Corruption and social values: do postmaterialists justify bribery?

Maria Kravtsova (), Aleksey Oshchepkov and Christian Welzel ()
Additional contact information
Maria Kravtsova: National Research University Higher School of Economics,
Christian Welzel: Center for the Study of Democracy, Leuphana University

HSE Working papers from National Research University Higher School of Economics

Abstract: Using World Values Survey data from dozens of countries around the world, this article analyzes the relationship between postmaterialist values and attitudes towards bribery in a multi-level framework. This is an inherently interesting and under-researched topic because the various propensities attributed to postmaterialism lead to conflicting expectations about how these values affect attitudes towards bribery. On one hand, the alleged tendency of postmaterialists towards impartiality should lead them to condemn bribery. On the other hand, condemning bribery is a social desirability issue and postmaterialists are known to be less susceptible to desirability pressures and more relaxed about norm deviations. From this point of view, postmaterialists might be more tolerant toward bribery. Reflecting these conflicting expectations, we obtain an ambivalent result, evident in an inverted U-shaped relationship: as we move from pure materialism to mixed positions, people tend to justify bribery more, but then moving from mixed positions to pure postmaterialism, people become again more dismissive of bribery. What is more, the demographic prevalence of postmaterialists in a country moderates these values’ effect on bribery: where postmaterialists are more prevalent, the disapproving effect on bribery outweighs the approving effect. This finding contributes to a better understanding of the pronounced negative correlation between corruption and postmaterialism at the country level and has some important implications.

Keywords: corruption; bribery; social values; postmaterialism; impartiality; norm deviations. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 D73 K42 Z10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in WP BRP Series: Sociology / SOC, January 2013, pages 1-36

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.hse.ru/data/2014/01/23/1325408143/34SOC2014.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hig:wpaper:34/soc/2014

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in HSE Working papers from National Research University Higher School of Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Shamil Abdulaev () and Shamil Abdulaev ().