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Abstract
Corruption is widespread throughout the former Communist states, and it is particularly severe and entrenched in Russia. Despite the fact that Russia's contemporary corruption has recently become a subject of analysis, there is, however, no study that has addressed the role of the Communist legacy in the development of various aspects of corruption. This paper contributes to the debates through, first, disentangling the complex phenomenon that is corruption, and focusing on its three aspects: supply, demand, and the attitude of the population. Second, the paper also contributes to the literature on modern corruption by explicitly focusing on the role of the historical legacy in these different aspects of corruption. The study is based on several rich data-sets on corruption and on an original data-set compiled to measure the percentage share of Communists in various regions of Russia in the last decades of the USSR (1970s–1980s). The analysis presented in the paper uncovers different roles of the Communist legacies across the development of various aspects of corruption. By doing so, the paper contributes to the literature on historical legacies in general, on Communist legacies in particular, as well as to the broader literature on the causes of corruption in transitional societies.
Acknowledgements
The authors appreciate the valuable comments of Robert Orttung and Tomila Lankina. Some of the ideas of the paper were presented and discussed at the conference of the Competence Network “Institutions and Institutional Change in Postsocialism” at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in November 2013, and the paper benefited from the feedback received at the conference.
Notes
1. For example, Lankina and Getachew (Citation2006), Gel'man and Lankina (Citation2008), Obydenkova (Citation2011, Citation2012), Obydenkova and Libman (Citation2012), and many other studies have focused on differences across the regions of Russia, investigating how they account for differences in regional democratization and using the regions as a natural laboratory for developing new theories.
2. Both documents are available on the official web portal of the President of Russia at http://archive.kremlin.ru (accessed 2 September 2013).
3. These are descriptions summarized by the authors and derived from the text of the law, as cited in note 2.
4. However, the outcomes vary for different countries. Frye (Citation1998) compares post-Communist Poland and post-Communist Russia. Although corruption in Poland during Communism was more serious than in Russia, the situation reversed after the collapse of Communism. Corruption in Poland decreased radically, but increased in Russia.
5. According to Inglehart (cited in Sandholtz and Taagepera Citation2005), culture explains 75% of the variation of the perceived corruption index in the non-Communist world. Sandholtz and Taagepera (Citation2005) note that the “survival” orientation contributes twice as much as a strong “traditional” orientation to higher levels of corruption.
6. The FOM survey conducted in 2010 is referred to as FOM (Citation2011a) and that conducted in 2011 as FOM (Citation2011b) throughout the paper. All questions of the survey conducted in 2010 were adopted from Satarov (Citation2006, 26–27).
7. All translations from the Russian are done by the authors.
8. Specifically, we used the 1976 party congress, for which the norm of representation was 1 delegate per 3000 Communist Party members.
9. Finland also borders a region with very high CPSU penetration (Leningrad Oblast – a very special case in the Soviet Union, where it had the informal status as the second capital).
10. University education is a meaningful measure for the Russian case, because the share of those not receiving primary and secondary education is close to zero in most Russian regions.
11. Because the FOM study investigates corruption by households and not by businessmen, this parameter should have no effect on bribe-givers.
12. The set of regions we excluded due to the lack of information about CPSU membership strongly overlaps with the set of regions for which FOM surveys do not contain any data. Therefore, the overall number of regions we had to exclude from our data is relatively small. While the Russian Federation in 2011 consisted of 83 regions, we ran regressions with 65–66 regions, depending on the specification.
13. See Stoner-Weiss (Citation1997), Gel'man (Citation1999), Hale (Citation2003), Lankina and Getachew (Citation2006), Obydenkova (Citation2008), and Obydenkova and Libman (Citation2013).
14. This robustness check is implemented only for the demand for bribes, since it is the bureaucracy which should directly react to the policy of the federal center.
15. To distinguish this effect from the legacy of the CPSU, we control for the share of votes received by the CPRF during the most recent parliamentary elections in 2011 and the share of votes received in the 1999 elections, the last before Putin came to power, to account for possible electoral manipulation during Putin's rule. Note that the share of CPSU members in the 1970s is almost uncorrelated with the voting for the CPRF in 1999 (the correlation coefficient is − 0.099) and in 2011 (correlation of 0.232).
16. This test is performed only for regressions investigating the behavior of bribe-givers: There is no reason to expect that the general age structure of the regional population and the age structure of the bureaucracy should coincide.
17. See Lambsdorff (Citation1999) and Treisman (Citation2000).
18. A detailed list of the variables is available upon request.
19. Details are available upon request.
20. If the CPSU legacies were correlated with the contemporary distribution of CPRF support, one could explain the appointment of younger judges in the regions and their vigilance by the willingness to combat political opponents. However, as mentioned, CPSU legacies and CPRF support are not correlated. We also correlated the CPSU spread in the 1970s with the share of votes for Otechestvo–Vsya Rossiya, Putin's main competitor during the 1999 parliamentary elections, as well as checked whether there is any significant difference in the past share of CPSU membership between regions run by governors who belonged to Otechestvo–Vsya Rossiya (using the data from Lussier Citation2002) and other regions. We found a very low correlation coefficient ( − 0.016) and no significant difference.