fig. 1 Impact of signifcant infuences on paying bribe

Table 2 Bribery for services after controlling for contact

No contact (%) Contact, no bribe (%) Contact, bribe (%) Bribe % contact

Health 42 Education 64 Permits 61 Police 75 Courts 87 49 31 32 19 10 9 16 5 14 7 18 6 24 3 23

Source Global Corruption Barometer 2016; 98 countries. Dominican Republic and Nicaragua excluded because of inadequate contact data

reporting having paid a bribe in the past year. This may refect that longterm recall is low and so any experience of bribery years ago is unlikely to affect current attitudes.

Bribes vary by service. Generalizations about corruption in public services imply that bribery is much the same for every service. This is not the case. The 2016 GCB found that bribes are most often paid for the health service and for permits (Table 2). By contrast, the fewest people pay bribes for court services. The chief reason for this is that far fewer people have, or want to have, contact with the courts than with health and education. Controlling for contact gives a different rank order. Among people who contact the service, almost one-quarter pay bribes to the courts and to the police. The apparent high level of bribery for health and education is because these are much needed and used services. After controlling for contact, the percentage of users paying a bribe for health care or education is signifcantly lower than that of people paying bribes to law enforcement offcials.

The more contacts people have with public services, the more likely they are to pay at least one bribe, but the increase is not proportional (fig. 4). Among GCB respondents using one service, 14% pay a bribe. However, when the number of services contacted doubles, the proportion paying a bribe increases by only one-quarter and when it quadruples, the proportion paying bribes just doubles. Among heavy users of public services, the median respondent paid a bribe for only one service (see Rose and Peiffer 2015: fig. 4).

When bribery happens. The use of an abstraction such as bureaucracy is dehumanizing in the literal sense, since it says nothing about the people whose behaviour immediately determines what the system does. The critical stage in the process of service delivery occurs when a person comes

Contacts Consistent payers Mixed experience No bribe

One

14% 86%

Two 8% 12%

Three 6% 21%

Four 8% 31% 80%

73%

61%

Five 7% 34% 58%

0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%

Fig. 4 Consistent payers of bribes the exception (Source Global Corruption Barometer 2016: 100 countries for which all data available)

face-to-face with the offcial responsible for delivering it. for a bribe to be paid, the two parties must come to an understanding that a payment must be made if a claimant is to get what he or she wants. The exchange is like buying something in a street market where a person pays in cash and the trader pockets the money without any evidence on paper of a transaction having taken place.

Since soliciting a bribe is illegal, public offcials do not display prices as a shopkeeper would. The UNODC survey in the West Balkans found that only one in fve bribe-payers were quoted a price or were told by a go-between acting as a fxer how much had to be paid. Corrupt offcials use a variety of means to cue claimants of the need to ‘volunteer’ a payment in order to get what they want. The more widespread the public perception of corruption, the more likely an individual is to interpret remarks as a prompt to offer a payment.

To test the extent to which people understand indirect requests for payment under the table, the 2009 GCB survey asked for comments on the following scenario:

A public offcial looks at the application for a business license and describes how complicated it can be to get a license. He complains about his work load and how much paperwork it takes to provide the license. your friend, the shopkeeper, is worried his application for a business license may be rejected. He offers a payment, roughly equal to fve times the price of a good restaurant meal. The public offcial takes the money and issues the license.

More than nine-tenths of respondents picked up the cue that the offcial was asking for money and 81% described the offcial’s action as soliciting a bribe. In a follow-up question, the offcial is described as giving the license to the shopkeeper along with the information that many of his clients show their thanks by placing something in a box for tips on display in his offce. Again, nine-tenths have no diffculty in understanding this cue as a request for a bribe. Even though people can understand implicit requests for a bribe, more than three-quarters think it is unacceptable for public offcials to solicit ‘tips’.

People may pay a bribe if the beneft is proportionate to the cost. A person who applies for a passport in January for use on a summer holiday can wait three months for slow-moving offcials to issue it, while a business person needing a passport to make a trip the following week may be prepared to offer money on the side to secure its prompt delivery. Public offcials can exploit the reputation of bureaucracy for being slow by holding up action on a permit or service to which an individual is entitled. In the UNODC survey, two in fve report paying bribes because they value their time and want to speed up the delivery of a service. When a bribe is the only way to get a service, for example, a permit or a passport, one-quarter are prepared to pay a bribe. One in six says their payment was made as a gift, a means of showing gratitude in return for what an offcial does, whether it is simply being helpful in interpreting or bending rules or breaking them.

Since the public purse rather than corrupt offcials pays the cost of providing public services, any amount an offcial receives as a bribe is proft in hand. To accommodate poorer users of public services, a corrupt offcial can set the cost on an ‘ability to pay’ basis or allow the person wanting a service to decide. Cash is the conventional way of paying for a service, whether the transaction is legal or illegal. In the West Balkans three-quarters paying a bribe give cash or valuable goods; this is consistent with the idea of bribery as an economic nexus (UNODC 2010).

In households where cash is in short supply, other benefts may be offered. One in fve reports that they have given food or drink to an offcial who has delivered a service, an action consistent with non-bureaucratic norms of reciprocity. Only 3% report that a service is obtained in exchange for what they give an offcial. Giving something to a public offcial who has provided a service is sometimes described as an expression of gratitude customary in a society in which personal relations are much more important than the impersonal bureaucratic standards of a modern society. A gift made after a service is received can refect the expectation that the recipient will favour the gift- giver in the future. However, the UNODC survey provides slight support for the theory that what is given is a free expression of gratitude. More than three-quarters of those paying a bribe report that they are expected to do so before they receive a service and, whatever their resources, to make their payment in cash (UNODC 2010: 22).

Because a bribe usually involves paying cash, some surveys have asked questions about how much money was paid. The Eurobarometer (2014: 83f) survey did ask about the cost, but bribery in European Union countries is so low that there were only three services for which as many as 100 respondents among tens of thousands said how much money they paid. The smallest sums recorded, between 1 and 50 euros, tended to be paid to the police, while bribes for health care tended to fall between 100 and 200 euros. In 2009 the GCB requested respondents to indicate on a fve-point scale the amount paid in their national currency. To make replies comparable cross-nationally, they were converted into a single currency, US dollars. Given very different levels of national incomes, the GCB followed up by asking bribe-payers to relate the sum paid to their household income. Replies showed wide variations in answers and oneffth said that they did not know what was paid. The questions have not been repeated in subsequent GCB surveys, because of problems of making national currencies commensurable and interpreting their signifcance in low as against high-income countries.

It is easier to guesstimate a total national cost of bribery than to analyse sums paid by individuals. The total expenditure on retail bribes may be estimated by grossing up the amount of money reportedly paid by a small number of individual respondents. An alternative method favoured by macroeconomists is to impute the opportunity cost to the economy of the ineffciencies caused by bribery diverting resources. Because of the large number of assumptions used to produce statements about the monetary cost of corruption, the fgures are notional as well as national, and we avoid such speculations.

Credibility checks. Because survey evidence of bribery does not conform to familiar characterizations of whole societies, critics challenge its validity on the assumption that citizens are unwilling to tell the truth to interviewers about engaging in an act that is both wrong and illegal. However, the idea that there is something wrong with paying money on the side for a public service is a socially constructed norm originating in Western bureaucratic societies (see Tänzler et al. 2012). Ethnographic studies in Africa interpret material gifts to public offcials as refecting cultural norms of reciprocity (see e.g. Smith 2007). An African offcial speaking to a Swedish academic refected cross-cultural differences in norms by claiming that in Kenya there is a ‘stigma attached to honest behaviour’ (quoted in Persson et al. 2013: 461).

Insofar as national cultures do label paying bribes as wrong, this could encourage people who do so to avoid a social stigma by hiding what they have done. This theory can be tested in three different ways with Barometer data. A simple way for a person to conceal payment of a bribe when asked is to reply don’t know or refuse to give any answer. However, the proportion doing so in reply to questions about bribery is very low. An average of less than 1% of respondents to the GCB, Afrobarometer, and LAPOP surveys give no answer. In formerly Communist countries, where there is a legacy of corruption, the percentage of respondents giving evasive answers, 1.3%, is trivial and not significantly different from the eight-tenths of 1% saying don’t know in older EU member states. By comparison, people giving no answer to questions about corruption are much fewer than the proportion who do not say what their income is when asked. In the 2012 round of the European Social Survey, which sets the gold standard for methodological rigour, 11% refused to reply to question about income and an additional 10% said they did not know. In short, ordinary people have no inhibition about discussing with an unfamiliar interviewer what happens when they encounter public offcials.

If respondents think paying a bribe is wrong, reports of paying a bribe should be much lower among those who think that bribery is wrong than among those who fnd it understandable. However, this is hardly the case. fourth-round Afrobarometer respondents who think bribery is wrong are only fve percentage points less likely to report paying a bribe than the minority who do not think so. Among EBRD respondents, there is no signifcant difference between the 25% paying

a bribe and who do not think that bribery is wrong and the 23% who have paid a bribe even though they think it wrong to do so. Since those thinking bribery wrong are a big majority, the upshot is that more than three-quarters of those who report paying a bribe also think it is wrong to do so.

In Western nations, there is some evidence that education encourages the under-reporting of socially undesirable activities. Insofar as more-educated people are more aware of what is socially acceptable, they are expected to be ‘most likely to misrepresent their true beliefs, attitudes or practices’ when asked about unacceptable behaviour (Karp and Brockington 2005: 826). This implies that more-educated people will be less likely to report paying bribes. However, this is not the case. Among Eurobarometer respondents, who ought to be most likely to regard bribery as socially undesirable, 2% who left school before the age of 16 replied don’t know to questions about bribery. Among those with more education, the same percentage likewise said don’t know.

The inherent limitation of sample survey results is that they are estimates of the behaviour of the population from which the sample is drawn. However, in a properly conducted nationwide sample, the statistical margin of error is only a few percentage points. In countries in which reported bribery is only a few percent (see Appendix fig. A.1), even a small margin of error cautions against drawing conclusions about trends that may only refect sampling error. However, in a continental or global survey in which up to one-ffth or more report paying a bribe, such cautions do not apply. Instead, the far greater risk would be to rely on generalizations drawn from a few anecdotes or assertions about mass behaviour rather than making use of reliable social science evidence.

Corrupt governance contingent not pervasive. To divide citizens into those who do and those who do not pay bribes implies that individual characteristics tend to determine bribe-paying. If this is correct, then individuals should pay a bribe for every public service that they use. This assumption can be tested by examining the behaviour of people having contacts with two or more public services. When this is the case, individuals may pay a bribe for one service but not another. Insofar as an individual’s behaviour is contingent rather than consistent, this implies that the payment of a bribe is infuenced more by characteristics of particular public services than by characteristics of people who use these services.

Those who pay a bribe are only a minority of all users of public services, and those who consistently pay a bribe for every service they contact are a minority of this minority (fig. 4). Among people having contacted two services, those who pay bribes for both services are outnumbered almost two to one by people having mixed experiences, receiving one service by the book and one in return for a bribe. Among those using three services, consistent bribe-payers are only one-ffth of the total and among those using four or more services, consistent bribe-payers are outnumbered by more than ten to one by people who get most but not all of their services free of bribery. In short, there is not a division between individuals paying a bribe to all public offcials they come in contact with and those who never do so. Instead of thinking in terms of some people being bribe-payers while others resist doing so, we should think in terms of particular services offering greater or fewer opportunities to collect bribes.

When grass-roots corruption is high, it also tends to be high at the top level of governance. The simple bivariate correlation between the percentage of a country’s citizens reporting the payment of a retail bribe and the CPI of capital-intensive bribery is signifcant, 0.69. In other words, political elites who are complicit in bribery at the top of government tend to tolerate the collection of bribes by low-level employees nominally accountable to them. However, this statistical correlation of two aggregate measures is not suffciently strong to make one measure a satisfactory substitute for the other, since it leaves most of the variance between them unexplained.

Whereas the CPI’s rating of national governments shows that most are closer to the extreme of bad governance than good governance, surveys of their citizens show the opposite. Substantial majorities having contact with a public service receive the service in keeping with bureaucratic standards rather than by paying a bribe. Even though the level of corruption varies between countries, most people most of the time receive services without having to make payments on the side. Every national population divides into three groups: those who do not have contact with a service; those having contact without paying a bribe; and bribe-payers.

references

Eurobarometer. 2014. Corruption: Special Eurobarometer 397. Brussels:

European Commission. Goel, R.K., U. Mazhar, and M. Nelson. 2016. Corruption Across Government

Occupations: Cross-National Survey Evidence. Journal of International

Development 28 (8): 1220–1234. Karp, J.A., and D. Brockington. 2005. Social Desirability and Response Validity.

Journal of Politics 67 (3): 825–840. Kumlin, Staffan. 2004. The Personal and the Political: How Personal Welfare State

Experiences Affect Political Trust and Ideology. New york: Palgrave Macmillan. Lipsky, Michael. 2010. Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in

Public Services. New york: Russell Sage 30th Anniversary Expanded Edition. Persson, A., B. Rothstein, and J. Teorell. 2013. Why Anticorruption Reforms fail: Systemic Corruption as a Collective Action Problem. Governance 26 (3): 449–471. Reiner, Robert. 2010. The Politics of the Police. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rose, Richard, and Caryn Peiffer. 2015. Paying Bribes for Public Services: A

Global Guide to Grass-Roots Corruption. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Samuelson, P. 1954. The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure. The Review of

Economics and Statistics 36 (4): 387–389. Smith, D. 2007. A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular

Discontent in Nigeria. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tänzler, K., K. Mara, and A. Giannakopoulos (eds.). 2012. The Social

Construction of Corruption in Europe. Aldershot: Ashgate. UNODC (United Nations Offce on Drugs and Crime). 2010. Corruption in the

Western Balkans. Vienna: UNODC. Weber, Max. 1948. From Max Weber, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills.

London: Routledge. Wilson, James Q. 1991. Bureaucracy. New york: Basic Books.

CHAPTER 5

Explaining Who Pays Grass-Roots Bribes

Explanations of corruption are methodologically determined. Studies at the national levels usually concentrate on capital-intensive corruption, but understanding the experience of individuals at the grass roots requires a different approach. To infer the behaviour of individual citizens from national characteristics implies that individual behaviour is determined by the incentives and constraints imposed by their country’s institutions. If that were the case, then almost everyone living in a county with a negative rating on the Corruption of Perceptions Index would pay a bribe and nobody would do so in countries placed at the top of the Index. However, this is not the case.

To understand why individuals living in the same country differ in their experience of public services requires information about individuals as well as their national context. A sample survey of a nation’s citizens provides appropriate data for testing why some people pay bribes while others do not. However, studying people within a single country cannot take into account differences between national contexts in how public services are delivered. In default of comparative survey data, explanations must be limited to inferences or speculations. It is an ecological fallacy to project onto everyone in a society conclusions drawn from the analysis of national institutions (cf. Robinson 1950). In a complementary way, it is an individualist fallacy to explain the behaviour of individuals solely in terms of their personal characteristics and disregard how political institutions infuence what happens to individuals in the process of governance (Scheuch 1966).

© The Author(s) 2019 R. Rose and C. Peiffer, Bad Governance and Corruption, Political Corruption and Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92846-3_5 83

The experience that individuals have when contacting grass-roots offcials refects differences between people, between national contexts and between specifc public services. The need to contact public services such as education differs with stages in an individual’s life cycle. The institutions that deliver these services differ in their national history and contemporary context. In this chapter, the frst section sets out theoretical hypotheses about which individual differences cause some individuals to pay a bribe while others do not. Controlling for variations in national context, the hypotheses are then tested in the second section. The third section goes further: it tests how differences between public services such as health care and policing affect whether an individual pays a bribe for one service but not another.

1 Theories of Who Pays BriBes

The Global Corruption Barometer (GCB) shows that the probability of an individual paying a bribe varies greatly between individuals within countries where bribery is relatively common and where it is infrequent. It also provides data that can be used to test four theoretical explanations about whether an individual pays a bribe. This is likely to vary according to an individual’s contacts with services, perceptions of institutions, political effcacy and socio-economic status.

Individual differences. Contact with public offcials is a necessary condition of an individual being asked to pay a bribe. Annually, the great majority of citizens contact a public service and the proportion doing so varies little between continents. Since public services differ in how they are delivered and operate independently of each other, the fact that an individual receives one service by the book still leaves her or him vulnerable in encounters with other services. Because of variations in bribery between services, the number of times an individual contacts a single service is less important than the number of different services contacted. The more public services that an individual contacts, the more likely an individual is to pay a bribe.

When individuals contact public offcials, they have expectations infuenced by their perceptions of whether they operate by the book or by crook and this will increase their sensitivity to hints by offcials that a bribe is needed to get what they want when it is wanted. If there is a widespread perception that offcials behave corruptly, people will think it is normal

to do so. As Gunnar Myrdal (1968: 409) put it, ‘If everybody seems corrupt, why shouldn’t I be corrupt?’ The more an individual perceives public offcials as corrupt, the more likely an individual is to pay a bribe.

In a system of good governance, individuals do not need to know how to make an effective claim, because public offcials are trained to ask claimants the questions relevant to determine whether they are entitled to receive a beneft. However, in a system in which an offcial may hint at the need to pay a bribe, individuals themselves need a suffcient sense of political effcacy to demand that an offcial give them what they are entitled to without a bribe. If an offcial is unwilling to do so, people who are more politically confdent may turn to someone they know for help in pulling a hook to get what they want. People who have a low sense of political effcacy are more likely to pay a bribe if a public offcial wants it, because they lack the confdence to resist the demand. The hypothesis that follows is: The greater an individual’s sense of political effcacy, the less likely an individual is to pay a bribe.

In every society, there are multiple inequalities in the socio-economic resources of individuals and in their theoretical implications for whether people pay bribes. Theories of social status postulate that inequalities in resources have a major infuence on how individuals are treated by others in society. In a developing country, public offcials tend to have a higher status than the people they deal with because they have more education and job security. If some may use their higher status to extract bribes from lower-status people, this is in keeping with Hunt‘s theory (2007): ‘Corruption hits people when they are down’. Reciprocally, grass-roots offcials may hesitate to ask higher-status people for a bribe because the latter will be knowledgeable about their rights. The hypothesis is: The lower an individual’s social status, the more likely an individual is to pay a bribe.

Microeconomic theories postulate that socio-economic status has the opposite effect. Proft-maximizing public offcials are expected to be more likely to extract bribes from people with higher incomes because they can pay more (Becker 1968). Moreover, higher-income people should be more willing to pay a bribe since its relative cost is much less than for a poor person and the higher value of their time makes it rational to pay to jump a queue for hospital treatment or to get a permit promptly. from a rational-choice perspective: The higher an individual’s economic status, the more likely an individual is to pay a bribe.

In feminist theory, gender can infuence whether an individual is exposed to bribery (Wängnerud 2015). Especially in developing countries, social status tends to be male-dominated and men are more likely to be public offcials. Insofar as women are more likely to perform caring roles within the family, they are also more likely to be in contact with heavily used social services. Insofar as women have a lower status in a society this predicts: Women are more likely than men to pay a bribe.

Individuals in context. Of the contextual infuences on corruption tested in Chapter 3, four were statistically signifcant. In this chapter, we test the robustness of their effect by seeing whether they remain signifcant after controlling for within-country individual differences.

The impact of historical context on individuals is ignored by most theories of individual behaviour. Individuals cannot choose the country in which they are born; it is given. People are socialized from a very early age to become part of their society, whether it is governed honestly or corruptly. If you grow up in a country in which bureaucratic institutions have long been established, you do not expect public offcials to demand bribes for their services, whereas socialization in a country where bribery is part of everyday life can have the opposite effect. The hypothesized effect is: If an individual has been socialized in a country that bureaucratized early, an individual is less likely to pay a bribe.

Communist regimes represent the other extreme from commitment to the Weberian idea of bureaucracy. Marxist–Leninist doctrines give overriding authority to the Communist party to decide how services are administered. The result is: If an individual has been socialized in a country that has been under Communist rule, an individual is more likely to pay a bribe. In other words, governance is corrupt by the standards of a rule-of-law modern state. Where Communist rule was introduced after early bureaucratization, the interaction of these two opposing infuences should reduce individual payment of bribes.

Legacies favouring corruption are receding into the past, and the socialization effect of old regimes is especially weak for younger generations. In no longer Communist regimes, a steadily increasing proportion of adults have been born or socialized into the use of public services after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Democratic institutions are the only institutions that they know. In theory, these institutions make it possible for individuals to hold accountable at the ballot box politicians who are responsible for corruption. The hypothesis is: If governors can be held accountable through democratic institutions, individuals are less likely to pay a bribe.

foreign aid is signifcantly associated with capital-intensive corruption in low-income countries where it is a disproportionate amount of national income. Because foreign aid is paid to the national government, high-ranking politicians and offcials may be the frst to beneft from its corrupt management. The effect of high-level corruption may then trickle down to the grass roots. Aid projects that fnance building roads, hospitals and schools can distribute contracts and jobs to regional and local offcials who can take a percentage of what is spent for their private beneft without regard to rules governing the procurement of these services. These behaviours can encourage a tolerance of grass-roots offcials demanding bribes from individuals who have directly or indirectly beneftted fnancially from the trickle-down effects of aid. The more important foreign aid is in a national economy, the more likely an individual is to pay a bribe.

2 BoTh LeveLs maTTer

Our basic model of who pays bribes is: f(bribery) = Individual differences + National context. Logically, the combined effect of individual and contextual hypotheses can have opposing effects, with one set increasing bribery and the other reducing it. Alternatively, taking individual attitudes and behaviour into account could reduce the size of the effect of national context to insignifcance. Third, their effects may be additive, with each signifcantly exerting infuence after controlling for the effect of the other. Insofar as integrating individual and contextual infuences shows that each is signifcant, this provides a fuller explanation of who pays bribes than models relying exclusively on studies of individual effects within a single country or cross-national studies that cannot account for within-nation differences of individuals.

Multivariate statistical analyses take into account the independent effect of each hypothesized infuence after controlling for the effect of all other variables (Table 1). As we are testing what divides people who have and have not paid a bribe, we use logistic regression and treat countries as cluster variables (Rabe-Hesketh and Skrondal 2012). Since our sample of countries is far smaller than that of individuals, we consider contextual-level variables signifcant if they have a p-value below 0.10. At the individual level, we consider variables signifcant if they have a p-value below 0.001. The substantive effect of signifcant variables is shown in the column reporting shifts in predicted probabilities. Shifts estimate the change in the likelihood of paying a bribe when an independent variable changes

Table 1 Combined individual and institutional infuences on bribery

Effect on paying bribe P-value

Individual characteristics Number of contacts Perceived corruption Education female High political effcacy Low political effcacy Institutional context

Early bureaucracy Post-communist Early bur’y * Post-communist Extent democratic foreign aid Pseudo R2 Wald’s chi2 Log pseudolikelihood

0.45 0.10 0.01 −0.01 −0.01 0.01

−0.11 0.02 0.18 −0.20 0.18 0.000 0.000 0.669 0.000 0.241 0.132

0.000 0.333 0.018 0.000 0.001

17.0% 451.07 −38413

Source The effect on paying a bribe is the predicted probability of doing so due to a shift in an independent variable from its lowest to its highest value. Multivariate multi-level logistic regression of Global Corruption Barometer 2016 survey, using 97 countries for which all data are available. Probability chi: 0.000

from its minimum to its maximum value and the effect of all other variables is held constant. Appendix Table A.1 gives details of each variable.

Contact most important for individuals. Services differ in how they are delivered and the opportunities offered for bribery. It is, therefore, appropriate to test whether contacting more services increases the likelihood of an individual paying at least one bribe. This is the case. After controlling for all other infuences, the 14% who contact four or fve major services during the year have a 45% greater chance of paying a bribe than those with no contact. The median group contacts three services annually. Of this group, one in four is likely to pay a bribe but they are not inveterate payers of bribes. Instead, their experiences are mixed: Contact sometimes leads to a service being provided by the bureaucratic book and sometimes money changes hands.

The GCB measures the perception of corruption in nine different major institutions (see fig. 1 in Chapter 4). In total 37% think most or all MPs are corrupt and 36% think that most or all government offcials are corrupt. Our measure combines perceptions of government offcials,

who are responsible for delivering public services, and of MPs, who are expected to represent the interests of people receiving services. The more that individuals see public offcials as corrupt, the more likely this belief will become a self-fulflling prophecy. When confronted by an offcial demanding a bribe, those who think all offcials are corrupt are 10% more likely to pay a bribe than those who think that none want cash in hand. Although the tendency is signifcant, most people who perceive offcials as corrupt do not pay a bribe because offcials do not make this a condition of getting their service. This disjunction challenges relying on perceptions of corruption as proxy evidence of the actual payment of bribes (see Rose and Peiffer 2015: Table 5.3).

If people think bribery is wrong and public institutions tend to be corrupt, this is an incentive to avoid contact with services in order to escape the risk of having to pay a bribe because they lack the political effcacy required to make public offcials give them what they are entitled to. To assess political effcacy, people were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement: Ordinary people can make a difference in the fght against corruption. One in fve believed actions of people like themselves could make a difference, one-third explicitly disagreed with this belief and almost half had no opinion. Notwithstanding the theoretical logic about how political effcacy ought to affect how people deal with public services, the hypothesis associated with political effcacy receives no signifcant statistical support (Table 1). Those who think that ordinary people can make a difference in fghting corruption are just as likely to surrender to demands from corrupt offcials as people who feel helpless.

Major inequalities in status are measured in a multiplicity of ways. Occupational class is inappropriate for characterizing GCB respondents, since a majority live in developing countries in which many people do not have a steady occupation. Income is inappropriate, because of the lack of a single currency that can be used for international comparisons. Moreover, many GCB respondents avoid poverty by eking out their irregular cash earnings by producing much of what they consume. Education is a major source of status in every country and inequalities are particularly marked in developing countries. Countries differ in the number of years of free education offered, and within every country younger people have more opportunities for education than their elders. The GCB survey identifes three levels: no education or only an elementary level; secondary schooling; and higher education.

Education makes no difference for the payment of bribes. Educated people not only know what services they are entitled to but also know from experience that an offcial demanding a bribe has no more respect for their status than for his or her bureaucratic obligation to deliver services by the book. The lack of infuence of socio-economic status is confrmed by analysis of the 2013 GCB survey, which included a subjective measure of income: whether people view their household income as average, below average or above the average in their society. When this income measure was included in a multilevel statistical analysis, it had no signifcant effect on the likelihood of paying a bribe (Rose and Peiffer 2015: 68ff).

Gender does have a statistically signifcant infuence on bribery: Women are less likely to pay a bribe than men. However, the impact is insubstantial. After controlling for other infuences, the likelihood of a woman paying a bribe is only one percentage point less than for a man. A preliminary analysis also tested the effect of age; the result is not reported here since it had no signifcant effect on whether any bribe was paid.

Context matters too. The multilevel analysis confrms the independent effect of national context on bribery. After controlling for the effect of within-country individual differences, all four contextual infuences that signifcantly affected a country’s national Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) rating infuence individual behaviour too. Moreover, the impact of context on individual behaviour is similar in size to the impact on a country’s national CPI rating (cf. Table 1, fig. 1 and Table 1 in Chapter 3).

The signifcance of national context is strikingly illustrated by legacies from a country’s political past having a strong effect on individuals born when their country had a different political system. The impact of a country beginning to bureaucratize before 1914 is signifcant because it started a path-dependent process that has led to good governance today. After controlling for individual differences, bureaucratization begun more than a century ago reduces the likelihood of paying a bribe by 11%.

The impact of a Communist legacy is contingent. When all countries experiencing a Communist regime are grouped together, it has no signifcant effect on bribery. This is because countries that are no longer Communist do not share similar histories. Successor states of the Soviet Union, for example had no experience of early bureaucratization before becoming subject to governance in accord with Marxist–Leninist principles that relied on political favouritism rather than bureaucratic

impartiality. By contrast, a majority of Central and East European countries experienced early bureaucratization as part of the German or Austro-Hungarian empires. Even though no GCB respondents had been born when bureaucratization was introduced before 1914, they nonetheless experience its path-dependent effects today.

The interaction between being bureaucratized early and then being subject to Communist rule cuts two ways. On the one hand, dealing with offcials in a political system that had been bureaucratized early reduces the likelihood of having to pay a bribe by 11 percentage points. However, if the political system was subsequently turned into a Communist regime after the end of the Second World War, the interaction of this negative experience and the positive pre-1914 legacy raises the chance of paying a bribe by 18 points. The greater strength of the Communism legacy refects the thoroughness with which so-called Socialist legality was imposed in the wake of the Second World War. Communist commissars purged senior offcials who had been trained to administer services by the book; they were replaced by offcials whose frst loyalty was to follow the twists and turns of the Communist party line.

Since the freedom House democracy index does not discriminate between old and new democracies, its impact shows that recent changes in institutions can have a signifcant effect independent of historical legacies. Compared to countries with the lowest rating for democracy, citizens in countries that have the highest rating for democracy are 20% less likely to pay a bribe. This calls into question the argument of many democratic theorists that it takes generations for new democratic institutions to infuence the way in which public offcials behave and how ordinary citizens respond.

A second contemporary infuence, the proportion of a country’s national income coming from foreign aid, has a big trickle-down effect on individuals using services that aid helps fnance. Even though the intention of aid is to improve the quality of public services and governance, in countries where aid is most important the likelihood of an individual having to pay a bribe is 20% higher than where national governments receive no foreign aid.

The combined effect. Multilevel statistical analysis confrms that where you live is as important for paying a bribe as who you are. How individuals react to the experience of contacting public offcials cannot be fully understood by relying exclusively on measures of individual attitudes and socio-economic characteristics. four characteristics of national context

Likelihood of paying bribe

0.50

0.40

0.30

0.20

0.10 Number contacts 0.45

Early bur* Comm legacy Foreign aid 0.18 0.18 Perceived corruption 0.10

0.00

–0.10

–0.20

0.30 –0.11

–0.20

Early bureauc.

Extent democratic –0.01 Female

–0.40

–0.50

Fig. 1 Impact of signifcant infuences on paying bribe (Sources Predicted probabilities of impact of multi-level logit analysis reported in Table 1 signifcance level: characteristics < 0.001. Institutional level: < 0.05)

are signifcant. While necessary, contextual infuences are not suffcient to account for who pays bribes. Three measures of individual differences also have a signifcant impact on the payment of bribes (Table 1). from an anti-corruption perspective, the ideal system of good governance would be found in a country that began bureaucratization early, that is fully democratic today, receives no foreign aid and has never been subject to Communist rule. This combination makes the delivery of public services by the book normal. However, there are only seven countries in our GCB database that combine all four characteristics conducive to good governance. This small number refects its under-representation of countries where bribery is very low (see Appendix fig. A.1). It is due to many of Transparency International’s national chapters in Western Europe convincing TI’s Berlin headquarters not to bother asking about bribery in their countries when at most only a dozen or two respondents among the thousand persons interviewed will have paid a bribe.

In most member states of the United Nations, the national political context falls far short of what is required for good governance. More than three-quarters started bureaucratization late. fewer than half the countries evaluated by freedom House are rated as fully democratic. Moreover, among developing countries, foreign aid is often more than 1% of their national income. When tax revenue is relatively low and diffcult to collect, foreign aid constitutes a substantially larger proportion of the revenue controlled by the country’s central government.

Political leaders in countries lacking a legacy of early bureaucratization cannot be blamed for what happened long before they were born. Nor can contemporary corruption be blamed on a colonial legacy, since statistical analysis shows that it has no signifcant infuence on bribery in countries that have been independent for half a century or more. Two signifcant infuences on corruption are contemporary conditions for which today’s governors are responsible: the refusal of governors to be democratically accountable and the diversion to their private beneft of foreign aid money meant to fnance the country’s postcolonial development.

3 Differences BeTWeen services

The public services that low-level public offcials deliver at the grass roots differ from each other in what is delivered, how it is delivered and who benefts. for example, policing is different from health care in the laws police enforce, their authority to tell people what they must do, and, by contrast with the reliance on doctors for treatment, many people do not want to have contact with the police. There are also substantial differences in the extent to which people have contact with different services: Individuals are four more times as likely to contact health services during a year as the courts and half again as likely to contact schools as the police. There are also differences in the likelihood that being in contact makes a person vulnerable to paying a bribe. Even though police services are much less used than social services, the likelihood of having to pay a bribe to the police, once contact is made, is much greater than for social services (see Table 2 in Chapter 4).

The delivery of grass-roots services is a two-step process. Individuals must frst make contact with a service. This divides people into two groups: those who are not at risk of paying a bribe because they have no contact and those who face a risk, whether small or large, by being

in contact with public offcials. With the exception of health, in the year before being interviewed a majority of GCB respondents had no contact with the courts, the police, offcials issuing permits and schools. They thus were not at risk of paying a bribe. for those who do contact a service, the second step is getting what you want by the book, by hook or by crook. Individuals in contact with public services divide into two groups: the majority who do not pay a bribe to get what they want and a minority who pay a bribe at least once.

Service-specifc hypotheses. for each service, the likelihood of an individual making contact or paying a bribe may be infuenced by service-specifc features, such as the supply of hospital places, as well as by pervasive features of national context. Laws set out the specifc conditions that entitle or obligate individuals to make contact with a public service. Education is doubly affected; laws not only entitle children to receive a free education but also obligate parents to see that their children attend school. Laws about the health service do not compel individuals to have periodic check-ups or follow a healthy daily routine; they specify the conditions that entitle people to receive health care fnanced in whole or part by public funds. Contacting local offcials to secure a permit or license depends on what people want to do. If an individual wants to secure a passport for foreign travel, contact is obligatory, but foreign travel is a matter of choice. Contact with the police is contingent on individual characteristics and behaviour, and on informal as well as formal standards of police behaviour.

Social roles arising from age and gender may infuence the likelihood of individuals contacting a service. Contact with education services follows from adults being parents of school-age children. This is most likely to be the case when people are in the age range between the mid-20s and the early 50s. Social roles are different for health. Even if the whole of a country’s population is eligible for publicly funded health care, people over 65 are much more likely to need health care. Gender can also affect contact with health care, since women are a disproportionately large part of the older population. Since crime rates are higher among youths, age can infuence the extent to which young people unwillingly come into contact with the police.

Gender can affect the likelihood of men and women contacting specifc services. During the life cycle, women are more likely to need health care because they live longer in old age, when health needs are greatest, and because of needing maternity services when younger. In many

societies, women are more likely to have the role of a carer for other members of their family. Looking after a child’s education and health will bring women into contact with two public services and looking after the care of ageing parents or relatives can add to contact with health services. In more traditional societies, dealing with local government offcials may be considered a man’s role. Engagement with the police can be gender-biased towards men rather than women (Kevane 2004). (Hypothesis 1 Social role.) If an individual’s social role is relevant to a specifc service, she or he will be more likely to contact it. A corollary of this hypothesis is that, after controlling for contact, differences in age and gender will have no effect on the payment of bribes.

The supply of public services in suffcient quantity to meet all needs is taken for granted in societies with a high gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. However, in many developing countries, governments may fnd it easier to enact laws entitling people to education and health care than to fnd the money to supply the school places and health facilities needed to meet the demand they have created. The percentage of youths of secondary school age who are actually receiving a secondary education in countries covered by the GCB is as low as 21% in Niger compared to 100% in most developed countries. A good measure of the current supply of health care is the percentage of childbirths in which the mother is attended by a trained provider of healthcare services. While this is invariably the case in high-income countries, the proportion of births with a medical professional present drops to 35% in Nigeria.

When the supply of a service in demand is scarce, a standard bureaucratic practice is to introduce queuing. It can also stimulate some people to want to jump the queue. Making people queue for months for treatment for a painful illness imposes pain or worse. Raising the examination score required to enter university appears fair, but it also increases the number of applicants who cannot get a university place. Long delays can encourage people to fnd the money to pay a bribe to jump the queue for health care or to pay an education offcial to admit a youth to university whose examination marks are not high enough to qualify for a place (Aidt 2003). While scarcity in the supply of a service implies that fewer people will make contact, it also implies that bribes are more likely to be paid by those who do have contact. (Hypothesis 2 Supply of social services.) If a social service is in scarce supply, individuals are less likely to have contact but more likely to pay to pay a bribe.

In every society administering laws is not confned to the police and the courts. Regulations requiring offcial documents such as permits and licenses are an integral part of public services too. Regulations require individuals to register births, license their car if they have one and get a permit to build a house. A surplus of regulations encourages bribery; the more signatures of public offcials that are required before a document is issued, the more costly it is in time and effort to obtain them and the more opportunities there are for corrupt offcials to collect ‘rents’ (i.e. bribes) as a condition of expediting the delivery of documents. Bribes can also be paid for issuing a permit in contravention of offcial rules or ignoring the enforcement of a regulation.

Since businesses are specially subject to regulations, we measure the extent of regulation with the Regulatory Quality measure from the World Bank’s World Governance Indicators. Venezuela and Zimbabwe are ranked as having the poorest quality of regulations while Hong Kong and Australia are credited with being the countries with the highest quality of regulations. The effciency of high-quality regulations is likely to reduce the need for those affected to have lots of contacts as well as the likelihood of paying a bribe. Conversely, poor quality regulations are likely to create more burdensome red tape requirements and more need to contact public offcials for approval. (Hypothesis 3 Supply of regulations.) The greater the burden of regulations in a country, the more likely individuals are to contact regulatory services and to pay a bribe.

Public services differ in whether the state is a monopoly supplier or private sector and not-for-proft institutions offer an alternative. In virtually every country there is a choice between alternative suppliers of social services, such as public and private schools or public and private hospitals and doctors (Rosling et al. 2018). In principle, choice offers individuals the opportunity to avoid contact with corrupt public offcials by going to a non-state alternative. By contrast, if a service is a monopoly of the state, such as policing or the issuing of permits, individuals have no choice but to deal with the state when engaging with monopoly services. However, this also means that in a system of bad governance engagement with a monopoly service is at the risk of paying a bribe (cf. Hirschman 1970; Klitgaard 1988).

The theoretical rationale for making alternative services available is economic: If there is a choice between public-and private-sector institutions, the service will be more effcient. The political objection is that making alternative services more available increases social inequality,

because only those with more resources will have an effective choice between the two types of services. Even in a high-income country, the cost of using private schools and hospitals is beyond the resources of many people. In a developing country where inequalities of income and education are much greater, very few have the resources to choose between public and private social services. Those with fewer resources are more likely to have to use a public service. In a system of bad governance, the choice is likely to be between fnding the money to pay a bribe for using a social service or doing without. By contrast, those with more resources are more likely to want permits for their personal and business affairs, and thus more likely to have contact with regulators. If they cannot deal with them by invoking their higher status, the marginal cost of escaping from monopoly obligations by paying a bribe is less than for people with fewer obligations. (Hypothesis 4 Alternative services or Monopoly.) If individuals have more resources, they are less likely to contact a public service when there is an alternative but more likely to contact and pay a bribe for monopoly services.

Testing service-specifc infuences. The logic of separately examining contact and bribery at the service level is that hypothesized infuences are contingent rather than uniform. An infuence can be signifcant for contacting public services but not for paying a bribe, or vice versa. In addition, the indicators appropriate for independent variables can differ from one service to another. for example, the stage in the life cycle for contacting a public service differs between education and health care. There are also categoric differences for measuring the supply of different services.

To take account of contingencies, we test separately the infuence of social roles, the supply of services and institutional alternatives on four different services: health care, education, permits and the police. In doing so, we control for the effect of differences in national context. To test our two-stage model statistically, we employ a Heckman (1979) logistic regression model, which estimates the impact of the hypothesized effects on contact, and by accounting for those infuences on contact, the model also identifes the independent infuences of hypothesized effects on the payment of a bribe (Table 2).

The frst criterion for testing a hypothesis is whether it has a statistically signifcant effect on contact with particular services and/or paying a bribe. The second criterion is whether a signifcant infuence also has a substantial infuence, that is whether the estimated size of its effect is

Police Bribe

Cont

Permits

Comparing infuences on contact and bribery by service

2 Table

Health

Education Bribe

Cont

Bribe

Cont

Bribe

Cont (Impact of signifcant infuences on contact and bribery) 0.07 n.s. n.s.

0.02 0.06 − n.s.

0.05 − − 0.01 n.s.

− 0.20 0.04 − n.s.

n.s. n.s. n.s.

n.s. 0.05 n.s.

n.s. n.s. n.s.

0.09 n.s. n.s. n.a. − 0.18

n.a. n.s.

n.a. 0.06 −

n.a. n.s.

n.s. n.a.

n.s. n.a.

n.s. n.a.

n.s. n.a. n.a. n.s.

n.a. n.s.

n.a. n.s.

n.a. n.s.

n.s. n.a.

n.s. n.a.

n.s. n.a.

n.s. n.a. − 0.13 n.s.

0.08 n.a.

0.03 − − 0.03

n.s. n.a.

− 0.06 − 0.06

n.s. n.a.

0.09 − n.s.

n.s. n.a. − 0.16 n.s. n.s. − 0.23 0.32

− 0.12 0.10 − 0.18 n.s. n.s.

0.04 − − 0.04 0.11 − 0.05 n.s.

− 0.18 0.24 − 0.27 n.s. n.s.

− 0.06 n.s. 0.10 − 0.07 0.11

n.s. − 0.12 0.20 n.s. 0.13

n.s. n.s. n.s. 0.11 − 0.24

0.19 − − 0.21 0.20 n.s. n.s.

Social roles Life cycle Gender Education Supply Social services Regulation Alternative providers available y es Choice: Monopoly: No Controls: Individual Perceptions N contacts Controls: Context Early bureaucracy Post-communist Bur’y * P-communist Extent democratic oreign aid f

0.10 < p -value 0.001; context: < p -value Individual level variables signifcant: f or alternatives available education is used as a proxy for income. The impact coeffcient is the predicted probability of a shift from the Note and Source 3 f or full details, see Table lowest to the highest value of an independent variable. Heckman logit analysis of Global Corruption Survey 2016.

relatively large or small. Third, we compare whether an infuence is consistently signifcant and strong across most services analysed. Given the volume of statistics generated by testing the Heckman model, Table 2 presents results only for signifcant infuences on each service. The full regression statistics are given in Table 3.

The importance of social roles related to gender and to age are each contingently signifcant. for education, middle-aged persons are more likely to have children, and therefore are nine percentage points more likely to have contact with education offcials compared to young people who have not yet started a family and compared to older adults whose children have completed their education. Gender is signifcantly associated with contact with health services while being older has no infuence. Whatever their age, women are 5% more likely to contact health services than men. The absence of an age effect is likely to be due to the fact that women are likely to have need of health services at both ends of the life cycle: When women are young maternity services are needed for themselves and for their children and when women are older, health services are needed to deal with conditions of old age.

Since many permits involve once-for-all concerns arising in earlier stages of the life cycle, the impact of age on contact is very strong, 20 percentage points. The police are signifcantly more likely to be in contact with young people but the margin is slight. Once the impact of age on contact is accounted for, life cycle differences have no signifcant relationship with paying a bribe for social services and young people are only 3% more likely to pay a bribe to the police. Differences in contact and bribery due to a person’s position in the life cycle are signifcant but temporary. In the course of the life cycle an individual’s need for contact is likely to change, being biased towards education when younger and health care when older.

The social role of women has a signifcant infuence on contact too. Women are more likely to have contact with social services than men, although the impact of being a woman increases the likelihood of contact with health services by no more than fve percentage points. Being female is associated with a slight increase in the likelihood of contacting education offcials but the effect falls short of signifcance (Table 3). Gender also has a predicted impact on contacting obligatory services. Women are 4% less likely to seek permits and 6% less likely to be in contact with the police. After accounting for the impact of gender on contact, there is no signifcant impact of gender on bribery except for permits, for which men are only 1% more likely to pay bribes than women.

Police P-value

PP shift 0.002 0.000 0.077

0.02 0.06 − 0.04 0.305

0.14 0.000

0.08 0.044 0.006 0.027 0.748 0.853

0.12 − − 0.10 0.18 − 0.02 0.03 0.002 0.084 0.456

0.03 − 0.02 0.01 0.081

− 0.18 continued

P-value

Permits PP shift 0.000 0.000 0.131

0.20 − − 0.04 0.04 0.987

0.00 0.347

0.02 − 0.039 0.000 0.010 0.919 0.940

0.18 − 0.24 − 0.27 0.01 − 0.01 0.000 0.000 0.271

0.05 − 0.01 − 0.00 0.043

0.06 −

Heckman analysis of infuences on contact and bribery

3 Table

Health

Education P-value

PP shift

P-value

PP shift 0.012 0.000 0.659

0.03 0.05 0.01 0.176

0.08

0.000 0.013 0.198

0.09 0.01 0.05 0.208

0.09 − 0.577

− 0.01 0.404 0.001 0.008 0.642 0.010

− 0.05 − 0.12 0.20 0.03 0.13

0.440 0.004 0.000 0.023 0.196 0.523

0.03 − 0.19 0.21 − 0.20 0.06 0.05 0.922 0.012 0.781

0.00 0.01 − 0.00

0.517 0.918 0.770

0.06 − 0.00 0.01 0.813

0.00

0.128

0.09

CONTACT Social roles Life cycle Gender Education Supply Social services Regulation Controls: Individual PerceptionsControls: Context Early bureaucracy Post-Communist Bureaucracy Post-C Extent democratic f oreign aid BRIBERY Social roles Life cycle Gender Education Supply Social Services Regulation

continued

3 Table

Police

Permits

Health

Education P-value

PP shift

P-value

PP shift

P-value

PP shift

P-value

PP shift 0.000 0.042

0.13 − 0.07

0.000 0.000

0.03 0.03

0.000 0.000

0.06 0.06

0.000 0.020

0.09 0.08 0.000 0.697 0.339 0.011 0.000 562.10 − 65,501 134,870

− 0.16 − 0.02 0.07 − 0.23 0.32

0.000 0.000 0.003 0.046 0.119 555.40 − 79,368 134,870

− 0.04 − 0.04 0.11 0.05 − 0.05

0.002 0.479 0.025 0.022 0.039 225.30 − 87,604 133,670

− 0.06 0.01 0.10 − 0.07 0.11

0.140 0.661 0.378 0.053 0.009 180.50 70,507 − 126,459

− 0.16 − 0.05 0.16 0.11 − 0.24

Controls: Individual Perceptions N of contactsControls: Context Early bur’y Post-comm Bur * Post-C Democratic f oreign aid Wald’s chi2 -likelihood Log P N Global Corruption Barometer surveys, 2016 the number of countries varies with availability of full data: Education, 90 countries, Health 96, Permits and Police 97. Each of the four logits has a probability chi2 of 0.000. Supply of service uses three indicators: % of births attended by skilled health staff; gross % of secondary school age youths enrolled; and the regulatory quality score from the World Governance Indicators Relevant age in life cycle: Health, over 65; Education: most likely to have children in school, 26–55; Police: younger than 35. Permits: grouped categories for age in years ranging from 1 (18–25) to 8 (86 or older)

Source

More educated people ought to be better at understanding bureaucratic rules and feel more confdent in asking assistance from well-educated doctors and teachers. Having a better understanding of their entitlements may encourage educated people to ignore signals from offcials about paying a bribe. By contrast, people with a minimum of education may be intimidated and feel they must pay bribes to get what they want. This generalization can be applied to the use of obligatory services such as the need for permits as well as desirable social services.

Although the inequality between high and low education is clear, it does not lead to a signifcant difference in the use of public services. Less educated people are just as likely as more educated people to have contact with each of the four services. However, equality in vulnerability to corrupt offcials has a cost in countries where corruption is relatively high, since it means that offcials are prepared to exploit the great majority of their subjects, regardless of their social or economic status.

Contrary to the importance of supply and demand in economic theory, whether there is a suffcient supply of social services or they are scarce has no signifcant infuence on whether people make contact with social services. A shortage of school places may mobilize parents to badger education offcials in hopes that persistence may secure a scarce place, people seeking medical treatment in short supply may resort to methods to get what they want by using hooks rather than bribery. The quality of regulations has no impact on contact with permits offces or the police, however, it does have an infuential association with bribery. In an environment of weak regulations, people are more likely to pay a bribe to get what they want, such as the non-enforcement of a law by the police.

The theory that choice and monopoly services will differentiate users according to their resources is not supported by statistical analysis (Table 2). Whereas income can be a suitable indicator of resources in a fully monetized society, the GCB includes many countries in which people may rely on getting what they want by being in the know politically. Since more educated people ought to know better how to work their political system, we use it as our measure of resourcefulness as well as of having a social role. Table 2 shows that having more education does not result in signifcantly opting out of contact with public services. Instead, it may enable people to remain in the public sector by getting preferential treatment without being more likely to pay a bribe. Nor do educated people more often use monopoly services. If they do, their knowledge does not make them less likely to be subject to paying a bribe than people without their resources.

Contrary to theoretical expectations, the extent to which people perceive political institutions as corrupt has no signifcant effect on contact with three services (Table 2). The exception is the police: people with a negative view of the police are eight percentage points more likely to be in contact. In other words, experience counts as well as second-hand accounts from television or other media. Because of the overlap in the independent and dependent variables, the number of services an individual contacts cannot be applied to individual services.

Individual controls consistently infuence the payment of bribes for specifc services. The effect of perceptions on bribery is as high as 13 percentage points for police, even after controlling for the effect of perceptions on contact. Perceptions also have a signifcant impact on the other three services. The number of services contacted also has a signifcant effect on the payment of bribes for health care and for permits.

Applying contextual controls to specifc services produces a better understanding of the legacy of Communist regimes (Table 2). In countries with this anti-bureaucratic legacy, people are consistently less likely to contact services. The impact of living in a post-Communist country reduces the likelihood of people seeking permits by 24 percentage points. People prefer to evade requirements for documents rather than risk having to pay a bribe to comply with the law. A similar aversion is shown towards the police. Not contacting schools is a refection of less need to do so because of the drop in birth rates after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Bribery becomes signifcant when there is an interaction of the legacy of early bureaucratization in Habsburg and Wilhelmine German lands and a Communist legacy. This consistently increases contact with all four services; however, this can be an ambiguous beneft. The interaction results in an increase of 11 percentage points in the likelihood of paying a bribe to get permits rather than evade this requirement and an increase of 10 points in the likelihood of paying a bribe for health services.

The extent of democratization has no signifcant effect on contact with particular services, a reminder that the provision of public services is consistent with ‘welfare state authoritarianism’ as well as the satisfaction of popular demands that can be registered in a democratic political system. Consistent with theories associating democracy and good governance, having fully democratic institutions substantially reduces the likelihood of paying bribes for all four services. The impact is greatest for policing; those living in a fully democratic regime are 23% less likely to pay a bribe to the police and 11% less likely to pay a bribe for education.

Although a signifcant amount of foreign aid is meant to be invested in promoting human capital through improved education and health care, aid levels have no signifcant effect on contact with education, but a high level of foreign aid is associated with greater use of health care. Citizens living in highly aid-dependent countries are 11% more likely to pay a bribe for health care, 24% for education services and 32% more likely to pay a bribe to the police. This fnding is consistent with foreign aid being more likely to be given to countries that the CPI characterizes as having the most corruption (Table 1 in Chapter 3) Grass-roots public employees may then emulate their national politicians by demanding bribes for the delivery of retail services.

The focus on specifc services shows that people who contact several services may not always have to pay a bribe and that this variable is different across service types (see fig. 4 in Chapter 4 ). Moreover, it offers evidence to policymakers about what infuences people to make more or less use of particular services. The importance of contextual differences in both models emphasizes that a major source of the inequality in the payment of bribes for public services is not within a country but between countries.

references

Aidt, Toke. 2003. Economic Analysis of Corruption: A Survey. The Economic

Journal 113 (491): f632–f652. Becker, Gary. 1968. Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach. Journal of

Political Economy 76: 169–217. Heckman, J. 1979. Sample Selection Bias as a Specifcation Error. Econometrica 47 (1): 53–161. Hirschman, Albert O. 1970. Exit, Voice and Loyalty. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press. Hunt, J. 2007. How Corruption Hits People When They Are Down. Journal of

Development Economics 84: 574–589. Kevane, M. 2004. Women and Development in Africa. Boulder, CO: Lynne

Rienner Publishers. Klitgaard, Robert E. 1988. Controlling Corruption. Berkeley: University of

California Press. Myrdal, Gunnar. 1968. Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations.

New york: Pantheon. Rabe-Hesketh, Sophia, and Skrondal, Anders, 2012. Multilevel and Longitudinal

Modelling Using Stata, 3rd ed. College Station, TX: Stata Press.

Robinson, William S. 1950. Ecological Correlations and the Behaviour of

Individuals. American Sociological Review 15: 350–357. Rose, Richard, and Caryn Peiffer. 2015. Paying Bribes for Public Services: A

Global Guide to Grass-Roots Corruption. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rosling, Hans, Ola Rosling, Rosling Ronnlund, and Anna. 2018. Factfulness.

London: Sceptre. Scheuch, Erwin K. 1966. Cross-National Comparisons Using Aggregate Data:

Some Substantive and Methodological Problems. In Comparing Nations, ed.

Richard L. Merritt and Stein Rokkan, 131–168. New Haven: yale University

Press. Wängnerud, Lena. 2015. Gender and Corruption. In Routledge Handbook of

Political Corruption, ed. Paul M. Heywood, 288–299. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 6

Politicians Behaving Badly

Corruption studies evaluate behaviour by a combination of legal and normative standards. The two are mutually re-enforcing; when a public offcial takes a bribe, it is both illegal and wrong to do so. When social scientists write about political behaviour it is characterized in ethically neutral terms; for example, it is assumed that winning an election is better than losing an election. By contrast, ordinary people are ready to describe the behaviour of politicians as normatively good or bad. Thus, even though critics of Donald Trump accept that he was successful in winning the White House, they regard him as a politician who exhibits bad behaviour in dealing with facts, with women and with Members of Congress.

In social psychological terms, informal standards are expectations that people hold in their mind about how public offcials ought to behave. These expectations are more wide-ranging and less clear-cut than formal standards set out in legal statutes. Norms of how people ought to behave can be common to both private and public behaviour, such as not telling lies. They can be confned to private behaviour of no concern to the law, such as not cheating in a game of cards or golf. Some forms of behaviour are entirely legal but normatively unacceptable. The distinction is particularly clear in the contrast between tax avoidance and tax evasion. The former involves using legal loopholes to avoid the payment of millions in taxes, while tax evasion involves the violation of tax laws.

© The Author(s) 2019 R. Rose and C. Peiffer, Bad Governance and Corruption, Political Corruption and Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92846-3_6 107

Bureaucratic standards consist of impersonal rules devoid of normative language. Impersonal rules are deemed necessary in order to ensure that bureaucratic agents carry out the directions of their political principals. The implicit assumption is that public offcials ought to comply with the choices of their legitimate superiors. Insofar as impersonal rules ensure that everyone is treated the same then bureaucratic impersonality is ethically desirable because it promotes fairness in the treatment of citizens wanting to use a public service.

Informal norms can be derived from personal relationships. The belief that you ought to stand by a friend in trouble is shared by politicians. When a friend’s political behaviour is challenged, at frst political leaders usually stand by their friend and dismiss charges as partisan motivated. However, if political pressures are re-enforced by evidence, a leader is likely to accept impersonal standards of good behaviour and tell the friend to resign.

Given a choice, citizens can apply partisan standards that dismiss charges against a politician in their own party while vilifying similar actions by a partisan opponent. A social democrat can regard legal contributions that businesses make to their opponents as a sign of corruption, while supporters of a pro-market party can regard trade union contributions to their opponents as a way of buying social benefts for their members fnanced by taxpayers’ money. Whatever the evidence of corruption, on election day both groups may follow the maxim: My party, right or wrong. Voters without a strong party identifcation may judge both types of fund-raising as violating informal standards of good governance. In polarized political systems, voters can regard corruption in the governing party as a lesser evil to the alternative at hand. In Italy during the Cold War, the Christian Democratic Party was regularly re-elected, because more voters preferred a party of democratic bad governance as a lesser evil than a Communist Party threatening undemocratic governance.

Public offcials are particularly vulnerable to being held to higher informal standards of behaviour than ordinary people. If the media reveal that a politician has behaved inconsistent with public norms, for example, being publicly drunk while travelling abroad to an offcial meeting, it brings a public offce into disrepute. By contrast, if a private person gets drunk or misbehaves on holiday, this is a private matter known only to a small number of people. Business people who use tax loopholes to avoid high taxes may be admired for their cleverness, whereas a politician who does so can be regarded as shirking their duty to pay taxes according to the laws that they enact.

Punishments differ between types of bad behaviour. Laws specify the punishments to which a public offcial is subject if found guilty of taking a bribe. They can range from a fne to a jail sentence. Politicians who behave badly but do not break a law are subject to judgment by the court of public opinion. This metaphorical court is not a formal institution but a virtual body in which opinions can be expressed by MPs, parties, established and social media, and measured by public opinion polls. A politician who is judged to have behaved badly is expected at the least to make a public apology and at the most to lose offce and serve a jail sentence.

1 ToLeraTeD anD shamefuL Behaviour

The judgment of behaviour by informal standards can be inconsistent with legal judgments in two contrasting ways. If the law broken carries no moral stigma, for example, smoking marihuana in youth or driving faster than the speed limit, it is usually judged tolerantly in the court of public opinion. Alternatively, acquittal in a court of law is not suffcient to make an action normatively acceptable. Actions that are legal can nonetheless be deemed bad because they violate informal normative standards, for example, the use of politically incorrect language. If this verdict is applied to a politician’s behaviour, then he or she is expected to demonstrate a sense of shame by apologizing. If shameful behaviour is deemed serious, voluntary or forced resignation may be required to satisfy the judgment of the court of public opinion.

The standards used to label behaviour are socially constructed and this is true of formal legal statutes as well as of informal social norms. When norms are enacted as laws, they can readily be identifed by reference to the statute book. In youth, individuals learn informal norms about the right way to behave in their relationships with other people. Conformity to widely shared standards is evident in everyday relationships, but these standards are unwritten codes. More than that, some norms are contested. Norms about what is politically correct are particularly open to dispute because politics is about the articulation of competing values. In the absence of recourse to a court of law, disputes about informal norms are resolved in the court of public opinion.

Informal standards vary. The broadest standard is that public offcials should act in the public interest to beneft the whole of society rather than in their self-interest. This norm is complementary to the Transparency International defnition of corruption as the abuse of

entrusted power for private gain. The vagueness of the term public interest means that it can be invoked by any politician seeking rhetorical support for their actions and opponents can be denounced as acting in their self-interest. The protean character of its meaning leaves open to debate how the public interest is defned (Ho 2011).

Confict of interest laws specify a formal standard of what is not in the public interest. A confict of interest exists when a public offcial participates in making a decision in which his or her multiple interests, political or fnancial, create the risk that a public decision will not be made on its merits but to beneft the private interest of the policymaker. Unlike anti-bribery laws, which are intended to punish bad behaviour after the fact or discourage it for fear of punishment, confict of interest laws are intended to prevent bad behaviour. This can be done by disqualifying from participating in a decision anyone whose private interests could create suspicion that their self-interest infuenced their behaviour. This guards both the decision process and the public offcial from any suspicion of violating standards.

A weaker law requires a policymaker to declare any material interest that they have in an issue that they are reviewing. Bad behaviour occurs if an offcial fails to declare a potential confict of interest, for example, a local councillor not disclosing that a plot of ground his family owns would increase substantially in value if the council grants planning permission. Many parliaments now require MPs to declare their family’s fnancial assets and income and benefts in kind that they receive to prevent politicians from using other members of their household as a shield so that they can deny having personally received money or other benefts. However, this is not an effective barrier, as demonstrated by the American tax reform act of 2017, which concentrated billions of dollars of benefts on less than 1% of the population, multimillionaires and billionaires supporting the Republican Party.

Members of Parliament have ex offcio conficts of interests when they make laws that affect themselves. Elected politicians are particularly concerned with laws that determine who can vote, how votes can be cast and counted, and how this affects their personal re-election and their party’s success. When population changes require redrawing electoral boundaries, the party in power can gerrymander constituency boundaries to give itself the maximum of seats with the minimum of votes. As insiders, elected politicians have a collective interest in maintaining the laws that

make it diffcult for new parties to win seats. In the United Kingdom, insiders defend an electoral system that manufactures a majority of seats from a minority of votes by claiming that any change would make weak coalition or minority governments inevitable. The choice of how to allocate seats proportionately has enabled politicians from Spain to Ireland to make their system of proportional representation more disproportional.

The distinction between public laws and informal normative standards is also acute for the remuneration of elected offcials. Legislators feel a normative obligation to limit their formal salary to a sum acceptable to voters, while being ready to apply informal standards when making rules about claiming expenses and hiring staff paid from public funds. for decades British MPs accepted a relatively low salary by private-sector standards because, as a Labour Party chief whip told them, they could ‘pig it on expenses’, that is, augment their public salary by claiming generous expenses (see Hine and Peele 2016). Parliamentary rules allowed Conservative MPs to claim for such expenses as having the moat around their country house cleaned and for sacks of manure to spread on their garden. young Labour MPs demonstrated their entrepreneurial skills by buying a London home aided by public money, and renovating it to sell after a few years at a large proft. When leaks to the media and court orders revealed expense claims to public scrutiny, 389 MPs were so shamed by what was revealed that they repaid thousands of pounds that they had legally received, and dozens of MPs chose not to stand for re-election (vanHeerde-Hudson 2014).

Theories of interest group politics challenge the idea of the public interest. In place of widely held common interests, society is seen as divided into conficting interests, for example, low-paid versus high-paid workers, and old people receiving pensions fnanced in part by contributions of younger people. In democratic theory, politicians should represent the interests of the bloc of the electorate that give them their votes, whether these interests are economic, social or cultural. from this perspective, charges that MPs ‘buy’ votes by enacting laws that beneft their voters represent an abuse of rhetoric. Cutting taxes on businesses or raising the minimum wage is what Conservative and Labour supporters expect their party to do. MPs can justify their actions by saying they are promoting the interests of those who vote for them. from this perspective, bad behaviour would be to renege or ignore the interests of people they are meant to represent.

Normative standards contested. Black-letter laws facilitate agreement about what constitutes legal and illegal behaviour in public offce, and courts can apply and enforce legal standards. However, because informal standards are not authorized in public documents this facilitates disagreement about whether or not actions of politicians are shameful. Because norms are informal, they cannot be contested in a court of law. In a free society, this is left to politicians and the media, and public opinion polls and elections give ordinary citizens a chance to act as a jury and register their views.

The need for international agreement about normative standards is particularly important today as the spread of global trade and foreign aid involves the movement of large amounts of money between developed and developing countries to fnance capital-intensive projects. The rhetoric of international organizations goes further; its treaties endorse a commitment to universal standards of behaviour, such as delivering public services in accord with bureaucratic standards of fairness and not abusing public offce for private gain.

Leaders of countries corrupt by internationally proclaimed standards reject the assumption that these standards are, or ought to be universal. In countries that were once colonies, anti-corruption standards of good governance may be charged with refecting the cultural imperialism of Western countries that ignore cross-cultural differences in political norms about how a country ought to be governed. The allocation of valuable European Union-funded contracts to cronies of Hungary’s governors is deemed corrupt by EU standards. Prime Minister Viktor Orban has dismissed this judgment as a refection of liberal democratic values inconsistent with Hungary’s illiberal democracy. Claims that national values about corruption differ are rejected by survey evidence. The Global Corruption Barometer shows that in countries in which corruption is high, such as Russia, citizens have the same evaluation of corruption as in countries where it is low.

Theories of national political culture postulate that the maintenance of a political system requires an agreement on a minimum of political values and beliefs that are part of the informal rules of the game. However, even if there is agreement in the abstract about a cultural norm, partisan loyalties create differences of opinion about whether a particular action constitutes bad behaviour. When President Richard Nixon was under investigation for his part in the Watergate break in, his senior spokesman Pat Buchanan dismissed the charges as an attempt by Democrats to

reject the will of the American electorate, which had given Nixon 62% of the vote. When President Bill Clinton was charged with engaging in inappropriate sexual activities in the Oval Offce, Democrats dismissed his impeachment as a partisan act by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.

Decisions about behaviour also vary between personalities within a party. Although the British Labour Party has always denounced great inequalities of wealth as morally unacceptable, Peter Mandelson, the chief strategist of Labour leader Tony Blair, declared, that he was intensely relaxed about people getting ‘flthy rich’. Once Tony Blair left Downing Street, he followed this dictum, making millions by advising fnancial institutions in Wall Street and governments in countries such as Kazakhstan, Rwanda, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi. Blair described these money-making activities as ‘a series of deep business and government connections around the world that do both business and philanthropy’ (quoted in Ungoed-Thomas 2015). Labour politicians have felt differently. Before the 2015 British general election Blair gave £1000 to each of 100 Labour parliamentary candidates. Blair’s money was refused by a number of candidates because they regarded its source as tainted.

The assumptions on which social science theories of corruption rest tend to have a strong normative element. This is particularly true of microeconomics which replaces norms of good governance and the Rechtsstaat (Rule of law state) with the norm of self-interest. Calculations of individual costs and benefts replace regard for standards of right and wrong. from this perspective, it is not the law that motivates behaviour but the instrumental utility of conforming to a law. Offceholders will bend or break formal laws if the benefts of doing so— the cash value of a bribe and the satisfaction gained by obliging friends and political superiors—is greater than the risk of legal sanctions (cf. Becker 1997; Rose 1992).

Private enterprises put the material interests of shareholders and senior managers frst; the public benefts of private enterprise are, as Adam Smith noted, a by-product of the spirit of capitalism. A business-oriented cost-beneft analysis in countries where laws are fairly enforced with bureaucratic predictability can endorse the reputational value of good governance. However, in societies in which this is not the case, a cost-beneft calculation can show that paying a bribe to obtain a capital-intensive contract is money well spent because the resulting proft is much greater than the cost of the bribe. Moreover, the risk of doing so

may be less than the risk of having property confscated if a corrupt offcial is not given a bribe. Likewise, it makes business sense to pay an offcial money on the side to act immediately rather than being dilatory in delivering a permit to which an enterprise is legally entitled. However, by standards of good governance, this mutually benefcial exchange is corrupt.

2 The exTenT of BaD Behaviour

Standards can specify how politicians ought to behave but they cannot describe how they actually behave. Politicians who engage in bad behaviour would rather keep such activities private than have them publicized in the media. However, names make news and, because they are public persons, politicians are newsworthy. for television personalities and pop music stars, almost any form of publicity is welcome, including stories that show they have the money and the brazenness to violate conventional standards of behaviour. By contrast, politicians are expected to avoid behaving in ways that would bring their offce into disrepute. Nonetheless, like the people they represent, politicians have human failings, and public offce provides opportunities for politicians to enjoy a very important person (VIP) style of life that is not available to the great majority of citizens.

The freedom of the media to publicize bad behaviour varies enormously between countries. In some, laws give the media broad freedom to publish whatever they want, while in others censorship is strict and governors harass or even imprison media critics. The political interests of owners of print media can affect what it considered ft or unsuitable to print and judgments vary between media outlets. Broadcasting authorities have historically been most subject to the infuence of governments that control their licenses. Political journalists have likes and dislikes among the politicians they deal with on a regular basis and this can affect what they choose to expose and what is kept out of the paper. New electronic devices can catch politicians off guard and circulate their actions through social media that conventional media will also publicize to a politician’s embarrassment.

Public perceptions of bad behaviour. The tendency for citizens of West European democracies to see their governors as affected by corruption to some degree suggests that even though few people pay bribes to get the public services that they want, they are likely to see their elected

representatives as breaking informal norms as well as anti-corruption laws. To test the extent to which Europeans think this is the case, we designed and felded a Politicians Behaving Badly (PBB) survey in Britain, france and Spain. While all three countries are democracies and prosperous by international standards, their political and bureaucratic histories differ signifcantly from each other (Della Porta and Meny 1997; Tänzler et al. 2012). They also differ in their rating on the 100-point Corruption Perception Index. The British rating of 81 places it in the top tenth of countries and france is rated 70. The lower rating of Spain, 58, nonetheless leaves it among the best rated quarter of countries in the Corruption Perceptions Index. In each country, the proportion of respondents paying a bribe in the past year is very low (Appendix fig. A.1).

National media in all three countries regularly publicize examples of bad behaviour. In addition to reporting embarrassing claims for expenses by MPs, the British press provides a steady drip of exposures of distinctive sexual liaisons of politicians and about the way Tony Blair misleadingly took the country to war with Iraq. In france, the sex life of the then President, francois Hollande, was the object of media attention and ridicule. french concerns about how politicians use public offce has been underlined by revelations of public payments to the wife of a leading presidential candidate, francois fillon, and sleaze charges forcing the resignation of three ministers of President Emanuel Macron. At the time of the survey, Spain was going through a series of well-publicized corruption trials involving major politicians and parties in government at the national and regional levels and only 55% of voters and less than twoffths of the electorate voted for the two alternative parties of government, the Socialists and the Popular Party.

Because bad behaviour can take a variety of forms, some illegal and others legal but shameful, the PBB survey asked people about their perceptions of fve different activities. Two referred explicitly to public offcials taking bribes, while another ambiguously referred to MPs taking money in exchange for favours. Two questions referred to behaviour by politicians that was not illegal but could be deemed shameful: over-indulging in drink, sex or drugs, or making misleading promises when seeking votes. for each activity, people were asked whether they saw all, most, some, or hardly any offcials engaging in bad behaviour.

The job security of civil servants is meant to strengthen their commitment to acting in accord with legal standards when making decisions about capital-intensive projects, because they have the knowledge

Table 1 Popular perceptions of Politicians Behaving Badly

Britain (%) France (%) Spain (%) Mean (%) All or most behave badly

Politicians promise one thing, do another 73 84 86 81

High-level offcials take bribes

27 35 41 34 MPs take money for favours 29 35 36 33 Politicians over-indulge in private 28 24 17 23 Hospital offcials take bribes 11 9 12 11 Average (34) (37) (38) (36)

Source Politicians Behaving Badly survey organised by the Centre for the Study of Public Policy and the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin. Nationwide sample surveys in which Effcience3 interviewed 1004 people in Britain, 1003 in france and 1000 in Spain between 11 December 2015 and 22 January 2016

of the procedures that ought to be followed in awarding valuable contracts. PBB respondents were, therefore, asked: How many high-level government offcials take big bribes to give a business a contract it should not have received? In all three countries, those seeing high-level offcials taking big-money bribes from business are a minority. In Britain, where civil servants are expected to be non-partisan offcials, 27% think most high-ranking offcials are involved in bribery. The proportion rises to one-third in france and two-ffths in Spain, where civil servants can also have partisan ties (Table 1).

Whereas high-ranking offcials are by defnition remote from ordinary people, local hospitals are not. To test popular perceptions about offcials at a level where people may have frst-hand knowledge, the PBB survey asked about hospital offcials taking bribes to allow people to jump long queues to get an operation without a painful wait. The phrasing made clear that offcials were behaving illegally, while the service provided, helping a sick person get an operation quickly, was desirable. In each country only one in ten thought most hospital administrators were taking money in order to let people jump queues. This compares with 1% of Britons and Spaniards reporting having paid a bribe for a health service in the past year and 5% of french (Eurobarometer 2014: 88).

Members of Parliament are expected to be helpful to people they represent by responding to requests from constituents for assistance and regard doing favours for constituents as an electoral asset. Help can take the form