the glitzy boat is a usefully concrete reminder of what Russia experts have said for years: that it is impossible to understand Putin’s regime without understanding the corruption that has by turns created, fueled, shaped, constrained it. And that may, one day, prove to be its undoing.
Mapping the details of that corruption would be the work of a lifetime. But two simple insights can help you grasp the big picture. The first is true of systemic corruption wherever it occurs: It is not primarily a problem of individual immorality, but of a collective action trap. And the second is true of Russia: It got stuck in that trap as a result of its flawed, and ultimately incomplete, transition to democracy in the 1990s.
A collective action problem
We tend to think of corruption as a failure of morality, when a greedy person decides to benefit by steering public resources toward private gain. But while that’s not exactly untrue, it misses the most important thing: namely, that corruption is a group activity. You need bribe-payers and bribe-takers, resource-diverters and resource-resellers, look-the-other-wayers and demand-a-share-of-the-takers.
When that kind of corrupt network behavior becomes widespread, it creates its own parallel system of rewards — and punishments.
“What is different with systemic corruption is that it’s the expected behavior,” said Anna Persson, a political scientist at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, who studies corruption. “These expectations make it very difficult for all individuals, actually, to stand against corruption, because it’s very costly in all different ways to resist that kind of system.”
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