Abstract
Drawing on experimental games and surveys conducted with students at two universities in Russia, we compare the behavioral, attitudinal, and demographic traits of students seeking public sector employment to the traits of their peers seeking jobs in the private sector. Contrary to similar studies conducted in other high-corruption contexts, such as India, we find evidence that students who prefer a public sector career display less willingness to cheat or bribe in experimental games as well as higher levels of altruism. However, disaggregating public sector career paths reveals distinctions between the federal civil service and other types of public sector employment, with federal government positions attracting students who exhibit some similarities with their peers aspiring to private sector careers. We discuss multiple interpretations consistent with our findings, each of which has implications for the creation of effective anti-corruption policies and for understanding of state capacity in contexts where corruption is widespread.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1086-1128 |
| Number of pages | 43 |
| Journal | Comparative Political Studies |
| Volume | 54 |
| Issue number | 6 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - May 2021 |
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was made possible in part by a grant from the Equality Development and Globalization Studies (EDGS) program at Northwestern University, funded by the Rajawali Foundation in Indonesia, and was prepared within the framework of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) and supported by the Russian Academic Excellence Project ‘5-100’. We thank participants at the University of Chicago Comparative Politics Workshop (January 17, 2018), PONARS Eurasia Workshop (Kharkiv, Ukraine, June 22–23, 2017), the European Association for Comparative Economics Studies-Higher School of Economics Topics in Political Economy Workshop (Moscow, Russia, June 13–14, 2017), and the Virtual Workshop on Authoritarian Regimes (November 30, 2016), as well as John Bullock, Simeon Nichter, Thomas Remington, Bryn Rosenfeld, Jason Seawright, and Joshua Tucker for helpful comments, and Evgeniia Mikriukova for outstanding research assistance. This research was approved by the Northwestern University Institutional Review Board and the Higher School of Economics Commission for Ethical Evaluation of Empirical Research. The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was made possible in part by a grant from the Equality Development and Globalization Studies (EDGS) program at Northwestern University, funded by the Rajawali Foundation in Indonesia, and was prepared within the framework of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) and supported by the Russian Academic Excellence Project ‘5-100’.
Keywords
- Russia
- bureaucracies
- corruption and patronage
- political economy
- public administration
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Sociology and Political Science
Access to Document
Other files and links
Fingerprint
Dive into the research topics of 'Self-Selection into Public Service When Corruption is Widespread: The Anomalous Russian Case'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Datasets
-
Self-Selection into Public Service When Corruption is Widespread: The Anomalous Russian Case
Gans-Morse, J. (Creator), Kalgin, A. (Creator), Klimenko, A. (Creator), Vorobyev, D. (Creator) & Yakovlev, A. (Creator), SAGE Journals, 2020
DOI: 10.25384/sage.c.5189256, https://sage.figshare.com/collections/Self-Selection_into_Public_Service_When_Corruption_is_Widespread_The_Anomalous_Russian_Case/5189256
Dataset