Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/339361 
Year of Publication: 
2026
Series/Report no.: 
ECONtribute Discussion Paper No. 388
Publisher: 
University of Bonn and University of Cologne, Reinhard Selten Institute (RSI), Bonn and Cologne
Abstract: 
Democratic societies depend on citizens following rules even when those rules are set by political opponents. Rising polarization may threaten this behavior. We test the impact of polarization on rule compliance in the United States across three pre-registered waves (May and November 2024; April 2025; n = 8,340) using the "coins task", which is a non-political, generic rule-following task, where breaking the rule increases payoffs. Participants were randomly assigned to follow rules set by the experimenter, a political co-partisan, a political opponent, or a non-partisan US citizen. Rule compliance ranged from 52.3% to 57.8%, and equivalence testing indicates no meaningful differences across waves or partisan rule-setter identities. However, greater affective distance from partisan rule setters is associated with lower compliance and weaker descriptive and normative beliefs about rule-following. These findings suggest that rule compliance is resilient to the rule-setter's identity. While affective polarization may erode this behavior somewhat, substantial compliance remains: the human tendency to follow rules, even when incentivized to break them, survives the "stress test" of partisan rule-setting in highly polarized times.
Subjects: 
Political polarization
affective polarization
rule-following
coins task
norms
online experiments
political identity
equivalence testing
replication
JEL: 
C91
D72
D91
Z13
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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