Tag Archives: Culture of Corruption

Does Corruption Flourish in a “Culture of Corruption”?

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A common intuition about corruption is that individuals are more likely to engage in corruption when they witness others committing corrupt acts without facing serious consequences—in other words, a “culture of corruption” can be self-perpetuating (see here and here), and the perception or belief that corruption is widespread can itself be a cause of corruption. While compelling, this intuition has not been subjected to much empirical scrutiny. While there does seem to be some evidence of an association between individuals’ perceptions of the prevalence of domestic corruption and those individuals’ inclination to act corruptly, the research on this topic is relatively thin.

In a recent paper, a group of academics (Israel Waismel-Manor, Patricia Moy, Rico Neumann, and Moran Shechnick) weighed in, presenting the results of a controlled lab experiment that sought to assess whether news about corruption by public officials affected individuals’ incentives to behave dishonestly. The study was conducted in Israel, and participants were required first to watch a short television news segment. The treatment group’s segment revolved around an Israeli mayor suspected of certain corrupt acts, while the control group’s segment was unrelated to corruption. The participants were also given a short quiz about the segment they’d seen, and half of the participants in each group were offered a monetary reward if they answered all the questions correctly; they were told “to answer all questions from memory” and not look anything up on the internet. However, unbeknownst to the participants, one of the questions could not be answered without doing additional searches, so the researchers could use the answer to this question to identify those participants who cheated on the test. The real goal of the study (of which participants were not aware) was to see whether exposure to the corruption news story (alone or in combination with the financial incentive) affected participants’ likelihood of cheating.

Unsurprisingly, participants who were offered money for answering all questions correctly cheated far more often, regardless of which news story they watched. The study’s authors seem to have expected that those participants who watched the corruption-related story would also cheat more (holding constant whether they had financial incentives to answer questions correctly). But this did not occur: Participants who watched the news segment involving a mayor suspected of corruption did not cheat in statistically significantly higher rates than those who watched the other, unrelated-to-corruption segment. The researchers suggested that perhaps the reason was that Israelis had been inundated with so much news about official corruption around the time of the experiment (which took place in 2019), particularly in connection with the investigation and prosecution of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior politicians (see here, here, and here), that the marginal impact of exposure to additional news about corruption, in the form of this one story, would not have much impact.

While that explanation is plausible, I have some other concerns about the research’s design and methodology, which make me question whether this experiment was in fact a good way to assess the “culture of corruption” hypothesis.

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Appearances Can Be Revealing: The Trump Administration’s Corruption Perceptions Problem

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In the wake of President Trump’s Executive Order “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States” (also known as the “Muslim Ban”), numerous media outlets published articles highlighting the fact that Trump’s order excluded several predominantly Muslim countries where the Trump organization conducts business (see here, here and here). The implication was that this exclusion was intentional, and demonstrates the extent to which Trump’s business ventures create conflicts of interest that influence his policy decisions. Although this explanation is plausible, another likely explanation is that the list of countries targeted by the ban tracked the visa waiver program restrictions Congress passed in 2015 and the Obama administration expanded in 2016 (see here).

Were the limitations on the ban driven by corruption or policy priorities? We don’t know—and that’s the problem. Even if Trump’s executive order had no connection with his business, Trump’s extensive conflicts of interest and unwillingness to divest from foreign holdings casts a shadow of corruption over any decision made by the administration. The fact that every decision Trump makes could be tainted with the appearance of self-interest, regardless of whether his administration actually is doing what it believes is in the public’s interest, is incredibly damaging, delegitimizing, and destabilizing. This is why we have ethics rules for government officials that seek to prevent not only corruption, but also the appearance of corruption. Trump’s failure to clear his presidency of any potential conflicts of interest has a few particularly pernicious effects:

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Culture Matters: How Indonesia Should Account Culture to Eradicate Corruption

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Corruption in Indonesia is endemic, permeating all levels of society. As I argued in my last post, Indonesia’s culture of corruption is a result of the corruption of culture: Far too many people see corruption as unsolvable and even “normal,” even though they clearly realize its wrongfulness.

To date, Indonesia’s independent anticorruption agency, the KPK, has pursued a main strategy of prosecuting the “big fish”—the high-ranking officials (including numerous parliament members and powerful politicians) whose corrupt behavior has caused massive damage to the country. Laudable though the KPK’s bold enforcement efforts have been, eradicating corruption requires more than prosecutions. Rather, the KPK needs to complement its aggressive law enforcement with preventive measures designed to change Indonesia’s “culture of corruption” to a “culture of anticorruption.” There are several strategies the KPK could pursue to foster such cultural change:

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The Culture of Corruption and the Corruption of Culture in Indonesia

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With over 300 ethnic groups scattered across more than 17,000 of its islands, Indonesia is justly proud of its extremely diverse cultural heritage. But Indonesia is certainly not proud of a different aspect of its culture: a ”culture of corruption” so pervasive that it is not merely associated with grand corruption in the central government, but also infects the daily lives of the citizens through petty corruption, as well as daily harassment by local officials and governmental departments.

When trying to diagnose the root cause of such pervasive corruption, a common knee-jerk response is to focus on the legal system and law enforcement institutions. Yet Indonesia seems to do fairly well on these dimensions: A well-regarded independent anticorruption agency, the KPK, in cooperation with the police and prosecution spearheads enforcement of a comprehensive Anticorruption Law that both considers domestic needs and incorporates principles enshrined in international materials such as the United Nations Convention Against Corruption. Still, corruption persists. Why?

To answer this question, one must look at not only the legal system, but also the society—the people whose conduct the laws are supposed to regulate. Such observation reveals that the “culture of corruption”— society’s permissive, tolerant, and even accepting attitude toward corruption – is perhaps the main culprit responsible for Indonesia’s incurable corruption.

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