Suchergebnisse

Many international survey projects contain items on corruption that facilitate comparative analyses of individual-level determinants of perceived and experienced corruption, yet such data remain under-used. To encourage more and better use of the wealth of available survey projects, this article presents a comprehensive review of the largest collection of extant cross-national data suitable for research on corruption in Europe. I examine a total of 1129 items on corruption stemming from 21 international survey projects and their 89 survey waves that cover 45 European countries during the period 1989–2017. Within three decades, the number of corruption items has grown remarkably, rising from just one in 1989 to nearly a hundred in 2017. This article shows the trends: a considerable increase in experiential items; greater differentiation between forms of corruption; a move from items on 'what government has done' to items on 'what ordinary people can do'; and inclusion of items on corruption in private sector. Researchers interested in understanding perceptions and experiences of corruption, as they are shaped by social contexts, are offered an opportunity of exploring the availability of corruption items in international survey projects in a systematic manner in order to analyzed patterns of corruption, its causes and consequences. Concluding part of the paper contains some remarks on the challenges of using survey data on corruption in a comparative framework.

Although the generational experiences of young adults are believed to have an enduring impact on their attitudes throughout the life course, it remains unclear whether periods of stability versus different types of radical social change lead to substantive generational differences. In this paper, we examine attitudes toward meritocracy of four generations in Poland whose young adulthood was spent in (a) the "Little Stabilization" period of the 1960s and early 1970s; (b) the economic and political crisis of the late 1970s and 1980s; (c) the turbulence of the political and economic transformation of the 1990s; and (d) the relative stability of the first decade of the 21st century after Poland's accession to the European Union. Our data come from surveys dating back to 1988, before the regime change in Poland, and until 2020. The results show changing attitudes toward the value of education, innate abilities, talent, and hard work in Poland. There is a generational effect on perceived meritocracy. The generation of people born in 1956–1959, who entered adult life during the deep crisis of the socialist state, expresses the greatest distrust in meritocracy. Findings suggest that the experience of spending one's youth and young adulthood in a relatively stable political and economic system, either socialist or capitalist, has a positive influence on meritocratic attitudes.