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.
Highlights
Is paying a bribe less painful in context where this behaviour is pervasive? Are people less affected by their own experience with corrupt officials if they think it is just what most people experience? This is what we propose to investigate here, by measuring the life satisfaction cost of corruption, in the context of Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, a region known for its high prevalence of corruption.11 3 Vol.:(0123456789)Life satisfaction2 is increasingly used to understand how people value different aspects of their lives and the trade-offs that they may face
An interesting debate in this area revolves around the apparent happiness gap between Eastern European countries and Western ones
While it is well-known that the economic and social disruption associated with the process of post-communist transformation had far reaching repercussion on well-being, it is far from clear why, as economies recovered starting from the mid-1990s or early 2000s, subjective well-being initially failed to catch-up, generating a happiness gap that persisted until as late as 2015–2016
Summary
Is paying a bribe less painful in context where this behaviour is pervasive? Are people less affected by their own experience with corrupt officials if they think it is just what most people experience? This is what we propose to investigate here, by measuring the life satisfaction cost of corruption, in the context of Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, a region known for its high prevalence of corruption.. There has been a growing interest in understanding how context impacts on individual life satisfaction, i.e. the extent to which one considers a “good life” may differ depending on where they live and what others around them value In this spirit, researchers have tried to explain regional or country level differences in the appreciation of life using contextual controls to account for the effects of aggregate variables, including social norms or culture.. Following a useful review of the underlying concepts presented in Cialdini and Trost (1998), we are recognising that the subjective acceptance of a given practice (corruption) depends on each individual’s subjective views (their personal moral values), and the specific norms of the social group or society in which this individual lives. We document systematic differences in the cost of corruption according to the income and education level of respondents
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