Public and Personal
Involvement in Corruption Scandals in Bulgaria
The aim of
this project is to investigate the mechanism of public scandals related
to
corruption and the ways different social groups get involved in them. I
will
attempt to explain also why some issues are more susceptible than
others to
attract public attention as well as whether corruption scandals are
able to
provoke civic action.
Several
public scandals related to corruption took place in
Several
hypotheses will be tested during this study. My initial assumption will
be that
a public scandal is related to common values that a specific social
group feels
as threatened. This approach was adopted by Jeffrey Alexander in his
analysis
of the Watergate scandal. J. Alexander (1990) demonstrated how the
issue
gathered momentum because new and larger groups in the American society
identified their common values as being at risk. Using a paradigm
largely influenced
by T. Parsons, he assumed that there were values common to the whole
American
society. It will be interesting to see whether there are values adopted
by all
the groups in the contemporary Bulgarian society I will investigate.
At the same
time, I will adopt a more partial approach based on the analysis of the
concept
of “ideology” done by Clifford Geertz (1993). Geertz argues that there
are
values common only to specific social groups, which are not necessarily
adopted
by the society as a whole, and one might expect these group to react
when they
feel their values are threatened. In this case, a large public scandal
could be
analyzed as a combination between several smaller scandals, when
different
social groups would get involved on different grounds and following a
different
logic.
Another
important issue is what type of institutional actors (media, political
parties,
civic organizations) are able to trigger a public scandal. In
researching it, I
will largely rely on instruments already tested by Luc Boltanski in his
analysis of the mechanisms of public scandals in France (Boltanski
1990).
My research
will be based on in-depth interviews carried out with 28 individuals
once per two
months during one year. The respondents will be selected to cover a
variety of
age, gender, professional, and social-economic indicators. For the
income
indicator, I will rely on the studies of the Bulgarian sociologist
Borjana Dimitrova
who identified important differences between groups with an income of
less than
150 BGL per member of the household as compared to richer people. 8 of
my
respondents will be inhabitants of a village, another 8 will be
residents of a
small town, and 12 will live in the capital city of
The interview
questionnaire will consist of two parts, the first largely standardized
and
common for all the interviewed, and the second semi-directed, based on
open
questions. The first part will check which corruption cases discussed
in the media
or by the local community have attracted the attention of the
respondents.
Additional questions will be how the respondents learned about the
cases, what they
think about them, whether they can compare them to other corruption
cases they
find similar, and why. The second part will be designed specifically
for each
respondent. At this stage and with the advance of my research, I expect
significant
divergences concerning the issues identified as interesting for the
specific
social groups. The aim of the interviews will be to understand which
one of the
current corruption-related scandals managed to attract the attention of
the
interviewed, and why. Here I will investigate the particular causes
that
provoked the personal involvement of the respondent.
The
research will rely heavily on earlier studies as well as qualitative
and
quantitative data collected at a much larger scale and with much larger
resources.
Especially useful will be the data collected during the projects “The
State of
Bulgarian Society”, organized by Open Society Foundation in 2002,
“Social
Pessimism in Bulgaria”, organized by the Centre for Liberal Strategies
in 2003,
the annual poverty reports of the World Bank, and the corruption
indexes
monitored by the local branch of Transparency International (in
cooperation
with IMIR) and Coalition 2000. The current results of my fieldwork will
be
compared with the data from the corruption indexes.
I hope that
this research will advance our understanding on several problems.
First, we
will learn more about the structure of the contemporary Bulgarian
society. Investigating
public scandals will allow us to see whether there are values common
for the whole
society, or values that command the loyalties of large social groups.
This
study will be in direct dialogue with the “State of
Second, I
will investigate issues that attract the attention of different social
groups
and the way they use corruption discourses. My initial hypothesis will
be that
the notion of corruption might be used in a variety of ways. It can be
employed
as a bargaining tool by specific social groups, for example when
business
associations lobby for lesser state regulations. It can be employed as
an
interpretative tool, for example when the “new poor” look for
explanation of
the social inequalities emerging in the last decade. Further, it can be
employed as a discursive strategy providing an excuse for personal
failures, as
Michael Herzfeld’s analysis (1992) of skepticism in
Third, we
will understand better the links between corruption scandals and
potential
social action. If corruption scandals are related primarily to
bargaining or
interpretative strategies rather than to reactions against what is
perceived as
a threat to basic social values, there is lesser ground to expect wider
social
action.
Fourth, we
will learn more about the capacity of different actors (media,
political
parties, civic organizations) to launch a public scandal related to
corruption,
their credibility and their potential to reach and influence different
audiences.
Last but
not least, we will learn more about what the corruption indexes
actually
measure. Corruption indexes in
References:
Alexander,
Jeffrey, 1990 Culture and
Political Crisis: Watergate
and Durkheimian Sociology. In: Alexander, Jeffrey (ed.) Durkheimian
Sociology: Cultural Studies.