The Rotting Fish: Institutional Trust, Dysfunctional Societies, and Corruption Tolerance - A Multilevel Study of the Individual Justification of Corruption in a Global Perspective

The aim of my dissertation is to empirically examine the relationship between (subjective and objective) measures of state dysfunctionality and corruption tolerance, measured using an index of corruption permissiveness. A key individual-level factor is argued to be trust in the institutions that exercise government authority and are tasked with the implementation of public policy, namely the police, the courts, and the civil service (bureaucratic distrust). Public administrations and individual civil servants are generally expected to perform their duties in an evenhanded and efficient manner. Failure to meet these expectations may have deleterious consequences for the legitimacy and utility of the formal norms that citizens and firms are expected to follow, possibly resulting in wider acceptance of bribe taking, tax evasion, and other forms of illegal and/or uncivic behavior. The focus of this study lies mainly on the conditions under which bureaucratic distrust influences corruption tolerance, and if/how the nature of this relationship varies depending on country characteristics such as the level of development, the extent of corruption, institutional quality, and the extent of economic inequality. However, I am also interested in the potential direct effects of these contextual factors. One of the questions that this study, which utilizes World Values Survey-data in a multilevel framework, hopes to answer is; When or where do distrusting attitudes toward civil servants have the most substantial impact on civic morality? Do dysfunctional structures and corrupt elites generate dysfunctional citizens that tolerate corrupt behavior (the “rotting fish” thesis), or is corruption tolerance part of a “larger culture” that affects the quality of institutions (the “raccomandazione” thesis)?