Cognition, cultural practices, and the working of political institutions: An adult developmental perspective on corruption in Russian history.

Abstract

Corruption is one of the typical problems facing societies that aim at making transitions toward modern, Western-type democracies. Even though corruption also exists inside most developed democracies, the scope and quality of corrupt practices, as well as the way they are evaluated and dealt with by politics, justice, and public discourse, differs substantially, depending on the degree of complexity of the dominant political, legal, and economic cultures in the respective country. This article looks at how a developmental perspective can provide deeper insights into the role of patronage, clientelism, and corruption in Russian society. It is based on an earlier in-depth discussion on the relation between adult development and phenomena of corruption (Fein & Weibler, 2014), and draws on the metatheoretical framework for analyzing corruption, discourses on corruption (and anticorruption), and action taken against corruption developed there. By looking at how these phenomena have changed in Russia over the past 150 years, it shows that developmental perspectives provide a considerable surplus value for analyzing and understanding culture and society, as well as the functioning of political institutions. Both can be interpreted in relation to the dominant level of complexity of Russia’s political culture as it has changed over time.