Understanding when and why people give bribes
McGill-led researchers developed a model of the factors that go into citizens’ calculations about whether to bribe officials, information that can help authorities fight corruption.
Even in countries where corruption is rife, “bribery is situational, and people consider lots of different elements when they are considering whether to give a bribe,” explained Aaron Erlich, an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at McGill and one of three co-authors of a recent paper in .
“We sometimes have this mental model of the world, that there are corruptible and incorruptible people. This is potentially a wrong mental model of bribery in the developing world and in a lot of other places as well,” he said. “I think a much stronger model is not that some people are totally corrupt, but that most people will give a bribe in some situations and some people will give a bribe in many situations.”
To unpack why a citizen would choose to bribe in one situation and not in another, the researchers surveyed over 3,000 people in Ukraine in 2020. The country had recently carried out extensive and partially successful anti-corruption campaigns. Transparency International estimated that, whereas 38 per cent of the population had reported paying a bribe in 2016, by 2020 only 26 per cent reported having done so.
Participants in the survey were asked to respond to questions about offering bribes in two different situations: to get a driver’s licence more quickly or to get an earlier appointment with a doctor at a state-run health-care clinic. These are services that were frequently obtained through bribery in Ukraine. Indeed, surveys cited by the researchers show over half of the survey respondents who had either received medical care or sought a driver’s licence for themselves or a family member over the past year had paid a bribe.
The researchers discovered citizens are less likely to offer bribes if either the costs or the risks of detection are high, or if the services are available without red tape or from multiple providers.
“So, we should think about how to make it more possible for them to not give a bribe,” Erlich said.
The researchers believe it may be possible for nations and regions to begin to unravel corruption by targeting one area to start with and taking it one step at a time.
The researchers said the next steps would be to test their research findings in other countries and across additional sectors by applying their framework there. The researchers also suggested that it would be helpful to explore different public service sectors to better understand how urgent needs, variations in public officials' roles and the availability of alternative services might influence bribery.
The paper
“Selective Bribery: When Do Citizens Engage in Corruption?” by Aaron Erlich, Jordan Gans-Morse, and Simeon Nichter was published in
DOI:
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.