Identity and Corruption: A Laboratory Experiment

Maria Cubel, Anastasia Papadopoulou and Santiago Sánchez-Pagés

No 9ch2d, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: This paper explores the role of identity in voters’ decision to retain corrupt politicians. We build up a model of electoral accountability with pure moral hazard and bring it to the lab. Politicians must decide whether to invest in a public project with uncertain returns or to keep the funds for themselves. Voters observe the outcome of the project but not the action of the politician; if the project is unsuccessful, they do not know whether it was because of bad luck or because the politician embezzled the funds. We run two treatments; a control treatment and a treatment where subjects are assigned an identity using the minimal group paradigm. Our main result is that, upon observing a failed project, voters approve politicians of their same identity group significantly more often than in the control and compared to politicians of a different group. This is partially driven by a belief on same-identity politicians being more honest. We also observe that subjects acting as politicians are much more honest than expected by the equilibrium prediction.

Date: 2022-09-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-exp and nep-pol
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Working Paper: Identity and Corruption: A Laboratory Experiment (2022)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:9ch2d

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/9ch2d

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