komai and Susan Rose-Ackerman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 86-87.
38. Virginie Coulloudon, "Russia's Distorted Anticorruption Campaigns," in Political Corruption in Transition, ed. Stephen Kotkin and Andras Sajo (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2002), p. 188.
39. Virginie Coulloudon, "Russia's Distorted Anticorruption Campaigns," in Political Corruption in Transition, ed. Stephen Kotkin and Andras Sajo (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2002), p. 188.
40. Davis, Camp, and Coleman, "Influence of Party Systems," p. 700;
41. and Mitchell Seligson, "The Impact of Corruption on Regime Legitimacy: A Comparative Study of Four Latin American Countries," Journal of Politics, 64 (May 2002): 408-33.
42. As suggested by the senior economist of the World Bank (James Anderson, "Corruption in Latvia: Survey Evidence," report commissioned by the World Bank, http://www.politika.lv/en/index.php?id=15662).
43. Krastev, Shifting Obsessions.
44. Richard Rose, William Mishler, and Christian Haerpfer, Democracy and Its Alternatives: Understanding Postcommunist Societies (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 188.
45. Used as the title of Karklin's 2005 book on corruption.
46. Ledeneva, How Russia Really Works; and Karklins, System Made Me Do It.
47. Miller et al., Culture of Corruption, pp. 61-62.
48. James Curran and Michael Gurevitch, eds., Mass Media and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
49. Karklins, System Made Me Do It, p. 51.
50. Shyamal K. Chowdhury, "The Effect of Democracy and Press Freedom on Corruption: An Empirical Test," Economic Letters, 85 (October 2004): 93-101;
51. Rudiger Ahrend, "Press Freedom, Human Capital and Corruption," DELTA Working Paper 2002-11, 2002, available at http://ideas.repec.org/p/del/ abcdef/2002-11.html.
52. Remzi Lani and Frokk Cupi, "The Difficult Road to the Independent Media: Is the Post-Communist Transition Over?" Journal of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 2 (January 2002): 75-90;
53. Colin Sparks, Communism, Capitalism and Mass Media (Tirana: AMI, 2000).
54. Laura Belin, "Political Bias and Self-Censorship in the Russian Media," in Contemporary Russian Politics: A Reader, ed. Archie Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001);
55. Chris Groner, "The Post-Communist Media: Comparative 'Oligarchisation' and After," Slovo, 18 (January 2006): 5-41.
56. Ledeneva, How Russia Really Works.
57. Stephen Ansolabehere and Shanto Iyengar, Going Negative: How Political Advertisement Shrink and Polarize the Electorate (New York: Free Press, 1997).
58. Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, "Why Was Democracy Lost in Russia's Regions? Lessons from Nizhnii Novgorod," Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 40 (September 2007): 1-20;
59. Joel Moses, "PoliticalEconomic Elites and Russian Regional Elections 1999-2000: Democratic Tendencies in Kaliningrad, Perm and Volgograd," Europe-Asia Studies, 54 (September 2002): 905-931
60. Daniel Kaufmann, Aart Kraay, and Pablo Zoido-Lobaton, "Governance Matters," World Bank Policy Research Paper No.2196, 1999.
61. As suggested by Lambsdorff, "Corruption in Empirical Research."
62. Donchev and Ujhelyi, "Corruption Indices," p. 14.
63. Natalya V. Tchemina and Efim A. Tchernin, "Older people in Russia's transitional society: multiple deprivation and coping responses," Ageing & Society, 22 (2002): 543-62;
64. Vladimir Mikhalev, "Social Security in Russia Under Economic Transformation," Europe-Asia Studies, 48 (January 1996): 5-25.
65. The protests most threatening to Putin's regime were initiated by pensioners in January-February of 2005, when the government replaced the system of benefits to retired and disabled people by a petty monetary compensation.
66. See Phyllis Dininio and Robert W. Orttung, "Explaining Patterns of Corruption in the Russian Regions," World Politics, 57 (July 2005): 500-529
67. Dininio and Orttung have already noted a very low level of correlation between the two.
68. The sample size is about 7500 households and business representatives. The more detailed information about the data and methodology is available from the author upon request.
69. The description of the project's methodology includes a discussion of the technique used in this study, available at http://www.transparency.org.ru/proj- index.asp;.
70. The description of the methodology used for creating indices is available at http://www.transparency org.ru/proj-index.asp.
71. I also tested the model using the regional press freedom rating produced by the Glasnost Defense Foundation (http://www.gdf.ru/map). Their indicator is a categorical variable, taking values from 1 (least free) to 4 (most free). The results were generally consistent with those presented here.
72. The other two dimensions were constructed based on the analysis of the legislative regulation of the press in the regions as well as the responsiveness of regional governments. The preliminary tests showed that these two dimensions (access to and production of information) were not correlated with the dependent variable.
73. Kelly M. McMann and Nikolai V. Petrov, "A Survey of Democracy in Russia's Regions," Post-Soviet Geography and Economics, 41 (April-May 2000): 155-182
74. Christopher Marsh, "Social Capital and Democracy in Russia," Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 33 (June 2000): 183-99;
75. Tatu Vanhanen, Prospects of Democracy: A Study of 172 Countries (New York: Routledge, 1997).
76. Bryon Moraski and William M. Reisinger, "Explaining Electoral Competition across Russia's Regions," Slavic Review, 62 (Summer 2003): 278-301.
77. http://www.freepress.ru/publish/publish043.shtml.
78. Nikolai Petrov, "Russia's 'Part of Power' Takes Shape," Russia and Eurasia Review, Jamestown Foundation, 2 (16), 2003.
79. In 2003 thirty out of Russia's eighty-nine regional leaders were members of this party (Caroline McGregor, "United Russia Betting on Governors," Moscow Times, October 15, 2003).
80. Reported in the project description available at http://www.freepress.ru/ publish/publish043.shtrnl.
81. This project was a result of collaboration of three respected Russian think tanks (INDEM, Public Expertise, and Merkator) and is arguably one of the most accurate systematic assessments of regional-level democracy in Russia under Putin.
82. www.gks.ru.
83. In doing that, I assume that regional-level variables are strictly exogenous with respect to individual perceptions of corruption. Under this assumption, OLS yields unbiased and consistent estimates. Though there are statistical methods that may improve the efficiency of the estimates (Thomas M. Stoker, "Empirical Approaches to the Problem of Aggregation Over Individuals," Journal of Economic Literature, 31 [1993]: 1827-74), the results are already statistically significant. Therefore more precise statistical method will only strengthen the results of this paper.
84. To even the measurement scales, I used the logarithms of gross regional product indicator.
85. In the earlier specification of this model I included the variable of ethnic heterogeneity (measured by the proportion of non-ethnic Russian population in the regions) and found it to be highly correlated with political competition measure. I excluded this variable from the final model because my earlier research suggested a causal relationship between these two variables (Sharafutdinova, "When Do Elites Compete? The Determinants of Political Competition in Russian Regions," Comparative Politics, 38 [April 2006]: 273-93).
86. I tested for a potential nonlinear effect of press freedom on corruption perceptions (hypothesized by Dininio and Orttung, p. 526) by creating dummy variables for the upper and lower segments of the press freedom variable and estimating regression with these dummies. The results were consistent with the linear analysis.
87. On the role of television in Russia, see Ellen Mickiewicz, Changing Channels: Television and the Struggle for Power in Russia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).
88. Davis, Camp, and Coleman, "Influence of Party Systems."
89. Dininio and Orttung, "Explaining Patterns of Corruption."
90. I tested this model removing the insignificant variables. The results highlighted the significance of political competition and economic development variables revealing that the impact of political competition is more robust than the press freedom variable.
91. The ranges between the categories are arbitrary; therefore, to avoid the bias in model specification I decomposed this variable into dummy variables.
92. Vitalii Silitski, "Has the Age of Revolutions Ended?" Transitions Online, January 13, 2005;
93. and Lucan Way, "Kuchma's Failed Authoritarianism," Journal of Democracy, 16 (April 2005): 131-145
94. Dininio and Orttung, "Explaining Patterns of Corruption," p. 504.
95. Edward L. Glaeser, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, and Andrei Shleifer, "Do Institutions Cause Growth?" Journal of Economic Growth, 9 (June 2004): 271-303.
96. Karklins, "System Made Me Do It," p. 5.
97. Janos Kornai and Susan Rose-Ackerman, eds., Building a Trustworthy State in Post-Socialist Transition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
98. Grzymala-Busse, "Discreet Charm";
99. and Rebecca Bill Chavez, "The Construction of the Rule of Law in Argentina: ATale of Two Provinces," Comparative Politics, 35 (July 2003): 417-437
100. Joel S. Hellman, Geraint Jones, Daniel Kaufmann, and Mark Schankerman, "Measuring Governance, Corruption and State Capture: How Firms and Bureaucrats Shape the Business Environment in Transition Economies," Policy Research Working Paper 2312, 2000.
101. Sharafutdinova, "Why Was Democracy Lost";
102. Moses, "Political-Economic Elites";
103. and Rustem Bikmetov, "Rol' sredstv massovoi informatsii v vyborakh gubernatora Nizhegorodskoi oblasti 2001" in Regionalnye vybory i problemy grazhdanskogo obshchestva v Povolzhie, Carnegie Moscow Center, Working Papers (3): p. 137.
104. Moses, "Political-Economic Elites," p. 907.
105. Sharafutdinova, "Why Was Democracy Lost."
106. Ivan Zassoursky, Media and Power in Post-Soviet Russia (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2004);
107. Belin, "Political Bias."
108. Natalia Roudakova, "Media-Political Clientelism: Lessons from Anthropology," Media, Culture and Society 30 (1), 2008, pp. 41-59.
109. See, for example, Andrew Wilson, Virtual Politics: Faking Democracy in the Post-Soviet World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).
110. William Mishler and Richard Rose, "What Are the Origins of Political Trust? Testing Institutional and Cultural Theories in Post-Communist Societies," Comparative Political Studies, 34 (February 2001): 30-62.
111. This has been illustrated by Levada polls. See also, Mishler and Rose, "Origins of Political Trust."
112. http://www.levada.ru/press/2004092902.html.