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Institutions, Norms, and Accountability: A Corruption Experiment with Northern and Southern Italians

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 December 2017

Nan Zhang
Nan Zhang*
Affiliation:
Max-Planck-Institute for Research on Collective Goods, 53113 Bonn, Germany, e-mail: zhang@coll.mpg.de
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Abstract

Anti-corruption research has highlighted the potential for grassroots monitoring to improve governance outcomes, but the conditions under which citizens are willing to report bribery remain under-studied. Are individuals from some societies socialized into a “culture of corruption” that makes them more accepting of malfeasance, or is the failure to denounce wrongdoing simply a response to low-quality enforcement institutions? I conduct a laboratory experiment to examine how the propensity to report corruption differs between Northern and Southern Italians, two populations experiencing different levels of corruption in everyday life. For each group, I experimentally manipulate the quality of enforcement institutions. When given high-quality institutions, all participants are more willing to report corruption. Moreover, Southerners and Northerners behave similarly when placed within the same institutional environments. These results suggest that high-corruption societies are not “culturally” predisposed to tolerate malfeasance. Rather, improving the capacity of enforcement institutions may significantly strengthen accountability norms.

Keywords

Corruption experimentinstitutionscultureaccountability
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Experimental Political Science , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , Spring 2018 , pp. 11 - 25
Copyright
Copyright © The Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2017 

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