The resilience of rule compliance in a polarized society

Dominik Suri, Simon Gaechter (), Sebastian Kube () and Johannes Schultz ()
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Dominik Suri: University of Bonn
Simon Gaechter: University of Nottingham
Sebastian Kube: University of Bonn
Johannes Schultz: University of Bonn

No 2026-01, Discussion Papers from The Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, School of Economics, University of Nottingham

Abstract: Democratic societies depend on citizens following rules even when those rules are set by political opponents. Rising polarization may threaten this behavior. We test the impact of polarization on rule compliance in the United States across three pre-registered waves (May and November 2024; April 2025; n = 8,340) using the “coins task”, which is a non-political, generic rule-following task, where breaking the rule increases payoffs. Participants were randomly assigned to follow rules set by the experimenter, a political co-partisan, a political opponent, or a non-partisan US citizen. Rule compliance ranged from 52.3% to 57.8%, and equivalence testing indicates no meaningful differences across waves or partisan rule-setter identities. However, greater affective distance from partisan rule setters is associated with lower compliance and weaker descriptive and normative beliefs about rule-following. These findings suggest that rule compliance is resilient to the rule-setter’s identity. While affective polarization may erode this behavior somewhat, substantial compliance remains: the human tendency to follow rules, even when incentivized to break them, survives the “stress test” of partisan rule-setting in highly polarized times.

Keywords: Political polarization; affective polarization; rule-following; coinstask; norms; online experiments; political identity; equivalence testing; replication (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-pol
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