Former Communist Party Membership and Bribery in the Post-Socialist Countries

Artjoms Ivlevs () and Timothy Hinks

No 11594, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We study the effect of former Communist party membership on paying bribes to public officials and motivations for bribery, 25 years after the fall of communist rule. Data come from a large representative survey, conducted in post-socialist countries in 2015/16. To deal with endogeneity, we instrument party membership with information on whether family members were affected by the Second World War. Instrumental variable results suggest that links to the former Communist party increase the likelihood of paying bribes today; this result applies to the former party members as well as their children and relatives. Among bribe payers, people with the party links are more likely to offer bribes as well as think that bribe payments are expected. Overall, our findings suggest that the proclivity to corruption of the former Communist party members has been transmitted through family and thus sustained over time, contributing to corruption decades after the demise of the Socialist bloc.

Keywords: post-socialist countries; political elite; Communist party; corruption; path dependency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D73 P37 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 47 pages
Date: 2018-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-his and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Published - published in: Journal of Comparative Economics, 2018, 46 (4), 1411-1422

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp11594.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Former Communist party membership and bribery in the post-socialist countries (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp11594

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().