Researchers in New York have found a correlation between UN members countries who flout traffic fines and the level of corruption in their home countries.
Their approach avoids the problem of differential legal enforcement levels across countries, and more generally strips out enforcement effects, since there was essentially no enforcement of parking violations for diplomats during the main study
period.
We thus intepret diplomats’ behavior as reflecting their underlying propensity to break rules for private gain when enforcement is not a consideration.
The authors say: “The parking violations data are at the individual diplomat level for over 1700 U.N. mission diplomats, allowing us to study how individual behavior changes over time and hence the evolution of corruption norms.
For diplomats from high corruption countries of origin, a model of convergence to United States norms of compliance would (presumably) predict a decline in the rate of parking violations over time, as tenure in the U.S. increases.
By contrast, a model of convergence to the “zero enforcement norm” would imply an increase in violations over time, particularly for officials from low corruption countries.
We do find some evidence for the latter: the frequency of violations increases with tenure in New York City.
However, in contrast to models of norm convergence, we do not find a statistically significant interaction effect of home-country corruption levels and tenure in New York, implying there is a similar (proportional) increase in rule-breaking for diplomats across the board from both high and low corruption countries.”
I intend to plough through this study over the next little while. If you want to look for yourself the paper is here.
No comments:
Post a Comment