IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/rpsaxx/v38y2022i5p386-409.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Explaining Putin’s impunity: public sector corruption and political trust in Russia

Author

Listed:
  • Marina Zaloznaya
  • Jennifer Glanville
  • William M. Reisinger

Abstract

While corruption of different types has been shown to lower popular political trust in democratic regimes, evidence from non-democracies remains inconsistent. In some post-Soviet countries, for instance, widespread bribery and nepotism in the government co-exist with enduring popularity of top political leadership. Drawing on an unusually nuanced dataset from Russia (N = 2,350), we show that, in general, encounters with corruption in the public sector are associated with citizens’ lower trust of their government. At the same time, we theorize two caveats that attenuate this relationship, contributing to inconsistent findings in previous studies. First, we find that the negative association between corruption and political trust is significantly weaker when such corruption is beneficial to ordinary people. Second, citizens tend to “penalize” local rather than central government officials, which, we argue, is a result of top leaders’ ability to manipulate public discourse around corruption.

Suggested Citation

  • Marina Zaloznaya & Jennifer Glanville & William M. Reisinger, 2022. "Explaining Putin’s impunity: public sector corruption and political trust in Russia," Post-Soviet Affairs, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 38(5), pages 386-409, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:rpsaxx:v:38:y:2022:i:5:p:386-409
    DOI: 10.1080/1060586X.2022.2063633
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/1060586X.2022.2063633
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/1060586X.2022.2063633?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:rpsaxx:v:38:y:2022:i:5:p:386-409. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/rpsa .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.