Youth Attitudes Towards Intolerance to Corruption in Lithuania

Abstract

Corruption as the challenge needs many efforts. The fight against corruption is uniting organizations at international, national and local levels. This fight requires not only changes in legal basis or institutional procedures, but rather the change of society mindset turning it more and more to the intolerance to corruption. Therefore, youth is considered as a targeted group, which is able and capable to fight the dishonest behavior, corruption cases. It is important to ensure, that youth would be able to identify the corruption and inform appropriate institutions about this. This needs the values’ background of the youth, the relevant understanding of corruption and intolerance for it. This paper aims to reveal the understanding and attitude of the Lithuanian youth towards the corruption and to identify opportunities for strengthening the anti-corruption potential. The research was implemented in Siauliai region, Lithuania, using quantitative approach. Few main findings were found out in the research. First, the motives to inform/withhold about the corruption cases depend on the status of occupation (students of high schools, employers or having no job young people are mostly ready to inform about corruption cases rather than students of universities and colleges), the gender (women have bigger potential of anticorruption), the social status of the family (having medium social status people have higher potential than people with lower or higher social status), the civil and political activity (more active young people have higher anti-corruption potential).