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Explaining Patterns of Corruption in the Russian Regions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Phyllis Dininio  and
Robert Orttung
Robert Orttung
Affiliation:
American University American University
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Abstract

Corruption is one of the key problems facing the Russian state as it seeks to evolve out of its socialist past. Naturally, regional patterns of corruption exist across a country as large and diverse as the Russian Federation. To explain these variations, the authors analyze 2002 data from Transparency International and the Information for Democracy Foundation that provide the first effort to measure differences in the incidence of corruption across forty Russian regions. They find that corruption in Russia is fueled by the size of government and by the level of development. Within each region, the amount of corruption increases as the number of bureaucrats grows and gross regional product per capita decreases. Russian policymakers can therefore work to reduce corruption by effectively reforming or scaling back bureaucracies and by encouraging economic development outside of the key centers of Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 57 , Issue 4 , July 2005 , pp. 500 - 529
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 2005

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References

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59 We chose ordinary least square estimates because they are efficient with small numbers of cases and are easy to interpret.

60 This number is the R square generated from running the regression with only two independent variables: the per capita gross regional product and the number of bureaucrats.

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