Corruption drives the emergence of civil society

Abstract

Centralized sanctioning institutions have been shown to emerge naturally through social learning, displace all other forms of punishment and lead to stable cooperation. However, this result provokes a number of questions. If centralized sanctioning is so successful, then why do many highly authoritarian states suffer from low levels of cooperation? Why do states with high levels of public good provision tend to rely more on citizen-driven peer punishment? Here, we consider how corruption influences the evolution of cooperation and punishment. Our model shows that the effectiveness of centralized punishment in promoting cooperation breaks down when some actors in the model are allowed to bribe centralized authorities. Counterintuitively, a weaker centralized authority is actually more effective because it allows peer punishment to restore cooperation in the presence of corruption. Our results provide an evolutionary rationale for why public goods provision rarely flourishes in polities that rely only on strong centralized institutions. Instead, cooperation requires both decentralized and centralized enforcement. These results help to explain why citizen participation is a fundamental necessity for policing the commons.A centuries-old debate exists on how to best govern society and promote cooperation: is cooperation best maintained by a central authority [1,2] or is it better handled by more decentralized forms of governance [3,4]? The debate is still unresolved, and identifying mechanisms that promote cooperation remains one of the most difficult challenges facing society and policymakers today [4].Decentralized, individual sanctioning of non-cooperators (also known as free-riders or defectors) is one of the main tools used by societies to promote and maintain cooperation [5]. Individuals can sanction free-riders implicitly via behavioural reciprocity (as in the case of the highly successful tit-for-tat strategy [6]) or explicitly via costly punishment [7]. Both of these forms of peer punishment have been widely studied using evolutionary models and behavioural experiments [8][9][10]6,11].Recently, however, Sigmund et al. [12] showed that centralized institutions can have an evolutionary advantage over peer punishment because, unlike peer-punishers, these institutions may eliminate 'second-order' free-riding. Second-order free-riders cooperate with other players but they do not pay the cost of punishing defectors and this can allow defectors to re-emerge [13][14][15]. To address this problem, Sigmund et al. present a model of 'pool' punishment, where agents commit resources to a centralized authority that sanctions freeriders [12,16]. Pool punishment avoids the second-order free-rider problem because the centralized authority punishes any individual who does not

Social dilemmas among unequals

“…In this context, it may also interesting to study how the efficiency of central punishment institutions is undermined by bribery and corruption 87 . In the context of homogeneous groups, corruption possibilities can lead to a large decrease in public good provisioning, with the exact welfare losses depending on the cultural background of a society, the implemented transparency rules, and the extent to which leaders themselves are invested in the public good 88 .…”

Evolutionary dynamics of cooperation in a population with probabilistic corrupt enforcers and violators

“…52 While punishment can solve the original dilemma of cooperation, the effectiveness of punishment in promoting cooperation has been challenged by recent theoretical research showing that the existence of corruption where defectors bribe corrupt officials to avoid punishment can destroy the positive consequence of costly punishment in cooperation. 1,29,31,35,66 For example, Muthukrishna et al 35 experimentally showed that the possibility of corruption can cause a significant fall in public good provisioning and make empowering leaders decrease cooperative contributions.…”

An Initial Study of Agent Interconnectedness and In-Group Behaviour

“…Abdallah et al [1], among studies of social behaviour, demonstrate that peerpunishment is more effective than an overly strong centralized punishment in promoting cooperation, if actors are able to bribe centralized authorities.…”

“…, C. Second, the agent's origin ('town') is set based on the clan. Towns are divided logarithmically from largest clan (1) to smallest (C): clan 1, the largest clan, has approximately 1 2 of the towns; clan 2 has approximately 1 2 of the remainder, and so on, with the constraint that every clan has at least one town. If the agent is to live in one of its clan's towns (based on chance), the town is assigned randomly among them; otherwise the town is assigned randomly from all the other clans' towns.…”

“…It is argued that in order to counter established, widespread corrupt practices, a deeper understanding is required of the processes in which corruption features, together with a deeper understanding of the corrupt practices that occur, within the broader socio-political, socio-economic, governmental and cultural situation [1,10,13,17].…”