Deontological and consequentialist ethics and attitudes towards corruption: a survey data analysis

Much of the empirical research on corruption for the past 45 years has focused on perception-based definitions and measurements. People’s sociotropic and egocentric perceptions, their attitudes and (self) reported experiences of corruption have been widely studied through different perception-based measures obtained in surveys, interviews, and experiments applied to citizens in general, and experts, business leaders, politicians, or public officials. Notwithstanding the significant progress made to understand the complexity of people’s understanding and interaction with the phenomenon, we are still unable to decipher by what criteria people establish what is or is not corruption and what types are susceptible of being condemned/tolerated. This paper makes an innovative contribution to fill this gap. We propose a methodological design to identify and measure different conceptualisations of corruption based on two contrasting normative perspectives​: deontological and consequentialist ethics. We identified four ideal-types: hypocrites, tolerants, intransigents, and virtuous.​ Using survey data from a national sample of Portuguese citizens, we employ discriminant analysis and logistic regression models to differentiate individual profiles in terms of process- and outcome-based definitions of corruption and explore the explanatory factors that account for these different conceptualisations.