Socio-cultural context of corruption

Corruption counteraction requires definite and consistent ideas about the essence and forms of corrupt behaviour. In other words, in the course of development and implementation of a national anticorruption policy, it is important to consider existing standards or stereotypes in the understanding of corruption. People rely on such standards in their assessments of various dimensions of corruption, which, sometimes, differ from a legislative vision of the essence and forms of corruption entirely. In the countries where the process of implementation of the international anticorruption conventions containing fundamental or model descriptions of elements of corruption crimes has not been completed, the picture is even more complicated.

In the public opinion, corruption may take various forms; and a model described in an anticorruption law is not always acceptable for people. Moreover, there are types of actions that look like corruption but are not corruption from a legal perspective; conversely, circumstances that may not look corrupt at first sight are corruption under the law. It is very important to determine how respondents understand corruption and how they distinguish its various forms in specific everyday situations. From a socio cultural perspective, perceived assessments of corruption depend on the public conceptions of corruption.

The problem has received essentially no attention in the studies conducted in Ukraine. To an extent, an explanation could be that there were no legal experts in the research groups carrying these surveys out and that the conceptions of sociologists in respect of corruption were, at best, incomplete or superficial, because they covered only most common forms of corrupt conduct, i.e. bribery and abuse of power. Legal subtleties associated with the definition of offenders, elements of crime, types of liability and correlation between moral and legal aspects etc. have been left without attention of the methodology designers.