Many people associate bribe giving with business executives and foreign corporations seeking to secure government contracts. While those perceptions may hold for grand corruption, it also lends support to the belief —perhaps faulty —that Czech bribery experiences are largely concentrated among the business elite.

 

Even the most sophisticated analyses often don’t measure the relationship between people’s perceptions and experiences of corruption. Elite surveys and indices, such as Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, are susceptible to echo effects, i.e. that they do not report experts’ own experiences, but simply repeat the conventional beliefs about the given country. Scholars are beginning to discover that, across countries, perceptions of the overall extent of corruption by experts and by ordinary citizens are nearly identical, which raises the question why out-of-country experts are even asked at all.

 

The only reliable way to determine what kinds of people tend to experience bribery is through large-scale, representative social surveys with questions on corruption that people wouldn’t be afraid to answer. The common way this is done is not by asking whether people give bribes, which may lead to biased responses, but by asking whether a public official has ever suggested or requested a bribe or a “service” from the respondent, which removes the ethical problem in responding.

 

According to the 2004 European Social Survey, about 13 percent of Czech respondents— compared to 5.5 percent for Europeans as a whole—claimed that a public official suggested or requested a bribe from them at least once over the previous five years. By that measure, the Czech Republic ranked very poorly at 23rd of the 25 European countries where the survey was conducted, beating out only Slovakia and Ukraine. According to the newest data from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) Role of Government survey, which has yet to be publicly released, about 15 percent of Czech respondents and their families have sometimes, and nearly 3 percent have often, experienced a bribe request by a public official over the last five years.

 

While these numbers are certainly alarming, they also remind us that the large majority of Czechs haven’t experienced bribery at all.

 

Scholars have a number of theories about who is most likely to experience bribery. One theory is that public officials wanting to exact a bribe try to identify people who would be able or willing to pay it; that suggests richer Czechs would experience bribery more often. An opposite theory states that in an unequal society, it is the poor who are likely to need to bribe to secure some public services, since wealthier people tend to have more political connections and networks that give them privileged access to things, without needing to bribe.

 

Both of those theories are most likely wrong. An analysis I conducted on the two surveys above suggests that income plays virtually no role in the experience of bribery either in the Czech Republic or Europe as a whole (the European data contains over 40,000 respondents). Czech college graduates are no more likely to experience bribe requests than people who never went to college. Czechs in supervisory positions at large firms are no more likely to experience bribery than other employees. Across Europe, men are about 50 percent more likely to report bribery experiences compared to women, but in the Czech Republic there are no gender differences at all. Younger Czechs and the self-employed are marginally more likely to experience bribery. However, these factors only explain about 1 percent of the incidence of bribery, which means that they basically have no explanatory value. The key message is that, when it comes to petty forms of corruption, the phenomenon is spread out across society in so many different ways that no one particular group of Czechs experience it much more frequently than others.

 

There seems to be three factors that matter in explaining Czech bribery experiences. The first is the importance of contacts in people’s lives. According to the recent ISSP survey, Czechs who need various connections and favors to get things done are much more likely to experience bribery than anyone else. Since people who own their own business have to deal with Czech bureaucracy or rely on political contacts more than the average person, that may explain why self-employment is relevant as well. Professors Richard Rose of the University of Aberdeen and William Mishler of the University of Arizona have also shown in a new study of corruption in Russia, that the frequency of contacts with the public administration is the leading determinant of bribery experience, whereas the income of the respondent doesn’t matter at all.

 

Second, about half of the Czechs who claim that public officials requested a bribe from them also admitted that they offered bribes to others—the statistic is about 30 percent across Europe. A Czech doctor who suggests a bribe to prioritize an operation for a patient is also very likely to offer bribes to others for things he or she needs. While a lot of scholars seem to assume that “bribe takers” are an entirely different group of people than “bribe givers,” that may hold true only for grant corruption, but not the everyday experiences that social surveys measure. It also suggests that corrupt people are people who live off of connections and immoral deal making, regardless of the side of the transaction they are on.

 

Third, while many more Czechs’ perceive rampant corruption than actually experience it, it is also true that corruption perceptions and experience are closely correlated from a statistical point of view. It is well-established in economics that expectations shape people’s behavior. Widespread perceptions of corruption can breed a vicious circle leading to more corruption. If Czechs as a whole believe that bribery among the police is rampant, it will lead some people to think they can get away with offering a bribe the next time they get pulled over by a police officer. It also suggests that people who tend to see all politicians and public officials as corrupt may be doing a greater disservice to the fight against corruption than they think.