Corruption and Life Satisfaction in Transition: Is Corruption a Social Norm in Eastern Europe?
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Corruption and Life Satisfaction in Transition: Is Corruption a Social Norm in Eastern Europe? Chiara Amini1 · Elodie Douarin1 Accepted: 16 May 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
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. Keywords Happiness · Subjective well-being · Corruption · Easter Europe · Social norms
1 Introduction 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 also 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.1 1
For example, according to transparency international (transparency.org accessed on 07/04/2020) Eastern Europe and Central Asia, as a region, records the second lowest score on its “Corruption Perception Index” in 2019 (the index scores countries on a scale of 0–100, with 0 for highly corrupt and 100 for very clean
* Chiara Amini [email protected] Elodie Douarin [email protected] 1
School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), University College London (UCL), Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK
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C. Amini, E. Douarin
Life satisfaction2 is increasingly used to understand how people value different aspects of their lives and the trade-offs that they may face. Both in aggregate and individual-level studies, there are today a number of well-established stylized facts relating to what can generally be seen as a “good life”. At the same time, there has also 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 th
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