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4th LCSR International Workshop. Day 2

A review by Anna Ryabchikova

The second day of the Fourth LCSR International Workshop Social and Cultural Changes in Cross-National Perspective: Values and Modernization” was mostly devoted to political institutions and corruption. Eric Uslaner, professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, opened Saturday morning session by presenting his paper entitled “The Bulging Pocket and the Rule of Law: Corruption, Inequality, and Trust”. Professor Uslaner focused on a link between economic inequality and corruption. He suggests that the actual causal relation between these two phenomena may depend on various characteristics of specific societies. For instance, corruption prosper in post-socialist Eastern European countries while economic inequality rates there remain moderate. Therefore, generalized trust as a mediating variable is probably needed to include in the causal model linking inequality and corruption. Using simultaneous equations modelling, professor has shown that both corruption and economic inequality grow among societies with low level of trustworthiness. Furthermore, he revealed that corruption growth leads to inequality growth and decrease in trust – this is a vicious circle that is hard to break.

The next presenter, Maria Kravtsova ( LCSR NRU HSE) told about the differences and similarities among two types of corruption: market and network corruption. She also paid attention to the impact of the type of corruption on economic growth. First working section was culminated by a new project by Tatiana Karabchuk and Ruslan Almuhametov on “Propensity for Corruption in Police: comparative study of Russia, Kazakhstan, Bulgaria and Latvia”. They intend to research how socio-economic characteristics of post – soviet countries influence propensity of corruption among police officers.

Then Arye Rattnerprofessor of criminology and law at the University of Haifa, read a lecture on macro- and micro- explanations of corruption. Particularly, he illustrated the main differences between two approaches to measurement of corruption: the first one is based on expert surveys and general public perceptions about the propensity of corruption in a country, while another one is based on individual self-reported corruption.  Professor Rattner also depicted in brief general problems of modeling corruption propensity on individual and country level.

After lunch new projects were presented by Anna Almakaeva , Alexey Domanov and Anastasia Dubova . At the end of the day Christopher Swader presented senior research proposal on "Loneliness and urbanization in Europe". Key hypothesis of Chris’s project is that urbanization and individualization positively affected loneliness in Europe.