Can Policy Signals Break the Corruption Equilibrium

Corruption is a political phenomenon many citizens suffer from and strongly dislike. At the same time, citizens rarely mobilize against corruption and often re-elect incumbents they know to be corrupt. Research has argued that this disconnect between citizen attitudes and behavior comes from a “corruption equilibrium” where citizens know corruption to be wide-spread, believe that institutions and other citizens are complacent with corrupt practices of office holders, and accordingly, engage themselves in bribe-paying. In this context, it is crucial to understand how citizens process information about corruption and how such perceptions interact with the institutions in which they are embedded. This paper has two goals. The first is to assess the extent to which the sanctioning of corrupt officials by the courts might be perceived by citizens as a signal that state institutions care about corruption. The second is to investigate whether this, in turn, might make citizens more willing to support anti-corruption policies and change their own behavior. We propose a mechanism linking corruption sanctioning by courts with citizens’ support for anti-corruption policies, via increased trust in courts and heightened citizen beliefs about their own efficacy to fight corruption. We will conduct a survey experiment in Tunisia and South Africa, two cases in which impunity is widespread and corruption is salient, to test this mechanism. The paper is intended as a contribution to the understanding of possible spillover effects arising from a legal punitive treatment of corruption. Ultimately it can shed light on whether crack-downs against corruption only corroborate widespread perceptions of corruption or can trigger popular engagement with anti-corruption.