FILSAFAT KORUPSI - Direktori File UPI

These responses indicate both that the countries in the former Soviet
Union suffer from the most serious problems of corruption and government functioning but that the
rest of the former East Bloc should not be complacent.
Most people view corruption negatively even in countries where it is widespread. In the four
countries studied by Miller, Grødeland, and Koshechkina, nearly 60% view corruption as bad for the
country (69% in the Czech Republic) with the rest believing it is bad for the country but
unavoidable.
38
However, answers to a related question indicate a sharp regional divergence. The
Czechs and the Slovaks generally disapprove of a system where officials sometimes accept presents
and favors (91% and 81%) while 59% and 52% of Bulgarians and Ukrainians feel this way (Miller,
Grødeland, and Koshechkina, 1998). This difference may reflect underlying ―cultural‖ differences,
but it could just as well indicate citizens‘ beliefs about the quality of government. People may
prefer a more ―flexible‖ system of official behavior if they see the underlying rules as restrictive,
arbitrary and unclear. However, people do recognize that systemic corruption can encourage
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VII
Social Structure, Collective Action, and
Corruption: Theory, and Evidence from
India
112
Page 1
Christopher Kingston∗
Amherst College
November 28, 2003
Corruption often creates a collective action problem: several citizens or firms may each have an incentive
to pay bribes in an effort to obtain pref-erential treatment, but they would all be better off if they could
mutually commit not to pay bribes. If, however, they can sanction each other in other games, then by
strategically “linking” the games they may be able to escape this “briber‟s dilemma”. Accordingly, we
argue that the level of corrup-tion will be lower in societies with an “integrated” social structure, in which
interactions are frequently short-lived and single-stranded, and individuals interact with different people for
different purposes, than in a “segmented” society in which people tend to engage in stable, multi-stranded
informal interactions within close-knit groups. An empirical test using Indian data supports the model over
several alternative hypotheses about how social structure might affect the quality of government.
∗
cgkingston@amherst.edu. I am grateful to Masahiko Aoki, Kurt Annen, Gre-gory Besharov, James Fearon, Avner
Greif, Anjini Kochar, Anne Krueger, Jon Levin, Mark Rosenzweig, Steve Tadelis, Chris Woodruff, Mu Yang, Beth
Yarbrough, and seminar participants for comments and discussions. For financial support, I thank the Lynde and Harry
Bradley Foundation for a dissertation fellowship awarded through SIEPR, and the John M. Olin Program in Law and
Economics, Stanford Law School.
Page 2
1 Introduction
Cross-country regression studies have found that aspects of a society‟s “informal rules” - variables such as
“social capital” (Knack and Keefer 1997), “cultural values” (Licht et al. 2003), or ethnic heterogeneity
(Easterly and Levine 1997; La Porta et al. 1999), are correlated with measures of corruption and
bureaucratic inefficiency. 1 Yet the cross-country regression approach reveals little about how these factors
affect the quality of government in particular settings. So, because most of these social and cultural
variables would appear to be exogenous, it is hard to derive policy implications. This paper explores one
way in which social structure (which is one aspect of a society‟s “informal rules”) can affect the quality of