The Origins of Corruption Perceptions: An Epidemiological Approach
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Many Latin American countries have engaged in massive anti-corruption reforms in the past decade. Yet, these reforms have had very limited success in changing citizens’ perceptions of corruption in their respective countries. This calls into question the foundations of corruption perceptions and the dynamics that sustain them. This thesis is the first study to investigate the relative weight of institutions vis-à-vis culture for individual-level corruption perceptions. It does so using migration as a natural experiment that affords both institutional and cultural variation. Drawing data from the fifth round of the European Social Survey, this study finds no evidence that corruption perceptions are culturally stable or intergenerationally transmitted. Rather, it provides evidence that corruption perceptions are adaptive and malleable to institutional contexts. More specifically, it finds that if a person grows up in an institutionally corrupt country and moves to a less corrupt institutional context after their impressionable years, they are likely to adopt a more benign perception of corruption in the host country. The analysis ruled out the possibility of this effect being the result of socio-economic factors, education, discrimination in the country of residence, self-selection into economic sectors, or local country-level conditions. These results should spur optimism for anti-corruption crusaders in Latin America and around the world. The results suggest that fundamental institutional reform can in fact change individuals’ corruption perceptions – perceptions that are central to breaking out of suboptimal corruption equilibria.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | December 3, 2021 |
| Date modified | December 5, 2022 |
| Publication date | December 6, 2021; December 6, 2021 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Juarez Jensen, Kim |
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6726-0657
(unverified)
|
|---|
Subjects
| Subject | Culture, Institutions, Corruption Perceptions, Latin America. |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND).
Preferred citation
- Preferred citation
- Juarez Jensen, K. (2021). The Origins of Corruption Perceptions: An Epidemiological Approach. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/kc508wh2811
Collection
Stanford University, Center for Latin American Studies, Masters Degree Thesis
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- Contact
- kimaje@stanford.edu
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