Petty bribery, pluralistic ignorance, and the collective action problem (original) (raw)
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Robert W. McGee and Mercedes A. Jáuregui Guadron, Do Urban Dwellers View Bribery Differently than Rural Dwellers? An Empirical Study of Views in 76 Countries. In Robert W. McGee & Serkan Benk (Eds.), The Ethics of Bribery: Theoretical and Empirical Studies. . Switzerland: Springer. , 2023
The present study is part of a much larger study that examined the ethics of bribery and the ethics of tax evasion from a variety of perspectives. In this study, data were taken from the most recent World Values Survey. Seventy-six countries were included in the survey. Of the 76 countries included in the survey, 49 (64.4%) of the urban and rural populations did not differ significantly in their view of bribe taking. Rural populations considered taking a bribe to be significantly more serious in 15 countries (19.7%). Urban populations considered taking a bribe to be significantly more serious in 12 countries (15.8%).
British Journal of Political Science, 2022
The conventional view of corruption emphasizes its detrimental impact on the evaluations of public institutions. This view implies that in corruption-intense environments, the public should exert strong pressure on relevant authorities to combat corruption. Yet, multiple historical accounts suggest that in such contexts, corruption tends to thrive even despite extensive state-imposed anti-corruption measures. In this letter, we address this puzzle by studying the context-dependent effects of individual experiences of petty corrupt exchanges on the popular evaluation of public institutions. Drawing on the literature on the functionality of informal exchanges and normalization of corruption, we posit that negative effects of such experiences will be attenuated by the presence of institutional corruption among public service providers. In contexts permeated by corruption, corrupt exchanges will become routine, with limited effect on citizens' perceptions of street-level bureaucracy. Our empirical test, relying on a unique cross-national survey dataset from Central-Eastern Europe and a fine-grained ecological (municipality-level) indicator of corruption, largely supports these conjectures.
Social Class and Attitudes toward Bribery
In Robert W. McGee & Serkan Benk (Eds.), The Ethics of Bribery: Theoretical and Empirical Studies. (pp. xxx-xxx). Switzerland: Springer, forthcoming, 2023
The present study is part of a much larger study that examined the ethics of bribery and the ethics of tax evasion from a variety of perspectives. In this study, data were taken from the most recent World Values Survey. Forty-eight countries were included in the study. Social class was often a significant demographic variable. However, no clear pattern emerged regarding which social class was most or least opposed to bribe taking.
Human Affairs, 2013
This study is an empirical approach to answering the question: are there any universal factors that account for the origin, diffusion and persistence of corruption in human societies? The paper enquires whether the perception of corruption in politics and economics can be tackled as a form of cultural adaptation, driven by exogenous and endogenous forces. These are respectively: freedom of access and management of economic resources, and the pressures towards human grouping. Following the analytical insights of cultural theory, developed by Mary Douglas and later Aaron Wildavsky, variation is introduced through the ways in which corruption is perceived through the different behavioral and cultural biases that prevail in societies. This research introduces a cross-country comparative analysis of 57 countries attempting to test quantitatively whether institutional pressure and emphasis towards social grouping are correlated with corruption perception at country levels.
The experience and perception of corruption: A comparative study in 34 societies
International Journal of Sociology, 2019
In this article we show that perceptions of corruption and the experience of bribery are related theoretically and empirically at the individual level, although the magnitude of this association relies on two context variables, country-level corruption and press freedom. For that purpose, we first offer a critical review of the literature studying perceptions of corruption. Then we propose a sociological approach to understand how people form "mental images" of corruption beyond (as well as based on) their personal experience of bribery. We test its main implications using a cross-national approach based on ISSP's 2016 Role of Government survey module, as well as the national-level predictors suggested by our theoretical framework and the specialized literature. Using multilevel models, we show that the generalized perception of corruption is associated with the personal experience of bribery and that this relation is stronger in countries where corruption is relatively absent and press freedom is high, i.e., developed countries. So, context is important in order to understand why perceptions of corruption and the experience of bribery sometimes are associated and other times are not. Finally, we argue that our findings could apply to a wide range of opinions lying far beyond the personal experience.
Policy Brief 4: Social norms, mental models and other behavioural drivers of petty corruption
Basel Institute on Governance Policy Briefs, 2017
This policy brief summarises the main findings and lessons learned from research on corruption, social norms and behaviours in Tanzania. While the findings show that petty corruption is prevalent and results in inequitable public service delivery, they also inform that citizen and public officials’ attitudes and behaviours towards corruption are shifting as a result of changes in the political environment. The evidence furthermore suggests that the effectiveness of conventional anti-corruption approaches may be enhanced by incorporating behavioural insights about entrenched social norms and collective understandings that are associated with practices of bribery and favouritism.
Social Norms in Corruption: A Bribery Experiment
2019
This paper analyzes social norms in corruption by exploring whether engagement in bribery induces costly third-party punishment. By introducing third-party punishment in a bribery experiment we disentangle social norms from other non-normative motives ̶ such as retaliation, negative reciprocity ̶ maintained merely by parties involved in corruption. We manipulate two main characteristics of bribery: the private benefits gained by corrupt actors, and the negative externality generated by bribery on passive members of society. We find that third parties punish bribers more often than the bribed, but to a lesser extent. Greater private benefits induce third parties to punish more, whereas greater negative externalities have no impact on punishment choices. We unveil the role of emphatic anger as a microdeterminant of third-party punishment. We find gender differences in punishment behavior, with females being more willing to punish the bribed than males, but to a lesser amount.
Political Studies, 2019
The literature studying citizen responses to exposed political corruption is rapidly growing. While some studies explore how information credibility and group identities can reduce the electoral impact of the exposure of corruption, this article addresses different mechanisms for weak electoral accountability for corruption: candidate competence in public works provision and corruption prevalence. It uses a vignette experiment embedded in a national survey in Peru to isolate the causal effect of political corruption on electoral support. The results suggest that even types of corruption with side benefits would be harshly punished when attributed to incompetent politicians. They also indicate that while voters punish corruption more leniently when a candidate is competent, they respond negatively to corruption regardless of the prevalence of corruption, which casts doubt on the idea that voters in highly corrupt environments are acceptant of corruption.
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Income Level and Attitudes toward Bribery
Robert W. McGee & Serkan Benk, Income Level and Attitudes toward Bribery. In Robert W. McGee & Serkan Benk (Eds.), The Ethics of Bribery: Theoretical and Empirical Studies. (pp. xxx-xxx). Switzerland: Springer, forthcoming. , 2023
How Prevalent Is Bribery? A Ranking of 52 Countries
Robert W. McGee & Edward Zhou, How Prevalent is Bribery? A Ranking of 52 Countries. In Robert W. McGee & Serkan Benk (Eds.), The Ethics of Bribery: Theoretical and Empirical Studies. (pp. xxx-xxx). Switzerland: Springer, 2023, forthcoming. , 2023
Education Level and Attitudes toward Bribery
Robert W. McGee & Serkan Benk, Education Level and Attitudes toward Bribery. In Robert W. McGee & Serkan Benk (Eds.), The Ethics of Bribery: Theoretical and Empirical Studies. (pp. xxx-xxx). Switzerland: Springer, forthcoming. , 2023