The Resilience of Rule Compliance in a Polarized Society

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

No 388, ECONtribute Discussion Papers Series from University of Bonn and University of Cologne, Germany

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; coins task; norms; online experiments; political identity; equivalence testing; replication (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D72 D91 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 58 pages
Date: 2026-02
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