Marina Zaloznaya
Biographic Data
| ID | 3594630 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Marina Zaloznaya |
| GIVEN NAMES | Marina |
| FAMILY NAME | Zaloznaya |
| SIGNATURE | ZALOZNAYA M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Iowa |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2988-1211 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 89 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
A Comparative Historical Sociology of Corruption
This volume renews the study of corruption as 'embedded' in ongoing social relations. Instead of treating corruption as a universal phenomenon, A Comparative Historical Sociology of Corruption shows how corruption is often morally ambiguous and deeply intertwined with the social, political and economic struggles of particular groups in specific times and places. Ranging from Early Modernity to the present day, and spanning across the globe, the b…
Anti-corruption and Illiberal Turns in National Politics in the Global South
Be Careful What You Wish For
Typically, a strong civil society and an active fight against corruption are considered crucial for the development and longevity of a democratic regime. In this article, I draw on the case of wartime Ukraine to show that, when institutional guardrails are weakened by an external crisis, the combination of the two may contribute to an illiberal turn in national politics. Based on an analysis of in-depth interviews with governmental and nongovernm…
A Comparative Historical Sociology of Corruption
A view of corruption as disembedded from society and history is predominant today. In this view, corruption is basically the same thing everywhere and inherently a bad thing because it gets in the way of proper processes. In opposition to this view, we argue for understanding corruption as socially and historically embedded . While there are many viable ways to embed corruption, we advocate a comparative historical sociology of corruption in part…
Of deviance and patriarchy: Mechanisms of gender discrimination in public‐sector corruption
Although men are overrepresented among the perpetrators of high‐profile, white‐collar crime, examinations of public‐sector corruption typically reveal little‐to‐no gender differences in participation. Drawing from Steffensmeier's theory of gender inequality in the criminal underworld and Tomaskovic‐Devey and Avent‐Holt's relational theory of inequality, we argue that this apparent equality conceals systematically different patterns of engagement.…
Is White-Collar Crime White? Racialization in the National Press Coverage of White-Collar Crime from 1950 to 2010
While much is written about racialization of street criminals in the American media, racial dimensions of the media framing of white-collar crime remain underexplored. To address this issue, we analyze the coverage of bribery, electoral fraud, tax evasion, and insider trading in five national newspapers between 1950 and 2010. Drawing on John Hagan’s (2012) work, we trace the racialization of white-collar crime in the press back to Richard Nixon’s…
The Political Ramifications of Corruption Experience for Political Trust and Pro-Leadership Voting: Evidence from Russia
How do citizens’ experiences of corruption affect their political trust and voting behavior? By analyzing a nationally representative survey of Russian citizens conducted a few months after the 2018 presidential election, we find that citizens who engaged in street-level bureaucratic corruption in the preceding two years assess the national leadership as more corrupt and express lower trust in them. This association between corruption engagement …
The civic crime of corruption: Citizen networks and public sector bribery in the non-democracies
In the Global North, corruption is considered incompatible with civic health: scholars argue that it decreases social trust, atomizes communities, and discourages active citizenship. Using the first-ever national dataset from Russia with behavioral measures of corruption, ego-centric networks, and political participation, this article develops an alternative theory of corruption’s impact on civic life in societies where freedoms of association ar…
Fear of punishment as a driver of survey misreporting and item non-response in Russia and its neighbors
Following its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the Russian government sharply broadened what actions were illegal and raised the level of punishment. Many more topics of interest to survey researchers became politically sensitive. Questions about these topics may generate high levels of misleading responses and question-specific (item) non-responses, both of which introduce biases that undermine inference. We use survey data from 2015 and 2018 …
Explaining Putin’s impunity: Public sector corruption and political trust in Russia
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 …
Criminalizing Atrocity: The Global Spread of Criminal Laws against International Crimes
Bureaucratic Quality and Social Development
Although a long tradition of research shows that the correlation between economic growth and well-being is imperfect, the sociology of development continues to focus on economic growth. In this paper we take a first step toward a sociology of social development by defining which indicators other than economic growth best capture different facets of citizen well-being, theorizing what social phenomena explain the variance in these indicators, and …
A Smarter Fight Against Corruption
According to a recent study, in forty-eight countries around the world, more than a quarter of citizens pays bribes in exchange for service. In this article, the authors suggest that a key to a more effective and socially responsible fight against corruption lies in sequencing. Here, they explain how initiatives targeting high-level corruption in government and business must take priority, preceding the reforms of the public sector
Social Issues in Contemporary Russia: Women's Rights, Corruption, and Immigration Through Three Sociological Lenses
This article reviews social science research on women's rights, corruption, and immigration in Russia. Intentionally diverse, our selection of topics illustrates how the same three analytical lenses have been applied across a broad range of scholarship on the postcommunist world. Each lens is bifocal and entails a tension between two extremes. The victims versus agents lens refers to a tendency of scholars to portray their subjects either as pass…
Popular Legal Attitudes and the Political Order: Comparative Evidence from Georgia, Russia and Ukraine
Using data from nationally representative surveys in 2015 in Georgia, Russia and Ukraine, we show that legal attitudes are shaped by experiences within a country’s specific political-legal order. Many who expressed support for legality when their own needs were at stake became more willing to evade the law when reminded of elites doing so. And, in an authoritarian, rule-by-law setting, expressed respect for legality correlates negatively with sup…
Rich Russians: From Oligarchs to Bourgeoisie
Pathways to Corruption: Institutional Context and Citizen Participation in Bureaucratic Corruption
Though bureaucratic corruption is widespread, social scientists have yet to develop a comprehensive model predicting ordinary people’s engagement in corrupt exchanges with street-level bureaucrats. Our article fills this gap by specifying an individual-level causal model of bureaucratic corruption centered around three theoretically derived predictors: beliefs about acceptability of corruption, its perceived riskiness, and its utility to the offe…
When civil engagement is part of the problem: Flawed anti-corruptionism in Russia and Ukraine
In developing countries, the fight against corruption entails purges of political and business elites and the restructuring of electoral, financial, and social provision systems, all of which are costly for the incumbents and, therefore, unlikely without sustained pressure from civil society. In the absence of empirical analyses, scholars and practitioners have, therefore, assumes that civil society plays an unequivocally positive role in anticor…
Tsar Putin and the “corruption” thorn in his side: The demobilization of votes in a competitive authoritarian regime
Global civil society and the test of Kyoto: A theoretical extension
What determines how successful global civil society is in promoting international governance norms within nation-states? Studies attribute the varied effectiveness of civil action to the capacity of non-governmental groups and organizations, the nature of global regimes that generate such norms, domestic political landscapes, or combinations of these factors. Yet, empirical cases, analyzed in this article, suggest that global civil society may lo…
The Politics of Bureaucratic Corruption in Post-Transitional Eastern Europe
Using a mix of ethnographic, survey, and comparative historical methodologies, this book offers an unprecedented insight into the corruption economies of Ukrainian and Belarusian universities, hospitals, and secondary schools. Its detailed analysis suggests that political turnover in hybrid political regimes has a strong impact on petty economic crime in service-provision bureaucracies. Theoretically, the book rejects the dominant paradigm that a…
Does everyday corruption affect how Russians view their political leadership
Do Russians’ personal experiences with corruption influence how they evaluate their political leaders and, if so, in what direction? In addressing this question, we focus specifically on small-scale corruption that arises when Russians encounter employees of service provision organizations. We analyze survey data gathered in the summer of 2015 from Russia to trace the links between personal corrupt behavior and political attitudes. We show that p…
Suspicious Gifts: Bribery, Morality, and Professional Ethics
The Social Psychology of Corruption: Why It Does Not Exist and Why It Should
In recent decades, corruption has emerged as a major cause of global inequality and an important subject of social scientific research. This article argues that social psychologists have not taken full advantage of analytical tools at their disposal to generate explanatory accounts of corruption in non‐Western contexts. In the first part of the article, the author maintains that the lack of social psychological research on why people engage in co…
Does Authoritarianism Breed Corruption? Reconsidering the Relationship Between Authoritarian Governance and Corrupt Exchanges in Bureaucracies
This article advocates for ethnographic and historical study of the political roots of corruption. Focusing on informal economies of Belarusian universities, it reexamines two theoretical propositions about corruption in autocracies. The first proposition is that authoritarianism breeds bureaucratic corruption; the second is that autocrats grant disloyal subjects corruption opportunities in exchange for political compliance. Using qualitative dat…
Does everyday corruption affect how Russians view their political leadership
Do Russians’ personal experiences with corruption influence how they evaluate their political leaders and, if so, in what direction? In addressing this question, we focus specifically on small-scale corruption that arises when Russians encounter employees of service provision organizations. We analyze survey data gathered in the summer of 2015 from Russia to trace the links between personal corrupt behavior and political attitudes. We show that p…
Fear of punishment as a driver of survey misreporting and item non-response in Russia and its neighbors
Following its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the Russian government sharply broadened what actions were illegal and raised the level of punishment. Many more topics of interest to survey researchers became politically sensitive. Questions about these topics may generate high levels of misleading responses and question-specific (item) non-responses, both of which introduce biases that undermine inference. We use survey data from 2015 and 2018 …
Does Authoritarianism Breed Corruption? Reconsidering the Relationship Between Authoritarian Governance and Corrupt Exchanges in Bureaucracies
This article advocates for ethnographic and historical study of the political roots of corruption. Focusing on informal economies of Belarusian universities, it reexamines two theoretical propositions about corruption in autocracies. The first proposition is that authoritarianism breeds bureaucratic corruption; the second is that autocrats grant disloyal subjects corruption opportunities in exchange for political compliance. Using qualitative dat…
The Social Psychology of Corruption: Why It Does Not Exist and Why It Should
In recent decades, corruption has emerged as a major cause of global inequality and an important subject of social scientific research. This article argues that social psychologists have not taken full advantage of analytical tools at their disposal to generate explanatory accounts of corruption in non‐Western contexts. In the first part of the article, the author maintains that the lack of social psychological research on why people engage in co…
Beyond Anti-Corruptionism: Sociological Imagination and Comparative Study of Corruption
This article outlines and illustrates a theoretical blueprint for comparative sociology of corruption. The author argues that existing cross-national studies of corruption, influenced by the global political movement for transparency, undermine fundamental sociological principles. At the same time, truly sociological studies of corruption are unfavorable to comparisons due to their emphasis on the singularity of exchange economies in non-Western …
When civil engagement is part of the problem: Flawed anti-corruptionism in Russia and Ukraine
In developing countries, the fight against corruption entails purges of political and business elites and the restructuring of electoral, financial, and social provision systems, all of which are costly for the incumbents and, therefore, unlikely without sustained pressure from civil society. In the absence of empirical analyses, scholars and practitioners have, therefore, assumes that civil society plays an unequivocally positive role in anticor…
Suspicious Gifts: Bribery, Morality, and Professional Ethics
Explaining Putin’s impunity: Public sector corruption and political trust in Russia
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 …
Social Issues in Contemporary Russia: Women's Rights, Corruption, and Immigration Through Three Sociological Lenses
This article reviews social science research on women's rights, corruption, and immigration in Russia. Intentionally diverse, our selection of topics illustrates how the same three analytical lenses have been applied across a broad range of scholarship on the postcommunist world. Each lens is bifocal and entails a tension between two extremes. The victims versus agents lens refers to a tendency of scholars to portray their subjects either as pass…
Migration as Social Movement: Voluntary Group Migration and the Crimean Tatar Repatriation
Voluntary group migration occurs when a collectivity reaches a group-level decision to migrate and does so as a community without external compulsion. Typical examples include collective settler movements and voluntary repatriations of refugee communities. We demonstrate the distinctive characteristics of voluntary group migration that make it hard to analyze with current migration theories, and we develop an initial theoretical framework identif…
Mechanisms and Consequences of Professional Marginality: The Case of Poverty Lawyers Revisited
A partial replication of Jack Katz's (1982) Poor People's Lawyers in Transition , this article explores the manifestations and consequences of professional marginality of legal aid lawyers. Based on thirty-five interviews with poverty attorneys and interns in Chicago, the authors show that scarce material resources and unclear expectations continue to give rise to the marginalization of this segment of the legal profession. The authors analyzed i…
Rich Russians: From Oligarchs to Bourgeoisie
The civic crime of corruption: Citizen networks and public sector bribery in the non-democracies
In the Global North, corruption is considered incompatible with civic health: scholars argue that it decreases social trust, atomizes communities, and discourages active citizenship. Using the first-ever national dataset from Russia with behavioral measures of corruption, ego-centric networks, and political participation, this article develops an alternative theory of corruption’s impact on civic life in societies where freedoms of association ar…
Of deviance and patriarchy: Mechanisms of gender discrimination in public‐sector corruption
Although men are overrepresented among the perpetrators of high‐profile, white‐collar crime, examinations of public‐sector corruption typically reveal little‐to‐no gender differences in participation. Drawing from Steffensmeier's theory of gender inequality in the criminal underworld and Tomaskovic‐Devey and Avent‐Holt's relational theory of inequality, we argue that this apparent equality conceals systematically different patterns of engagement.…
The Political Ramifications of Corruption Experience for Political Trust and Pro-Leadership Voting: Evidence from Russia
How do citizens’ experiences of corruption affect their political trust and voting behavior? By analyzing a nationally representative survey of Russian citizens conducted a few months after the 2018 presidential election, we find that citizens who engaged in street-level bureaucratic corruption in the preceding two years assess the national leadership as more corrupt and express lower trust in them. This association between corruption engagement …
Mechanisms and Consequences of Professional Marginality: The Case of Poverty Lawyers Revisited
A partial replication of Jack Katz's (1982) Poor People's Lawyers in Transition , this article explores the manifestations and consequences of professional marginality of legal aid lawyers. Based on thirty-five interviews with poverty attorneys and interns in Chicago, the authors show that scarce material resources and unclear expectations continue to give rise to the marginalization of this segment of the legal profession. The authors analyzed i…
Migration as Social Movement: Voluntary Group Migration and the Crimean Tatar Repatriation
Voluntary group migration occurs when a collectivity reaches a group-level decision to migrate and does so as a community without external compulsion. Typical examples include collective settler movements and voluntary repatriations of refugee communities. We demonstrate the distinctive characteristics of voluntary group migration that make it hard to analyze with current migration theories, and we develop an initial theoretical framework identif…
Beyond Anti-Corruptionism: Sociological Imagination and Comparative Study of Corruption
This article outlines and illustrates a theoretical blueprint for comparative sociology of corruption. The author argues that existing cross-national studies of corruption, influenced by the global political movement for transparency, undermine fundamental sociological principles. At the same time, truly sociological studies of corruption are unfavorable to comparisons due to their emphasis on the singularity of exchange economies in non-Western …
The Social Psychology of Corruption: Why It Does Not Exist and Why It Should
In recent decades, corruption has emerged as a major cause of global inequality and an important subject of social scientific research. This article argues that social psychologists have not taken full advantage of analytical tools at their disposal to generate explanatory accounts of corruption in non‐Western contexts. In the first part of the article, the author maintains that the lack of social psychological research on why people engage in co…
Does Authoritarianism Breed Corruption? Reconsidering the Relationship Between Authoritarian Governance and Corrupt Exchanges in Bureaucracies
This article advocates for ethnographic and historical study of the political roots of corruption. Focusing on informal economies of Belarusian universities, it reexamines two theoretical propositions about corruption in autocracies. The first proposition is that authoritarianism breeds bureaucratic corruption; the second is that autocrats grant disloyal subjects corruption opportunities in exchange for political compliance. Using qualitative dat…
Suspicious Gifts: Bribery, Morality, and Professional Ethics
The Politics of Bureaucratic Corruption in Post-Transitional Eastern Europe
Using a mix of ethnographic, survey, and comparative historical methodologies, this book offers an unprecedented insight into the corruption economies of Ukrainian and Belarusian universities, hospitals, and secondary schools. Its detailed analysis suggests that political turnover in hybrid political regimes has a strong impact on petty economic crime in service-provision bureaucracies. Theoretically, the book rejects the dominant paradigm that a…
Does everyday corruption affect how Russians view their political leadership
Do Russians’ personal experiences with corruption influence how they evaluate their political leaders and, if so, in what direction? In addressing this question, we focus specifically on small-scale corruption that arises when Russians encounter employees of service provision organizations. We analyze survey data gathered in the summer of 2015 from Russia to trace the links between personal corrupt behavior and political attitudes. We show that p…
Pathways to Corruption: Institutional Context and Citizen Participation in Bureaucratic Corruption
Though bureaucratic corruption is widespread, social scientists have yet to develop a comprehensive model predicting ordinary people’s engagement in corrupt exchanges with street-level bureaucrats. Our article fills this gap by specifying an individual-level causal model of bureaucratic corruption centered around three theoretically derived predictors: beliefs about acceptability of corruption, its perceived riskiness, and its utility to the offe…
When civil engagement is part of the problem: Flawed anti-corruptionism in Russia and Ukraine
In developing countries, the fight against corruption entails purges of political and business elites and the restructuring of electoral, financial, and social provision systems, all of which are costly for the incumbents and, therefore, unlikely without sustained pressure from civil society. In the absence of empirical analyses, scholars and practitioners have, therefore, assumes that civil society plays an unequivocally positive role in anticor…
Tsar Putin and the “corruption” thorn in his side: The demobilization of votes in a competitive authoritarian regime
Global civil society and the test of Kyoto: A theoretical extension
What determines how successful global civil society is in promoting international governance norms within nation-states? Studies attribute the varied effectiveness of civil action to the capacity of non-governmental groups and organizations, the nature of global regimes that generate such norms, domestic political landscapes, or combinations of these factors. Yet, empirical cases, analyzed in this article, suggest that global civil society may lo…
Rich Russians: From Oligarchs to Bourgeoisie
Popular Legal Attitudes and the Political Order: Comparative Evidence from Georgia, Russia and Ukraine
Using data from nationally representative surveys in 2015 in Georgia, Russia and Ukraine, we show that legal attitudes are shaped by experiences within a country’s specific political-legal order. Many who expressed support for legality when their own needs were at stake became more willing to evade the law when reminded of elites doing so. And, in an authoritarian, rule-by-law setting, expressed respect for legality correlates negatively with sup…
Bureaucratic Quality and Social Development
Although a long tradition of research shows that the correlation between economic growth and well-being is imperfect, the sociology of development continues to focus on economic growth. In this paper we take a first step toward a sociology of social development by defining which indicators other than economic growth best capture different facets of citizen well-being, theorizing what social phenomena explain the variance in these indicators, and …
A Smarter Fight Against Corruption
According to a recent study, in forty-eight countries around the world, more than a quarter of citizens pays bribes in exchange for service. In this article, the authors suggest that a key to a more effective and socially responsible fight against corruption lies in sequencing. Here, they explain how initiatives targeting high-level corruption in government and business must take priority, preceding the reforms of the public sector
Social Issues in Contemporary Russia: Women's Rights, Corruption, and Immigration Through Three Sociological Lenses
This article reviews social science research on women's rights, corruption, and immigration in Russia. Intentionally diverse, our selection of topics illustrates how the same three analytical lenses have been applied across a broad range of scholarship on the postcommunist world. Each lens is bifocal and entails a tension between two extremes. The victims versus agents lens refers to a tendency of scholars to portray their subjects either as pass…
The Political Ramifications of Corruption Experience for Political Trust and Pro-Leadership Voting: Evidence from Russia
How do citizens’ experiences of corruption affect their political trust and voting behavior? By analyzing a nationally representative survey of Russian citizens conducted a few months after the 2018 presidential election, we find that citizens who engaged in street-level bureaucratic corruption in the preceding two years assess the national leadership as more corrupt and express lower trust in them. This association between corruption engagement …
The civic crime of corruption: Citizen networks and public sector bribery in the non-democracies
In the Global North, corruption is considered incompatible with civic health: scholars argue that it decreases social trust, atomizes communities, and discourages active citizenship. Using the first-ever national dataset from Russia with behavioral measures of corruption, ego-centric networks, and political participation, this article develops an alternative theory of corruption’s impact on civic life in societies where freedoms of association ar…
Fear of punishment as a driver of survey misreporting and item non-response in Russia and its neighbors
Following its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the Russian government sharply broadened what actions were illegal and raised the level of punishment. Many more topics of interest to survey researchers became politically sensitive. Questions about these topics may generate high levels of misleading responses and question-specific (item) non-responses, both of which introduce biases that undermine inference. We use survey data from 2015 and 2018 …
Explaining Putin’s impunity: Public sector corruption and political trust in Russia
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 …
Criminalizing Atrocity: The Global Spread of Criminal Laws against International Crimes
Is White-Collar Crime White? Racialization in the National Press Coverage of White-Collar Crime from 1950 to 2010
While much is written about racialization of street criminals in the American media, racial dimensions of the media framing of white-collar crime remain underexplored. To address this issue, we analyze the coverage of bribery, electoral fraud, tax evasion, and insider trading in five national newspapers between 1950 and 2010. Drawing on John Hagan’s (2012) work, we trace the racialization of white-collar crime in the press back to Richard Nixon’s…
A Comparative Historical Sociology of Corruption
A view of corruption as disembedded from society and history is predominant today. In this view, corruption is basically the same thing everywhere and inherently a bad thing because it gets in the way of proper processes. In opposition to this view, we argue for understanding corruption as socially and historically embedded . While there are many viable ways to embed corruption, we advocate a comparative historical sociology of corruption in part…
Of deviance and patriarchy: Mechanisms of gender discrimination in public‐sector corruption
Although men are overrepresented among the perpetrators of high‐profile, white‐collar crime, examinations of public‐sector corruption typically reveal little‐to‐no gender differences in participation. Drawing from Steffensmeier's theory of gender inequality in the criminal underworld and Tomaskovic‐Devey and Avent‐Holt's relational theory of inequality, we argue that this apparent equality conceals systematically different patterns of engagement.…
Political science (25 works) · Law (21 works) · Politics (21 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Corruption and Economic Development (19 works) · Law (19 works) · Language change (18 works) · Economics (16 works) · Political economy (16 works) · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance (9 works)