The current dominant discourse in the research literature postulates that informal payments in public education will be negatively associated with satisfaction with public education. In contrast, we theorize that informal payments can be classified into three different groups based on the motivations of the people who make such payments, namely, “sand-the-wheels”, “cultural norm”, and “grease-the-wheels” motivations. We further hypothesize that each of these motivations will have distinctly different patterns of association with satisfaction with public education. We test our hypotheses on a diverse sample of 27 post-communist countries in Eastern and Central Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. Our main findings confirm our hypotheses. The “sand-the-wheels” motivation is indeed associated with lower satisfaction. However, the “cultural norm” motivation is associated with higher satisfaction. As well, the “grease-the-wheels” motivation does not have a significant association with satisfaction. These findings are true for education at the primary/secondary and vocational levels. These findings are also true for fixed effect and for random effect multilevel models. Overall, 12 % of users made informal payments in public primary/secondary education and 14 % did so in public vocational education. Most informal payments were made because users had been directly asked to do so by educational personnel or when users felt that such payments were required by educational personnel. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd
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