Motivations for Public Service in Post-Soviet Russia∗

Throughout much of the world, corruption in the civil service undermines state capacity, impedes economic development, and saps citizens’ morale. But while its pernicious effects are widely recognized, the roots of corruption remain poorly understood. Whereas most studies on corruption’s origins focus on the incentives bureaucrats face once in office, this study contributes to a line of recently emerging research that considers the role of self-selection of citizens with a propensity for corruption into bureaucracies where corruption is known to be widespread. Drawing on a survey and experimental games conducted with students at an elite university in Moscow, Russia, we compare the attitudinal, behavioral, and demographic traits of students seeking public sector employment to the traits of their peers seeking jobs in the private sector. Contrary to studies conducted in other high-corruption contexts, such as India, we find surprising evidence that students who prefer a public sector career display less willingness to cheat or bribe in experimental games as well as higher levels of altruism. One interpretation of these findings is that corruption in Russia results from the transformation of bureaucrats’ behavior and attitudes after entering the civil service, rather than through a process of corrupt self-selection. ∗This work was made possible by a grant from the Equality Development and Globalization Studies (EDGS) program at Northwestern University, funded by the Rajawali Foundation in Indonesia. We thank Evgeniia Mikriukova for outstanding research assistance. Over the past several decades, scholars have accumulated extensive evidence of the negative political, social, and economic consequences of corruption. Yet understanding of corruption’s origins, and of variation in levels of corruption across and within countries, has lagged far behind. Existing studies on the sources of corruption overwhelmingly focus on the incentives faced by state officials, ranging from micro-level considerations such as wages to macro-level considerations such as regime type.1 By contrast, this study contributes to a recently emerging line of research that considers the role of self-selection into government bureaucracies. For example, in the high-corruption context of India, Hanna and Wang (2013) find that among university students, aspiring civil servants are more likely to cheat in laboratory experiments than their peers aspiring to careers in the private sector. Meanwhile, in the low-corruption context of Denmark, Barfort et al. (2015) find the opposite: Aspiring civil servants are less likely to cheat in laboratory experiments. Together, these findings suggest that part of cross-national variation in corruption results from the self-selection of individuals with a higher propensity for dishonesty into state bureaucracies where corruption is widespread and out of state bureaucracies where corruption is limited. The notion of becoming a public servant with the explicit aim of self-enrichment runs counter to the image of civil service that has evolved in Western Europe and North America over the past two centuries. Public Administration scholars with a focus on Western countries have produced an extensive literature on the concept of “public service motivation” – a distinct set of attitudinal traits such as compassion, self-sacrifice, and commitment to public values – that distinguish public employees from their private sector counterparts (Perry and Wise, 1990; Perry, 1996). In line with this image, Barfort et al. (2015) find that aspiring civil servants in Denmark are more likely than students who plan on pursuing a private sector career to sacrifice personal financial gain in order to contribute to charity when playing a modified dictator game. They also find that standard indicators used by Public Administration scholars to measure public service motivation are robust predictors of who seeks a 1For reviews of the literature on corruption’s consequences and origins, see Svensson (2005), Treisman (2007), and Olken and Pande (2012).