On September 7 at noon (CST), Prof. Marina Zaloznaya (Sociology, University of Iowa) will be conducting a talk "Corruption as Freedom: The Different Ways that Petty Economic Crime Undermines Autocracy," at 3057 Lincoln Hall (702 S. Wright Street Urbana, IL).  This talk focuses on her research on authoritarian regimes and reveals that, for ordinary citizens, engagement in public sector corruption is linked to more active participation in the political life.

In this talk, Prof. Zaloznaya will explore the mechanisms whereby extorted and voluntary bribery exchanges are connected to civic activism, drawing on national representative surveys from Russia (2015 and 2018) and China (2018). Besides the negative impact of undesirable, extorted bribery on citizens’ satisfaction with the regime, which leads to political mobilization, she explains that even bribery exchanges that citizens consider desirable are linked to heightened civic engagement. Using egocentric network data, she argues that when political freedoms are severely limited, social networks that foster corruption activity also sustain an alternative, informal space for civic connectivity and free political expression. Her analyses show that ordinary citizens who participate in public sector corruption (1) are embedded in outward-oriented and mobilizable personal networks, supportive of civic connectivity; and (2) are significantly more likely than law-abiding citizens to mobilize others when pushing back against the state. Counterintuitively, then, in non-democracies, corruption in the public sector may be symbiotic with rather than antithetical to civic culture.

Lunch will be provided, please RSVP if attending to rriley@illinois.edu. For more information, please contact: sociology@illinois.edu