Corruption and life satisfaction: Evidence from a transition survey

Abstract

AbstractFighting corruption cannot lie exclusively on appropriate formal institutions. It also requires social support and public engagement. Particularly in countries under institutional and economic transition. We embrace the recent perspective arguing that higher quality of life conditions makes people better citizens, more civically committed and more conformed to institutional rules. Accordingly, we study whether life satisfaction is a predictor of individuals' corruption aversion across 28 former socialist countries from Eastern Europe and Central Asia. We use data from the third wave of the Life in Transition Survey (2015–2016). 2SLS estimations suggest that individuals reporting higher scores of life satisfaction are more averse to corruption. Our results are robust to a series of sensitivity analyses. Additionally, we estimate predicted values of corruption aversion for different levels of institutional trust across low and high life satisfaction groups. We find that when institutional trust is very low, its impact on corruption aversion does not differ between life satisfaction groups. As institutional trust increases so does corruption aversion and this occurs even more amongst the group of respondents with high life satisfaction.