Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/312107 
Year of Publication: 
2024
Series/Report no.: 
CESifo Working Paper No. 11597
Publisher: 
CESifo GmbH, Munich
Abstract: 
Corruption is the great disease of government. It undermines the efficiency of the public sector in many countries around the world. We experimentally study civic engagement (CE) as a constraint on corruption when incentives are stacked against providing CE. We show that CE is powerful in curbing corruption when citizens can encourage each other to provide CE through social approval. Social approval induces strategic complementarity among conditional cooperators which counteracts the strategic substitutability (which tends to limit beneficial effects of CE) built into our design. We also show that civic engagement in the lab is correlated with civic engagement in the field, and that the effects of social approval are surprisingly robust to framing in our setting.
Subjects: 
corruption
civic engagement
public sector
public goods
social approval
JEL: 
C92
D73
D91
H41
Document Type: 
Working Paper
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