CORRUPTION

International Affairs Forum Fall 2016
...when people think that corruption is becoming a growing problem, they
tend to be less willing to report it, protest against it or join civic anticorruption
organizations.
do not know, for example, whether or how worries about corruption’s effects influences political
behavior; as such, it may be that even positively phrased encouraging messages may have
indirect unintended consequences on shaping unsavory political behaviors (like encouraging
disengagement, for example). These types of possibilities will be explored in further analyses
of the data.
Anti-corruption activism
One of the main objectives of the project was to start to address this concern of whether
awareness-raising efforts might be backfiring. This worry has been raised in recent years,
mainly by those researching under the “corruption as a collective action problem” framework
(see Person et al., 2013 for the most influential paper in this camp). The argument goes that
when there is a pervasive expectation across society that everyone is engaging in corruption,
most citizens will be inclined to swim with the tide rather than perhaps find they are struggling
against it alone. So, if anti-corruption messages give people the perception that corruption
is more widespread and is deeply detrimental than they would have otherwise thought, the
messages may actually be reducing their willingness to fight it rather than firing them up to
confront its perpetrators. Little research has so far been done to test this notion, but there is
already some worrying evidence. For example, after examining Transparency International’s
Global Corruption Barometer data from over 70 countries, my co-author Linda Alvarez and I
find that when people think that corruption is becoming a growing problem, they tend to be
less willing to report it, protest against it, or join civic anti-corruption organizations (Peiffer and
Alvarez 2016).
The preliminary evidence from the Jakarta experiment gives both a little more cause for
concern and some promising glimmers of hope. The results showed that people exposed to
the Grand Corruption message were more likely to agree with the idea that “there is no point
in reporting corruption, because nothing useful will be done about it”, than those who were
not exposed to a message at all. This is not entirely surprising as it seems logical that people
may be down on reporting when they think of high profile cases involving people much more
influential over the system than they are. The finding still works to support the argument
that perceptions of corruption being a big problem can trigger a sense of resignation, rather
than inspire an activist’s indignation. On the hopeful side, however, those exposed to the
Government’s Success message were more likely to think that it was their duty to report
corruption if they observed it happening, than any other group. This is encouraging; it suggests
that publicized successes that the government has had can positively shape how people see
their own role in the fight against corruption.
Fall 2016
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