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Spain experienced an outbreak of public sector corruption—much of it related to the involvement of regional and local administrators and politicians in the country's urban development boom—that angered the public and sparked calls for government reform. Using data from a 2009 survey that followed these events, the authors examine the association between perceived corruption and the attitudes and behaviors of citizens, including satisfaction with government and democracy, social and institutional trust, and rule‐breaking behaviors. The findings suggest that perceptions of administrative as well as political corruption are associated with less satisfaction, lower levels of social and institutional trust, and a greater willingness to break rules. Although these survey results cannot prove causation, they are consistent with the notion that administrative and political corruption damages the legitimacy of government in the eyes of citizens and weakens the social fabric of democratic society.

Understanding citizen corruption permissiveness can help clarify whether a general willingness to fight corruption exists in a society. Using 2005-2007 World Values Survey data from six Latin American countries, an index measuring corruption permissiveness was constructed. Results suggest that permissiveness varies by country and is associated with age, education, ethnicity, cultural values, and confidence in public organizations.

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The act of blowing the whistle on wrongdoing poses an ethical dilemma to the individual, the organization, and society. To help identify the key individual and organizational determinants that encourage or prohibit whistle-blowing in the U.S. federal government, this article presents a logistic regression analysis of survey data collected by the Merit Systems Protection Board, covering 36,926 federal employees from 24 agencies. Findings suggest that, although whistleblowing is a rare event within most federal agencies, its likelihood is positively associated with norm-based and affective work motives, but negatively associated with several key indicators of organizational culture, including perceptions of respect and openness, cooperativeness and flexibility in the work setting, and fair treatment and trust in supervisors. This indicates intrinsic individual motives, together with organizational culture and leadership, should be taken into account when developing and sustaining policies to promote ethical behavior and responsible public service in the federal government. Veterans Affairs. 4. These sections include the following: agency, job, work unit, job performance, pay and rewards, fairness, supervisor, training, career plans, supervisory status, management perspective, employment facts, demographics, and some open-ended questions (mission, performance, employee hiring). Separately, respondents were asked how strongly their perceptions were about these topics. 5. The steps in the exploratory factor analysis comprised running a principal component factoring (pcf) analysis in Stata, analyzing the covariance matrix and factor loadings, rotating the solution (orthogonal rotation using the varimax criterion), and deciding on the number of common factors to be retained based on the eigenvalue criterion (values greater than 1) as well as conceptual considerations. 6. Although the measurement of any phenomenon always contains a certain amount of chance error, this study considered the particular properties of indicators to address the extent to which these are reliable-provide consistent results across repeated measurements. Following Carmines and Zeller (1979), the reliability of the empirical measurements was established before assessing their validity using statistical procedures of internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha for scale construction).