Leonid Peisakhin

Transparency and Corruption: Evidence from India

Theories of corruption suggest that higher levels of transparency are necessarily associated with lower levels of corruption. Yet in highly hierarchical societies in which the gulf between government officials and the most underprivileged members of society is very wide, this relationship may not hold. In this paper, I test the link between transparency and corruption by means of a field experiment. I ask how effective recourse to a freedom-of-information law is in comparison to bribery for both slum dwellers and middle-class individuals in India as they apply for basic public services. I demonstrate that applicants who make use of the freedom-of-information law attain almost the same rate of success as those who bribe. Recourse to a freedom-of-information law comes close to erasing class differences; that is, it results in comparable processing times for slum dwellers and middle-class individuals.

Living Historical Legacies: The ‘Why’ and ‘How’ of Institutional Persistence – The Case of Ukraine

In this paper I present a theory explaining how historical legacies influence contemporary voting behavior and attitudes towards property and laws and test it against empirical evidence from Ukraine. I hypothesize that behavioral scripts created at the time of rapid modernization can survive under certain conditions, and that these pre-Communist expectations about the states of the world are the cause of much of contemporary variation in political and economic regimes across the former Communist space. I chose Ukraine as a case study because of a natural experiment that played out in western Ukraine at the end of the 18th century. Between 1772 and 1795, an otherwise homogenous population of landowning Poles and Ukrainian peasants was divided between two different empires at the partition of Poland between the Habsburgs and the Romanovs. Both empires faced the same challenge in their Ukrainian borderlands: the need to ensure that the powerful Polish magnates never realize their dream of reestablishing an independent Polish commonwealth. However, whereas the Habsburgs nurtured the Ukrainian community as a counterweight against the Poles, the Romanovs suppressed all local identities. This master policy cleavage gave rise to two completely different institutional landscapes in the political, commercial and cultural spheres. Imperial institutions disappeared by 1918, yet some behavioral scripts that they established persisted into the present. To demonstrate this persistence, I surveyed 1,675 respondents in 227 settlements (mostly villages) situated within 16 miles of the former imperial frontier. I found that former Russian communities have a very different vision of Ukraine’s geopolitical role, they vote for different political parties, have a greater attachment to the institution of communal property, and although their members exhibit higher levels of social trust, they are also less likely to participate in political protests. Importantly, my findings do not suggest that backward former Russian subjects are living side-by-side with enlightened Europeans: in fact, both former Romanov and Habsburg communities are equally authoritarian.

Cultural Legacies: Persistence and Transmission

It is well established that institutions evolve in a path-dependent manner, yet this essay shows that certain types of formal institutions leave a cultural legacy by creating political attitudes and behaviors that can persist for a surprisingly long time even in the face of hostile material and institutional environments. Making use of a natural experiment of history, a partition of a homogenous population of ethnic Ukrainians between Austrian and Russian empires, the chapter demonstrates how differences in political preferences that came about as a result of a historical accident have persisted over the course of several centuries. The essay records contemporary differences in political attitudes and behaviors in a survey of over 1,600 individuals residing in settlements that are located within 15 miles of a long-defunct Austrian–Russian imperial border. The chapter also proposes and tests a theory of political identity transmission. It finds that families, as long as they remain embedded within likeminded communities, play a vital role in transmitting historical political identities. By contrast, state institutions, and especially schools, are dominant in identity building and transmission in families where historical political identities have not taken root.