Everyday Corruption in Russia & Ukraine: Who, Why and With What Consequences?, Iowa City, Iowa, September 14, 2016

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- I want to acknowledge our university and community sponsors, The University of Iowa's international programs and the University of Iowa's honors program. They contribute vital time, talent, and logistics to our organization. I also thank the Stanley U of I Foundation support organization for their financial support, and today I thank especially our financial sponsors at MidwestOne Bank and the Iowa City Noon Rotary Club. Our programs are made possible by the financial support of these sponsors. Now, we're very happy to have Marina Zaloznaya. Okay, close enough. She's gonna correct it for you in a second here and she's an assistant professor in the sociology department at the University of Iowa. Her research interests focus on organizational and economic crime, nondemocratic governance and comparative historical research methods. Marina's book The Politics of Bureaucratic Corruption in Eastern Europe explores the impact that hybrid political regimes of Ukraine and Belarus have on informal economies of local Universities. Bill Reisinger is a professor in the political science department at the University of Iowa. His research concerns authoritarianism and democracy in former communist states especially Russia. His most recent book is The Regional Roots of Russia's Political Regime coauthored by Byron Moraski, published by the University of Michigan press that will appear later this year, and congratulations on that, Bill. So please join me in welcoming Marina and Bill. Thank you. - Thank you, Janet, for a nice introduction and for a very laudable effort to pronounce my last name and thank you all for coming. We are very honored to have this opportunity to share with you the findings of our recent survey project on everyday corruption in Eastern Europe. Before I go any further I would like to note that there is a third collaborator on this project who is not here today because she retired in May but a lot of you might know Vicki Claypool from previous programming at the counsel and even though Vicki's not here to present she has been engaged at every stage of this project. I also would like to say that the survey project that we are going to discuss was made possible by funding from the United States Department of Defense. So, the part of the project that we will discuss today focuses on two Eastern European countries, Russia and Ukraine. The reason why we chose these two countries are twofold. First, for anybody who's interested in political antecedents and consequences of any kind of social action, these countries present a fascinating comparison. Although they share years and decades of shared Soviet history as well as a lot of cultural similarities, the two countries have pursued fundamentally different trajectories of political development after the breakdown of the Soviet Union. Russia has become an increasingly strict authoritarian society under the governance of the president Vladimir Putin, while Ukraine has experienced a number of prodemocratic uprisings and is generally categorized by political analysts as a new democracy. Secondly, these two countries are fascinating for our purposes because they are both ranked as highly corrupt by Transparency International, which is an international watch dog organization on corruption. The focus of our project specifically is on everyday corruption, which we distinguish from grand, large scale or political corruption. Such corruption entails exchanges between ordinary people like yourselves and ourselves as well as employees in service provision organizations. So, we are interested at looking at exchanges in which people pay bribes, offer favors or small gifts to essentially everyday street level bureaucrats in their encounters to obtain basic services in hospitals, schools, police offices, courts, tax administrations, and other bureaucracies. At this point, I would like to turn the presentation to Bill for him to explain how we use our survey instrument in order to collect information on this kind of behavior. - Thank you, Marina. So, we did tackle these issues by using data that are gathered through national representative surveys conducted in each of the two countries. These involved face to face interviews in people's homes. They were conducted in June and July of 2015 and the key portion of the questionnaire involved a battery of four questions with which we could tease out what experiences people had. So, the first thing we did, that our interviewers did with the respondents in his or her home was to present them with a list of 12 service provision agencies, 12 bureaucratic sectors that you'll see examples of in a little bit and to allow them to look at this card and hold it as they were answering the subsequent questions. We then asked essentially please tell me which of these agencies, which of these types of agencies you had an encounter with in the past year. So, did you or did you not have to go to this or that bureaucratic officer? For each of those that you mentioned, and the followup question, the second question was were you satisfied? How satisfied with the encounter were you? So, we got a sense of the reaction to dealing with that bureaucrat. The third question, essentially not in these words, but came down to did you get a request from the official for some sort of bribe, gift or favor in order to receive the service that you went there for, and the fourth one was did you provide a bribe gift or favor as a result of that? Now, what this battery of questions allowed us to find out was interactions with a whole range of bureaucratic sectors and which ones were being used most, et cetera, but also how many times in the course of going about your every day business of the preceding year were you hit up or extorted for some sort of corrupt incentive, and it's quite possible given the way we asked the questions to find out that people were asked but did not give a bribe or that they gave a bribe without being asked, for example. So, those were the kinds of patterns that we came up with. And I should say before showing the results that we took that information and put it together into a single measure that tried to tap into what we call corruption engagement, the overall degree to which they were involved in corruption over the preceding year, and that for most people was a score of zero. That is, they neither were asked for a bribe nor gave one during the preceding year, but for people who had encounters that involved corruption it could go up to 19 in the case of Russia and 17 in Ukraine. That is multiple bureaucracies that they dealt with and that involved some sort of corruption. So, I now want to show on this chart the average scores for the two countries. On the left two bars are the averages for the two countries on that measure. It's a measure that runs from zero to either 19 or 17 and as you see, the bar for Ukraine in blue is higher than in Russia. So, there's more corruption engagement in the preceding year in Ukraine than in Russia. That's also shown by the two bars on the right which simply indicate how many of our respondents had any encounter with corruption at all in the preceding year. So, 20% for Russia, 27% for Ukraine. Now, that's far from every citizen of those countries. It's not the case that dealing with everyday corruption is something that every Russian or every Ukrainian does all the time. On the other hand, those are not trivial numbers. So, one fifth roughly of Russians and over one quarter of Ukrainians. Now, I know some of you will be asking yourselves how accurately or how honestly were people willing to talk about corruption to our interviewers. Bribing an official, after all, is illegal and it just might be something that they would refuse to talk about, and knowing that we included what's called a survey experiment in our questionnaire, and what this involved was assigning people to one of two different groups randomly and the first group received a question in which they were read four statements, all fully acceptable ones. I know who heads the Central Bank, I watch TV every day, I own a cell phone, pensions are high, and they were then asked to tell the interviewer how many of those statements they agreed with, just a number. Not which statements, but how many. The second group, again assigned randomly to this group received a list with the same four statements plus one more, over the last year I gave or accepted a bribe, and because people were put randomly into the two groups we could estimate the proportion of each country's population that had in fact given or received a bribe and compare that to the answers that we got on our corruption engagement questions. Fortunately in both countries, it turned out the proportion we calculated was remarkably close to the 20% and 27% figures on the chart, so we got some confirmation that we were getting relatively honest answers to these questions about different bureaucracies and whether and to what extent corruption was involved. Now, so who gets involved in corruption? Who had experiences that involved corruption over the preceding year? So, one of the things find, for example, is that corruption is more prevalent in cities rather than in rural areas, that it's more commonly associated with people in their 30s, 40s, and 50s rather than people who are either young adults or at retirement age, and it's more commonly associated with men rather than women, and as you can see this chart simply compares the average for men and women against the country average for both Russia and Ukraine and in both cases, the right hand column is taller. This is a much sharper difference in Russia, the group of bars on the left and statistically significant difference between the .89 for men and the .65 for women. It's pretty close in Ukraine. Although men were more engaged, women had higher levels and all three averages in Ukraine are higher than for Russia. We also found that the more educated a person was the more likely he or she was to be engaged in corruption over the preceding year. I assume you recognize the Ukrainian and Russian leaders there, and you see that it rises monotonically with education level and is true in both countries. Now, one of the things that occurred to us is people with higher levels of education also have higher income, so we wanted to check whether maybe this education pattern that we found was simply a matter of income. We did ask a question about people's monthly salaries but as is true in most countries we got fewer answers than we liked to that. Many people declined to provide their salary level so we had an additional question and the question asked people to pick a statement from a list that we read of what applied to their family's finances. So, what I've done in this chart is group the corruption engagement averages by level of family finances. The gray bar on the left in each grouping indicates people who said the following was true about their family finances. We do not have enough money even for food. The light blue bar, second from the left, are those people who agreed with the statement we have enough money for food but buying clothes is difficult. The red bar indicates people who chose we have enough money for food and clothing and we can save some amount, but it's not enough to buy expensive things such as a TV or refrigerator. The green bar is we can afford to buy some expensive things, and the blue bar, we can afford to buy anything we want. So, you have then the average response, the average amount of corruption engagement over the preceding year for people in different income categories, and ranging from those who are very destitute to what you could consider the blue bar on the right in the case of Russia to be the one percenters. Now, it's interesting the patterns are different in Russia and Ukraine. In Russia, the income group that is most engaged in corruption are the very rich. The middle income groups are lower and then there's a slight bump up for those who are very poor. There's sort of a J shape to that on the left. In Ukraine by contrast, the highest amount of corruption engagement is found among the middle classes and the super rich report no corruption engagement at all, although I need to say that because of Ukraine's economy we had very few respondents in the dark blue bar, so I think that's not necessarily representative but nonetheless, the Ukrainian pattern is not the same as in Russia. So, the next question I want to turn to is what bureaucratic sectors are involved? What agencies, what type of organizations tend to involve corruption? So, this chart shows for each of the 12 bureaucratic sectors that we had shown our respondents on the card. It shows how many of the encounters that people had with bureaucrats from those sectors resulted in the official asking for some sort of bribe or other incentive. The yellow bars indicating Ukraine are longer for every category, reflecting the overall higher level of corruption in Ukraine. But that said, the relationship across the different organizational sectors, which ones are most corruption prevalent and which ones are less, that's pretty much the same in both Russia and Ukraine. So, the most corrupt bureaucratic sector in both countries is traffic police, people who stop you and if you want to avoid a speeding ticket, slip them something. The regular police are second in both countries. There is, sad to say, a pretty high level for professors and other university officials as well as those in the court system. So, yourtoday does not get off scott free. So, that reflects the kind of variety we see across organizational sectors. The next chart is the data on, for people who are asked, how many ended up giving. It's the ratio of people who gave a bribe or gift or favor to the times that they were asked. There was a bar that goes to the left on this chart, means that fewer people gave the bribe than were hit up for it. If you can't see a bar in the place where there should be, that means the two were equal. Every extortion request resulted in a bribe. If a bar goes to the right, that means more people paid the bribe than were asked for one, and the two categories that meet that last criterion are teachers and hospital workers, which I think in part reflects the fact that those are underpaid and overworked people there as in many other places, and you can see that if you look at this, unlike the previous slide, the relationship among the sectors is not the same in the two countries. So, looking at the top category, governmental tenders, that the process by which you seek a government contract so you go through a tender process. In Ukraine, the yellow bar, only about 25% of the people who received a request for a bribe actually paid it. In Russia there's no red bar there. That means everyone who was asked for one paid it. So, we're starting to learn things about the relationship between what's going on in terms of who has to pay in what sector so there's different cultures within each of these organizational settings. We're really looking forward to trying to figure out more about these differences as we go forward in our work. I also want to say that these kind of data patterns that we're showing you are of interest for just describing the situation there, the social setting and other things, but we also are finding that they have political consequences, that they matter for the country's politics and they matter because engagement in corruption changes how people think about their country's leaders and their political system. So, let me mention just two political consequences that we have been finding in our data analysis. The first is that people who have experiences involving corruption over the preceding year have much higher estimates of how corrupt their political leaders are. So, it raises the perception of corruption among the political leaders and that causes these people who've been engaged in corruption to think worse of their political system as a whole and in the case of Russia it is associated with them having voted less often for Putin in 2012, so this is a group of people who were much less supportive of the political regime in that sense, and it raises dissatisfaction with the encounter. If you go to have something done with a bureaucrat and corruption gets dragged in, then you actually are less happy with the outcome of the bureaucratic encounter and that in turn we find is associated with people having lower estimates of how the members of the political system are doing their job, and that's a very telling indicator as well. And with that, I'll turn the podium back to Marina. - Thanks, Bill. In addition to exploring the consequences of corruption we also used our data to look at the reasons why people would participate in these kinds of illegal exchanges. To construct our hypothesis about potential reasons for corruption to figure out what differentiates people who do and who do not engage in this type of behavior we relied on traditional criminological theories. One of the classic determinants of criminal behavior in criminological theory is people's beliefs and ideas about acceptability of corruption. The theory goes that people who hold crime favorable or definitions or essentially crime favorable ways of thinking are more likely to break the law. How might people justify corruption? The quote that you see on the slide is lifted from my ethnographic work in the region. It belongs to a 39 year old Belarusian business man. When I asked him if he would consider offering a small sum of money or a present to an official he said of course I would. I don't really do it often, but it is not because I think there is anything particularly wrong with it, probably because I just don't have the money. We all have to make do somehow. It's not a crime to try to get what you want if you have the means. So, this is one of possible ways for people to think of corruption as acceptable. We use the survey data we have collected to see if perceptions of acceptability of this kind of behavior are indeed linked to higher likelihood of engagement and in both countries we find that people who hold definitions that are more favorable to corruption are indeed more likely to give bribes, presents, and do favors to street level bureaucrats. The second potential reason that we explored has to do with perceived risks of detection and punishment. A lot of criminological theories suggest that people are less likely to break the law if they think that they are more likely to be caught and more likely to be punished for their behavior. This is quite intuitive. In fact, a lot of anti-corruption policy in the region is focused on bolstering the accountability mechanisms within organizations to kind of ensure that detection and punishment are more likely. The quote that you see on the slide is taken from an interview with a Belarusian student, university student who talks about his professors being scared and this is his explanation for why they actually do not take bribes. It would be nice if there were a way to get out of some crazy, boring classes I have to take. I'd rather pay, but no, no such luck. My professors, they're all prim and proper, not a step out of line. I bet some of them would actually like to make some zaichiki, which is colloquial term for Belarusian currency, but they're too scared. Again, while this makes a lot of intuitive sense nobody has really been able to check whether there is a statistical relationship between perceptions of risk and likelihood of engagement and we find that in both countries the more scared people are of engagement the less likely they are to do it. The third reason that we thought might push people to engage in corruption is the perceived utility of bribery. So, people say that they do it because they need to get the services that they want and this kind of reasoning resonates with a criminological theory on the structural causes of crime whereby people are believed to break the law if they don't have legitimate ways of achieving the socially prescribed goals. So, the quote that you see is something that a Ukrainian university student told me. He told me that corruption is everywhere in Ukrainian universities like everywhere else, but if it's a problem he doesn't know. He says it makes my life easier because I don't have to study useless things. I am seriously better off making money. So, this is how he felt about the utility of bribery, so he thought why should I waste my time studying things that are not useful? I might as well pay. Now, to measure utility of bribery we actually weighed the perceived need to give bribes to get what you want by people's income, because participating in bribery is costly. You literally have to give up money, so we created a ratio of the perceived need to people's resources and found that in contrast to our other determinants, perceived utility of bribery really only matters in Russia. In Ukraine, there's no statistical relationship between perceived utility and engagement. There was also some other differences between the two countries that we would like to highlight. First of all, as Bill mentioned there is just more of it in Ukraine. Yet, even though there is more corruption in Ukraine, the theoretical model that we have developed based on criminological theories that have been put forth by Western academics actually works better to predict people's behavior in Russia than it does in Ukraine. Simply put, the predictors have much more strength in determining whether or not people are going to break the law. Also, we noticed that there's differences in the relationship among the predictors. So in Ukraine, people's beliefs about acceptability of corruption or how normal, acceptable, justifiable it is, actually influenced their calculations of utility. So for instance, if you think corruption is more acceptable you're more likely to consider it useful, necessary, helpful to you. In Russia, however, this relationship does not exist. So how do we explain the differences that we observe? Well, in one paper based on this data we argue that the explanatory factor here is the stability. The two countries that we looked at are significantly different in terms of their level of stability. Russia under President Putin has essentially been the same regime since the year 2000. There is a lot of continuity and predictability in how institutions work and what people need to do to get services. In contrast, Ukraine has oscillated between pro-Western and pro-Russian modes of governance. In fact, every single presidential election except for one brought in a new administration into office in Ukraine that has fundamentally reversed the previous political course of the predecessors. So, in Ukraine things are just much less stable and are much more fluid, and we believe that this matters. I'm gonna go back. This matters because instability itself has criminogenic effects. We argue that in addition to affecting the general predictors of this behavior, instability pushes people to break the law. When people exist in conditions of uncertainty they're just much more likely to not behave according to rules. Secondly, we argue that a lot of the fears that have been developed in the West, criminological theories that we rely on, are really based on a stable context. They assume the stability because they're based on the data we're collecting in the United States, Western Europe. They simply do not work quite as well in context like Ukraine that are much more fluid and finally, we argue that beliefs or culture matters much more in unstable environments. Why? Because when there is stability people don't need to rely on their beliefs to have their costs and benefits calculated. Rather, they know. They know from previous experiences. They know from factual, verifiable information. In Ukraine however things are unclear and therefore people are much more likely to invoke their cultural beliefs. Let me conclude. I think that our findings have important applications. First of all, we find that even in countries that are considered to be highly corrupt and sometimes are actually portrayed in popular and political discourse as hopelessly riddled with corruption, corruption is not ubiquitous. While there is a lot of people engaged in it, there is a lot of people who abstain on a regular basis and in fact, we can systematically predict who can avoid participating in such exchanges. We believe that this is an important finding for political as well as academic reasons. Also, we think that our finding that stability affects people's engagement in corruption is important to explain a common knowledge that exists out there that autocracies tend to have less corruption than new democracies despite the fact there are open actual elections. Autocratic regimes tend to be less corrupt than newly democratized counterparts. Why? Because they are more stable. Also, we find that criminological theories and we're guessing that probably other social scientific theories as well simply just don't work in unstable settings as well and this is a call for academics out there to actually collect data in this context and build new theories that are based on real information from this context instead of kind of transposing what we know about the Western world and arguing that this is going to work everywhere. Finally, as Bill pointed out it's not just grand, large scale corruption that undermines regimes. In fact, such simple inconsequential exchanges as a bribe that a student pays to a professor in fact may undermine a political system, particularly nondemocratic political system. Finally, within new research in corruption we need to talk about policy. Right now, a lot of anti-corruption policy is based on the practice of policy transfer where policies that are developed in one context are transposed onto a different context and because we find that pathways to bureaucratic corruption are actually quite different in countries that are usually grouped into one category, that are usually considered very similar or the same. We argue that policy transfer is a dangerous enterprise. What works in one place might not work in another because the reasons why people engage in these practices in two different places might be different. With this, I'm going to conclude and thank you for your attention. - How did you actually conduct the interviews in people's homes? Did you hire local people to do it? Was it people from the United States? I'm just curious about the actual process of the conducting the interviews. - Thank you, Janet. Yes, we worked with local partners so in each of the three countries we hired local research firms who actually have experience doing this kind of stuff. Each research firm, and I say three countries because in the project we actually also conducted data collection in Georgia as well. In each of these countries the survey interviews were conducted by a set of well-trained interviewees that were hired by the actual research firm in the country and they knew the locations well, they knew the cultural I suppose particularities of the context and they were able to figure out ways to talk to people about this stuff more comfortably than if we were to do this ourselves. - Thank you. Are attitudes justifying corruption comparable to attitudes justifying tax evasion in the United States? - I think so. You know, we don't know obviously. Our data does not speak to that but my guess is that the so-called techniques of neutralization or justifications people use to make themselves look good are actually quite universal, right? So, they tend to fall into one of a few categories such as appeal to a higher purpose. For instance, I need to help my family therefore I'm just going to pay the professor so that I can work and help my family. Alternatively, possibly it could be something like they are not doing a good job, therefore I'm going to pay and get out of my responsibilities, so blaming the other. So, from what I've seen on research on tax evasion and other low-level white collar crimes in the United States and other Western democracies it seems to be similar types of justification but somebody needs to research that and compare that in a more systematic fashion. - In the Soviet Union, corruption in the service economy and mentioning specifically travel was rampant. Is it worse now? - I promise this is my last answer. Is this worse now? Well, it's very difficult to say because part of the reason this project is really cool is because it's unprecedented. We generally just don't have systematic information on these kind of practices. They're hidden, they're stigmatized, they're difficult to collect data on, so there is no certain answer. However, we do know that under the table exchanges in bureaucracies were quite common in the Soviet Union. They were different, however. So, one thing that did change even if not their prevalence is their dynamics. In the Soviet Union, the exchanges that were most prevalent were so-called black exchanges. These were exchanges that were based on delayed reciprocity. So basically, instead of immediate monetary exchange like small scale bribery these days, they used to be based on in-kind exchanges and the exchanges were more spread out over time. So for instance, if I worked in a shoe factory and you needed shoes, you come to me and I help you out now but you work, let's say, in a factory that makes plates and I don't need you to repay me with plates right there, therefore I'm going to wait until a time that a need arises for me to have plates and I'm gonna come to you then, because the mode of exchange was different. It was not money, it was actually in-kind products and services. Meaningful exchanges necessitated this temporal separation and the maintenance of a relationship between the receiver and the giver. These days however the only scarce resource in Eastern Europe is money. Because of the immediateof money clearly there is no need to maintain these relationships over time. - Well, this may be another question for you but could you say more about the reliance on culture in cases where the countries are less stable. - So, our finding that beliefs matter more in Ukraine than they do in Russia actually resonates well with an established theory in sociology of culture that culture matters more in unstable times, that when people are uncertain about the right ways to behave, they're going to invoke their informal beliefs. So, this is essentially what we're seeing. We're seeing that Ukrainians have a hard time calculating the utility of bribery. They just don't know because one day bureaucracy works one way, a different day things change and they have a hard time drawing conclusions based on their past experiences. Therefore, they draw conclusions based on their beliefs. Where do they take their beliefs from? From informal interactions with others mainly. Mainly it's from talking in hallways, gossip, hearsay, informal observations. That kind of information becomes the source for the rational calculus about the costs and benefits of rule breaking. - This is just a little like a previous question but can you cross compare corruption in the U.S.A., for example pay to play, political contributions, inspectors of new houses, traffic tickets, gifts, trips, et cetera. - One of the things we've found in doing the research and in preparing this project, et cetera, is just how wide a ground, wide territory is covered by the term corruption, and so one of the things that's very clear is that in these countries some of the things you mention have counterparts and are very prevalent and involve really amazing sums of money that the higher, grand corruption kind of things or even things that maybe involve middle range officials, so they're very prevalent there and by most estimates, Transparency International and other agencies that try to get a handle on these things are even higher than in the U.S. certainly, but the most recent thing to hit the news is of the official who was the highest ranking anti-corruption officer for one of the security agencies in Russia was found with $125 million worth of cash in his apartment and then the other shoe dropped this morning I saw on Twitter, which was that he was no dumb enough to keep all his ill gotten gains in cash, that his Swiss bank account had $300 million or something so probably that cash was just on its way overseas, but this was the anti-corruption official. So, that's really something that's quite telling and it's a huge drain in both cases. Another thing that makes it very hard to really compare without really careful, close work, as Marina said we really think that scholars need to start doing the detailed work to figure out such comparisons. One of the things is the political context that our data show political context matters even in a comparison of Russia and Ukraine which are quite like each other in some important ways, and if it matters there it's certainly a comparison of the U.S. and Russia or the U.S. and Ukraine is gonna matter a lot, too, and just to kind of throw in something that we didn't mention in the formal remarks but that is one of the more fascinating parts of our research is that both Russia and Ukraine have portions of their countries, different regions within the country that are experiencing conflict or have in the recent past experienced militarized conflict. So, the Eastern part of Ukraine and the parts of Russia that are right across the border, the Northern Caucasus regions of Russia, et cetera, and we do find that those experiences of internal militarized conflict do contribute to the lack of stability in an additional way, in addition to the political changes and that has its affect and really changes the dynamics. So, the cultures of these two countries have regional variation as well, and we're really fascinated by that finding. - What are your next research plans and when can we expect to have you back to tell us about them? - Keep throwing them at me. So, one thing that Marina and I have talked about is that we really would love to build on this and we're hoping to incorporate another case, one that is not part of that same sphere of East European post-communist countries and it did occur to us that my department has an expert in China which would make a great comparison case, so a few weeks ago you heard my colleague talk about Chinese public opinion, so we're hoping we can go that way and how long it'll be will depend on whether we can get funding and bring it about but I think the comparisons of East Asia and East Europe would be really fascinating. So, I can at least say that has occurred to us and we're crossing our fingers. - We're hoping you don't have to have any bribes to be able to get the funding or approval or anything for that. Next, what do you think the Pentagon or Department of Defense, your funder, will do with this information? - Well we will both tackle that, I guess. So, it's funding through a agency that's a research agency set up under the auspices of the Department of Defense, the army in particular and so they do nothing but create social science research and the goal and the way it's explained to us and to other researchers is that the U.S. army is involved in various ways around the world and really, this is a time when it needs to understand the places in which it's operating and the human dynamics in different parts of the world and so this has value abstractly to them, so they encourage us to publish our research in scholarly outlets, to give our results at conferences to share our findings with other scholars and to do the normal kind of academic things. There's no classified end of this at all so it's really put out into the broader community but in the course of doing that becomes available to the military as well for their knowledge and just better appreciation of things. Did you want to add anything? - I'll just add that the only thing that I think we were encouraged to do that maybe a different kind of funder would not was to create policy briefs, so basically policy recommendations based on our findings, but policies that we're talking about in our case would be anti-corruption policies, sort of what works for fighting the issue that we're exploring, so not what works for United States to bring Russia down kind of policy. - The correlation between instability and corruption is clear. Is there a correlation between repressive government and corruption? - Yes, absolutely. Repressive governments tend to create a number of conditions that encourage corrupt behaviors, so a lot of repressive governments, for instance, are also characterized by controlled and planned economies and as a result, the bureaucracies, the services provision bureaucracies that all of us encounter in our everyday lives are not as effective as they would be in more open economies. So, in a lot of ways they affect the three predictors that we described. They create a need for people to resort to elicit, under the table means to get things that they need and corruption offers just a wonderful way because it creates kind of a private market on top of the inefficient, planned, dysfunctional systems of distribution whereby people can get things that they need to get, so this is actually a very interesting thing because the question that Bill addressed about political consequences of corruption was inspired by thinking about corruption as something that actually allows people to achieve their everyday goals. If you think about it as something that offers an additional tool to cope with dysfunctionality of an inefficient society, then maybe corruption could be the grease in the wheels of dysfunctional economy and thereby actually make people less disgruntled with the regime and more likely to support nondemocratic suppressing rulers, however we actually find zero support for that. We find that no, even if it might make people's lives in such societies more tolerable in the short term in the long term it still makes people less likely to support the regime and less like to vote for a repressive ruler. - Yeah, I would add that one of the things that excites us about doing this project is to be able to focus on street level corruption because in fact, when you see the reports from Transparency International, the World Bank and other things, they kind of jumble all different kinds of corruption together in making their estimates of which countries are more or less corrupt. Now, when they do create these kind of jumbled together measures of corruption in different countries, what they find is that authoritarian regimes can be low corruption or high corruption, that democracies can be very low corruption but only if they are relatively stable and democratic democracies, not just ones in which there may be elections but not a lot of the other trappings, in mature democracies, and that indicates that certain kinds of rule of law and other institutions are necessary as well. So, there's some sort of curvy linear relationship and yet, what we find is that the lower level every day kind of corruption is really operating in a different sphere. So, we think that going forward, breaking these apart and treating them separately is gonna be very important. I will say also that there is in the countries that we have gathered data on, there is one in which everyday street level corruption was lowered dramatically in the early years of this century and that's Georgia, the Republic of Georgia, and so we're kind of fascinated to try to figure out what was driving that. Was it something that is connected with democratic politics? Was it something much more cultural? Did it have to do with specific organizations, et cetera? They seem to, by the accounts of their people, have lowered dramatically, the corruption among traffic police, for example. So, there's something going on there. It can be done, but no doubt we're gonna find that they're very context specific reasons for that. - Hopefully this will be no, but might your grant be a DOD bribe to gain favor with academics? - They don't give us any additional summer salaries so probably not. If it is it's ineffective. - Next, I think somebody's interested in following up. Are you findings published in written form and where? - We have several things out for review and we have one publication that is accepted and will appear in electronic form in kind of a preliminary publication form but available on the internet later this month I believe or early next month. It's coming out from a journal called Post Soviet Affairs which is a well-regarded academic journal and it focuses primarily on our data from Russia but you'll see some charts very similar to the ones I've shown here today, so if you're interested you can find that on the web and they will periodically post to the website articles that have been prepared and typeset, et cetera, so ours will be there within a few weeks. - Okay, thank you. We now conclude our program. On behalf of the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council please join me in giving a big thank you to Marina Zaloznaya and Bill Reisinger. I also want to thank our sponsors, the University of Iowa's international programs, the University of Iowa's Honors program and the Stanley U of I Foundation Support organization for their generous support, and we also thank today's financial sponsors, Iowa City Noon Rotary Club and MidwestOne Bank and we thank City Channel Four for making our programs available to viewing audiences. Now, Marina and Bill, as a small token of our appreciation I am very pleased to give you each our very coveted Iowa City Foreign Relations Council mugs. - Thank you so much. - Thank you. - And thank you again for joining us and we are adjourned.

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