Corruption and Life Satisfaction in Transition: Is Corruption a Social Norm in Eastern Europe?

Abstract

To explain a so-called “happiness gap” between citizens of Eastern Europe and comparable individuals from other regions, researchers have pointed at low governance quality, and corruption in particular, as a possible cause. However, this explanation seems incompatible with the “broken windows” paradigm, which posit that in high-corruption environment, victims of corruption tend to report a lower psychological cost of victimisation. Our paper contributes to the literature by explicitly tackling this potential contradiction. Our results nuance our understanding of the role of corruption on people’s life satisfaction in Eastern Europe by investigating the extent to which the subjective cost of corruption depends on its pervasiveness. We demonstrate: (1) large individual cost associated with different measures of corruption, (2) a small reduction in these costs for some measures of corruption as it becomes more pervasive and (3) large inequalities in the cost of corruption depending on education and income. Overall, we conclude that, for the population as a whole, there is limited evidence of corruption being a social norm in Eastern Europe, in the sense that pervasiveness does not reduce individual cost.

Perception of Official Corruption, Satisfaction With Government Performance, and Subjective Wellbeing—An Empirical Study From China

“…Public officials often distort policies for their private interests, which may reduce residents’ wellbeing. The Corruption Perception Index (CPI) has often been used to measure general perceived corruption of the government in previous studies to discuss the negative relationship between corruption and wellbeing ( Tavits, 2008 ; Singer, 2013 ; Tay et al, 2014 ; Amini and Douarin, 2020 ), while the perceived corruption of different specific occupations of official is often omitted. In addition, the existing literature commonly focuses on the economic consequences of official corruption ( Johnson et al, 1997 ; Justesen and Bjørnskov, 2014 ; Liu and Mikesell, 2014 ).…”

Corruption and life satisfaction: Evidence from a transition survey

“…Recent literature focusing on the inter‐play between individuals' perception of corruption and life satisfaction tend to approach corruption as the independent variable and people's life satisfaction as a dependent variable (e.g. see Amini & Douarin, 2020; Ciziceno & Travaglino, 2019). We address this issue by using two‐stage least squares instrumental variable (2SLS IV) estimation method.…”

“…Furthermore, there might be reverse causality issues according to which the direction of causation could be from the variable of corruption towards those of life conditions as recently analysed in recent empirical studies (e.g. see Amini & Douarin, 2020; Ciziceno & Travaglino, 2019). To mitigate these issues, we employ a two stage least squares instrumental variable (2SLS IV) estimation method and we also conduct a Heckman correction estimation following (Ivlevs & Hinks, 2015).…”

An Assessment of Institutional Improvements in Romania and Bulgaria Following EU Accession

“…Whilst Eastern Europe has suffered greatly from the costs assimilated to corruption, it is no longer considered to be a social norm, nor a common practice (Amini & Douarin, 2020). Nevertheless, it is considered that moral disengagement mechanisms are still persistent throughout certain social categories, thus normalizing corruption to a certain extent (Takacs Haynes & Rašković, 2021).…”