Bureaucratic Corruption in Transitional Economies: Political Regimes, Organizations, and Informality in Ukraine and Belarus

This dissertation explores the link between informal economies of bureaucracies and political regimes in a newly democratic Ukraine and autocratic Belarus. The analysis suggests that the relationship between socio-political regimes and corruption is systematically varied within individual nation-states and mediated by organizations.;In autocratic regimes, I argue, the prevalence of corruption in a specific institutional sector depends on its strategic importance for the maintenance of the incumbent regime. Thus, organizations, whose loyalty is critical for preserving the power of an autocratic leader, are free of petty corruption due to strict controls and ideological pressures from the government. In contrast, organizations that, in the eyes of the authoritarian elite, are politically unimportant, are likely to be permeated with small-scale bureaucratic informality. This finding contradicts the implicit assumption that 'authoritarianism breeds corruption', common in quantitative literature on development and corruption.;The Ukrainian case, then, reveals that a new democracy, which, according to corruptological literature is the most corrupt type of a political regime, is not ubiquitously permeated with informality. Instead, I found that there are more and less corrupt Ukrainian universities. Citizens' likelihood of engagement in bureaucratic corruption, then, depends on their exposure to the informal cultures of specific organizations.;I explain the variation in corruption across Ukrainian organizations with the fragmentation of the socio-normative space in new democracies into old and emergent normative-economic markets. I argue that corrupt and non-corrupt universities operate in distinct socio-normative spheres. The old, inherited sphere is based on the legacy of pervasive informality of the Soviet era, monetized and adjusted to the realities of the liberalized economy. The new, emergent sphere, in contrast, consists of logics of transparency and meritocracy, partially carried over from the Soviet times and partially adopted from the West since the fall of socialism.;The implications of my arguments are three-fold. First, they show the importance of organizations in mediating the link between regimes and corruption. Second, I argue against using numeric indicators of corruption to understand its political and economic determinants. Finally, I advocate for a comparative-historical approach to the study of corruption that simultaneously allows for across and within-country comparisons.