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Comment by soundarana | Hacker News Reader

You also need to take religion into account - Catholic vs Orthodox.

Orthodox countries are statistically more corrupt due to relation to God and it's translation to relation to authority. This is well researched.

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Maybe relevant, from Conversations with Tyler (Ep. 184, with David Bentley Hart):

  COWEN: Let’s say Poland, Slovenia, Czechia, which have a lot of Catholicism in their backgrounds — they seem to be converging on Western norms, living standards much more than, say, the EU members to the East: Bulgaria, Romania.

  HART: Well, they had certain advantages to begin with, too, but better relations. Again, I don’t think it has any particular... To be honest, Polish Catholicism is basically culturally very much like Slavic Orthodoxy. There, you’re going to find that culturally, Catholicism and Orthodoxy are closer to one another in many ways than Catholicism in the East is with Catholicism in the West.

  Trying to draw causal ties between what are very complex social histories, I just think is a mistake. There’s no way of saying one way or the other. Greek democracy flourished in the modern age for a while after Greek independence in the early 19th century, and Greece remains Orthodox, too. Even more than Poland, it is committed to a set of real democratic norms. In Poland, there are stronger reactionary forces at present than there are in Greece.

and also from Ep. 192, with Jacob Mikanowski:

  MIKANOWSKI: [...] I think that idea of an Orthodox disease is maybe a figment of geography more than a deeply cultural matrix that we think. I’m not — I think we could be optimistic about Croatia and Romania simultaneously. Bulgaria maybe too. I’m not sure that I believe in a kind of Orthodox curse. I think it has more to do with how things shook up internally in former Yugoslavia and where those countries are in relationship to that industrial core of Germany, Austria, Switzerland.

Yeah, I also don't think I'd really call Czechia a place with a "lot of Catholicism in its background." It was a hostile top-down imposition from the Austrians, with the consequence that Czechs are largely agnostic/areligious today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_Czech_Republic

What would Czech have if not for Austria? Would it be Protestant or Orthdox?

Prior to re-Catholicization of the 17th century, there was a strong presence of homebrewn Hussite/Brethren Protestantism (mostly Czech-speaking people) and somewhat smaller presence of classical Lutheranism/Calvinism (mostly German-speaking people). There wasn't any clear geographic boundary between those two, the communities were mixed, though there were regional "strongholds" - e.g. Silesia was strongly German-Protestant while southern Moravia was strongly Czech-Catholic.

Orthodox communities, with the exception of ambassadors or foreign businesspeople, weren't a thing in Early Modern Kingdom of Bohemia.

Without Austria it would be about half Catholic, half Protestant with a significant Jewish minority.

I have to say that I met Mikanowski in HS in passing a few times in academic competitions and I never heard anything about him being bigoted in any way whatsoever.

That’s a pretty big claim and I’d be curious to see this research. I think you’d have a hard time untangling the communist effect (and earlier Ottoman effect) on Orthodox states to make any kind of deeper argument here.

One sample:

> Religion plays a significant role in influencing corruption levels [26,[29], [30], [31], [32], [33]]. While all religions encourage good moral conduct and ethical behavior, studies show that different religions are associated with varying levels of corruption. Notably, countries whose primary religions are hierarchical religions such as Catholic Christianity (Catholicism), Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and Islam, tend to have higher corruption levels, particularly in comparison to Protestant Christian countries [21,30,[34], [35], [36], [37]]. Supporting this claim, [30] found that corruption levels are lowest in countries with a Protestant majority and highest in countries with an Orthodox Christian majority.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10360949/

To disentagle communism you can look at 1800. But there you have other confounders (colonialism, industrialization, feudalism...)

This claim of hierarchy doesn’t make sense for Islam, which explicitly does not have a fixed religious hierarchy like Christianity (which I will also note it’s interesting that Christianity was split into sects but not Islam for this study).

All studies analyzing countries as a whole are flawed. First of all, it's low sample size, there are 200 something countries. Secondly, countries are complex systems with thousands if not more variables, that are impossible to account for, so any finding is incidental at best.

But how many of these Orthodox countries have been Orthodox countries officially for more than a few decades? I’m struggling to think of any besides Greece.

Lebanon never got communism and the country was founded as largely a Catholic and Orthodox project, but it still has considerable corruption. (Not defending the OP's claim, just offering another data point.)

Confessionalism is probably just as large a confounder as communism in this context though..

Different iterations of the Serbian state have been Orthodox since the 12th century. The entire Orthodox part of the Balkans is in that range as well.

But the question is concerning studies done recently, not centuries ago. So I think the only way to determine if Orthodoxy leads to "more corrupt" states would be to analyze one that wasn't something un-Orthodox (e.g., socialist Yugoslavia) for the last half-century.

Huh, Orthodoxy is very old and widespread. Ofc during Communism, it tended to be suppressed, but as a bedrock of the society, Orthodoxy definitely prevails in Serbia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Belarus and Russia at least.

Ukraine is more complicated, a nation sewn together from very different regions; Greek Catholics are an important minority, mostly present in the formerly Austro-Hungarian western part of the country, which also seems to be the most nationalist one.

Presumably these studies have been done recently, not two centuries ago, so I'm not sure how useful they are in determining that Orthodox states are "more corrupt."

I am not sure either, but I wouldn't rule it out either. Caesaropapism was probably, on the net, a negative shaping force in societies which indulged in it.

In the world of Islam, the Shi'a system of ayatollahs is structurally fairly close to Christian Orthodox Churches, and the Iranian theocracy which builds on it is corrupt beyond belief.

That said, it probably makes sense to study why some countries are somewhat less corrupt or how they managed to keep corruption in check. Corruption seems to be fairly widespread across space and time, one of the universal blights of mankind.

FWIW I don't know about the statistics, but it is true that Eastern Orthodoxy does have notions like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphonia_(theology) that are especially conductive to authoritarianism and its associated ills (including unchecked corruption by local authorities).

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