Ase B. Grodeland

‘If you pay, we'll operate immediately’

Objectives—To study the attitudes of health care staff in four postcommunist countries towards taking gifts from their clients—and their confessed experience of actually taking such gifts. Design—Survey questionnaire administered to officials including health care staff, supplemented by focus-group discussions with the general public. Setting – Ukraine, Bulgaria, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Participants—A quota sample of 1,307 officials including 292 health care staff, supplemented by stratified national random samples of 4,778 ordinary members of the public and in-depth interviews or focus-group discussions involving another 323. Main measurements—Explicit justifications and willingness to accept offers, reported frequency of offers, and personal confessions to accepting “money and expensive presents” as well as smaller gifts. Results—Health care staff were far more inclined than the average official or public servant to accept “money or an expensive present” if offered, far more inclined to justify asking clients for “extra payments”, and far more inclined to confess that they had actually taken gifts from clients recently. Judged by their own confessions, hospital doctors were only rivalled by traffic police and customs officials for taking money or expensive gifts from their clients. Conclusions—Poor pay does not explain why doctors so often took large gifts from their clients. Moral self justification, opportunity, and bargaining power are much more effective explanations.

‘Red Mobs’, ‘Yuppies’, ‘Lamb Heads’ and Others: Contacts, Informal Networks and Politics in the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Romania

Abstract This article addresses the use of contacts and informal networks in the political sphere in post-communist states in East Central and South East Europe. It tests two major hypotheses: (i) informality is functional and mainly a result of transition; and (ii) informality is embedded in the national culture and/or a leftover from communism. These hypotheses are tested on findings from 360 in-depth elite interviews. The article concludes that although informality is largely a response to problems and opportunities caused by transition, the manner in which it is expressed, to quite some extent, reflects the national culture and communist experience.

Religion and Political Action in Postcommunist Europe

Patterns of political identification in postcommunist Europe are still weakly formed. The churches, however, command high levels of confidence, in sharp contrast to political parties. Representative surveys in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Ukraine in late 1997 and early 1998 indicate high levels of confidence in the churches in three of these nations, but not in the Czech Republic for reasons that appear connected to its forced conversion to Catholicism. The religious, as in other countries, are disproportionately female, but attenders in postcommunist Europe are not more likely to be elderly or resident in the countryside. There was little difference between church attenders and national populations in attitudes to the market, NATO membership, or the current government; there were rather larger differences between the countries, with Bulgarians the most favourable to the market, NATO and pro-market parties, and Ukrainians the least favourable. A multiple regression analysis found that church attendance of itself had little effect on attitudes or party preferences in either the Czech Republic or Slovakia; it did, however, increase support for the market, for joining NATO and for pro-market parties in Bulgaria and Ukraine. The relatively modest effects of overt religiosity are likely to be helpful to the formation of a democratic political culture, although account must also be taken of a strong association between the Muslim minorities in these countries and the political parties that seek to represent their interests.

Are the people victims or accomplices

Mother Courage clearly felt that bribery and corruption had their advantages for ordinary people. But Brecht’s point was that although she seemed so worldly wise in the short term she was completely and tragically wrong in the longer term. Our purpose is to explore public attitudes towards lowlevel corruption in Eastern Europe – to see how many praise it with Mother Courage, and how many condemn it with Bertolt Brecht. We focus on the way ordinary citizens use presents and bribes to influence the officials they meet in day-to-day life. Our principal concern is not with high-level corruption involving senior politicians and officials or top businessmen, but with the role of corruption in these everyday interactions between citizens and the state. We look in particular at Ukraine, Bulgaria, Slovakia and the Czech Republic – near neighbours with a common commitment to democratisation in the 1990s but very different historical and bureaucratic traditions. Our findings are based on 4778 interviews between November 1997 and February 1998 with representative national samples of the public: 1003 in the Czech Republic, 1056 in Slovakia, 1519 in Bulgaria, and 1200 in Ukraine. Where appropriate we have illustrated these findings with verbatim quotations taken from 26 focus-group discussions and 136

Alternative strategies for coping with officials in different postcommunist regimes: the worm's eye view

This article uses focus group methods to see how citizens in Ukraine, Bulgaria, Slovakia and the Czech Republic view their interactions with postcommunist officials. In the Czech Republic, while they complain that bureaucracy has increased with the transition from communism, and they gossip about the need to use contacts and bribery, their own experience is much more positive, and the reforms they propose centre on efficiency and convenience. At the other extreme, citizens of Ukraine complain that corruption has increased because officials are no longer afraid, and their tales about bribery and extortion extend from general gossip to specific personal experience. They see advantages in more ‘control’ and more ‘fear’. Slovakia and Bulgaria fall between these two extremes, though perhaps are rather closer to Ukraine. People seldom suggest that reform is impossible or undesirable anywhere, and, in terms of attitudes towards dealing with officials, there is no simple, clear and definitive line marking a quantum change in culture between Catholic and Orthodox traditions, or between former Hapsburg, Romanov and Ottoman territories.

What is to be done about Corrupt Officials? Public Opinion and Reform Strategies Inpost-Communist Europe

Almond and Verba (1963) argued three decades ago that democratic citizenship should provide fair treatment by state officials as well as a voice in choosing governments or formulating public policy. Since 1989 more or less ‘free and fair’ elections have given the citizens of post-communist Europe more choice of government but not necessarily better treatment by state officials. In late 1996 a series of 26 focus-group discussions (Grødeland et al., 1997; Miller et al., 1997) and 136 in-depth interviews (Grødeland et al., 1998a, b) in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Ukraine revealed widespread allegations of corruption and ill-treatment though these allegations were much less frequent, and at the same time more varied cross-nationally, when the discussion turned from general gossip to specific recollections of personal experiences. To quantify and extend these findings we carried out 4778 fully structured interviews with national representative samples in the winter of 1997–98. In these we asked not only about people’s personal experience of dealing with officials in post-communist Europe, but also about their attitudes to various strategies of reform: What did the public think could, and should, be done to ensure that citizens get fair treatment from officials without having to give them money or ‘presents’?