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Cultures of Corruption: Evidence from Diplomatic Parking Tickets
Not so much news as proof. Research on the causes of corruption is compounded by the difficulties inherent in disentangling the effects of social norms from the effects of legal enforcement. Specifically, societies that collectively place less importance on rooting out corruption, and thus have weak anti-corruption social norms, may simultaneously have less legal enforcement. Understanding the real causes of corruption is of central importance in reforming economic and social institutions: if corruption is predominantly norm-based, interventions that focus exclusively on boosting legal reforms will likely fail. We exploit a unique natural experiment the stationing in New York City of thousands of government officials from 146 countries from around the world in a setting of zero legal enforcement of parking violations to construct a revealed preference measure of official corruption. We find that this measure is strongly correlated with existing measures of home country corruption. This finding suggests that cultural or social norms related to corruption are quite persistent: even when stationed thousands of miles away, diplomats behave in a manner highly reminiscent of officials in the home country. Norms related to corruption are apparently very deeply engrained. We find that this measure is strongly correlated with existing measures of home country corruption. This finding suggests that cultural or social norms related to corruption are quite persistent: even when stationed thousands of miles away, diplomats behave in a manner highly reminiscent of officials in the home country. Norms related to corruption are apparently very deeply engrained. The second main empirical finding is the strong correlation between affinity for the United States in the diplomats home country and parking violations in New York. This provides real-world empirical evidence that sentiments matter in economic decision-making. Of course, in the case we study the punishment for parking violations was essentially zero (at least in the pre-November 2002 period), allowing individuals to indulge their tastes without penalty. The most important message of our main result is that corruption norms are sticky. This result raises the critical question of whether there are policy interventions that can modify norms over time. For example, the Bloomberg administrations enforcement efforts in New York City were extremely successful in changing diplomats behaviors, and it would be extremely useful to know whether these changes might additionally have long-lasting effects on norms once individuals become habituated to rule compliant behavior. Unfortunately, our context does not accommodate this analysis. Corruption rank Country name Violations per diplomat U.N. Mission diplomats in 1998 1 KUWAIT 246.2 9 2 EGYPT 139.6 24 3 CHAD 124.3 2 4 SUDAN 119.1 7 5 BULGARIA 117.5 6 6 MOZAMBIQUE 110.7 5 7 ALBANIA 84.5 3 8 ANGOLA 81.7 9 9 SENEGAL 79.2 11 10 PAKISTAN 69.4 13 Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2006-07-07 |
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