FILSAFAT KORUPSI - Direktori File UPI

such activities, the government supplies information about its actions, the media and the public
voice complaints, and private organizations and individuals push for public accountability. The goal
is to increase governmental openness, leaving it more vulnerable to popular discontent. Thus many
regimes, even nominally democratic ones, may view such policies with suspicion. They are,
nevertheless, an essential check on corruption and on other forms of dishonest self-dealing that can
arise if officials are insulated from popular oversight. One route to a more trustworthy state is the
creation of institutions empowered to hold officials to account outside of criminal investigations for
malfeasance.
D. Conclusion: Trust, Honesty and Corruption
The theoretical work suggests that some countries and sectors can descend into vicious
cycles in which corruption, distrust, and dishonesty breed more of the same over time. Conversely,
virtuous cycles can also operate in which trust and honesty build on each other. These patterns
depend both on people‘s underlying attitudes and on calculations of self-interest broadly
understood. My basic claim, based on both theory and empirical work in advanced democracies, is
that attempts to produce generalized trust are not likely to produce large gains in terms of
democratic performance and market functioning. Rather, the fundamental puzzle is how to create
state and market institutions that are reliable and trustworthy at the same time as interpersonal
relations based on mutual trust (or distrust) are kept from undermining these reform efforts. Strong
and loving interpersonal bonds are, of course, valuable aspects of any society, but they can cause
harm if they operate unchecked within political and bureaucratic organizations. As we will see in the
sections that present data on the region, there appear to be widespread differences across the post-
socialist countries in the functioning of the state and the market and in the degree of trust in public
institutions and in other people. Most of the countries created out of the Soviet Union appear to
suffer from much higher levels of distrust and corruption and much lower levels of functioning than
many of the countries on the list for potential European Union membership. To the extent that some
of countries are caught in vicious cycles while others are not, the reform recommendations will
differ widely across the region.
II. The State and the Citizen in Post-Socialist Societies
Information about honesty, trust, and corruption in post-socialist countries can be divided
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into four categories: (1) trust in government and in other people, (2) individuals‘ perceptions of
corruption in public institutions and their coping methods, (3) the role of the nonprofit sector, and
(4) business dealings with each other and with state institutions. This section discusses the first two
issues.
Roughly speaking, the data show a disturbing trend. The countries close to Western Europe
are increasingly diverging from most of the countries of the former Soviet Union. Corruption and
distrust of government are serious problems in Central Europe, and some sectors are especially
dysfunctional, but, in general, the scale of the difficulties is much less than in the countries farther to
the East. The evidence from some countries of former Soviet Union is that a vicious cycle may be at
work where high levels of corruption, distrust and organized crime produce even higher levels in the
future with a resulting undermining of state and market institutions. One important issue for future
research is whether some of these countries may need to go through a second fundamental
transition rather than being able to reform through small steps. In contrast, many of the countries in
line for membership in the European Union appear to have problems that can be dealt with on a
case by case basis.
Research on transition countries is complicated by the difficulty of knowing if the
phenomena one observes are a temporary product of the transition itself or if they represent longterm
attitudes and behaviors. Furthermore, we know little about whether the nature of the transition
process has consequences for the type of society that will emerge. The available data cannot usually
distinguish between short-term behavior and long-term shifts and has little to tell us about the
feedback mechanisms that may operate to convert short-term practices into long-term
characteristics for good or for ill.
There are, however, grounds for believing that the transition process has created special