Sociologie Românească, Vol. III, no. 3/2005, pp. 232-243.
Corupția, între blamare și alegere rațională
Corruption, between blame and rational choice
Radu Mălureanu
Abstract (Rezumat în limba engleză): This paper is meant to argue on the idea that petty corruption has a cultural support amongst the Romanian public. On the contrary, we sustain, Romania face some of it's paradoxes, as some nation-wide polls would show: (1) The most trusted public actors are those perceived as moral (Church, the Army and so on); (2) Bribe is blamed by the general public, on the one hand, however; (3) Bribe is met on daily basis in the public life (roughly 60% declared that they gave or they know somebody who gave bribe). We, therefore, proposed a model of quantitative analysis on trust, from which one can observe the trust investment strategies of the individuals as they would group in classes, and, also, we proposed a model of analyzing public actors by the trust invested in them. We also described an analysis we made, based on qualitative methods, on the public sector representatives. As conclusions, we argued that, even though Romanians would blame corruption, it is sometimes a rational choice to be made in order to avoid the lack of efficiency of the public administration or the public authority, that are still under the umbrella of the state-capture paradigm, and still dependent on informal networks and groups of interests.