system of courts have neither ended corruption nor increased trust. We examine the roots of trust
and perceptions of corruption in two surveys: The 1995 World Values Survey (WVS) and our
own survey in 2001 that was part of a larger pan-European project on Citizenship, Involvment,
Democracy.
2
We also put Romania and the countries making the transition from Communism
more generally in context by cross-national aggregate data analysis - and by comparing Romania
with the most trusting and third least corrupt nation, Sweden.
The story we tell is not what the literatures on trust and corruption might lead
us to expect: In Romania and, more generally in the countries making the transition from
Communism, the link between trust in people and corruption is weak and inconsistent.
Romanians don’t generalize from corruption among the elites to less serious offenses by ordinary
citizens. Corruption is something that public officials do. When regular folks skirt the law, they
are just getting by. If people need to skirt the law to make do, then flouting standards of moral
behavior is not a sign of an intention to exploit others. Elites, however, got benefits unavailable
to ordinary citizens under Communism and many Romanians believe that they still have unfair
advantages. Small scale dishonesty is “good corruption”; it is based upon the expectation of
reciprocity. As Bertold Brecht wrote in Mother Courage and Her Children (Scene 3, quoted in
Miller, Grodeland, and Koshechkina 1998): "Thank God they’re corruptible. They’re human and
after money like the rest of us. They’re not wolves. As long there’s corruption, there’s hope.
Bribes! They’re man’s best chance. As long as judges go on taking money, then there’s some
chance of justice."
2.
The larger project is funded by the Starr Foundation through the International Research
and Exchanges Board (IREX) Caspian and Black Sea Collaborative Program (2001). We also
conducted surveys of the mass public in Moldova and of organizational activists in Romania and
Moldova using an expanded version of the Citizenship Involvement Democracy (CID) common
core questionnaire. See the CID web page at
http://www.mzes.uni-mannheim.de/ projekte/cid/
.
See a description of our research project at http://www.irex.org/programs/black-caspian-
sea/grantees01-02.htm, and at
http://www.policy.ro
.
Convention