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Marina Zaloznaya CV

Marina Zaloznaya joined the University of Iowa's Political Science department in 2021, but she has been on the Sociology faculty since 2012, after she received a Master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University.

Dr. Zaloznaya’s research explores public sector corruption, political behavior, and gender in non-democratic regimes from a range of methodological perspectives, including ethnography, survey methods, comparative-historical, and network analyses. Her first book, The Politics of Bureaucratic Corruption in Post-Transitional Eastern Europe (Cambridge University Press 2017) analyzed the impact of hybrid political systems in Ukraine and Belarus on petty corruption in local universities, from the dissolution of the Soviet Union to the present day. In 2020, Dr. Zaloznaya edited a special issue of Demokratizatsiya, featuring cutting-edge law & society research on non-democratic societies with a legacy of socialism.

For one of her current projects, funded by two grants from the U.S. Department of Defense, Dr. Zaloznaya and her collaborators (Dr. Bill Resinger, Dr. Vicki Hesli Claypool, and Dr. Wenfang Tang) carried out a series of national representative surveys in Russia, China, Ukraine, and Georgia. Using these rich data, they analyzed individual-level causes, social network properties, and gendered patterns of public sector corruption, its impact on citizens’ political views and behaviors, and its embeddedness in citizens’ social networks. Results of these analyses have appeared in a range of top sociology, political science, and area studies journals, such as Social Forces, Electoral Studies, Post-Soviet Affairs, Europe-Asia Studies, Sociology of Development, and so on.

The other two projects that Dr. Zaloznaya is working on at the moment are (1) an agenda-setting volume on Sociology of Corruption (in collaboration with Dr. Marco Garrido and Dr. Nicholas Wilson); and (2) a solo-authored monograph on Russian women’s involvement in informal economies and political resistance (funded by the U.S. Department of State).