Comparative Whistleblowing Administrative, Cultural, and Ethical Issues(2005年公共管理国际会议论文).docVIP

Comparative Whistleblowing: Administrative, Cultural, and Ethical Issues Roberta Ann Johnson Politics Department, University of San Francisco, USA Abstract This paper will explore the reasons for the different patterns and the different degrees of success of whistleblowers in four countries: the United States, Israel, Russia, and India. What emerges from the comparison is the importance of the cultural context. Cultural context, more than any other factor helps explain why in some countries whistleblowers play an important role in opposing corruption and in other countries they do not. Key words corruption, whistleblower, cultural context, forms of political corruption, forms of business corruption, administrative programs responding to corruption, whistleblower protection, patterns of minor rule breaking behavior in Israel, informancy in Russia, petty corruption and grand larceny in India 1 Introduction The following is a comparative study of four countries?the United States, Israel, India, and Russia. These countries vary in their level and pattern of corruption. According to Transparency International (TI), a nonprofit organization that measures the perception of corruption using a variety of survey tools, the United States and Israel are rated as relatively low in corruption. The United States is rated as 16th out of 102 countries and Israel is 18th. Russia and India, on the other hand, are ranked as 71st, and are rated among the worst. But a countrys corruption level provides just a partial picture for this study. The focus of this comparative examination is not on corruption per se, but on the people who expose the corruption, the whistleblowers. After formally defining corruption and whistleblowing, we will describe and compare the whistleblower experience in the four sample countries. The differing whistleblowing patterns we find can be attributed to the different cultural contexts. Cultural context refers to the countrys unique history, values, and ins