Corruption and Bribery in the Eyes of Public Opinion

The article reflects the perception of corruption during the last several years. Within this period corruption has become the focus of the media attention and it has even become one of the important words of the vocabularies of politicians. Czech general public has been quite skeptical in terms of the state of the corruption of our society and believes that the incidence of corruption is significant. It is of course necessary to differentiate the feelings and fears of public from the limited factual knowledge on its phenomenon itself. Because of the lack of hard data on corruption the exploration is therefore based on the secondary analysis of findings from surveys on public opinion carried out in the Czech Republic and on the analysis of Czech governmental strategic documents concerning this phenomenon. Author takes into account mostly the views on corruption in public sector. It tries to answer the question whether the situation can be characterized as “common” corruptive behavior on the everyday level, as “corruptive climate” or even as systemic corruption steering for the so-called "state capture". It tries also to formulate the main differences of the extent and character of corruption under socialist period and at present.