Civic Engagement as a Constraint on Corruption

Kenju Kamei, Louis Putterman, Katy Tabero and Jean-Robert Tyran

No 19834, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Corruption is the great disease of government. It undermines the efficiency of the public sector in many countries around the world. We experimentally study civic engagement (CE) as a constraint on corruption when incentives are stacked against providing CE. We show that CE is powerful in curbing corruption when citizens can encourage each other to provide CE through social approval. Social approval induces strategic complementarity among conditional cooperators which counteracts the strategic substitutability (which tends to limit beneficial effects of CE) built into our design. We also show that civic engagement in the lab is correlated with civic engagement in the field, and that the effects of social approval are surprisingly robust to framing in our setting.

Keywords: Corruption; Civic engagement; Public sector; Public goods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 D73 D91 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-01
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